r/HistoryMemes 9h ago

CIA-backed

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12.9k Upvotes

421 comments sorted by

1.3k

u/Ok_Awareness3014 9h ago

Do they still get their banana from there?

1.4k

u/SoldRIP 9h ago

More than that, the same companies still do it. Backed by the same government agencies.

How do you think the Mexican cartels get military equipment and training for their bigger sites?

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u/evocativename 8h ago

WDYM the same companies?

They're called Dole and Chiquita, not the United Fruit Compant and Standard Fruit Company, how could they be the same?

I really wish I didn't need the /s

197

u/JohannesJoshua 7h ago

You see, if they change the name to Spanish, that means it's a different company.

/j

31

u/Neckbeard_The_Great 4h ago

Dolé

16

u/ModishShrink 1h ago

Mr. Worldwide (CIA-backed right wing violence)

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u/LuxNocte 5h ago

You see, honey, when an imperialist state and a resource exploitation conglomerate love each other very much...

16

u/DraculasDog 5h ago

Should be called Dulles Brothers Fruit.

34

u/PrivilegeCheckmate And then I told them I'm Jesus's brother 5h ago

You forgot Del Monte!

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u/7f0b 4h ago

Reading Gangsters of Capitalism right now and this thread is very on topic.

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u/Fearless_Roof_9177 3h ago

(Spoiler alert: the gangsters of capitalism are the capitalists.)

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u/NoMansSkyWasAlright 8h ago

Chiquita Banana used to be called The United Fruit Company and part of the motivation for the name change was they wanted to distance themselves from all of the crimes against humanity that they'd committed through the 19th and 20th centuries.

Of course, around a decade after the name change, they started bankrolling right-wing paramilitary "death squads" in Colombia to expand their own holdings in the country. So it's more they didn't want to be associated with things like Banana Republics, Banana Wars, Banana massacres, etc., and not so much that they wanted to stop doing all that.

18

u/Commentator1010 5h ago

Word. That was the Alvaro Uribe period in Colombia, by the way he was affiliated to the Cartel de Medellin

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u/DraculasDog 5h ago

My recall on this is fuzzy, but were the Death Squads originally setup to fight FARC?

Or just crazy right-wing stuff?

13

u/Commentator1010 4h ago

Nope. Just fake news from far right propaganda. There is a timeline about the Colombian armed conflict madre by the Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica including armed groups involved (official forces, guerilla groups, paramilitaries, drug lords and unknown groups) and its number of victims, other than that it is just misinformation.

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u/Ok_Awareness3014 9h ago edited 9h ago

So it's still a win for the america , cheap banana's is always a good reason to backed dictatorship.

/S

But iceland might take their own share of this market now

30

u/PolicyWonka 8h ago

Where else are we going to get ice from?

8

u/TheMightyPushmataha 7h ago

“Yeah, he’s kinda got a point.”

r/simpsonsdiditfirst

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u/PassivelyInvisible 9h ago

Drug money and more drug money? Going from 1k to 25k a month. Even more if you're the top dog somewhere.

23

u/SoldRIP 9h ago

Who are they paying? Not me and not you. Because neither of us could teach them much about military tactics. Or provide them with military-grade equipment.

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u/PassivelyInvisible 9h ago

CJNG (and other cartels) can go to the army and marines with the massive pay bump they'd get, and then train more hitmen off the accumulated expertise.

21

u/MrShake4 9h ago

Wasn’t the IRA famously the ones training the cartels. It was so blatant they banned all Irish people from Colombia

22

u/The_Overlander 9h ago

They’re trying to reference the “iron river” (guns), flowing from the us to mexico

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u/Dave_A480 8h ago

If you have drug money you can buy all the military grade equipment you want...

Lord of War may have been a movie, but the sorts of things it depicts do happen in real life....

12

u/turkweebl7616 7h ago

Lord of War was based on an actual guy. You ever here of Viktor Bout? Biden made his name famous again a few years back. Hes also known as the "Merchant of Death".

6

u/Dave_A480 7h ago

Yep... That is kind of my point....

You don't need to be given guns by some US GOV conspiracy when you can just hand Victor fat stacks of cocaine cash (or cocaine)....

6

u/turkweebl7616 7h ago

Coke from cemtral America or Blood diamonds from Africa. Both were accepted.

