Zitat des Tages von Greg Grandin:
Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, heavy-handedly provoked South American governments on any number of issues, including a rush to endorse the 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela, which only worked to steel resistance and build solidarity.
Wilson won re-election in 1916, his campaign running on the slogan, 'He kept us out of war.' But he could then betray his anti-war supporters knowing that a rising political coalition - made up, in part, of men looking to redeem a lost war by finding new wars to fight - had his back.
Brazil imported more enslaved Africans than any other American nation and was the last country in the hemisphere to abolish the institution, in 1888.
On April 14, 1986, when the Reagan administration launched an airstrike on Libya in clear violation of international law, Kissinger did the rounds on news shows to justify the bombing. The day after the bombing, Kissinger appeared on ABC's 'Good Morning America' to voice his 'total support.' Attacking Libya, he said, was 'correct' and 'necessary.'
Migrants don't come to the United States because, as Ambassador Aponte argued in her press conference, of 'lies' told by smugglers that, once here, you can't get deported. They come because their countries have been destroyed by U.S. policy.
Without U.S. input, the countries of South America joined forces in 2008 to shut down a coup attempt in Bolivia and prevented a war between Ecuador and Colombia.
In 2015, El Salvador suffered nearly 50,000 cases of dengue. Cuba had 1641 cases, no deaths, and one of the lowest incidence rates in the Americas.
The effect of Bill Clinton's NAFTA and Hillary Clinton's Colombian Free Trade Agreement has been devastating to Michigan and most of the rest of the country, and accounts for the appeal of Donald Trump.
Honduras in 2009 and Paraguay in 2012 were low-hanging fruit, small countries with outsized oligarchies, where mild reformers were easily dispatched.
In its original version, the FTAA was meant to be a special carve-out for Washington and Wall Street as global 'free trade' advanced under the umbrella of the Doha round of the WTO.
Hillary Clinton's progress as a public figure and politician can, in fact, be indexed perfectly by her relationship to Henry Kissinger.
According to Colombia's respected Escuela Nacional Sindical, as of April 2015, 105 union activists had been executed in the four years since Clinton's free-trade treaty went into effect. That's just trade unionists.
Neoliberalism is hard to define. It could refer to intensified resource extraction, financialization, austerity, or something more ephemeral - a way of life - in which collective ideals of citizenship give way to marketized individualism and consumerism.
In 1954, Guatemala's deposed president, the democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz, was forced to strip down to his underwear and photographed before being allowed to leave the country.
In the early 1800s, both Spain and Portugal disseminated the smallpox vaccine throughout the Americas via the 'arm to arm of the blacks,' that is, enslaved Africans and African-Americans, often children, who were being moved along slave routes as cargo from one city to another to be sold.
The idea that Hillary Clinton wants to do to Central America what her husband did to Colombia is troubling.
In Honduras, in particular, Hillary Clinton as Obama's secretary of state was instrumental in legitimizing the coup's subsequent death-squad regime.
The only person Henry Kissinger flattered more than President Richard Nixon was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran. In the early 1970s, the shah, sitting atop an enormous reserve of increasingly expensive oil and a key figure in Nixon and Kissinger's move into the Middle East, wanted to be dealt with as a serious person.
Obama and Kuczynski each promised to do all they could to enact the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
America is exceptional, it is asserted, because, with the exception of the abolition of slavery, it has been able to extend the promise of liberal reform mostly peacefully, through its democratic institutions.
If you search for Colombia on The Nation's website, you will see how key the country has been in regional politics.
'Blowback,' as many 'Nation' readers are aware, was a term introduced into popular circulation by the late political scientist Chalmers Johnson, an old Cold Warrior turned dissident.
President George H. W. Bush soon launched Operation Desert Shield, sending an enormous contingent of troops to Saudi Arabia. But once there, what exactly were they to do? Contain Iraq? Attack and liberate Kuwait? Drive on to Baghdad and depose Saddam? There was no clear consensus among foreign policy advisers or analysts.
Harriet Washington, in 'Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present,' documents the smallpox experiments Thomas Jefferson performed on his Monticello slaves. In fact, much of what we now think of as public health emerged from the slave system.
As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton was an active promoter of increased resource extraction in Latin America, pushing both fracking and the privatization of petroleum production.
Most students of Kissinger find it hard to say anything about Kissinger that isn't about the man himself. He is such an outsize figure that he eclipses his own context, leading his many biographers, critics, and admirers to focus nearly exclusively on the quirks of his personality or his moral failings.
Just as much as the United States mattered to cotton, cotton mattered to the United States. Cotton reinvigorated slavery, established the young nation's place in the global economy, and eventually helped create the political and economic conflicts that resulted in civil war.
It is a job requirement of U.S. envoys to El Salvador to be skilled in the art of the threat. And Aponte, named ambassador in 2010, is a pro. In particular, she's been tasked with making sure the former insurgent FMLN, which first won the presidency in 2009 and was reelected in 2014, reconciles itself to neoliberal reality.
Kissinger's unusually high body count and singular moral imperiousness has the effect, among his critics, of obscuring his didactic utility. An outsized personality who has committed outsized mayhem, Kissinger eclipses his own context. Yet, as animals were to the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, Kissinger is good to think with.
After Plan Colombia came the Colombian Free Trade Agreement. Hillary Clinton opposed the treaty when she was running against Barack Obama in 2008 but then supported it as secretary of state.
By June 1974, Treasury Secretary George Shultz was already suggesting that rising oil prices could result in a 'highly advantageous mutual bargain' between the United States and petroleum-producing countries in the Middle East.
The question of causality is complex. For some philosophers and physicists, time might not exist. And since cause-and-effect reasoning needs the concept of time - of one thing preceding another - the effort to establish causality is a mug's game, an infinite regression of increasingly unanswerable questions.
Most critical histories of U.S. involvement in Iran rightly began with the joint British-U.S. coup against democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, which installed Pahlavi on the Peacock Throne. But it was Kissinger who, in 1972, greatly deepened the relationship between Washington and Tehran.
Endorsing Ronald Reagan in 1980, Kissinger threw in with America's new militarists, who would jump-start a revived Cold War and drive to retake the Third World.
Haiti and the Dominican Republic don't just share an island, Hispaniola, but a history, one that includes all the signal events that went into creating the modern world: Columbus, conquest, genocide, slavery, imperial war, revolution, and U.S. counterinsurgencies and military occupations.
