Reply #18: The U.S. shouldn't have been butting into Latin American business

[Judi Lynn]

before Viet Nam.

Any power wielded there was inappropriate, and the U.S. was truly hated and feared all the way back as far as the Eisenhower administration when Nixon got the reception his right-wing administration had coming, during his not-so-triumphal Latin American tour in Caracas:







They had had enough of this long, long ago, in the early 1950's, when Eisenhower had Guatemala's Arbenz eliminated.

President Dwight Eisenhower and Guatemala
excerpted from the book
Lying for Empire
How to Commit War Crimes With A Straight Face
by David Model
Common Courage Press, 2005, paper

1954, the American government successfully orchestrated the overthrow of the freely elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and replaced him with their hand-picked alternative.
p81
... nationalist ambitions in developing country where the government sought to become independent of Washington's influence were usually interpreted on the surface as communist subversion whereas the greater threat was a weakening of the American sphere of influence. As well, redistributing wealth or land was usually a sign that the government was apparently poisoned by communist subversion. Gabriel Kolko, in Confronting the Third World: United States Foreign Policy 1945-1980, points out that:
Both privately and publicly, each attributed to the Russians a transcendent ability to shape events in the most remote countries, and even when they did not initiate them they almost invariably knew how to exploit them... Russia "seeks world rule through the domination of all governments by the International Communist Party" as John Foster Dulles typically put it in 1957. Such conspiracies included "extreme nationalism" as one of its tools. And he found their alleged ability "to get control of mass movements" uncanny.
According to a number of scholars, the hypothesis that international Communism infiltrated developing world political and economic structures for the purpose of establishing a communist government was inaccurate and missed the real motivations for American foreign policy which was to expand the American Empire.
(snip/...)

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/American_Empire/Eisenhower_Guatemala_LFE.html