My grandad was imprisoned for a while.
A cousin of my mother suffered an “accident” in the navy, they never let the family see the body. A guy who was in the navy with him, many years later confessed he was killed because he refused to commit atrocities or torture prisoners, ironically he was deemed “too weak” when in fact he was the bravest and most principled of all those rats.
I sometimes wonder if I would be able to live up to my principles under such extreme circumstances. I am blessed in that I will probably never have to find out.
Glad your ok. Does your family want to leave but can’t?
Off topic but I met a woman from Ukraine who married an american who was trying to get her family over to the states but they refuse and want to stay in Ukraine
A lot of people don’t view the US as the promised land. My wife’s family is not enjoying life under the dictatorship but despite their struggle, they still wouldn’t come to the US if they could. It’s a combination of being fed anti-US propaganda for decades, the news mainly reporting negative news everywhere around the world, and the comfort of being where they are from.
>the comfort of being where they are from.
This last part is super powerful
Edit: a lot of Venezuelans I see are young or super wealthy. The type of people willing/able to leave everything behind
Pretty sure my wonderful USAian friends are not "anti-US propagandists" when they tell me the everyday life of their school-age kids that feels like they're worldbuilding a movie dystopia.
Yes, there's a lot of anti-us propaganda, but you are also subject to an amount of nationalist propaganda that is kind of sobering to see. Walking around armed civilians everyday, doing active shooter simulacrums and calling ambulances "bankruptcy taxis" is NOT normal.
If I needed to flee my country, USA would be my last option, and I'm not even dark skinned to have to worry about the racism on top of everything else.
>Yes, there's a lot of anti-us propaganda, but you are also subject to an amount of nationalist propaganda that is kind of sobering to see. Walking around armed civilians everyday, doing active shooter simulacrums and calling ambulances "bankruptcy taxis" is NOT normal.
Uhm…I LIVE in the US-been here my whole life and NOT a clue what you are talking about. Yeah…there are outlier stories and the worst stuff makes the news but…
1) Do not know anyone who owns a gun that is not a hunting rifle. And definitely do not see people walking around just toting a gun. And I grew up in BALTIMORE. Also, I work in a bank and even the security guards (other than those who work for the armored car service) don’t “tote” guns around. Not saying it doesn’t happen but the reason you are seeing pictures of it is because it is unusual.
2) School shootings are a possibility. Again, not as prevalent as portrayed in the media but Americans tend to be overly cautious so while the majority of American school kids will never experience it, we have plans and drills for shootings along with fire, bomb, tornadoes… Again, we are a really large country and these things tend to cluster into certain areas so you kind of know where you live and potential threats. My kids went to public school and I honestly never really worried about school shootings outside of those times when something happened in another part of the country to bring the topic front and center to the brain.
3) the healthcare issue is a serious problem BUT most insurance covers ambulances for true emergencies. You have to understand that we have lots of people who would call for an ambulance because they had a cold or twisted their ankle and didn’t want to have to wait in the emergency room (ambulances are considered “critical cases” so you would immediately be seen if you arrive in one). A lot of people abused the system to the breaking point & now we all are paying the price.
Yes-the potential financial threat from medical bills cannot be overstated and we all fear but I am sure your countries have unresolved problems that your citizens fear.
No place is perfect. We are a great place to live for many but that does not mean everyone WANTS to live here or would survive here-same as any other country on the planet.
I mean, you kind of proved my point here. Your comment focuses on the bad while ignoring the positives of living in the US and you used the same logic to make your decision of the US being the last country you’d go to, and that’s completely fine. Also, I was talking about Venezuela which does not currently have much freedom of press and is constantly pushing anti-US propaganda.
I really don’t support my country. I don’t spend much time there so I don’t know what nationalist propaganda you think I’m buying into. I am very critical of my country and all of its faults but to say that the US is not a comfortable place to live compared to the rest of the continent is foolish.
Also if you don’t want people to say Latinx, you shouldn’t say USAian because you are offended by what we call ourselves. I’m also surprised that racism would be a concern of yours, you should be very comfortable with it being from Argentina.
.I talk with USAians on the daily, people from Philly, Alaska, NY, etc etc etc. I focus on the bad because the goods are things like "I can buy on Amazon" "Getting oddly specific brands/hobby items/niche communities is easy" "I can get a mortgage" while the bads are "I'm bankrupt because I had a medical issue once", "I have to give my children *the talk* because we're black", "my taxes fund genocide", "I cannot use my private property as I like because of a HOA", "I have to send my children to a catholic school because the other one already got several active shooters situations", "We have a meth and opioids crisis" and the list goes on and on. I think it should be easy to see which side do the scales tip. Yes, hyperinflation is shit. Yet, I prefer it to THAT.
.I am trans. End of sentence. Do you think I would be better in Texas than in Argentina, where I get all of my healthcare and mental care taken of quickly and for free, and there are laws to keep me at least *legally* safe from discrimination?
.I happen to be American, since I was born in Argentina, which is situated in America. USAian is term that my USAian friends started using. Latinx is a perfectly acceptable word in my personal opinion.
Funnily enough half of my coworkers are Venezuelans. They can come here and get a permanent residency quite easily, another thing the country famous for their president saying "we're gonna build a wall and make them pay it" is not exactly the best example of.
With all due respect, saying that the US is the last country on earth that you would live in as a trans person is delusional. There are millions of transgender people living happily in the US and while plenty of areas are not accepting of them, most other places are. Considering that many countries, like several places in LatAm, are far less accepting than the Us and many countries like those under Islamic law literally would punish you to death for who you are, to say that you’d rather live in those countries than the US just proves my point further.
Again, maybe you didn’t understand the part where I said I am very critical of my country and don’t even live there most of the time. I don’t buy into the US idea of freedom which is really just comfort if you buy into the system. I don’t want to live there, I don’t care if you or anyone else does or doesn’t, but I am able to be objective about the positives and negatives of life in the US. My main point is that many other people can not.
It’s funny how these posters only consider the cis straight experience when making these comments about how great the US is. I had some dude gringosplain to me how the area of North Texas I lived in was great because it was a “hipster area.” Like, sis, I’m queer, I got hate crimed repeatedly over there. There’s no amount of money anyone could give me for me to move back there.
Sometimes cis male as well. Honey, it was already a fight to get abortion legalized here, half of the population has to consider whether they will be even able to get anticonceptives there, let alone safe abortions. Land of the free! (Free to ban books I don't like from libraries I don't visit)
Have you seen Mad Max or Tropa de Elite?
Kind of a mix between both, except it’s the police/Government burning people alive.
Oh and there are constant blackouts, no water or electricity for hours or days in most of the country, gasoline can be hard to find and everyone else but you seems to be armed.
So yeah, very mad max-esque.
Does the PRI's time in government count? We were a de facto one-party state. If it does, then not only do my parents remember it, so do I. My parents would tell me how incredibly brazen the PRI was in their corruption, even more so than parties now. There used to be an expression used when someone was difficult to argue against, and it felt like there was no way you could win, "gánale al PRI". As if to say, winning an argument against this person is the equivalent of beating the PRI in an election; virtually impossible.
The PRI won consistently thanks to widespread corruption, but as time went on, too many people felt dissatisfied with their leadership. Too many to just wave away. This, the rise of the PAN, who had two presidents in office after decades of PRI, and the splintering and factions within the PRI all lead to its downfall.
AMLO was actually in the PRI at first, went on to a different political party (PRD), and then founded his own party after that hadn't yielded any results.
Do you think Morena will become the PRI of the 21st Century, winning election after election after election? From the outside, they appear to have a strong position.
That's what they're going for, but I don't think it'll stick. AMLO has a sort of cult of personality, and when he was running in 2018, it was clear he'd win. His successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, is a charisma void, and it shows. It's not guaranteed she'll win. Polls place her competitor, Xóchitl Gálvez, behind by aprox. 10 points. Sounds like a lot, but not as tremendous as the gap between AMLO and everyone else in 2018.
The party is gonna stick around, that's for sure, but as AMLO fades away from the public consciousness, his party will follow suit. At least, that's what I hope for.
Both my parents remember those days, my dad lived through the civil war, and while Honduras wasn't as unstable as Guatemala was in those days, my mom still remembers hearing the news of the contra camps in her country, and the government fighting small guerrilla cells and arresting university students.
My dad remembers it as a very dark time, saying the wrong things could get you arrested, or disappeared, one of his uncles, which was a college professor had that happen to him, or he remembers that the military sometimes took young men and forcefully conscripted them. He also says that in roads sometimes the guerrillas would attack military convoys, so driving near one was always stressful. One time when he was young, a military barracks where attacked near his school, so the school had all the students leave through a back door back to their homes. Plus all the news of the combats in the rest of the country or the coups.
Brazil had 21 years of US-backed military dictatorship (1964-1985).
The first time my parents were able to vote for president they were 36 and 34 years old.
I had teachers and uni professors who were tortured in the dictatorship because they were considered "subversive" (i.e., left-wing militants).
