It totally defeats the truth, which has to fight hard to get noticed, sometimes years later.

We need to be reminded, those of us who bothered to pay attention, of what has been going on since Hugo Chavez was inaugurated in Feruary, 1999.

The author does such a great job of compiling important parts we really don't want to forget. Hope the real DU'ers here I respect will see your post and read this article.

Love the last line:

If anything, the real national security threat is to Venezuela's left-wing government--and it is coming from the United States.

They tend to be an unpopular voice around here, sadly. Too many are trying to forget what we shouldn't be, as you said.

I wish I knew more about Latin American history, actually--I was 4 when Chavez was inaugurated, and I'm still very new to their politics. What other sources would you recommend reading, both for current events and older history?

Edit: lol, I wasn't even 4 then. Misread the date.

Eduardo Galeano is an amazing writer who was actually on the list of people Argentina wanted to assassinate when he was living there, and he had to leave the area during its US-backed "Dirty War," during which it's estimated 30,000 suspected "leftists" were tortured, murdered, "disappeared."

The pregnant mothers who were kidnapped and tortured were occasionally given Caesarian operations when they were near their delivery dates, and those infants taken were given out to politically popular military figures, or politicians, etc., and the mothers, as well as the fathers were taken to airplanes and thrown out, bound by chains to other prisoners, into the ocean, or large rivers in the country.

Mr. Galeano has written many books but his "Open Veins" is well read throughout the world.

Otherwise, there are so many books it's hard to pick one other overall book. There are books concerning conditions, histories, situations in every country, dictators, military juntas, etc., etc. I have so many I still have books I haven't had time to read them through, yet. Once you start looking for information you will find enough to keep you busy almost forever, it seems.

A good website is Green Left Weekly, or https://zcomm.org/znet/ or http://upsidedownworld.org/main/home-mainmenu-1 or Colombia Reports, which is the only English-speaking news source in Colombia.

There are many others but these could give you a basic beginning.

You are very young. Your very best bet would be to try to get in as much basic history of the Americas you can, in shortened form, and if you are interested in the role the U.S. has played in the Americas, the really intensive, heavy stuff close enough in time to us to have any media coverage, started in 1954 in Guatemala, when U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had his Marines overthrow the Guatemalan government of leftist President Jacobo Arbenz, on behalf of the United Fruit Company (known as Chiquita Banana in the present) upon whose board sat the brother of Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. That brother also became the head of the U.S. CIA. United Fruit had taken vast areas of land in Guatemala, owned the railroad, and worked the citizens at very near slave wages. They didn't like Arbenz' plans to redistribute land to help the desperately poor people of that country.

This pattern has been repeated relentlessly since that time, in various manifestations. Truly sad.

We are frightened about countries like Haiti and Honduras and Grenada. We are scared to death that LGBT people may get to live their lives normally, that taxes might be raised, that other nations might get to look good too.

And that is because we think we have to control everything and everybody. A daunting task that. It does not work. So as we see that we CANNOT control everything, that is very scary for weak and debilitated countries like the USA.
(?)

who would want to take on the chore of running that mess of a country. Much cheaper to simply buy whatever oil we need. Besides, VZ will need a lot of capital and expertise to fix their oil industry so I doubt the oil companies want the U.S. to mess up future lucrative deals.

"How dare those brown folk get so uppity! Don't they know we are the Empire! And the Empire strikes back! Always!"

And yes, the Irony Meter is busted. It's been busted just about forever...ever since Kennedy bros. were shot.

Not that you are wrong ...

The rage, however, is growing and spreading and contaminating all political dialog in the US and therefore, by export, the rest of the world.

The US is getting a lesson in realpolitik, the hard way. This can be laid at the feet of that Ober-RealPolitiker, Henry Kissinger, and his foster son, Zbigniew Brzezinski.

That will be when it gets dangerous.

Well, those are the guys that decided the old ways were still best, yes. Narrow-gauge short-term thinkers, the lot of them. Lot's of big important abstractions and no grasp of how things really work. And war criminals, the lot of them too.

I've been waiting for this about 35 years now, and I'm not afraid at all.