Newsweek Discovers US History: Only 'Past Efforts' in South America
Newsweek runs a piece on "South America Regime Change: How Past US Efforts Played Out," dutifully listing coups from Guatemala (1954) to Chile (1973). It's a fascinating look at history, if one pretends that history ended sometime before the Internet was invented. The article functions as a tidy history lesson on US-backed strongmen (like Pinochet, a known proponent of economic liberalization
through torture), but curiously avoids any mention of more recent 'soft coups' or destabilization efforts that don't involve paramilitary death squads, like the 2009 coup in Honduras that ousted democratically-elected Manuel Zelaya, or the 2019 ouster of Evo Morales in Bolivia, which Washington quickly recognized. It's almost as if the U.S. State Department's playbook got a modern update, but
Newsweek's historical database didn't. One might wonder if the article's framing allows readers to comfortably distance themselves from contemporary implications, suggesting this is a problem of a bygone era. After all, it's much easier to deplore the CIA's banana republic meddling of the 20th century than to question ongoing 'democracy promotion' initiatives, especially when those funds often
flow through USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). How many generations exactly must pass before a 'past effort' is truly historical, and not just the precursor to current policy by different means? Such historical amnesia allows the empire to continue its work unscrutinized, rebranded as 'support for democracy,' of course.