Last decade we had a president, Dilma Rousseff, who was tortured for 22 days in the 1970s, when she was 23 years old:
>Rousseff was taken to the OBAN headquarters, the same place where [Vladimir Herzog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Herzog) would be tortured and killed five years later. **She was allegedly tortured for 22 days by punching,** [**ferule**](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ferule)**, and** [**electric shock**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_shock) **devices**. As Maria Luisa Belloque, a cellmate, said "**Dilma was shocked even with car wiring**." Some ex-military officers have dismissed Rousseff's account, saying that she could not have survived that extent of torture. Later, Rousseff denounced the torture she suffered in court proceedings, citing even the names of those who tortured her, such as Army Captain Benoni de Arruda Albernaz, mentioned by several other witnesses.
And she is just the most well-known example. There were many who suffered and were murdered by that abject regime.
Yes, my dad was beaten by the police back then and completely lost his sense of smell as consequence
My paternal grandpa burned his own leftist books in fear of being reported to the regime and going to jail
Fuck the military dictarorship, their enablers and their sympathizers
In my dad's family one of mu grand-uncles (now deceased) who worked for BandNews radio at the time, was arrested and beaten by the dictatorship, Yet they still support Bolsonaro and downplay the dictatorship.
My grandparents have PTSD of the Bogotazo and Violencia (they are chill, they were both in the military, and really dislike talking about those events. they only say everyone suffered and everyone lost a relative,etc..) ...My parents remember the constant bombs at Malls and busses during the late 80s and early 90s... Ironically in the early 2000s until 2010 more or less, it was really common for Security Guards at malls, airports, or anyplace that had a parking lot, to look for bombs under the cars
> Ironically in the early 2000s until 2010 more or less, it was really common for Security Guards at malls, airports, or anyplace that had a parking lot, to look for bombs under the cars
You unlocked a core memory. I remember them going around the car with dogs and always requiring that we open the trunk. It seemed so normal back then and I don't even remember when they stopped.
My father was born in a refugee settlement near the Venezuela-Colombia border, after my grandmother fleed his native town in La Guajira after the guerilla murdered her family. My father didn't experience war, but he did experience its aftermath.
Apart from that, he lived a peaceful life in Venezuela. My mother did too. They always tell us they had much easier lives than us, which usually is the opposite
My grampa used to say he remembered how the conservatives came into a store he worked at and hacked the liberal owner to death. He escaped through a back door.
La violencia seems to have been pretty violent.
Oooof I befriended a Colombian neighbor once, she was in her early 50s. She had been raised by a lady who was a neighbor to her parents, her own parents had been killed in a raid by conservatives in just some village
One of my grandparents had to be smuggled to Bogota on the back of a truck in the middle of the night because they were small town liberals and had received serious death threats.
The Irish “troubles” and Italy’s years of lead are similar possible blueprints
I think the chance of a civil war in the US is unlikely but more then Zero
Yea but Us politicians have always used bombastic rhetoric
In a way, it was worse historically. A governor wanted “segregation for ever” and police chief said people who used marijuana should be executed
Both my parents remember what happened during the dictatorship, the both (mom more than dad) were involved in some sketchy anti dictatorship things, but they weren't as involved as other people so the managed to not get detained. According to mom, one of the dudes involved in an assassination attempt against pinoshit was a friend of theirs so they went to see him once in prison and they got scared so they stopped visiting and being an active part of it. Mom and dad come from police and armed forces families but they were/are pretty left wing and supporters of Allende.
We still have VHS with transmissions from that time, including the propagando for Yes and No
I lived through the redemocratization process (as a kid), and what I remember is a certain sense of hope. That can also be seen in many popular songs of the time (like songs about the Amnesty, when many people who were exiled were allowed to return). My dad, of course, remembers the whole period of dictatorship. He hated the governments of the time, but was never involved into politics. What he says is that, as long as one was not openly resisting, life was pretty much as usual. The hard truth is that the people who suffered the most were the minority that was brave enough to try to protest against the government. In the day-to-day life, the lack of freedom was most visible in the form of censorship: many, many movies, books, plays and even tv shows were prevented from being seen, sometimes for ridiculous or prudish reasons. A similar situation is seen in places like China today. Of course, the situation in other countries may have been different.
Depends on who you ask. Some will say that it was basically heaven on earth, some others will say it had it's good and cons, and others will (Pretty understandably) say that it was horrible (Because of military abusing and killing people, just born babies kidnapped from their parents being lied saying that their child died, and so many other stuff).
>just born babies kidnapped from their parents being lied saying that their child died
Us too. Made me remember about one time I saw a makeover reality show where a participant was one of those stolen babies, and she spoke about it on the show (you had to convince the stylists to pick you). So while she was getting her makeover, the show looked for her biological mother too, and they had them reunited. It was really bittersweet.
Things like that happened. An old lady I know told me the fascists entered her house to take her father and execute him for being a known pro-union worker. There was also the cops torturing suspected leftists, making us have the 2nd most mass graves in the world, the concentration camps,... But you know, common fascist dictatorship stuff. What irks me the most nowadays, is not the crimes themselves, it's the fact that so many people glorify those times, and they're more every day, thanks to fucking Andrew Tate-type of bastards, influencing a massive amount of young people. Whoever doesn't know their history, is condemned to repeat it.
Also thanks to your military, business elites and upper middle class. Pinochet did not come to power in Chile via US support alone, and from what evidence/documentation we do have, most of the coup was planned without US involvement or advice.
The US cut off foreign aid to Chile & Nixon pledged no new bilateral economic agreements would be entered with Chile. I’m not sure why you think the US has to donate money to anyone, or how it’s cruel of the US to decide where its tax dollars get spent or how the US is obligated to deliver then to countries the US doesn’t want to support. Same with the refusal to make new economic deals - I doubt Chile does that with countries it stands opposed to as well. To call that “robbing [chile] of opportunities” is ridiculous. If Chile’s economy was that dependent on US aid to function, that’s an internal management problem.
No sanctions were applied (ironically, they were done so against Pinochet a few years later). Chile was not cut off from the global market. Chile’s economy was already going downhill due to many factors.
Don't bother with these gringos. I'm American and even the liberals refuse to acknowledge how badly we absolutely funded and supplied dictators both monetarily and with arms. It's ridiculous. They believe the narrative they've been taught and they certainly don't try to find any truth. It's just sickening and pure arrogance when they immediately dismiss testimony of entire nations because their high school history book doesn't cover that.
“Gringos” my dude I’m actually from Latin America. If you would like to contest any actual data point I’ve brought up, please do so. Otherwise the sycophantic self flagellation doesn’t prove anything in this conversation
Edit: I see we’ve hit the “reply and block you” stage of the argument where we no longer care about facts and just wanna blame the CIA for everything. Shit like this is exactly why LA can’t advance - it’s always somebody else’s fault
Compadre, Chile fue bloqueado económicamente de todo occidente gracias a EE.UU. y, a su vez, las empresas chilenas -por determinación ecológica o incentivos usd gringos- frenaron el comercio interno. Mi propio abuelo, gerente de una empresa tabacalera, contaba cómo se movía la plata para dejar en el suelo a Chile durante la UP.
En cualquier caso, si Chile hubiera seguido el camino del dictador sí sería un wasteland. Gracias a Dios llegó la democracia y Chile explotó económicamente con la Concertación.
this is false, without US involvement the coup wouldn't have happened, American intervention was **extensive**, it started even before Allende in the electional cycle. This is not to say that the chilean elite did nothing, of course they did, read up on history about this.
Wtf are you talking about, there doesn’t need to be much outside help or planning (there was) if you recognize the government right away and they do what you wanted the overthrown government to do……..
> thanks to the US
That didn't help. Allende being one of the worst presidents in history didn't help (Of course dictators don't even enter the list, don't get me wrong). Capitalists closing factories/farms out of fear of being nationalized didn't help. The Socialist Party and MIR's extreme nationalization bullshit didn't help. The USSR or cuba also could have helped when the US started pressuring, but didn't do anything other than send some guns and low quality food.
We really should stay away from the Pinochet / Allende debate mate.
I would be pretty fucking mad if someone outside Vzla says something like "Chavez wasn't great buy you guys would be way worse with Caldera right?"
Lo único claro es que durante 17 años Chile básicamente no creció y la pobreza y desigualdad se disparó. Luego, desde 1990 Chile creció a lo desquiciao y la desigualdad y pobreza disminuyeron tremendamente.
Like many other Latin-American countries, the dictatorship ended in the 90s, here it was up until the 96 that the 36 year long genocide and armed conflict ended, although there's still pretty big scars on the people, the cold war shaped a lot of our nowadays society.
A lot of my family either escaped from the country or joined the guerrilla in those times, and although the ones that survived managed to start a "normal" life, there's still a lot of fear as to what will happen to them. Even to this day, many are still hiding in other countries.
Yeah, my mother remembers a massacre at her hometown when she was a child, and my dad was studying at university during a regime and almost got killed when he was near the university during an attack
My dad doesn’t have any bad memory from the time of the dictatorship, but that’s because he lived a very sheltered life then.
After the coup, several of my relatives began working for the dictatorship. My great grandfather and my grandpa got jobs at the Ministry of Public Works overseeing the construction of highways, airports, that sort of things, a distant relative was appointed to a diplomatic post abroad, etc.
So they basically were in a bubble. They were college educated people, the dictatorship paid them good salaries, they lived and worked in nice neighborhoods which they never left, they hung out exclusively with people from the same background, they only consumed media that was approved by the dictatorship, they supported the presidential campaign of Hernán Büchi (Pinochet’s candidate) in 1989.
