Talk of U.S. driven right-wing coups in Latin America

Last week I pointed our meddling in Mexico's elections.
Now some are asking about our involvement in rigging the last Brazilian election.

In March, citing The Intercept’s reporting, the Brazilian Supreme Court vacated the convictions against Lula, who had earlier been released, and restored his right to run for office. The court also ruled later in the month that Moro was biased, dealing a mortal blow to the hugely influential prosecution that evolved into a powerful political movement.

Moro broke with Bolsonaro in 2020 and resigned from office. He now works as a lawyer and the managing partner at a consulting firm that represents companies he previously convicted as the Car Wash judge. Lula is again the frontrunner in next year’s presidential election. Reporting from The Intercept and Brazilian news outlet Agência Pública also revealed that the FBI requested case files on the investigation into Lula before the case went public and the Brazilians quietly sent the information through nonofficial channels.
...Brazilian Rep. Glauber Braga, who organized the Brazilian congressional letter, considers the U.S. role in Operation Car Wash to be an “illegal and criminal interference.” “We cannot accept foreign interference disguised as ‘cooperation’ that aims to facilitate the implementation of an economic program to dismantle the Brazilian economy and harm democratic freedoms within the country,” Braga told The Intercept.

It's worth pointing out that Obama was president at the time of our meddling in Brazil.
Next.
It shouldn't surprise too many people that Bolivia's right-wing plotted a second coup with the aid of ex-pats in Miami.

The Bolivian right wing, however, was not ready to relinquish power. The call with Áñez’s defense minister, in which the speakers suggest several other top officials are likely to be on board, sketches a coup plot even more flagrant than the one in October 2019.

Several of the plotters discussed flying hundreds of foreign mercenaries into Bolivia from a U.S. military base outside Miami. These would join forces with elite Bolivian military units, renegade police squadrons, and vigilante mobs in a desperate bid to keep the country’s largest political movement from returning to power.

Peru's right-wing is talking coup as well, but so far this one hasn't been blessed by the United States. So far.

A group of retired officers has suggested Peru's military should refuse to recognize socialist candidate Pedro Castillo if he is declared winner of the country's presidential election if fraud allegations are not investigated, according to a letter circulated widely on social media on Friday.
...The Armed Forces played a key role in the career of Alberto Fujimori, backing him when he shut down Congress in 1992 and assumed the broad powers of an authoritarian government.

Now in Colombia the U.S. has the opposite problem. Our position in Colombia is to prop up a brutal right-wing regime.

In recent weeks, Colombia’s estadillo social (social outburst) has given way to a low-intensity civil conflict that has pitted police, military, paramilitaries, and vigilantes against workers and protesters alike. The human rights organization Indepaz reports that these forces have killed at least 70 people while injuring and disappearing many more.

Needless to say, the U.S. gives Colombia enormous amounts of money and weapons. Weapons that they have turned against the children of their country.
So in midst of all this repression and violence, this happened.

A car bomb exploded inside a military base in the Colombian border town of Cucuta on Tuesday, leaving 36 people injured, including three in critical condition, officials said. A small number of U.S. troops were at the base at the time, but not harmed, officials said.

This has a bad look.

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Comments

This post seems to be very thin on substance making the entire article merely a collection of innuendo. Even following some of the links doesn't really firm up the apparent thesis (and like footnotes, links should be used to verify a writer's claim or allow the reader to find more detail). Perhaps the author is so steeped in the subject material that he implicitly assumes the reader already knows the underlying facts?

1. For the Brazilian segment you state that the US examined the Lula case files. If a US reporter had got a look at them would we have a US newspaper driving a Brazilian de facto coup?

2. A Bolivian official dreamed of using US mercenaries (Blackwateresque?) in a coup. That doesn't seem to imply any "drive" by the USG.

3. The Peru segment doesn't seem to have any tie at all to the US except an implication that Castillo is maybe not liked.

4. The Columbian segment seems a little bit more solid but still doesn't really make the case.

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edg's picture

@MinuteMan

I notice you haven't written an essay in 4-1/2 years. I would certainly welcome and avidly read your take on the situations gjohnsit cited. It might be difficult, though, to fully document US government actions as the CIA doesn't operate in the open. Sometimes speculation is all we have.

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Lookout's picture

visited CIA headquarters on his 1st visit to the US, before he had visited his own spy service.

IMO the US was knee deep in President Dilma's coup (as the Olympics were on-going), Lula's imprisonment, and the Bolsonaro election.

No leader will be allowed who serve their own people before corporate interest.

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Nothing our troops are doing down in Central or South America is on the up and up.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

during the GWB/Cheney years was that they didn't have the resources for or much interest in Central/S. America. (The US backed 2002 coup in Venezuela lasted all of 47 hours and left skid marks on the Bush admin.)

That changed with the Obama administration in June 2009. That's when I began to loathe loathe him and it cemented my loathing for HER.

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edg's picture

You're one of the few essayists worth reading. Keep 'em coming.

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