After sponsoring juntas until well into the 1990s, the US went after Central and South America with “free trade” deals before once again working with extremists. The recent elections of Argentina’s Mauricio Macri and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro are major blows to socioeconomic and cultural progress. The recent decision of Ecuador’s President Lenín Moreno to allow British police to arrest Julian Assange by dragging him from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where Assange was granted asylum, is a further indication of that country’s alignment to US elite interests.
NOT TOO FAR LEFT…
In the recent past, the US attempted to hook Latin America into the “free trade” paradigm. From the viewpoint of the US neoliberal project, a devastating turn of invents took place in the late-1990s to early-2010s. A number of left(ish) governments came to power in Central and South America, a region traditionally thought of by US elites as their “backyard.” The governments included: Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Álvaro Colom of Guatemala, Leonel Fernández of the Dominican Republic, Mauricio Funes of El Salvador, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Lula da Silva of Brazil, Luis Guillermo Solís of Costa Rica, and Manuel Zelaya of Honduras.
Together, these representatives pushed backed against decades of US corporate and military domination.
US analysts did not consider these governments to be as…