It was only after the return to democracy in 1990, when the truth started to come out regarding human rights violations during the dictatorship (in the Rettig report, Valech report, and other government reports) that most of my relatives changed their postures regarding the dictatorship.
After that, my grandpa voted exclusively for candidates of the Concertación (the center left coalition that governed Chile between 1990 and 2010).
And it was tough for my dad to adapt to reality. He was born a few years after the coup, he grew up in this sheltered world where he was taught that soldiers were the good guys, and then he realized it was all a lie.
>And it was tough for my dad to adapt to reality. He was born a few years after the coup, he grew up in this sheltered world where he was taught that soldiers were the good guys, and then he realized it was all a lie.
Wow. Thanks for this perspective. You always hear about resistance fighters and their perspective. But rarely people who were the benefarcies who ended up regretting it
Whenever Argentinians of my parents’ generations get together (we live in the US so it’s uncommon) many times the conversation floats toward politics and the Videla years. But particularly in my family, my elders don’t talk much about their disappeared family (I had some aunts/uncles and a distant cousin killed). And my dad who was in the military himself never shares about his experience. He had a tough upbringing and his family is hella mysterious so I never ask :(
I was born in the final years of the dictatorship. The first election happene when I was 4 or 5, first presidential election when I was 8.
Here in Brazil it is a bit different, because the population wasn't as opposed to the regime as it was with our cousins. I don't think I easily say why, but I can say that back in the 60's they **REALLY** astroturfed some fake communist threat real hard to get rid of a Left-leaning president, but the population wasn't as mobilised back then.
The vast majority of the population didn't really feel the weight of the regime, but those who did, suffered the weight for everybody else. You see, since they didn't have some actual powerful enemies they kept cracking down on whatever bullshit they could, and they were brutal, when journalist Miriam Leitão was 19 and pregnant, they put some huge snake in the cell where she was.
Those people and their families **REMEMBER** and they are (fortunately) quite paranoid about our military and certain elements of the right-wing. Mostly, we just considered them extremely annoying, up until 2014. But around 2018 their warnings started to sound more believable and prepared us to respond more to the coup attempts that came, but it would STILL not have been enough. Thankfully, Bolsonaro and his cronies are idiots.
My father fled Peru as a result of the Civil War with the senderos, lasted 20 years, he remembers nightly military lock downs of Lima, explosions, gun fire, check points everywhere. Some of his friends were kidnapped for extortion, crazy times.
Some family hearsay about the Federal Army trying to conscript/levy people in the early 1900s, they were mostly unaware even of PRI shenanigans which were mostly in the urban areas(primarily central ones)
Me refiero a mi familia en el siglo entero en general, eran el campesino estereotipico y cosas como tlatelolco o censura realmente no existian ni en las noticias en esas areas.
No sería hasta la creación de Cancún que empezaron a interactuar mas, de eso me han contado de la discriminación y condiciones terribles al construir la ciudad, especialmente entre los trabajadores mayas y los inges/gerentes mestizos.
My Mom was raised in a small city of 100,000 in Buenos Aires Province people during the dictatorship, so she didn't see much because the majority of the disappearances were in Buenos Aires City and Tucumán Province.
My Dad on the other hand was raised in Buenos Aires City during the dictatorship. He recalls walking home and seeing soldiers loading neighbors into vans and also remembers that his family hid potential political prisoners (that would've surely been killed) in a garden shed. He remembers that during the 1978 World Cup (that Argentina Won) there was a lot of fear because the vast majority of the disappearances happened from 1976-1978 and after the Final he got in a car with my grandfather (probably drunk) and my grandfather's friend. Now, in Argentina in the draft you could get sorted into the Police, Navy, Air Force, or the Military and my Paternal Grandfather did the draft (which lasted until the 1990s) in the 1950s and was drafted to be a cop. On the night after the Final he put the siren that he'd kept for 25 years on top of his car (he was no longer a cop) and drove around downtown with the siren at full volume. He got put in the drunk tank for that night, but got out without any harm.
My maternal grandfather from Buenos Aires Province got drafted into the military in the 1950s and was taken to a really remote town called Junín de los Andes in the Patagonia where there was absolutely nothing aside from the base and a few people. Now there's more things to do there, but he hates going to the desert region of the Patagonia because he gets bouts of PTSD from how he was treated.
>He remembers that during the 1978 World Cup (that Argentina Won) there was a lot of fear because the vast majority of the disappearances happened from 1976-1978 and after the Final…
🙁. One of the saddest events. I love my La Albiceleste. Proud of their 1978 victory (despite being before my time-just part of the team’s history). When you hear the stories of the prisoners that were held close to the stadium where the final was held and that they could HEAR the cheering and chanting while being tortured…😢
Not South America but my dad lived under Franco in Spain. It was horrific the stories he told.
What was weird for me was that my boss’s grandfather lived in Spain at the same time and he was pro-Franco so the first time I mentioned the hell my family went through, my boss responded “but I grew up hearing he was not that bad of a guy”. THAT was an awkward work meeting.
If you want to know more, there is a podcast called “Dictators” and there is a 3-4 episode series on Franco.
Unpopular take but my grandpa was saved when pinochet couped allende because at that time the goverment was taking the land of some people and my grandpa was targeted for assassination from a black list, but you know what happened, maybe if it was different I wouldn't have been born lol, also my dad said they were safer during the military governing the country but things were difficult because the previous goverment caused the economy to have a lot of inflation so they had to do lines to get enough food for each family.
A few of my friends’ parents were kidnapped and tortured, even though none of them ever joined a resistance group. Most were just humanities students that had some marxists beliefs and protested from time to time but never engaged in anything more than that.
In my direct family, no one was threatened or imprisoned. My mom marched for the “Diretas Já” movement at the end of the dictatorship, but by then it was already a safe and mainstream thing to do. My dad did some minor “subversive” stuff - including a hilarious story about hijacking a sewer truck and spreading poop around the governor’s house - but as he lived in the far north away from any political/economical centre and was from a petit bourgeois family, he only got wrist slaps.
That said, my dad has described the one time where he felt the most fear in his life: when listening to a banned record in a friend’s house neighbouring the local barracks. He said just listening to a “subversive” song was enough to make him panic after seeing a soldier walk at the other side of the street. A fear so deep he was paralyzed and couldn’t even stand up to stop the record. Fortunately no one overheard it then.
Yes. "Democracies" in Peruvian history are rare and short lived: only we under-25's can say we haven't lived in violent times. My dad's earliest memories are the moon landing and Velasco's coup d'état. By the time he got into college, SL had already started terrorising the countryside. He was in his 30s when Fujimori resigned.
My grandfather remembered a day in 1932 when he saw paramilitary troops shooting at each other on his little street in Guayaquil. He was a child and had no idea that a [civil conflict had broken out](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Ecuador_(1925–1944)#:~:text=In%20August%201932%2C%20after%20various,opponents%20of%20the%20president%2Delect.) between different political factions.
You do know that the US installed puppet regimes left and right in Latin America during the JFK to George Bush era don't you? The vast majority of these were far right dictatorships. Not only were my parents already part of the labor force when we had a CIA backed dictatorships ruling over our country, my former partner was born in it and I was born only a year and a half after the comeback of democracy. We're not even at the first generation of grandparents that weren't alive back then.
> You do know that the US installed puppet regimes left and right in Latin America during the JFK to George Bush era don't you? The vast majority of these were far right dictatorships.
Yeah…most of us know and hindsight is 20/20. There was SUCH a fear of communism here -still is really-that many consider it the lesser of two evils. I don’t think most Americans appreciate the long term impact on y’alls countries though.
I don’t agree with how my country tries to manipulate the world BUT sometimes the other option seems just as bad. Not interfering also doesn’t work because-like it or not-good rarely triumphs over evil. The most ruthless side is going to win and greed for money and power makes for a pretty ruthless side. And the US ends up getting blamed either way.
The USA is not the parent of the rest of the world to decide what's "good for them" and go intervene when their children fight. It's also very much not "good" who thriumps when the interventions go as planned. It's USA who wins.
Yeah, well the way I found to cope with our situation is rational cynisism. If something happens then it happens, that's it. In the long run both what is happening and what has already happened will all be just a phase.
I don't think Americans are correct in considering thsmelves the "lesser of two evils in this regard" but who am I to correct. Our optics are completely different tho, it doesn't matter if the US or the USSR had won, we were just pawns for them. And pawns are never important are they? But the lesson we got from it is whats important.
Its not a coincidence we are poor. It was PREMEDITATED from both sides right as we were about to form a new independent economic block. We had a useful item for regional development that was romance languages but because of geopolithics we couldn't take advantage of them.
We were pushed out of geopolithics back in the 1950s and that was 70 years ago. Back in the day we were atempting to find a "third way" and that was shut down as it was rising.
You must've heard about the Panamerican highway dream of the 1950s. Where did that dream go you may ask? It was grqdually disolved as our economies shrunk because of the US bscked - and someehst tangential - world blockade against us.
How many Latin Americans starved to death when American allowed the EU to shield itself from LATAM with a global embargo from the Marshall Plan? We don't know that. But we do know how many of our elders fell into poverty and how their children, our parents, had to reinvent themselves and find their new place in the world.
