Sorry guys, this week is going to be a little bit of a rant. Thinking back on past history classes, I got a bit of an impression that the U.S. involved themselves in places they had no place being. After hearing all the different ways they were involved with Latin American countries really makes me see the point that they U.S. were hypocrites, and probably still are though I have no specific proof or examples.
Reading about the military dictatorship in Chile and how the people were executed and tortured based on their beliefs was really heartbreaking for me. Families were destroyed and torn apart because members went "missing" and were never seen again. The kind of pain of not knowing is something no one should go through. It really upset me to know that the U.S. secretly backed the military takeover and supported the over turn of the democratic government. I can't even fathom having an entire class of people almost systematically exterminated for no other reason than the military disagreed with them. If something like that happened today, I would hope my government would go and try to stop it, yet the U.S. was the one to support the military and did nothing to stop the massacre. The same situation happened over and over again in Latin America with the U.S.'s fear of communism leading them to overturn democratic governments in favor of militant dictatorships that would do whatever the U.S. asked.
We say that the U.S. stands for democracy and all humans have equal rights, yet we don't fight for those same principles in other countries. How different would the world be if the U.S. had supported the democratic governments of Latin America instead of placing dictatorships in place. In class on Friday we discussed the idea that the U.S. may have purposely kept the Latin American countries in poverty, and on some points I do believe that. Whether it was completely intentional or not, I don't know, but the U.S. did take measures that would benefit them and keep Latin America in poverty. By imposing embargo's and other restrictions on trade with Latin America, it kept them from expanding becoming more competitive on the world markets, and the U.S. could keep their power and security. What do you guys think? Did the U.S. act to keep Latin America powerless? Are/were our government officials hypocrites?
You bring up a very good point here Gabby. I learned about the Desaparecidos in my Spanish class in high school and I was completely horrified. It's hard for me to believe that the United States just sat by and let this happen- and even worse, that we were involved in installing the government that did this! Like you said, I would hope that if something like this happened today that we would step in and try to stop it, but at the same time we have to be cautious. Maybe when the U.S. supported the government back when, they also thought they were doing the right thing. If we went to try to help again, maybe we would once again end up making the situation even worse for the people that lived there. Foreign involvement is a very tricky situation- is it better to try and help and possibly worsen the situation? Or is it better to stay away and let other countries go their own course?
ReplyDelete