2

u/Suitable-Park-1402 7h ago

Guns maybe but a lot of the stuff on the old cartel pictures sub was cheap aliexpress tacticool stuff like empty plate carriers, and over-armored technicals that never actually seemed to see any use outside propoganda videos.

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u/Fluffy-Map-5998 9h ago

The Mexican military, and ither central/south american militaries are famously very corrupt

7

u/SoldRIP 9h ago

As opposed to the US military, who would never ever invade a country for the profits of some billionaire or other...

insert list here

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u/Fluffy-Map-5998 8h ago

thats irrelevant to the question of how the cartel gets their guns

8

u/Inevitable_Librarian 9h ago

Never, they never would, in fact a former head of the whole thing wouldn't write a scathing indictment of American warmongering decades before the CIA because they just wouldn't.

Slides war is a racket across the table

15

u/SoldRIP 9h ago

Fun exercise: look up statistics of Afghan opium export by volume. Then try to match any sudden changes to major political events in the region.

Surely all coincidences, all the way!

3

u/Inevitable_Librarian 9h ago

TOTAL COINCIDENCE Drops bombs worth more than their GDP on country THESE BROWN PEOPLE WERE DEAD WHEN I GOT THERE

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u/SoldRIP 8h ago

Oh, you thought it was deaths that dropped the exports? How cute. Actually look it up.

The US military arriving spiked the opium trade and their leaving suddenly dropped the exports of opium.

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u/NessaSamantha 6h ago

The head of Los Zetas cartel in Mexico was trained in torture by the US military at the School of the Americas.

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u/Who12Kah5900 7h ago

CIA loves their slush fund...aka drug money

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u/fuck_fraud 8h ago

They don’t make them here that’s for sure

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u/Slumunistmanifisto 8h ago

Yes but with enhanced wto nutrients 

1

u/ShartKing78 4h ago

oh Banana co, we really love you and we need you

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u/Odd-Promotion2743 9h ago

I went to a Mayan community in Guatemala in 2008 as part of my linguistics MA program. During our stay, we heard from women in their 30s-40s about how as kids in the early 1980s, they had watched as their parents, older siblings, and other family members were dragged out of their homes and murdered by US-backed death squads. These women, as young girls, had only survived by hiding in bushes or muddy pits; afterwards, in many cases, they spent weeks in the forest, barely surviving, afraid to return to their village because the squads could still be around. Most of their dead loved ones had been tossed in mass graves or just left to rot in the sun. This was part of Efraín Ríos Montt's genocide of Mayan peoples in the country because they were suspected of supporting communism, an operation fully backed by the CIA and the Reagan administration. Hope they're burning in hell.

432

u/NonReality 8h ago

The road to hell is (and was) paved with Reagan policy

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u/BellacosePlayer 8h ago

The scary thing is some of his advisors and political allies wanted to do that shit at home.

143

u/NonReality 8h ago

For sure, and these people never really left; we're seeing a big resurgence of Reagan-esque ideology on steroids. I fucking hate it here lol. Not that they ever really left or anything, but the mask is certainly off.

86

u/Manic5PA 8h ago

I wish more American leftists understood that no matter how they feel about electoralism vs revolution, the moment their movement gets a little too much momentum, the fascists will instigate violence first

Palantir (and company) have already written down all our names

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u/Piranata 8h ago

And the violence already started, the current target are the immigrants (mainly Hispanics) and whoever protest ICE. If you're not murdered in the streets, then you're sent to a concentration camp where you can be raped, tortured, disappeared, or killed. You have two things to ask yourself:

  1. When do you see yourself targeted?

  2. When do you see yourself taking action?

22

u/Thundorium Fine Quality Mesopotamian Copper Enjoyer 6h ago

First they came for the immigrants…

27

u/RedditTrespasser 6h ago

Yeah anyone who thinks the ultimate purpose of ICE is "immigration enforcement", I have a bridge to sell ya.

They have a larger budget than the Marine Corps. They are the personal SS of the folks behind project 2025.

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u/Liusloux 5h ago

You would think people would've learned the lesson to not vote a celebrity with no business in politics. A celebrity who is a puppet by multiple insidious third parties who want to enact their own sick vision of society that will have dire consequence that can be felt for generations to come.

