Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie, and Coups d'etat

     After visiting Havana, watching a baseball game with Raul Castro, Barack Obama was flown to Buenos Aires where he met with Argentine President Macri.  Together, they marked the fortieth anniversary of the military coup that put a set of loathsome generals in charge of Argentina until 1983.  Obama's visit was protested vociferously.  In spite of the president's usual use of the word "transparency," many in Argentina, especially those mothers and grandmothers of disappeared people from 1976-1983, don't think much will come of Obama's pledge to release more U.S. documents pertaining to the superpower's relations with the odious junta, a mirror in some ways to neighboring Chile, itself a nation screwed with by the United States in 1973, resulting in decades of dictatorship and disappearances.
     Argentine citizens gave Obama the finger as his motorcade drove by.  I came across this information by reading the Guardian website, not from watching American news.  Obama sitting next to Raul Castro and watching a baseball game while ISIS bombers caused mayhem in Brussels made Fox News broadcasters sneer.  Obama getting the collective finger in Buenos Aires didn't make anyone on cable news wonder about what that means.
     As with Obama's decision to not apologize for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (cf. my May 11, 2016 post), he also didn't apologize for U.S. support for the March 24, 1976 coup in Argentina.  Later that year, President Gerald Ford's Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger (one of the great on the loose mass murderers of all time), advised Argentine Foreign Secretary Cesar Guzzetti, "If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly," adding, "We want you to succeed."
     "Succeed" means repress left wing dissent, kidnap and kill, the usual.
     Resentment felt for the United States in Latin America stems in part from the superpower's actions.  Depredations suffered by Nicaraguans, El Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Chileans, Argentinians, Colombians, Panamanians, have been caused in part by U.S. foreign policies carried out to exert control over a "sphere" of intersecting political and business interests.  In a way, the traditional system of overlords and peons still operates.  Latin America serves the U.S.  Encouragement of right wing political movements and persons has acted, especially during the Cold War, as a shield against the more people-oriented left.  U.S. intelligence helped many Nazis escape Europe (and justice), putting them in South America as vigorous foes of Communism.  This is what Kissinger calls realpolitik: politics based on practicality rather than morality.  If a right wing bastard can get the job done, support the right wing bastard.  From America's standpoint (I speak only of the Machiavellian political class seeking these solutions, not the American people generally), the goal is control; maintenance of power over people, what Kurt Vonnegut writes as, "The power that leads to money and the money that leads to power."
     Some of the people abducted and killed by the U.S.-supported Argentine government from 1976-1983 were flown in helicopters over the Rio de la Plata or over the ocean and shoved to their deaths.  Obama didn't do anything to make such atrocities happen, but the government he heads did.  True transparency would involve an apology, and a determination to never engage in such activities again.  It would also mean the arrest of Henry Kissinger, and his trial for egregious human rights abuses on three continents.  Instead, even to this day, Kissinger gets interviewed by fawning journalists as some great statesman.  His advanced age ensures that he's probably got only a few years left, maybe more, but when he dies, the U.S. news and political communities will overlook everything that would, in a just universe, send his soul screaming all the way to Hell.
   
                                                                               Vic Neptune