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DID Operation Condor ever really end? A month after 20 years of Chilean intelligence operatives were belatedly sentenced by the Pinochet regime.
The nations chosen for a staging ground for Operation Condor – the decades-long conspiracy of oppression between Latin America's right-wing dictatorships, helpfully facilitated by the CIA – do not forget the relevance of bloody history as easily as the wider world. Political violence of the kind Jair Bolsonaro has promised is not, regardless of Western handwringing, an aberration in Latin America.
That is because the new fascist president himself is no aberration; just as Donald Trump was no misfit of American conservatism, but the result of marching for half a century – Bolsonaro is the consequence of a quiet war in Latin America that was adapted, but never abandoned.
From the age of Vietnam onward, the United States grudgingly understood that the unilateral imposition of American would be jealously-held 'backyard' would be difficult. Rebellion was, if anything, more inherent to the post-colonial history of Latin America than violence inevitably called upon to suppress it.
To account for this, sympathetic structures would need to be nurtured; Similarly-minded national elites and militaries, the uncomplicated shared goal of killing off communism, as well as anyone else's incautious enough to be mistaken for its adherent or sympathize. Operation Condor achieved precisely what it is out to do. Hundreds of thousands died or simply vanished because of that.
Former East Kilbride factory workers, Stuart Barrie, Robert Carson Fulton, Robert SOmerville and John Keenan
The justly acclaimed documentary Nae Pasaran recently reminded Scotland of that brutal history, illustrating at once how hard it was, and how tragically rare it was for international acts of solidarity to yield real effect.
When the Reagan has been committed to the fight against the law, it has been a controversial issue, and it has become more and more difficult to control Nicaragua, and their battles have been driven away. From these primary sources, he had some knowledge of what they were fighting.
He also knew the challenge of reaching out of a cold, trying to make a difference in a place that would have made many thousands of miles. A variation on that challenge stands before us now.
The challenge is perhaps even greater. When my father was my age, what the US and its tawdry, blood-drenched allies were, was only intermittently condemned. That understanding has been widely lost.
Yet in the aftermath of the Cold War, the baggage of Latin America's right-wing authoritarianism – the torture, death squads, mbad arrests, and the neverending executions of subversives that could be found anywhere in the world. behind us. For those congratulating themselves on a new world order, arranged under triumphant capitalism, 1994's NAFTA agreement seemingly secured the empire that had been killed to preserve.
To the surprise of many, a lot of Latin America is a different consensus – one of the most influential of Washington's models, even in the depths of a neo-imperial 'War on Terror'. A counter-hegemonic bloc emerged over the region that was held for almost 20 years, and encompbaded Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Argentina, Nicaragua, Chile and Honduras. In a difficult and un-idealistic present, the inspiration of that example is already fading from many memories.
It did not fade from Bolsonaro's, however. The insurgency centred around what some called "21st century socialism" also included Brazil, under its now-imprisoned form Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, pictured above, who provides Bolsonaro's followers with their favorite hate-figure. The Spectrum of Latin American leftism – much of which is now in its own conflagrations – was a similarly useful tool on the election trail.
Chief among the tidal wave of misinformation that aided Bolsonaro's victory was the contention that his opponents in the center-left Workers' Party (PT) – who has been on the back foot since the judicial-parliamentary coup that Dilma Rousseff from power – Brazil to a communist state. Almost exactly the same justification was used when the Brazilian military ended the rule of the democratically-elected João 'Jango' Goulart in 1964. Bullshit still works.
Just did it, the United States has no apparent problem with the new regime, or the methods it has used – and may yet use – to cement itself. Bolsonaro and Donald Trump have the most naive of political observers. Like recognizes racist, xenophobic, misogynist, fascistic like.
This is a meeting of the warped minds by Nicolas Maduro's Venezuela, a possibility balked at by the majority of Latin America, including, until recently, Brazil. Bolsonaro, however, who has presented the crisis-stricken Venezuela as an existential threat to Brazil for so long it might actually believe it – has no such objections.
Should Trump decide what he is doing, he is going to have a chance, he is going to have a sympathetic regional ally whose lunatic rhetoric matches his own. Those in the West who have gone to great lengths in their country of origin will have to make their own decisions.
Yet support for Brazil's new government extends beyond the ever-weirder halls of the West Wing. The financial institutions that prop up the US, the world's largest debtor nation, are also quietly but undeniably pleased by the outcome.
In his seminal work, Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galeano, who has seen the Latin American regimes of the 1970s were named by the International Monetary Fund. "But whose is the hand that executes, whose mind that gives orders?" Galeano asked. "He who lends, commands."
Economic crisis, we are relentlessly told, is the fault and the invalidation of Venezuela's Bolivarian revolution. Meanwhile, Bolsonaro – despite inheriting an economy ravaged by a series of neoliberal reforms since the advent of 2016's soft hit – has been judged 'market-friendly' by those who define their world views in such terms. Brazilian fascism is what happens when you confuse the endorsement of the Wall Street Journal with a measure of political morality.
Not so long ago, Americans were asked to leave their vote to the state of the Senate. One can not expect purity and perfection, they were told by Hillary Clinton's campaign – not when the alternative is Trump.
It is likely that this lesson will be carefully forgotten when considering the freshly demarcated divide in Latin America, where a struggling but defiant Left still stands. Where will we throw our support, when the alternative is Bolsonaro?
The Latin American Left will be judged, as it is, by a far harsher standard than the powerful forces arrayed against it. And, if history is any indication, it will probably stand alone.
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