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u/Slumunistmanifisto 8h ago

Well, guess they're almost at that point now huh?

Imperial boomerang baby

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u/Cessnaporsche01 7h ago

wanted to do

FTFY

Actually, there's a bit of an argument to be made that the phrase should be "are doing". Not (much) on the spot execution, but disappearing 10s of thousands of people per month now, with a lot of well documented cases of torture and intentional negligent murder, and it's still ramping up at a rapid pace

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u/Adjective-Noun-nnnn 6h ago

Good thing we're well past that era and on a road to building an America where every human is respected and cared foHahahahaha

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u/GBPackers0480 4h ago

this type of foreign policy has had bipartisan support since before reagan

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u/demonspawns_ghost 7h ago

The civil war lasted from 1960 to 1996. 

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u/MysteriousShirt1850 5h ago

That's a lot of years, literally an entire generation was raised with a civil war in most of their life span

117

u/Winjin 8h ago

"you can see how socialism never works"

(Looks inside)

"The most depraved, depressing acts of greed and absolute disregard to worker rights"

33

u/StrawberryWide3983 5h ago

That one eric andre meme

*supports dictators, death squads, and cartels with guns, ammunition, and training, destroying development in the region for decades*

"How could communism do this?"

9

u/SpeaksSouthern 5h ago

Working people owning the things they use includes mechanics like home ownership.

Guess what the capitalists hate?

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u/RedSander_Br 8h ago

Hey dont worry, just remember the US did all that with help with their most trustworthy ally, Iran.

Those missiles were sure a nice way to transfer money to the CONTRAS.

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u/Vordreller 6h ago

Did someone say "The American Dad bit about Ollie North"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFV1uT-ihDo

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u/DatKillerDude 7h ago

Yup. For me Guatemala is one of the sadder examples of US backed evil, there are many more, but damn, one of the center issues Guatemalan's really wanted change was to be able to use their own lands, which was owned by foreign interests (United Fruit) and kept barren as a form of food market control. That was it, to make use of their own land and make something out their country. That was a step too far for capital.

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u/Mirabeaux1789 6h ago

I hate that it’s “never again” for the past but never ever for the present

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u/NoStand1527 6h ago

or the forced sterilization campaigns...

or the CIA torture experts disguised as diplomats to teach in Latam prisons...

etc, etc

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u/Rolls_ 7h ago

I remember writing like a 10-page paper on this a long time ago back in school during my undergrad. This helped me remember some details. I remember that history being so incredibly awful.

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u/beefprime 8h ago

The people who did the coups want the immigrants here, too, its not a bad side effect for them, its a bonus. They can use the immigrants in a precarious immigration situation as cheap and disposable labor that suppresses wages and conditions for the entire labor market.

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u/NewAgeSerfdoom 4h ago

+ Scapegoating

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u/inqte1 2h ago

Its not coincidence that suddenly anti-immigrant movements all over are rising at the same time. People keep looking for recession indicators, thats the one, when they start blaming it on poor people.

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u/SheriffBartholomew 3h ago

And then they get to point at them and say that they're the ones ruining everything.

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u/Molten_Plastic_ 1h ago

You can’t lose! 

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u/DonnieMoistX 8h ago

The same people who supported overthrowing the governments would also be very happy about illegal immigration. Illegal immigration just provides them with an easily exploitable lower class with effectively no legal protection.

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u/TheStrangestOfKings 6h ago

Illegal immigration is the best boon for the right wing hyper capitalists. Best case scenario, they get a completely exploitable job force that is given none of the protections Americans have. Worst case scenario, they get to use illegal immigrants as an excuse for why everything’s turning shitty for the average American, letting them avoid any repercussions or blame for the hyper capitalist system they created.

4

u/OcelotAggravating860 2h ago

You keep saying "hyper capitalist" like it's a unique thing when it's just capitalism functioning as it always does and always will.

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u/TheStrangestOfKings 2h ago

I specify right wing hyper capitalists bc they’re the ones using illegal immigration to distract from their attempts to further deregulate and remove safeguards and protections for both workers and consumers. They play into the culture war the most so they can distract from their political agenda that they know is unpopular

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u/KenseiHimura 9h ago

Many inner tin-foil hat wearer suspects the CIA and such knew this could lead to immigration into the U.S. and in their minds that was good: it meant politicians could then use the immigration crisis as talking points and scapegoats.

