“Why are there never coup attempts inside the United States?” an old joke among left-wing activists in Latin America goes. “Because there is no U.S. embassy there.”
It’s a reference to U.S. actions during the Cold War to undermine democratically elected governments across the region, including Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in the 1950s and Chilean President Salvador Allende in the 1970s. Under the auspices of fighting communism, Washington backed right-wing military coups and dictatorships throughout the hemisphere. As late as the 1980s, Jeanne Kirkpatrick—a foreign policy adviser to then-President Ronald Reagan who later served as his ambassador to the United Nations—issued a defense of authoritarian regimes that she believed helped to protect their populations from even worse revolutionary ideologies.
But the joke was outdated even before January 2021, when then-U.S. President Donald Trump tried to overturn the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. In fact, over recent decades, the view of the United States as a defender of authoritarianism, at least in Latin America, has become an anachronism. Eventually, Washington lent support to the Concertacion coalition that defeated then-dictator Augusto Pinochet at the polls and led to the reestablishment of democracy in Chile in 1990. And in 2001, the U.S. backed the Inter-American Democratic Charter, which clearly states in its opening that “[t]he peoples of the Americas have a right to democracy and their governments have an obligation to promote and defend it,” while promising to remove nondemocratic governments from various hemispheric institutions.
