If there was any doubt about the level of evilness in the White House, this recent speech removed all doubt.

“Today, we proudly proclaim for all to hear: the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well,” Bolton told the Bay of Pigs veterans group in Miami.

That is literally the very worst message that you could send Latin America.
Yet, amazingly this horrific document is being widely defended.

One can even make the case, as then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson did in 2018, that the Monroe Doctrine has been good for Latin America, because it has discouraged more aggressive authoritarian powers from exerting their influence in the region.

There is no "more aggressive authoritarian power exerting their influence in the region" than the U.S.
Since 1898, our imperialism in Latin America is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Make no mistake, no Latin American country is safe under the Monroe Doctrine.

Tuesday's failed coup attempt got me thinking about the last time our coup attempt failed.
It got me thinking about the situation in Latin America at the time, and what followed.

In December 2001, Argentina had borrowed heavily from the IMF, after many years of failed neoliberal policies. They defaulted and the country was thrown into depression in 2002, which caused Brazil to go into recession.

I bring this up because 2002 was a low point for the region.
The failed April 11, 2002, Venezuelan Coup was that point.

at first, the Bolivarian project was nothing more radical than that, a constitutional revision that would include new voices in government and end the power-sharing deal between the two dominant parties.
... Chávez, understanding that the ruling classes had no interest in joining his project for a more just Venezuela, turned his energy away from pacifying the center and toward building popular power with the poor majority.

What followed was the Pink Tide.
Chávez's (and later Maduro's) Venezuela, Lula's (and later Rousseff's) Brazil, Evo Morales's Bolivia, José Mujica's Uruguay, Rafael Correa's Ecuador, and Nestor Kirchner's (and later Cristina Fernández Kirchner's) Argentina.
They all turned left, some more than others.
Across Latin America some 70 million people were lifted out of poverty between 2002 and 2014 because of these left-wing policies.
In Ecuador, the middle class doubled from 18.58 percent to 37.40 percent between 2005 and 2015. Around 29 million Brazilians became middle class during Lula's eight years tenure.
Ironically it was this success at reducing poverty that caused the end of the Pink Tide.

In both Ecuador and now Brazil, recent analysis shows that this middle class is indeed voting in significant numbers for conservative candidates.

Right-wing appeals to individual attainment, as well as arguments that government interventions are responsible for economic slumps, have been powerful narratives in directing this new middle class towards right-wing candidates.

Blaming the left-wing policies will soon be exposed as a fallacy.
Brazil's economy has failed to turn around.
As for Argentina, it's happening again.

Argentina is grinding through a two-year recession coupled with stubbornly high inflation. That has forced its central bank to take drastic measures to stabilize the peso, which lost 50 percent of its value against the dollar last year. At nearly 65 percent, the bank’s benchmark rate is the highest in the world.

Macri, a market favorite who is running for re-election in October, is also significantly cutting spending to comply with the terms of a $56 billion financing program from the International Monetary Fund. The unpopular austerity measures have already hurt his approval rating, which now stand around 35 percent.

In 2002, Venezuela was the firewall against Yanqui Imperialism, and the whole region prospered because of it.
Let's hope history repeats itself.