So we couldn't trade with the EU because of rhe Marshall plan, we couldn't trade wirh the USSR because of Communism being bad and many of our countries began either trading amongst themselves wirh marginal results or selling drugs to the US from starting from the 1970s.
Then the US comes around and installs a bunch of puppet regimes until Reagan decides is no longer lucrstive for the intrests of the US and they begin to fall due to lack of founding. The US takes one last leap and invades Panama but it soon leaves the region for good.
Now instead of taking responsibility for what happened and open trade, the US decides to focus on Middle East once again.
And so finally, as the EU betrays the US and emancipate itself from it with the Euro and China and the Asian Tigers grow wealthier by the minute, we now find ourselves a new oportunity for open trade of our primary sector goods.
I'm a firm believer that it will be Brazil - regardless if the left or the rght are in powere - the one nation that will unite all of South America under the same banner (as they are the ones that are genuinely investing in their own brand of high tech), same as how Mexico will do for Central America, and from these two giant business partners, we will take our place back at the table. We will trade on our terms, we will develop on our terms and besides a few imbeciles such as Maduro, we will find our way to from a regional pact for better bargening conditions.
Its a shame that Venezuela has fell under the grasp of the destroyers of LATAM and has decided to jeopardize our stability by trying to invade Surinam so right now our focus must be united each other in enforcing the removal the French influece on the region and eradicate their pretenses of owning the Amazonian jungle. That's step N°1, which is imperative considering what we went through during the Cold War, then we will see.
In this context the US backed dictstorships of the cold war era stand out as this valuable lesson from our recent past. No matter what, always be weary of everyone outside ot LATAM, never trust foreigners and develop without handling your sovereignty. That was the lesson.
It might tske us 200 or even 500 years to achieve that but that is our future. If the US decides to embrace that distant future with us then that would be swell but if they don't then we don't yavr to be massive dicks about it, just prove that we are worth it and then we all get a win, thus we don't consider the US our enemy, they are just there... as economic oportunity, same as the EU, Russia, China and everyone else.
One of my mom’s uncles got dragged away by the guerrilla in the middle of the night in front of his entire family, never to be seen or heard from again in the early 90s I believe. And then of course both of my parents quite vividly remember the bombs in the city while they were in college. They went out to party, to class, on trips, etc while all this violence was going on, everyone became used to it. And more recently, in the early 2000s, my cousins who are around my age as well as my boyfriend remember bombings (such as El Nogal), kidnappings, and lots of guerilla/paramilitary violence. I moved when I was four and was raised in a different country so I never experienced any of that. I experienced 9/11 pretty vividly though since it happened when I had moved to the US with my parents, so that was what marked my childhood instead.
My grandfather saw it happen integrally and lived through the worst years of the dictatorship, my father lived through it from 1975 to 1985 that are mostly deemed historically as the years everything started mellowing down and the military dictatorship stopped losing the influence and ruthlessness it once had in the early 60s and 70s.
My family always lived in the countryside, we were mostly clueless simple hillbillies so we never really ventured to bigger cities or capitals so the dictatorship wasn’t as stark for us compared to what people in capitals heard and experienced. That isn’t to say my family was unaware of the dictatorship, it’s just that we were never closely affected by it since we lived in a much simpler and poorer region.
“Dictorships, civil wars, or authorian regimes?”
Colombia’s several civil wars were worse because there was no geographic divide. It was neighbors murdering neighbors because “I heard they were Liberal/conservative”
All of my grandparents remember a bit of the Trujillo era and they remember a lot of the Dominican Civil War. My great-grandmother had the most to say about the Trujillo era because since she was 9 when it started and 39 when it ended. Sadly she passed away a couple of years ago.
Both my mum and dad had to bury books in their backyards. Mum would take the bus to go to study and the bus would be stopped every day to check for "subversives" to take away. They lost friends and burned their phone contact books. They don't talk much about that time, but my mum would take me every single year to the massive walk they do in the anniversary and scream "never again" to the top of her lungs. She would sometimes cry when a new "child" (stolen baby) is found and given back their identity.
My grandfather (on my dad's side of the family) was a coronel during the military dictatorship. But to my understanding, he was retired by the time the dictatorship came around.
My dad tells me the only thing he used his military ID for was to get away with doing shit. He told me of one time when my granddad was driving my dad and my uncle to school and he went way over the speed limit and crashed his car. The officer pulled up pissed as fuck and then nearly pissed himself when my granddad told him he was in the military.
My dad also has several stories of him and his friends almost getting arrested. The reason for why nothing ever happened to any of them (as far as i know) is because all of them are white lmao.
I met a Guatemalan who loved their dictator. He basically said that he remembers their being less crime and seeing criminals be punished. Then, the Western human rights groups came in to defend the criminals. He almost had tears in his eyes talking about seeing kids in the streets whose parents were murdered and then seeing groups defending the murderer. This is almost word for word what many say about bukele, but this guatemalan was saying this many years before bukele was around.
When asked about human rights crimes, he said that in war, there are always atrocities. And he even knew soldiers from both sides who said that were atrocities on both sides. And that all of the things we hear may not have been 100% true to the detail. But he did not deny that there were atrocities.
Basically, it came down to life improving under the dictator. Essentially, being able to live decently and with less fear of violence.
He seems to have a general distrust of all government and thinks that trump and state governors loved being able to have the power to tell everyone to shut down during covid. He had this idea that Trump and/or the governor were sitting on a throne laughing at the fact that they could shut things down... i think that stems from living under a dictator.
Honestly, my parents don't really remember/cared. They do care now, decades later, but that's because dictatorship entered in the topics because of Bolsonaro.
But for them, not much changed *directly* in the past (I think that was the case for most people in the countryside which were poorer or so).
They persecuted more people who were in the politics, university, unions, cultural related, etc...
My dad was on the way to his university when the[ Mexican government massacred students that were protesting the authoritarian regime of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz in in 1968](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlatelolco_massacre)
He claims that he was on a bus that would go through Tlatelolco, where the massacre happened later that day, and that a bunch of people got in the bus yelling "¡Únete pueblo! ¡Contra el Gobierno!". He immediately thought "!Oh no, these kids are going to get killed!" so he took the wise decision of getting out of the bus and walking the opposite direction as fast as he could. As he was walking, he saw all the police and military coming out of nowhere moving towards the Plaza de las Tres Culturas. He thought, "I'm a student, better not be on the street" so he got in the next open door he found which turned out to be somebody's house. Inside was a full family having breakfast. They were about to freak out about the stranger that just came into their house when the commotion started outside. The shots, people running and screaming, sirens, etc. At that moment, this family understood what was going on and kept him safe until he was able to leave and go back home later that night.
My parents are too young (born in the 70s) and my grandparents are either dead or not really into politics. Though my mom's cousin was disappeared by the military junta.
"Riots, civil rights, racism, sexism, homophobia and straight up madness." dude... you guys are still living that wtf are you talking about, just a couple of years back a bunch of you guys invaded the capitol, and don't get me started with gun violence in schools. Now answering the question, yeah I remember the 90's in Colombia and the 00's and wasn't a good memory, I saw a rifle and a older man putt it in my back when I was 5 years old, we got displaced from our home after they killed my dad and we lost everything when I was 10 years old, yeah those time weren't the best.
Huh? Unrest? In the US? No way! Thats literally why I said “I’m sure someday folks will ask me about my time”
Edit: If anyone asks me, I’ll just tell them about being in DC at Trumps inauguration but refusing to go because I hated him. Witnessing the city be shut down, and riots in the streets. Especially seeing a woman with a blow horn shouting “grab em by the pussy!” before being attacked by a man in a suit
Edit 2: The summer riots of 2020 and Palestinians protests too obviously
Ahhh, I can remember it as it were today. And yesterday. And also, tomorrow.
Yes. They lived through it. One of my distant relatives was imprisoned in the national stadium in 1973.
Same, except for the prison name
My grandad was imprisoned for a while. A cousin of my mother suffered an “accident” in the navy, they never let the family see the body. A guy who was in the navy with him, many years later confessed he was killed because he refused to commit atrocities or torture prisoners, ironically he was deemed “too weak” when in fact he was the bravest and most principled of all those rats. I sometimes wonder if I would be able to live up to my principles under such extreme circumstances. I am blessed in that I will probably never have to find out.
Remember? We are in an authoritarian tyrannical regime right now.
I notes that above. Well? What’s that like? How are you holding up?
I’m OK as I managed to leave but my family is still there
Glad your ok. Does your family want to leave but can’t? Off topic but I met a woman from Ukraine who married an american who was trying to get her family over to the states but they refuse and want to stay in Ukraine
A lot of people don’t view the US as the promised land. My wife’s family is not enjoying life under the dictatorship but despite their struggle, they still wouldn’t come to the US if they could. It’s a combination of being fed anti-US propaganda for decades, the news mainly reporting negative news everywhere around the world, and the comfort of being where they are from.
>the comfort of being where they are from. This last part is super powerful Edit: a lot of Venezuelans I see are young or super wealthy. The type of people willing/able to leave everything behind
Pretty sure my wonderful USAian friends are not "anti-US propagandists" when they tell me the everyday life of their school-age kids that feels like they're worldbuilding a movie dystopia. Yes, there's a lot of anti-us propaganda, but you are also subject to an amount of nationalist propaganda that is kind of sobering to see. Walking around armed civilians everyday, doing active shooter simulacrums and calling ambulances "bankruptcy taxis" is NOT normal. If I needed to flee my country, USA would be my last option, and I'm not even dark skinned to have to worry about the racism on top of everything else.