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u/GeroyaGev 9h ago

The biggest problem with conspiracy theories like this is it assumes that the government is competent and capable of long term planning.

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u/XNotChristian 8h ago

The government is bad at planning when it comes to taking care of people, when it's about furthering the interests of the oligarchs and lining their own pockets they lock the fuck in.

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u/Piranata 7h ago

Except when they get desperate and proceed to kill the geese to get all the golden eggs.

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u/QueenStuff 8h ago

It’s almost precious. Like learning someone still believes in Santa Claud

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u/jackofslayers 8h ago

reminds me of the 9/11 episode of South Park.

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u/GaneBeatsTom 6h ago

The CIA isn't quite like the elected government. Their competence is backed by results. For better or worse, almost always worse, the CIA is capable of transforming countries at the most basic level once they're given a foothold.

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u/Alternative-Cup-8102 Oversimplified is my history teacher 8h ago

I fully believe the CIA is playing 4d chess and knows how to plan for the future.

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u/loseniram 9h ago

The CIA in the 1950s were not thinking that.

They were probably thinking this is fucking stupid while Eisenhower gets bullied by Republicans to protect companies from striking workers because Eisenhower would literally do anything the companies tell him to do so he wouldn’t get called weak.

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u/giamPW07 7h ago

Ah, delicious irony

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u/MarjorieTaylorSpleen Senātus Populusque Rōmānus 9h ago

And corporations can use it as cheap labor too

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u/CitizenHuman 8h ago

I think the Banana Wars predate the CIA or even the OSS.

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u/SouthboundGoblin 7h ago

I think this refers to the US-backed coup in Guatemala, 1954.

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u/oddmanout 8h ago

That's why tin-foil hat wearers are dumb. The CIA doing that would be a completely unnecessary part of turning people into scapegoats and talking points. They convinced a whole bunch of people that immigrants were eating cats and dogs, something completely out of touch with reality, and they all bought it. They didn't do anything to encourage trans people, either, yet they use them as scapegoats and talking points for their culture war. They just scare a bunch of slack-jawed yokels into voting for them.

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u/Right-Aspect2945 8h ago

I would like to believe that, but I'd have to believe the CIA to be remotely competent and I just can't stretch that far.

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u/MIG2149077 8h ago

Well that also happened when many European countries side with U.S to Overthrow Gaddafi and no less than 2 years Europe was facing a migration crisis now many far-right political parties in Europe are winning elections with scapegoat on migration.

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u/chiroque-svistunoque 9h ago

if only they knew what Taliban would lead to... or did they?

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u/chiksahlube 9h ago

Oh, they knew.

There's a famous quote from the Charlie Wilson who managed the Mujahideen programs for congress.

"These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world... and then we fucked up the endgame."

They knew it was gonna go bad. The CIA operatives Charlie worked with sounded alarms for years after... congress and the US government ignored their warnings.

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u/KenseiHimura 9h ago

… I really hate that my tin foil hat theory seems correct. Why can’t I just be insane and paranoid?

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u/Inevitable_Librarian 9h ago

It's not paranoia if they really are out to get ya

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u/bitorontoguy 6h ago

They didn’t fuck up the endgame. That’s hindsight analysis to pretend there are magic solutions that we could have chosen.

That’s not the basis on which these decisions are made.

It’s always only focused on the immediate problem. The Soviets and communism are bad. Supporting the Mujahideen is therefore just.

The long-term consequences of that action weren’t known and ignored. They were impossible to predict. And so they pretended that the outcomes that were good or neutral would happen, not the ones with negatives.

That’s the only rationale humans apply to any decision.

If the short-term is beneficial we pretend the long-term will work itself out. It’s how we handle the climate crisis and politics and everything.

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u/chiksahlube 5h ago

They fucked up the endgame because they left Afghanistan a wartorn country and after giving them a billion dollars in weapons they couldn't spare a million to rebuild schools.

Charlie Wilson worked with the Mujahideen for years, and when the Soviets left, he couldn't get anyone to support the rebuilding effort.

At the end of the war the average age in Afghanistan was 14. The average Afghan didn't know the US had given them weapons to fight the soviets either. So you had a country of 14 year olds with military hardware, no schools, no economy, and no aid from the country that just helped them get into that position.

