Approximately 17 people, including former heads of Bolivia’s army and navy, have been arrested so far in connection with the recent failed attempt to overthrow Luis Arce’s left-wing government in Bolivia. On Thursday morning, Bolivia’s minister of government, Eduardo Del Castillo, condemned the group, and told reporters that they will “be charged with crimes that could see them jailed for between 15 and 30 years.”


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Unfortunately, this is far from the first time someone in Latin America has attempted to overthrow the government. In fact, in many cases, the American government was all too eager to assist, facilitate or even initiate said coups, as one TikToker’s video demonstrates.



Running through the countries listed in the video, we have: Costa Rica in 1948, Guatemala in 1954, Paraguay in 1954, Brazil in 1964, Peru in 1968, Chile in 1973, Uruguay in 1973, Argentina in 1976, El Salvador in 1979, Nicaragua in 1981, Panama in 1989 and Venezuela in 2002. As the narrator explains, these coups were primarily the result of the governments being perceived as opposing American interests — either they were too left-wing, or they were dictatorships, or both. U.S. involvement in these countries varied from outright financing of right-wing groups like the Contras to failing to condemn military juntas as they forcibly took power from democratically elected governments.


One of the most horrifying aspects of U.S. involvement in Latin America was undoubtedly Operation Condor, in which eight U.S.-backed military dictatorships carried out cross-border kidnappings and tortured, raped and killed hundreds of political opponents throughout the 1970s and 1980s.



It doesn’t appear that the U.S. has learned from its mistakes, either. Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was overthrown by the military in 2009, and the U.S. was accused of making the situation worse by failing to condemn the coup sufficiently. More recently, in 2019, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro accused the U.S. of trying to orchestrate a coup against him, with then-President Trump recognizing Juan Guaidó as interim president following his challenge to Maduro’s presidency.


It’s unlikely that this will change any time soon. The United States has long seen itself as “leader of the free world” thanks to things like the Monroe Doctrine, particularly when it comes to the “Western Hemisphere,” aka North and South America. The best most Latin American countries can probably hope for is a sufficiently left-wing and semi-isolationist U.S. president who is content to let its neighbors to the south govern themselves, but such a person would probably magically “disappear” before they got anywhere near the White House.