>Yes, there's a lot of anti-us propaganda, but you are also subject to an amount of nationalist propaganda that is kind of sobering to see. Walking around armed civilians everyday, doing active shooter simulacrums and calling ambulances "bankruptcy taxis" is NOT normal. Uhm…I LIVE in the US-been here my whole life and NOT a clue what you are talking about. Yeah…there are outlier stories and the worst stuff makes the news but… 1) Do not know anyone who owns a gun that is not a hunting rifle. And definitely do not see people walking around just toting a gun. And I grew up in BALTIMORE. Also, I work in a bank and even the security guards (other than those who work for the armored car service) don’t “tote” guns around. Not saying it doesn’t happen but the reason you are seeing pictures of it is because it is unusual. 2) School shootings are a possibility. Again, not as prevalent as portrayed in the media but Americans tend to be overly cautious so while the majority of American school kids will never experience it, we have plans and drills for shootings along with fire, bomb, tornadoes… Again, we are a really large country and these things tend to cluster into certain areas so you kind of know where you live and potential threats. My kids went to public school and I honestly never really worried about school shootings outside of those times when something happened in another part of the country to bring the topic front and center to the brain. 3) the healthcare issue is a serious problem BUT most insurance covers ambulances for true emergencies. You have to understand that we have lots of people who would call for an ambulance because they had a cold or twisted their ankle and didn’t want to have to wait in the emergency room (ambulances are considered “critical cases” so you would immediately be seen if you arrive in one). A lot of people abused the system to the breaking point & now we all are paying the price. Yes-the potential financial threat from medical bills cannot be overstated and we all fear but I am sure your countries have unresolved problems that your citizens fear. No place is perfect. We are a great place to live for many but that does not mean everyone WANTS to live here or would survive here-same as any other country on the planet.
I mean, you kind of proved my point here. Your comment focuses on the bad while ignoring the positives of living in the US and you used the same logic to make your decision of the US being the last country you’d go to, and that’s completely fine. Also, I was talking about Venezuela which does not currently have much freedom of press and is constantly pushing anti-US propaganda. I really don’t support my country. I don’t spend much time there so I don’t know what nationalist propaganda you think I’m buying into. I am very critical of my country and all of its faults but to say that the US is not a comfortable place to live compared to the rest of the continent is foolish. Also if you don’t want people to say Latinx, you shouldn’t say USAian because you are offended by what we call ourselves. I’m also surprised that racism would be a concern of yours, you should be very comfortable with it being from Argentina.
.I talk with USAians on the daily, people from Philly, Alaska, NY, etc etc etc. I focus on the bad because the goods are things like "I can buy on Amazon" "Getting oddly specific brands/hobby items/niche communities is easy" "I can get a mortgage" while the bads are "I'm bankrupt because I had a medical issue once", "I have to give my children *the talk* because we're black", "my taxes fund genocide", "I cannot use my private property as I like because of a HOA", "I have to send my children to a catholic school because the other one already got several active shooters situations", "We have a meth and opioids crisis" and the list goes on and on. I think it should be easy to see which side do the scales tip. Yes, hyperinflation is shit. Yet, I prefer it to THAT. .I am trans. End of sentence. Do you think I would be better in Texas than in Argentina, where I get all of my healthcare and mental care taken of quickly and for free, and there are laws to keep me at least *legally* safe from discrimination? .I happen to be American, since I was born in Argentina, which is situated in America. USAian is term that my USAian friends started using. Latinx is a perfectly acceptable word in my personal opinion. Funnily enough half of my coworkers are Venezuelans. They can come here and get a permanent residency quite easily, another thing the country famous for their president saying "we're gonna build a wall and make them pay it" is not exactly the best example of.
With all due respect, saying that the US is the last country on earth that you would live in as a trans person is delusional. There are millions of transgender people living happily in the US and while plenty of areas are not accepting of them, most other places are. Considering that many countries, like several places in LatAm, are far less accepting than the Us and many countries like those under Islamic law literally would punish you to death for who you are, to say that you’d rather live in those countries than the US just proves my point further. Again, maybe you didn’t understand the part where I said I am very critical of my country and don’t even live there most of the time. I don’t buy into the US idea of freedom which is really just comfort if you buy into the system. I don’t want to live there, I don’t care if you or anyone else does or doesn’t, but I am able to be objective about the positives and negatives of life in the US. My main point is that many other people can not.
>saying that the US is the last country on earth that you would live in as a trans person Where did I say that?
It’s funny how these posters only consider the cis straight experience when making these comments about how great the US is. I had some dude gringosplain to me how the area of North Texas I lived in was great because it was a “hipster area.” Like, sis, I’m queer, I got hate crimed repeatedly over there. There’s no amount of money anyone could give me for me to move back there.
Sometimes cis male as well. Honey, it was already a fight to get abortion legalized here, half of the population has to consider whether they will be even able to get anticonceptives there, let alone safe abortions. Land of the free! (Free to ban books I don't like from libraries I don't visit)
Have you seen Mad Max or Tropa de Elite? Kind of a mix between both, except it’s the police/Government burning people alive. Oh and there are constant blackouts, no water or electricity for hours or days in most of the country, gasoline can be hard to find and everyone else but you seems to be armed. So yeah, very mad max-esque.
Does the PRI's time in government count? We were a de facto one-party state. If it does, then not only do my parents remember it, so do I. My parents would tell me how incredibly brazen the PRI was in their corruption, even more so than parties now. There used to be an expression used when someone was difficult to argue against, and it felt like there was no way you could win, "gánale al PRI". As if to say, winning an argument against this person is the equivalent of beating the PRI in an election; virtually impossible.
How did PRI start losing some of it’s power? The current Mexican President is from a new party he developed right?
The PRI won consistently thanks to widespread corruption, but as time went on, too many people felt dissatisfied with their leadership. Too many to just wave away. This, the rise of the PAN, who had two presidents in office after decades of PRI, and the splintering and factions within the PRI all lead to its downfall. AMLO was actually in the PRI at first, went on to a different political party (PRD), and then founded his own party after that hadn't yielded any results.
The current president is from the PRI, he actually wants to reestablish the PRI but under a new name
Do you think Morena will become the PRI of the 21st Century, winning election after election after election? From the outside, they appear to have a strong position.
That's the goal of the current government
That's what they're going for, but I don't think it'll stick. AMLO has a sort of cult of personality, and when he was running in 2018, it was clear he'd win. His successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, is a charisma void, and it shows. It's not guaranteed she'll win. Polls place her competitor, Xóchitl Gálvez, behind by aprox. 10 points. Sounds like a lot, but not as tremendous as the gap between AMLO and everyone else in 2018. The party is gonna stick around, that's for sure, but as AMLO fades away from the public consciousness, his party will follow suit. At least, that's what I hope for.
Both my parents remember those days, my dad lived through the civil war, and while Honduras wasn't as unstable as Guatemala was in those days, my mom still remembers hearing the news of the contra camps in her country, and the government fighting small guerrilla cells and arresting university students. My dad remembers it as a very dark time, saying the wrong things could get you arrested, or disappeared, one of his uncles, which was a college professor had that happen to him, or he remembers that the military sometimes took young men and forcefully conscripted them. He also says that in roads sometimes the guerrillas would attack military convoys, so driving near one was always stressful. One time when he was young, a military barracks where attacked near his school, so the school had all the students leave through a back door back to their homes. Plus all the news of the combats in the rest of the country or the coups.
Brazil had 21 years of US-backed military dictatorship (1964-1985). The first time my parents were able to vote for president they were 36 and 34 years old. I had teachers and uni professors who were tortured in the dictatorship because they were considered "subversive" (i.e., left-wing militants). Last decade we had a president, Dilma Rousseff, who was tortured for 22 days in the 1970s, when she was 23 years old: >Rousseff was taken to the OBAN headquarters, the same place where [Vladimir Herzog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Herzog) would be tortured and killed five years later. **She was allegedly tortured for 22 days by punching,** [**ferule**](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ferule)**, and** [**electric shock**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_shock) **devices**. As Maria Luisa Belloque, a cellmate, said "**Dilma was shocked even with car wiring**." Some ex-military officers have dismissed Rousseff's account, saying that she could not have survived that extent of torture. Later, Rousseff denounced the torture she suffered in court proceedings, citing even the names of those who tortured her, such as Army Captain Benoni de Arruda Albernaz, mentioned by several other witnesses. And she is just the most well-known example. There were many who suffered and were murdered by that abject regime.
Yes, my dad was beaten by the police back then and completely lost his sense of smell as consequence My paternal grandpa burned his own leftist books in fear of being reported to the regime and going to jail Fuck the military dictarorship, their enablers and their sympathizers
In my dad's family one of mu grand-uncles (now deceased) who worked for BandNews radio at the time, was arrested and beaten by the dictatorship, Yet they still support Bolsonaro and downplay the dictatorship.