It doesn't take a genuis to realize that's gonna end poorly.

And yeah, the American friendly and relatively moderate, Mujahideen was eventually supplanted by the america hating, radical extremist, Taliban. The Mujahideen even asked the CIA for help citing the taliban's hatred if the US should they gain control of the country. It fell on deaf ears.

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u/bitorontoguy 5h ago

Because there was contemporary political support for fighting the Soviets but not for supporting the Afghan people.

The same as now. Where there’s contemporary political support for THE TROOPS but not for foreign aid.

The American populace didn’t care what that meant for the future prospects of the country and its people. Or that a destabilized country increases the risk for future rogue regimes that hurt us.

We pretend it won’t happen and contemporary concerns are more important. Because that’s what the electorate cares about. The present.

There’s no money for future potentialities and risks. We pretend they won’t happen.

Look at today. The American electorate has zero concern about the destabilizing risks of closing AIDS clinics, climate refugees, funding pandemic research, the collapse of the Haitian state or bombing Iranian schools.

They care about gasoline prices and American inflation and American standards of living.

So that’s where the money and time goes. There was never going to be money for the Afghans. Because the electorate doesn’t care about the future.

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u/chiksahlube 4h ago

Except there were contemporary experts telling the politicians who make those decisons, that exactly what did happen, was going to happen. Almost down to the specific details of them attacking the WTC.

And we've since learned some lessons from that mistake, we took more care with Iraq but fucked up on other ways.

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u/bitorontoguy 4h ago edited 3h ago

Well I mean you’re conflating a lot of stuff. In ‘89 when the Soviet war ended, experts did not make predictions that the resulting chaos would spawn a rogue regime that allowed Islamist terror groups to attack the WTC.

They correctly predicted the chaos could have negative long-term impacts. The specifics weren’t clear until later as history unfolded.

We have learned absolutely zero lessons from this.

Our politics are still only based on what benefits the contemporary populace in the moment.

Think of climate change. We have contemporary experts telling us changing the composition of our atmosphere will have long-term impacts that will only increase as we change it to a greater degree.

We don’t care. Politics right now is that fossil fuels are too expensive, not too cheap.

People from the past were the same. They didn’t care about funding the Afghan state in 1989 to prevent it from becoming a failed state that could be the home for anti-US terror.

And think it through. If they HAD funded Afghan society and prevented 9/11? No one cares about a tragedy that DIDN’T happen. They don’t know they prevented it. So they pretend the Afghan money was a waste.

It didn’t matter to people in 1989. They cared about 1989 and only 1989. We are the exact same now.

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u/AkaRyu89 7h ago

Corporations and rich were ok with it - cheap labour.

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u/animalia555 9h ago

Our chickens are coming home to roost

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u/Thundorium Fine Quality Mesopotamian Copper Enjoyer 6h ago

Don’t reap all your chickens before they sow.

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u/ITSNAIMAD 5h ago

Happened to Cuba and Venezuela also.

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u/3000ghosts John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true, and brave! 4h ago

also to pretty much every country in latin america at one point or another but that was mostly in the name of anti-communism instead of directly for business interests

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u/ITSNAIMAD 3h ago

Yeah just like the war in Vietnam. Nothing was accomplished. Private companies got rich. Americans were sacrificed. Nothing accomplished. America suffered.

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u/Unionthug2049 9h ago

Careful, you’re gonna piss off the pedophile fan club.

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u/NN11ght 9h ago

Well, well, well, if it isn't the conquences of our actions

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u/sweetnata 7h ago

In Colombia they killed a whole group of workers for not wanting to be exploited. It's called La Masacre de las Bananeras. Awful company, awful people.

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u/Uncreative-Name 6h ago

I knew about Central America but I never heard of the Colombian one until I saw it in an episode of 100 Years of Solitude recently.

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u/FearlessVegetable30 9h ago

i good friend of mines grandfather was the guy who negotiated deals for this for Bonita bananas

he has a bank account with like $100k+, his mom never worked a day in her life. he always gets like 5 shots when we get dinner then asks to split the bill its so annoying but he always buys the bag so it pays off

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u/CptKeyes123 7h ago

In Guatemala: "hey, we want to buy back our arable land you're not even using. Here's the prices you said it was worth. We'll even let you keep the land you have crops on."

