What Did the US Do to South American Governments?

Is the US to blame for what happening in countries like Mexico, Guatemalan , Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador.
The All the crime, corruption, and etc.

I recently realized a lot of immigrants aren’t just Mexicans but a lot are traveling through mexico from Guatemala, el savador, Nicaragua, and Honduras just to come to the States. I didn’t think those countries were in bad situations until I heard about but all the immigrants leaving those countries.

What happened in the Central American countries that made all these immigrants leave.

Of course not. Why on Earth would it be the US’ fault?

The US was involved, notably here:

But the bulk of the blame falls on different political, geographical, societal and cultural factors in Central/South America. For example, if one excludes the Caribbean, the native population wasn’t killed off.

In order not to write a wall of text, historian Niall Ferguson covered in depth the underlying reasons for the divergence between South and North America:

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Yes, why do you blame the US for their corrupt governments? drug trade? human rights and human trafficking abuses? You think the US is behind those practices? No disrespect, but read some history before you make blanket statements.

I worked in several Central American and South American countries. I saw abuses that would make a pig puke and it did not come from the USG.

Read some history start with the Sandinista and work your way forward to MS-13,or just skip the history and research how many people have been killed in the Mexican Cartel wars in the last 5 years, and, how the drug trade has corrupted the central government, the military, and police. You will begin to understated why people want to leave

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@libanbolt maybe when creating topics like this reference specific things. In this case, what have you seen/read to even SUGGEST it’s somehow the US’ fault for the South American problems.

NAFTA. US agriculture flooded Mexico and Central America with cheap corn, driving prices down and pushing peasant farmers out of the market.

I would not try to spin this into “evil American corporations blah blah blah.” It’s more the result of unintended consequences.

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I originally saw just tweets about people dissing America’s intervention into foreign countries.

Most of the time America’s is painted as the bad guy in these tweets. While in my mind I’m just thinking “America’s there to just fight terrorism” than when I start to see people from Iraq or afghan just bashing the US for destroying their countries on twitter. I than just start to realize more and more that not everyone wants US’s help.

This thread is one of few I seen just scattered through twitter over the past couple of years . Mostly just people talking about how the drug war affected these countries and its people.


A pic I found on twitter.

Seems like people are just blaming the US.

I’ll be honest, I’ve never heard anyone suggest South America’s woes were in any way America’s fault until you made this thread.

We’ve probably wreaked mischief in Central America moreso than South.

I should have chose a better title. My bad. I ultimatelyjust wanted to know why people were blaming the US

I was just confused on why I saw people blaming America for southern American problems.

I just assumed that most of the politicians were just corrupt and the the cartels and gangs were ultimately what caused the problems in these countries.

In that guys tweet that I posted earlier he mentioned that the US systematically overthrew governments. I never heard anything about that in my entire life.

His thread was the final thread that just made me curious. I saw multiple throughout the years but I never really took interest into those threads I just skimmed over them

America has a bad habit (subjective) as acting as the world’s police force. Pretty easy scapegoat

I wholeheartedly agree and share in your confusion. Doesn’t make much sense to me. ME sure. Even eastern EU I could buy. But south America…? Ehhhhh

This is my understanding as well

Pinochet, Chile.

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Well, there’s your problem.

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Really? I can’t think of many situations in which we intervened absent a perceived national interest. Kosovo comes to mind. Where else?

Why would a perceived national interest have any impact re: world’s police force?

The actual police respond to perceived social interests do they not?

To me, the suggestion that the US is ‘acting like the world’s police force’ implies that we are intervening in events that have no clear impact on our national interest.

The police do not intervene in events because they have a personal (the individual’s equivalent of national) interest.

In a global atmosphere the overall makeup of other countries, how they lean towards you, etcetc could all EASILY have cases made for ‘national interest.’

If being called world’s police force is reliant on no interest of the police’s home country, I would ask you under what scenario it’s possible for any country to fit that bill in all of human history.

Of course they do. They are members of the society they’re protecting. Can you come up with a scenario in which the police are responding to an event in which the police forces members fundamentally can’t have a personal interest?

Grasping, tendentious post hoc rationalizations are not the same thing as genuine national interest. Unless this is another heterodox argument you’re making.

We had no significant national interest in Kosovo.

If this were the case, they’d work for free.

I don’t have to. Like I said above, post hoc rationalizations intent on saving a poorly-thought-out position don’t really count as ‘national interest.’

How is it grasping? Hitler certainly had a national interest for invading Poland. Putin certainly had a national interest for Annexing Crimea.

I’m struggling to see why the host country feeling they’re right has any standing on a phrase like “world’s police.”

So now it’s a significant national interest? Who’s defining significant?

Do you feel the same of our armed forces that we send to be the world’s police? That they also cannot have a personal interest?

Sounds like an awfully subjective definition. It’s no wonder my use of world’s police didn’t meet your criteria.

Socialism, Communism, crony-capitalism, corruption, narco-trafficking, break down of social order, in no particular order and without limitation of about 50 other things.

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