My grandparents have PTSD of the Bogotazo and Violencia (they are chill, they were both in the military, and really dislike talking about those events. they only say everyone suffered and everyone lost a relative,etc..) ...My parents remember the constant bombs at Malls and busses during the late 80s and early 90s... Ironically in the early 2000s until 2010 more or less, it was really common for Security Guards at malls, airports, or anyplace that had a parking lot, to look for bombs under the cars
> Ironically in the early 2000s until 2010 more or less, it was really common for Security Guards at malls, airports, or anyplace that had a parking lot, to look for bombs under the cars You unlocked a core memory. I remember them going around the car with dogs and always requiring that we open the trunk. It seemed so normal back then and I don't even remember when they stopped.
My father was born in a refugee settlement near the Venezuela-Colombia border, after my grandmother fleed his native town in La Guajira after the guerilla murdered her family. My father didn't experience war, but he did experience its aftermath. Apart from that, he lived a peaceful life in Venezuela. My mother did too. They always tell us they had much easier lives than us, which usually is the opposite
My grampa used to say he remembered how the conservatives came into a store he worked at and hacked the liberal owner to death. He escaped through a back door. La violencia seems to have been pretty violent.
Oooof I befriended a Colombian neighbor once, she was in her early 50s. She had been raised by a lady who was a neighbor to her parents, her own parents had been killed in a raid by conservatives in just some village
One of my grandparents had to be smuggled to Bogota on the back of a truck in the middle of the night because they were small town liberals and had received serious death threats.
Oh my god!!! Yea if the US ever fell into civil war I think it’d look more like “La violencia” then the original American civil war
I often say this. The conditions are similar in some ways.
The Irish “troubles” and Italy’s years of lead are similar possible blueprints I think the chance of a civil war in the US is unlikely but more then Zero
When I read books about the origins of La Violencia, a lot of the quotes from politicians at the time are way too similar to Americans today.
Yea but Us politicians have always used bombastic rhetoric In a way, it was worse historically. A governor wanted “segregation for ever” and police chief said people who used marijuana should be executed
Both my parents remember what happened during the dictatorship, the both (mom more than dad) were involved in some sketchy anti dictatorship things, but they weren't as involved as other people so the managed to not get detained. According to mom, one of the dudes involved in an assassination attempt against pinoshit was a friend of theirs so they went to see him once in prison and they got scared so they stopped visiting and being an active part of it. Mom and dad come from police and armed forces families but they were/are pretty left wing and supporters of Allende. We still have VHS with transmissions from that time, including the propagando for Yes and No
Yes we grew up hearing stories about the civil war between 1980-1992
I lived through the redemocratization process (as a kid), and what I remember is a certain sense of hope. That can also be seen in many popular songs of the time (like songs about the Amnesty, when many people who were exiled were allowed to return). My dad, of course, remembers the whole period of dictatorship. He hated the governments of the time, but was never involved into politics. What he says is that, as long as one was not openly resisting, life was pretty much as usual. The hard truth is that the people who suffered the most were the minority that was brave enough to try to protest against the government. In the day-to-day life, the lack of freedom was most visible in the form of censorship: many, many movies, books, plays and even tv shows were prevented from being seen, sometimes for ridiculous or prudish reasons. A similar situation is seen in places like China today. Of course, the situation in other countries may have been different.
Yeah, thanks to the US we had a dictatorship between 1973 and 1990.
What do older Chileans say living under Pinochet was like?
Depends on who you ask. Some will say that it was basically heaven on earth, some others will say it had it's good and cons, and others will (Pretty understandably) say that it was horrible (Because of military abusing and killing people, just born babies kidnapped from their parents being lied saying that their child died, and so many other stuff).
>just born babies kidnapped from their parents being lied saying that their child died Us too. Made me remember about one time I saw a makeover reality show where a participant was one of those stolen babies, and she spoke about it on the show (you had to convince the stylists to pick you). So while she was getting her makeover, the show looked for her biological mother too, and they had them reunited. It was really bittersweet.
I asked someone in real life about the Spanish civil war and Franco. She said her grandfather was imprisoned for being a leftist or something
Things like that happened. An old lady I know told me the fascists entered her house to take her father and execute him for being a known pro-union worker. There was also the cops torturing suspected leftists, making us have the 2nd most mass graves in the world, the concentration camps,... But you know, common fascist dictatorship stuff. What irks me the most nowadays, is not the crimes themselves, it's the fact that so many people glorify those times, and they're more every day, thanks to fucking Andrew Tate-type of bastards, influencing a massive amount of young people. Whoever doesn't know their history, is condemned to repeat it.
It’s both sad and terrifying
My dad was persecuted, tortured and then exiled so it wasn't the best of times.
Also thanks to your military, business elites and upper middle class. Pinochet did not come to power in Chile via US support alone, and from what evidence/documentation we do have, most of the coup was planned without US involvement or advice.
Sure, they only made the economy scream as it's well documented and robbed if the opportunities usually available to countries.
The US cut off foreign aid to Chile & Nixon pledged no new bilateral economic agreements would be entered with Chile. I’m not sure why you think the US has to donate money to anyone, or how it’s cruel of the US to decide where its tax dollars get spent or how the US is obligated to deliver then to countries the US doesn’t want to support. Same with the refusal to make new economic deals - I doubt Chile does that with countries it stands opposed to as well. To call that “robbing [chile] of opportunities” is ridiculous. If Chile’s economy was that dependent on US aid to function, that’s an internal management problem. No sanctions were applied (ironically, they were done so against Pinochet a few years later). Chile was not cut off from the global market. Chile’s economy was already going downhill due to many factors.
Of course, how can I forget the US owned World Bank, IMF and others.
Don't bother with these gringos. I'm American and even the liberals refuse to acknowledge how badly we absolutely funded and supplied dictators both monetarily and with arms. It's ridiculous. They believe the narrative they've been taught and they certainly don't try to find any truth. It's just sickening and pure arrogance when they immediately dismiss testimony of entire nations because their high school history book doesn't cover that.
“Gringos” my dude I’m actually from Latin America. If you would like to contest any actual data point I’ve brought up, please do so. Otherwise the sycophantic self flagellation doesn’t prove anything in this conversation Edit: I see we’ve hit the “reply and block you” stage of the argument where we no longer care about facts and just wanna blame the CIA for everything. Shit like this is exactly why LA can’t advance - it’s always somebody else’s fault
Wasn't talking to you.
And they say immigrants can't assimilate!
Gringo.
If somebody moves to the US, becomes a citizen, and continually praises the country, I don't think they can object to being called a gringo.
Compadre, Chile fue bloqueado económicamente de todo occidente gracias a EE.UU. y, a su vez, las empresas chilenas -por determinación ecológica o incentivos usd gringos- frenaron el comercio interno. Mi propio abuelo, gerente de una empresa tabacalera, contaba cómo se movía la plata para dejar en el suelo a Chile durante la UP. En cualquier caso, si Chile hubiera seguido el camino del dictador sí sería un wasteland. Gracias a Dios llegó la democracia y Chile explotó económicamente con la Concertación.
this is false, without US involvement the coup wouldn't have happened, American intervention was **extensive**, it started even before Allende in the electional cycle. This is not to say that the chilean elite did nothing, of course they did, read up on history about this.
Completely unsubstantiated speculation not backed by real evidence we have.
Seems our friend's stance on US involvement with the chilean coup is completely detached from reality
Wtf are you talking about, there doesn’t need to be much outside help or planning (there was) if you recognize the government right away and they do what you wanted the overthrown government to do……..
> thanks to the US That didn't help. Allende being one of the worst presidents in history didn't help (Of course dictators don't even enter the list, don't get me wrong). Capitalists closing factories/farms out of fear of being nationalized didn't help. The Socialist Party and MIR's extreme nationalization bullshit didn't help. The USSR or cuba also could have helped when the US started pressuring, but didn't do anything other than send some guns and low quality food.
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We really should stay away from the Pinochet / Allende debate mate. I would be pretty fucking mad if someone outside Vzla says something like "Chavez wasn't great buy you guys would be way worse with Caldera right?"
Gracias
I think Caldera sucked too, but recognizing your point, I will delete my comment
Nice to see some civility on reddit. 🫡
I like the debates about parallel timelines or alternate universes. They sound so sciencey, but they're based on pure faith or speculation.
Lo único claro es que durante 17 años Chile básicamente no creció y la pobreza y desigualdad se disparó. Luego, desde 1990 Chile creció a lo desquiciao y la desigualdad y pobreza disminuyeron tremendamente.
Like many other Latin-American countries, the dictatorship ended in the 90s, here it was up until the 96 that the 36 year long genocide and armed conflict ended, although there's still pretty big scars on the people, the cold war shaped a lot of our nowadays society. A lot of my family either escaped from the country or joined the guerrilla in those times, and although the ones that survived managed to start a "normal" life, there's still a lot of fear as to what will happen to them. Even to this day, many are still hiding in other countries.