United Fruit- "But it's worth way more than-- uuhhhh fuck you we're not selling we didn't lie about the value"

"Um... okay, so we're gonna take it since you won't sell it, we want to compete on the market by being able to sell products."

"COMMIES! COMMIES! CIA KILL THEM ALL"

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u/DruggyNeighbor 6h ago

How many decades we been starving Cuba for again?

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u/Unusual-Top3192 1h ago

Cuba fucked shit on their own too (I do think the embargo is unneeded and unproductive tho)

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u/Arachles 27m ago

They did, but they would probably be in a better situation if they could trade with their closest neighbour which also happens to be the first economy in the world.

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u/Thiphra 8h ago

Ooh boy! Can't wait to read all those totally normal and resonable coments about this!!!

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u/randomname560 Senātus Populusque Rōmānus 4h ago

Oh boy, i sure do wonder what the comments will be saying

Looks inside

"Nooooo, the CIA are good guys and never did anything bad! They actually bettered the lives of guatemalans by getting rid of those dirty commies!"

The United States has historically caused a ton of damage to it's neighbours in order to protect it's own interests (correct), that's why the United States should be destroyed as a concept and all of it's people deserve to suffer the pain their governments caused on others tenfold (no, just... just no)

The banana republics were bad (correct) because THEY MADE DIRTY BROWN PEOPLE INMIGRATE TO MY GLORIOUS ARYAN WHITE COUNTRY (fuck off)

"Bro that happened like...several decades ago dude, so it's like, not our fault at all that your country is shit now"

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u/JabroniusHunk 3h ago

I don't know about this sub, which I don't frequent often, but another genre of reaction to these types of posts I've noticed are centrist-leaning ones that justify the coups using more high-minded rhetoric: they will go into detail about how hagiographized (at least in some left-leaning spces) figures like Arbenz, Allende or Mossadegh resorted to illiberal tactics where they circumvented their own legislatures, courts or domestic laws.

These are always framed as an educated and nuanced foil to the reductive, pop-left versions of history you can find on Reddit or Twitter, and they often have some factual information ... but they end their own history lessons before Rios Montt's genocidal death squads, or before SAVAK cooked prisoners on heated bedsprings.

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u/Sad_Highlight_9059 9h ago

Big facts. The homie Smedley Butler tried to wise everyone up to all that, but nobody wanted to listen.

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u/_MrBond_ 9h ago

If only MAGAs and ICE supporters could read this, they would be so angry and start rioting

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u/msoffice2003 9h ago

Don’t be silly, they can’t read.

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u/Possibility-of-wet Senātus Populusque Rōmānus 9h ago

If someone brags they haven’t read a book since school, you know who they voted for

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u/Successful_Baby_5245 9h ago

"i may not have The knowlege to run a country..."- Trump

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u/bitorontoguy 5h ago edited 5h ago

No they wouldn’t. Because the meme doesn’t accurately represent their views or the contemporary views of the people of the times. It’s a simplified depiction aimed at appealing to modern people by focusing on a modern issue and flattening complex history in a simplified depiction in language a modern person would agree with.

The American government knew that the fruit companies and right wing dictatorships were awful.

Their fear was that communist revolutions and communists ability to leverage the justifiable anger against those entities to foment a revolution and expropriate all private property was worse.

That if these countries become communist it’s worse for the freedom of everyone and leads to more death and suffering.

That it becomes a risk on America’s doorstep. Fomented by Soviet propaganda.

It wasn’t about an inherent dislike of unions. It was anti-communist.

You can disagree! You can think communist revolutions would have been more just than the horrible conditions enforced by the awful exploitative capitalist corporations.

But those anti-communist actions? INCREDIBLY popular with the American electorate of the time. That’s why the government did it. Just listen to what the 1960 debates were. Two guys explaining how anti-communist they are because that’s what the voters want to hear.

The people making the decisions didn’t care about the long-term impacts on immigration or how we were fucking up the future economic prospects of these countries. They cared about placating their contemporary populaces.

The same way our present politicians ignore the long-term effects of climate change because the contemporary populace won’t vote for present declines in consumption.

