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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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Chilling effects don't mean no one will ever do something. When people talk about "chilling effects" on free speech, they're not saying literally zero people will speak their mind, just that fewer will speak their mind than would have without the chilling effects.

There are plenty of examples like the US orchestrated 1954 coup against President Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala, the 1973 coup against President Salvador Allende in Chile, the backing of the Contras against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the 1980s, and the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba in 1961. Any Latin American government wanting to be and remain socialist, not only had the challenge of propping up a socialist government but also of resisting US plots, and very few had resources to do both.

Add in the use of Structural Adjustment Programs by the IMF and World Bank, as a means of insuring liberalization of trade and privatization in countries that wanted loans, and you have a recipe where the number of live options for most Latin American countries were quite small. So yes, they had agency, but it was very much constrained by the circumstances of international relations.

We're not talking about "literally zero"; we're talking about a Latin American affinity for Communism. Claiming that this is due to the US's policies, as @Lizzardspawn did, is what I am objecting to. Your proposed mechanism for the US affecting Latin American countries would tend to result in a reduction in affinity of Latin American countries for Communism, not an increase.

I was saying that there is state level distrust of oxygen in Latin America if US is breathing it. Unfortunately US is somewhat competent at managing an economy so the good economic ideas are tainted by default.

In the historical context, I suspect your thesis (as I perceive it) is largely overstated, and gives the American / Monroe Doctrine undue credit for much more banal causes for Latin American socialist theory credence.

At the end of the day, while Communism as a theory started as an urbanized worker ideology that believed it could/would only occur in developed industrial countries, communism as a practiced revolutionary ideology was primarily an agrarian peasant-based force, and often garnering the most support when focused on land reforms and relations between tenet farmers - landowners rather than factor workers - capitalists. While Communist themes / vibes of being tied to heavy industry were part of the early marxist theory and the Soviet Union's approach to industrialization, the general framework was agrarian peasant revolution -> revolutionary victory -> then industrialization. The agrarian angle was the dominant focus from the Soviet revolution, to the Maoist, to the Asian uprisings such as Vietnamese and in Latin American as well.

While there are overlaps with the American history in Latin America- the plantation corporations most notoriously- at the end of the day the latin american peasant-elite relations were due to local conditions and the post-colonial/independence political patronage systems, not the American involvement during the Monroe Doctrine. The American latin american sphere of influence worked through the pre-existing political structures, rather than creating and enforcing them, and while the Americans were the associated 'capitalist outsider', their actual role in the lived experiences was interchangeable (and, in various places, interchanged). Local elites wanted the investments (and bribes) no matter who provided, and outsiders wanted the fruits of exploitation for non-ideological reasons.

This structural dynamic matters to the appeal of socialism in Latin America because the structural incentive occurs regardless of the Monroe Doctrine. While the Monroe Doctrine makes the most common outsider the American Yankee, the absence of it just substitutes another outsider willing to make deals with the elites who run the land system, and the revolutionary appeal is based on the land system abuses, not the outsider it's done in service of.

The Monroe Doctrine absolutely had longer-term blowback, and it made the US a natural/obvious outside foe for various pan-Latin American groups to use as a unifying against, but that's a geopolitical foil consequence, not an economic theory consequence. Revolutionary socialist influence are popular in Latin America because large agrarian populations were suppressed and exploited by local elite patronage networks selling their labors to outside producers, and those sales and the system that kept them going would have continued regardless of the Monroe Doctrine.

(And, arguably, been worse had Latin America been more up for colonial exploitation more akin to Africa, but that's a not particularly relevant alternative.)