The overview below began as a letter to a major international newspaper often publishing my work. But the US-orchestrated overthrow of elected government across Latin America is unspeakable in the corporate media. No communication is published that connects the dot of the US- led money-party destroying any and all democratic alternatives. This is how the life-devouring system prevails as it depredates the world, now the liberated social states of America Sud whose elections cannot be controlled.
In the Guardian Weekly front-page story “Venezuelans angry for reform” (27 May-2 June), we find no ‘reform’ mentioned in the article below the banner headline. The narrative interviews people who “want food” and “basic goods” in a declared “socialist society”, a familiar line from the past. Explanation of the crisis is confined to the long lines for subsidized goods and quotes form frustrated shoppers.
The all-fronts campaign of social destabilization by Venezuela’s US-backed oligarchy, mass media and street gangs behind Wall-Street-shorted oil prices are all deleted from the account. The same inner logic of mass media cover-up governs the official story of every one of Latin America’s continent-wide coups against elections from Brazil to Honduras.
In the article after the one on Venezuela, “Social policies scaled back in Brazil”, the real meaning of ‘reform’ is made clear. It means more “cutting healthcare spending”, “reducing the family poverty relief system” and otherwise depriving poorer citizens and the public of collective life goods provided by their elected social states. Venezuela and Brazil are certainly not alone in the continent -wide overthrow of democratic sovereignty and public life infrastructures. Social-program slashing across Latin America now reverses over 15 years of fair elections and life capital development. A corresponding financial-fascist sweep has usurped social states from Greece to Ukraine to pay for private bank system collapse by bleeding social life support systems dry. Here too government destabilizations and overthrows without electoral legitimacy are the modus operandi.
All societies are in fact being re-set to private financial predation of public wealth, the ultimate feeding trough no corporate state or media ever reports and no national election has supported. Concealing the great public dispossession behind big lies is the moral of the story across oceans.
Public life liquidated to ensure money gains to the rich is the inner truth of all the covert coups. Venezuela has been targeted since before 1999. Progressive elected governments in Honduras and Paraguay have already been overthrown by US-approved rightist coups. Argentina’s government has been financially strangled and led by corporate media hysteria and US court-supported vulture funds. Brazil ‘s government has been toppled led by gangster politicians who avoid their own criminal prosecution for private theft from the state by projection onto the democratically elected president with 54 million votes who is innocent of any crime under law. Ecuador and Bolivia are now in the cross-hairs as well. Blanket media destabilization and accusations without citizen vote or court decision are the transnational strategy of reversing social evolution after endless defeats of the right at the polls.
But the dots are never joined in the public conversations. The elected governments are blamed, and the poor’s rising deprivations are disconnected from the money-party forces always orchestrating them. That these same forces are rooted in the death-squad dictatorships of the past is buried from sight in the official narratives inside and outside victim societies.
Even as the IMF admits that its ‘austerity programs’ have failed, media propaganda and social destruction rampage on. In this way, the most advanced policies and governments in Latin America since the mass-murder dictatorships of US-led coups from the 1950’s on are reversed beneath public notice today. All the while media headlines mislead us to believe that the poor support the stripping of their elected social states which is always, in fact, led by system-wide financial schemes and social sabotage backed by Washington and Wall Street.
John McMurtry is author of The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Cure.