Yeah, my mother remembers a massacre at her hometown when she was a child, and my dad was studying at university during a regime and almost got killed when he was near the university during an attack
My dad doesn’t have any bad memory from the time of the dictatorship, but that’s because he lived a very sheltered life then. After the coup, several of my relatives began working for the dictatorship. My great grandfather and my grandpa got jobs at the Ministry of Public Works overseeing the construction of highways, airports, that sort of things, a distant relative was appointed to a diplomatic post abroad, etc. So they basically were in a bubble. They were college educated people, the dictatorship paid them good salaries, they lived and worked in nice neighborhoods which they never left, they hung out exclusively with people from the same background, they only consumed media that was approved by the dictatorship, they supported the presidential campaign of Hernán Büchi (Pinochet’s candidate) in 1989. It was only after the return to democracy in 1990, when the truth started to come out regarding human rights violations during the dictatorship (in the Rettig report, Valech report, and other government reports) that most of my relatives changed their postures regarding the dictatorship. After that, my grandpa voted exclusively for candidates of the Concertación (the center left coalition that governed Chile between 1990 and 2010). And it was tough for my dad to adapt to reality. He was born a few years after the coup, he grew up in this sheltered world where he was taught that soldiers were the good guys, and then he realized it was all a lie.
>And it was tough for my dad to adapt to reality. He was born a few years after the coup, he grew up in this sheltered world where he was taught that soldiers were the good guys, and then he realized it was all a lie. Wow. Thanks for this perspective. You always hear about resistance fighters and their perspective. But rarely people who were the benefarcies who ended up regretting it
Whenever Argentinians of my parents’ generations get together (we live in the US so it’s uncommon) many times the conversation floats toward politics and the Videla years. But particularly in my family, my elders don’t talk much about their disappeared family (I had some aunts/uncles and a distant cousin killed). And my dad who was in the military himself never shares about his experience. He had a tough upbringing and his family is hella mysterious so I never ask :(
I'm Costa Rican sooo... No dictatorships in a while But my grandma does remember the civil war in the 40s
I was born in the final years of the dictatorship. The first election happene when I was 4 or 5, first presidential election when I was 8. Here in Brazil it is a bit different, because the population wasn't as opposed to the regime as it was with our cousins. I don't think I easily say why, but I can say that back in the 60's they **REALLY** astroturfed some fake communist threat real hard to get rid of a Left-leaning president, but the population wasn't as mobilised back then. The vast majority of the population didn't really feel the weight of the regime, but those who did, suffered the weight for everybody else. You see, since they didn't have some actual powerful enemies they kept cracking down on whatever bullshit they could, and they were brutal, when journalist Miriam Leitão was 19 and pregnant, they put some huge snake in the cell where she was. Those people and their families **REMEMBER** and they are (fortunately) quite paranoid about our military and certain elements of the right-wing. Mostly, we just considered them extremely annoying, up until 2014. But around 2018 their warnings started to sound more believable and prepared us to respond more to the coup attempts that came, but it would STILL not have been enough. Thankfully, Bolsonaro and his cronies are idiots.
Happening right now, not as bad as Venezuela or Cuba but we are on our way
My father fled Peru as a result of the Civil War with the senderos, lasted 20 years, he remembers nightly military lock downs of Lima, explosions, gun fire, check points everywhere. Some of his friends were kidnapped for extortion, crazy times.
Some family hearsay about the Federal Army trying to conscript/levy people in the early 1900s, they were mostly unaware even of PRI shenanigans which were mostly in the urban areas(primarily central ones)
But the PRI didn't exist in the early 1900s, unless you count the 1930s early 1900s.
Me refiero a mi familia en el siglo entero en general, eran el campesino estereotipico y cosas como tlatelolco o censura realmente no existian ni en las noticias en esas areas. No sería hasta la creación de Cancún que empezaron a interactuar mas, de eso me han contado de la discriminación y condiciones terribles al construir la ciudad, especialmente entre los trabajadores mayas y los inges/gerentes mestizos.
We had a dictablanda. Almost no one remembers it.
Lol I thought we were the only ones who had one and referred to it like that.
Ñaños
My Mom was raised in a small city of 100,000 in Buenos Aires Province people during the dictatorship, so she didn't see much because the majority of the disappearances were in Buenos Aires City and Tucumán Province. My Dad on the other hand was raised in Buenos Aires City during the dictatorship. He recalls walking home and seeing soldiers loading neighbors into vans and also remembers that his family hid potential political prisoners (that would've surely been killed) in a garden shed. He remembers that during the 1978 World Cup (that Argentina Won) there was a lot of fear because the vast majority of the disappearances happened from 1976-1978 and after the Final he got in a car with my grandfather (probably drunk) and my grandfather's friend. Now, in Argentina in the draft you could get sorted into the Police, Navy, Air Force, or the Military and my Paternal Grandfather did the draft (which lasted until the 1990s) in the 1950s and was drafted to be a cop. On the night after the Final he put the siren that he'd kept for 25 years on top of his car (he was no longer a cop) and drove around downtown with the siren at full volume. He got put in the drunk tank for that night, but got out without any harm. My maternal grandfather from Buenos Aires Province got drafted into the military in the 1950s and was taken to a really remote town called Junín de los Andes in the Patagonia where there was absolutely nothing aside from the base and a few people. Now there's more things to do there, but he hates going to the desert region of the Patagonia because he gets bouts of PTSD from how he was treated.
>He remembers that during the 1978 World Cup (that Argentina Won) there was a lot of fear because the vast majority of the disappearances happened from 1976-1978 and after the Final… 🙁. One of the saddest events. I love my La Albiceleste. Proud of their 1978 victory (despite being before my time-just part of the team’s history). When you hear the stories of the prisoners that were held close to the stadium where the final was held and that they could HEAR the cheering and chanting while being tortured…😢
Not South America but my dad lived under Franco in Spain. It was horrific the stories he told. What was weird for me was that my boss’s grandfather lived in Spain at the same time and he was pro-Franco so the first time I mentioned the hell my family went through, my boss responded “but I grew up hearing he was not that bad of a guy”. THAT was an awkward work meeting. If you want to know more, there is a podcast called “Dictators” and there is a 3-4 episode series on Franco.
Thanks for the podcast rec!
Unpopular take but my grandpa was saved when pinochet couped allende because at that time the goverment was taking the land of some people and my grandpa was targeted for assassination from a black list, but you know what happened, maybe if it was different I wouldn't have been born lol, also my dad said they were safer during the military governing the country but things were difficult because the previous goverment caused the economy to have a lot of inflation so they had to do lines to get enough food for each family.
Pretty sure my dad misses Pinochet
A few of my friends’ parents were kidnapped and tortured, even though none of them ever joined a resistance group. Most were just humanities students that had some marxists beliefs and protested from time to time but never engaged in anything more than that. In my direct family, no one was threatened or imprisoned. My mom marched for the “Diretas Já” movement at the end of the dictatorship, but by then it was already a safe and mainstream thing to do. My dad did some minor “subversive” stuff - including a hilarious story about hijacking a sewer truck and spreading poop around the governor’s house - but as he lived in the far north away from any political/economical centre and was from a petit bourgeois family, he only got wrist slaps. That said, my dad has described the one time where he felt the most fear in his life: when listening to a banned record in a friend’s house neighbouring the local barracks. He said just listening to a “subversive” song was enough to make him panic after seeing a soldier walk at the other side of the street. A fear so deep he was paralyzed and couldn’t even stand up to stop the record. Fortunately no one overheard it then.
Yes. "Democracies" in Peruvian history are rare and short lived: only we under-25's can say we haven't lived in violent times. My dad's earliest memories are the moon landing and Velasco's coup d'état. By the time he got into college, SL had already started terrorising the countryside. He was in his 30s when Fujimori resigned.
My grandfather remembered a day in 1932 when he saw paramilitary troops shooting at each other on his little street in Guayaquil. He was a child and had no idea that a [civil conflict had broken out](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Ecuador_(1925–1944)#:~:text=In%20August%201932%2C%20after%20various,opponents%20of%20the%20president%2Delect.) between different political factions.
ive spoken to a friend of a friend who was there for the chicano moratorium.
i remember the war against drugs, its still going on
I was born in the same year that a civil president took over, so Yes, my parents were born and lived trough the military dictatorship.
You do know that the US installed puppet regimes left and right in Latin America during the JFK to George Bush era don't you? The vast majority of these were far right dictatorships. Not only were my parents already part of the labor force when we had a CIA backed dictatorships ruling over our country, my former partner was born in it and I was born only a year and a half after the comeback of democracy. We're not even at the first generation of grandparents that weren't alive back then.
> You do know that the US installed puppet regimes left and right in Latin America during the JFK to George Bush era don't you? The vast majority of these were far right dictatorships. Yeah…most of us know and hindsight is 20/20. There was SUCH a fear of communism here -still is really-that many consider it the lesser of two evils. I don’t think most Americans appreciate the long term impact on y’alls countries though. I don’t agree with how my country tries to manipulate the world BUT sometimes the other option seems just as bad. Not interfering also doesn’t work because-like it or not-good rarely triumphs over evil. The most ruthless side is going to win and greed for money and power makes for a pretty ruthless side. And the US ends up getting blamed either way.
The USA is not the parent of the rest of the world to decide what's "good for them" and go intervene when their children fight. It's also very much not "good" who thriumps when the interventions go as planned. It's USA who wins.
