There is talk of regime change in Venezuela. US military aircraft are flying missions out of El Salvador. About 10,000 American troops have amassed in the region, alongside drones, bombers, and half a dozen warships. A US aircraft carrier has left the Mediterranean and is headed to the Caribbean Sea, where US gunships have killed at least 70 “suspected drug smugglers”, essentially civilians, since September.
Latin America has long been the laboratory where the United States installs friendly right-wing autocrats to stamp out the contagion of freedom and revolution before it reaches US shores, and where dictators wear the guise of leftist revolutionaries to oppress their own people. The people organise and fight to get power, only to see their leaders toppled and their dreams and economies shattered.
“Power, they say, is like a violin,” Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano once wrote, recounting an Argentinian joke from the 1970s. “It is held by the left hand and played by the right.”
