Of all the missteps by U.S. President Donald Trump in his conflict with Venezuela, the most fateful may be his Oct. 16 authorization for the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct covert operations to bring about the overthrow of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. For decades the CIA has been heavily involved across Central and South America, spent untold millions of dollars, and destroyed thousands of lives, but still cannot point to a single success story. The CIA has not brought stability or prosperity, but instead has enforced a colonial system in the Global South as described in books, such as Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins. A 2023 study stated that the effects of CIA-sponsored regime change caused “large declines in democracy scores, rule of law, freedom of speech, and civil liberties,” and a 10% reduction in per capita income, on average. The CIA’s current top colonial objectives in Iberoamerica are to keep China out and to break cooperation among the BRICS nations.
Even the Washington Post warned about the CIA’s many failures south of the border. The CIA admitted failure in its own declassified documents in the 1954 CIA-backed coup in Guatemala, code-named, PBSUCCESS. The CIA, with plenty of help from the Boston-based United Fruit Company, which opposed land reform programs, forced the democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz into exile, and plunged Guatemala into a 36-year civil war from which that country has still not recovered. In 1963 the CIA helped to install a military junta in Ecuador by removing the democratically elected President Carlos Julio Arosemena Monroy. The stated objective was to force Ecuador to break diplomatic ties with Cuba. However, in 1966 a different military faction overthrew the junta. More than 100 people died during these operations, civil liberties were suppressed, and Ecuador was left in crisis. In Brazil the CIA was directly involved in the 1964 overthrow of President João Goulart. This coup resulted in a 21-year military-led dictatorship characterized by mass arrests, torture, the disappearance of union leaders and political activists. The CIA’s disaster in Chile may be the most thoroughly documented. From at least 1963 to 1973 the CIA used covert operations to influence elections in an effort to keep U.S. companies in control of Chile’s copper mines. The CIA backed a failed coup in 1970, but eventually was able to replace democratically elected President Salvador Allende in 1973 with Gen. Augusto Pinochet. The 17-year Pinochet dictatorship resulted in more than 3,000 people killed, tens of thousands tortured, economic turmoil, and political polarization.