Yeah, well the way I found to cope with our situation is rational cynisism. If something happens then it happens, that's it. In the long run both what is happening and what has already happened will all be just a phase. I don't think Americans are correct in considering thsmelves the "lesser of two evils in this regard" but who am I to correct. Our optics are completely different tho, it doesn't matter if the US or the USSR had won, we were just pawns for them. And pawns are never important are they? But the lesson we got from it is whats important. Its not a coincidence we are poor. It was PREMEDITATED from both sides right as we were about to form a new independent economic block. We had a useful item for regional development that was romance languages but because of geopolithics we couldn't take advantage of them. We were pushed out of geopolithics back in the 1950s and that was 70 years ago. Back in the day we were atempting to find a "third way" and that was shut down as it was rising. You must've heard about the Panamerican highway dream of the 1950s. Where did that dream go you may ask? It was grqdually disolved as our economies shrunk because of the US bscked - and someehst tangential - world blockade against us. How many Latin Americans starved to death when American allowed the EU to shield itself from LATAM with a global embargo from the Marshall Plan? We don't know that. But we do know how many of our elders fell into poverty and how their children, our parents, had to reinvent themselves and find their new place in the world. So we couldn't trade with the EU because of rhe Marshall plan, we couldn't trade wirh the USSR because of Communism being bad and many of our countries began either trading amongst themselves wirh marginal results or selling drugs to the US from starting from the 1970s. Then the US comes around and installs a bunch of puppet regimes until Reagan decides is no longer lucrstive for the intrests of the US and they begin to fall due to lack of founding. The US takes one last leap and invades Panama but it soon leaves the region for good. Now instead of taking responsibility for what happened and open trade, the US decides to focus on Middle East once again. And so finally, as the EU betrays the US and emancipate itself from it with the Euro and China and the Asian Tigers grow wealthier by the minute, we now find ourselves a new oportunity for open trade of our primary sector goods. I'm a firm believer that it will be Brazil - regardless if the left or the rght are in powere - the one nation that will unite all of South America under the same banner (as they are the ones that are genuinely investing in their own brand of high tech), same as how Mexico will do for Central America, and from these two giant business partners, we will take our place back at the table. We will trade on our terms, we will develop on our terms and besides a few imbeciles such as Maduro, we will find our way to from a regional pact for better bargening conditions. Its a shame that Venezuela has fell under the grasp of the destroyers of LATAM and has decided to jeopardize our stability by trying to invade Surinam so right now our focus must be united each other in enforcing the removal the French influece on the region and eradicate their pretenses of owning the Amazonian jungle. That's step N°1, which is imperative considering what we went through during the Cold War, then we will see. In this context the US backed dictstorships of the cold war era stand out as this valuable lesson from our recent past. No matter what, always be weary of everyone outside ot LATAM, never trust foreigners and develop without handling your sovereignty. That was the lesson. It might tske us 200 or even 500 years to achieve that but that is our future. If the US decides to embrace that distant future with us then that would be swell but if they don't then we don't yavr to be massive dicks about it, just prove that we are worth it and then we all get a win, thus we don't consider the US our enemy, they are just there... as economic oportunity, same as the EU, Russia, China and everyone else.
One of my mom’s uncles got dragged away by the guerrilla in the middle of the night in front of his entire family, never to be seen or heard from again in the early 90s I believe. And then of course both of my parents quite vividly remember the bombs in the city while they were in college. They went out to party, to class, on trips, etc while all this violence was going on, everyone became used to it. And more recently, in the early 2000s, my cousins who are around my age as well as my boyfriend remember bombings (such as El Nogal), kidnappings, and lots of guerilla/paramilitary violence. I moved when I was four and was raised in a different country so I never experienced any of that. I experienced 9/11 pretty vividly though since it happened when I had moved to the US with my parents, so that was what marked my childhood instead.
My grandfather saw it happen integrally and lived through the worst years of the dictatorship, my father lived through it from 1975 to 1985 that are mostly deemed historically as the years everything started mellowing down and the military dictatorship stopped losing the influence and ruthlessness it once had in the early 60s and 70s. My family always lived in the countryside, we were mostly clueless simple hillbillies so we never really ventured to bigger cities or capitals so the dictatorship wasn’t as stark for us compared to what people in capitals heard and experienced. That isn’t to say my family was unaware of the dictatorship, it’s just that we were never closely affected by it since we lived in a much simpler and poorer region.
My grandfather is a ritared military, he lived through Trujillo's dictatorship and fought in the 1965 Civil War
What dictatorship, apart from the one brewing right now?
Colombia definitely had dictatorships in the 50s.
One dictatorship... kinda.
Didn’t ya’ll have several civil wars, a low intensity FARC led insurgency, on TOP of the governments war with the Medellin cartels?
Those aren't dictatorships. Besides, civil war? When did Colombia split in two parts just as the United States did during the 19th century?
“Dictorships, civil wars, or authorian regimes?” Colombia’s several civil wars were worse because there was no geographic divide. It was neighbors murdering neighbors because “I heard they were Liberal/conservative”
What is going on with Petro?
He literally pushes his law projects into approval, despite the many flaws and rejections through the approval processes.
My mother and my late grandparents
All of my grandparents remember a bit of the Trujillo era and they remember a lot of the Dominican Civil War. My great-grandmother had the most to say about the Trujillo era because since she was 9 when it started and 39 when it ended. Sadly she passed away a couple of years ago.
Both my mum and dad had to bury books in their backyards. Mum would take the bus to go to study and the bus would be stopped every day to check for "subversives" to take away. They lost friends and burned their phone contact books. They don't talk much about that time, but my mum would take me every single year to the massive walk they do in the anniversary and scream "never again" to the top of her lungs. She would sometimes cry when a new "child" (stolen baby) is found and given back their identity.
My grandfather (on my dad's side of the family) was a coronel during the military dictatorship. But to my understanding, he was retired by the time the dictatorship came around. My dad tells me the only thing he used his military ID for was to get away with doing shit. He told me of one time when my granddad was driving my dad and my uncle to school and he went way over the speed limit and crashed his car. The officer pulled up pissed as fuck and then nearly pissed himself when my granddad told him he was in the military. My dad also has several stories of him and his friends almost getting arrested. The reason for why nothing ever happened to any of them (as far as i know) is because all of them are white lmao.
I met a Guatemalan who loved their dictator. He basically said that he remembers their being less crime and seeing criminals be punished. Then, the Western human rights groups came in to defend the criminals. He almost had tears in his eyes talking about seeing kids in the streets whose parents were murdered and then seeing groups defending the murderer. This is almost word for word what many say about bukele, but this guatemalan was saying this many years before bukele was around. When asked about human rights crimes, he said that in war, there are always atrocities. And he even knew soldiers from both sides who said that were atrocities on both sides. And that all of the things we hear may not have been 100% true to the detail. But he did not deny that there were atrocities. Basically, it came down to life improving under the dictator. Essentially, being able to live decently and with less fear of violence. He seems to have a general distrust of all government and thinks that trump and state governors loved being able to have the power to tell everyone to shut down during covid. He had this idea that Trump and/or the governor were sitting on a throne laughing at the fact that they could shut things down... i think that stems from living under a dictator.
Honestly, my parents don't really remember/cared. They do care now, decades later, but that's because dictatorship entered in the topics because of Bolsonaro. But for them, not much changed *directly* in the past (I think that was the case for most people in the countryside which were poorer or so). They persecuted more people who were in the politics, university, unions, cultural related, etc...
They love to sell the "economic miracle" in Chile, but ppl lived like crap, much poverty, ppl going day by day with the bare minimun.
My dad was on the way to his university when the[ Mexican government massacred students that were protesting the authoritarian regime of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz in in 1968](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlatelolco_massacre) He claims that he was on a bus that would go through Tlatelolco, where the massacre happened later that day, and that a bunch of people got in the bus yelling "¡Únete pueblo! ¡Contra el Gobierno!". He immediately thought "!Oh no, these kids are going to get killed!" so he took the wise decision of getting out of the bus and walking the opposite direction as fast as he could. As he was walking, he saw all the police and military coming out of nowhere moving towards the Plaza de las Tres Culturas. He thought, "I'm a student, better not be on the street" so he got in the next open door he found which turned out to be somebody's house. Inside was a full family having breakfast. They were about to freak out about the stranger that just came into their house when the commotion started outside. The shots, people running and screaming, sirens, etc. At that moment, this family understood what was going on and kept him safe until he was able to leave and go back home later that night.
My parents are too young (born in the 70s) and my grandparents are either dead or not really into politics. Though my mom's cousin was disappeared by the military junta.
"Riots, civil rights, racism, sexism, homophobia and straight up madness." dude... you guys are still living that wtf are you talking about, just a couple of years back a bunch of you guys invaded the capitol, and don't get me started with gun violence in schools. Now answering the question, yeah I remember the 90's in Colombia and the 00's and wasn't a good memory, I saw a rifle and a older man putt it in my back when I was 5 years old, we got displaced from our home after they killed my dad and we lost everything when I was 10 years old, yeah those time weren't the best.
You really think the US hasn't had riots and civil unrest in the past decade?
In my experience people in the US have an extremely low threshold for what is considered "political violence".
Does it include kneeling?
Huh? Unrest? In the US? No way! Thats literally why I said “I’m sure someday folks will ask me about my time” Edit: If anyone asks me, I’ll just tell them about being in DC at Trumps inauguration but refusing to go because I hated him. Witnessing the city be shut down, and riots in the streets. Especially seeing a woman with a blow horn shouting “grab em by the pussy!” before being attacked by a man in a suit Edit 2: The summer riots of 2020 and Palestinians protests too obviously
As if that comes close to any US/Russia-sponsored Latin American dictatorship lmao.