The Old Authoritarian Playbook Gets a New Face
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, speaking at the Munich Security Conference, recently linked growing economic inequality to the global rise of authoritarian movements. She posited that unchecked wealth concentration fuels a disillusionment that strongmen exploit, a notion often dismissed by the very institutions she addressed. Yet, this isn't a new phenomenon, nor an accident of nature. The 1954
CIA-backed coup in Guatemala, overturning democratically elected Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán to protect United Fruit Company profits, directly destabilized the nation, fostering decades of brutal military rule and social unrest. Similarly, the 1973 Pinochet coup in Chile, supported by the US, installed a brutal dictatorship that crushed dissent while implementing neoliberal economic policies, plunging
many into poverty. These interventions, ostensibly to prevent communism, consistently paved the way for regimes far more repressive than those they replaced. The pattern is unmistakable: economic disruption, often orchestrated or permitted by Western powers, creates a vacuum. Instead of accountability for the architects of this inequality, such as the architects of the 2008 financial crisis who
faced no jail time, the narrative shifts to blaming the rise of 'authoritarians' for their own predictable consequences. This selective amnesia allows the same policies that enrich a few while dispossessing the many to continue unabated, from structural adjustment programs to unregulated global capital flows. The crucial lesson remains: when economic justice is denied, the ground is fertile for