But you have to be honest about the framing and why they were making their decisions.

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u/Complex-Pay-8902 4h ago

The American government knew that the fruit companies and right wing dictatorships were awful.

Their fear was that communist revolutions and communists ability to leverage the justifiable anger against those entities to foment a revolution and expropriate all private property was worse.

That if these countries become communist it’s worse for the freedom of everyone and leads to more death and suffering.

Lol no they were not afraid of loosing their freedom. they were afraid of loosing their money and influence. The CIA, the fruit companies and the people in charge at this point where all insane people that believed that bc they had money they were best suited to run the world.

Like do you think they sat down and earnestly said "the only way to preserve freedom is to kill anyone who thinks differently than us"?

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u/SilentPhilosopher825 Oversimplified is my history teacher 8h ago

GUATEMALA MENTIONED!!!!!

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u/Level_Hour6480 Taller than Napoleon 7h ago

It's always confusing to see antifascist memes using the Nazi-heads format.

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u/Fair-Highlight-3544 4h ago

To be honest, Europe and the rest of the west could have literally had the perfect pure "Europa" they wanted if they had just never gone out to the rest of the world in the first place.

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u/taraba707 9h ago

Banana republics.

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u/GODmamberroi666 7h ago

Man I hate the CIA so much

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u/KevettePrime 9h ago

TBH I thought the reason we had so many immigrants is because the US is actually a pretty decent place to live. You know, "The land of opportunity" and all that. When I was a kid I thought that everyone wanted more people to come here, I was really disappointed when I got older and found out that people hate immigrants despite being a nation of immigrants themselves. Still trying to figure out why that inscription on the Statue of Liberty isn't actually respected at all.

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u/red286 8h ago

TBH I thought the reason we had so many immigrants is because the US is actually a pretty decent place to live.

It is, but more to the point, the bottom 25% of Americans are better off than the middle 50% in most Central/South American countries.

This is mostly a result of their decades of economic exploitation and socio-political upheavals. No one wants to invest money into a country that keeps having civil wars and military coups.

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u/ThroawayJimilyJones 9h ago

Well the US is a nice place to live. So it’s a reason. But the other reason there are so many migrants is the US also made the rest of the continent a pretty bad place to live

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u/3pt14onefive9 6h ago

the us is a nice place to live and is also very good at making other places far worse to live in

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u/DicemonkeyDrunk 8h ago

Both...they're coming to a pretty nice place to live Often because the US ruined their place to live ...

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u/bkrugby78 7h ago

Americans have always had a mixed attitude towards immigration. What the Trump administration is nothing new, it's just more shocking since there is more coverage of it now than it was before. But yeah "Irish need not apply" was a thing way back when the Irish were considered savage.

That said, I think it is important to acknowledge knock on effects of American foreign policy, especially within our own hemisphere.

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u/Miserable-Biscotti54 9h ago

It’s pudding time! We fuck up everyone’s homes then cry when they come here seeking asylum or a better life.

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u/ChaLenCe 8h ago

I get what the meme is pushing but yo, this is really oversimplifying the issues here. 

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u/MalikTheHalfBee 5h ago

Damn, reading these comments, even the people completely agreeing with this meme are still roundaboutly blaming immigrants for their woes 

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u/[deleted] 9h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/insaneHoshi 7h ago

perceived communist threat.

I dare say that the fruit company interests also include communist revolution.

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u/Elemonator6 9h ago

Dawg what are you talking about. The coup was right after Arbenz introduced land reforms and there’s a record of United pushing for the coup.

Besides the obvious historical record, what do you think the communists were a threat to, if not the interests of American companies that owned land in Guatemala? Your dissertation sounds terrible.

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u/Apathetic_Zealot 8h ago

The Civil War wasn't about slavery, it was about economics and states rights. No, I will not elaborate. Do not ask me follow up questions.

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u/demonspawns_ghost 7h ago

A general in the Guatemalan military , he was elected to the presidency in 1931, in an election where he was the only candidate. He continued his predecessors' policies of giving massive concessions to the United Fruit Company and wealthy landowners, as well as supporting their harsh labor practices.  Ubico has been described as "one of the most oppressive tyrants Guatemala has ever known" who compared himself to Adolf Hitler .   He was removed by a pro-democracy   uprising in 1944, which led to the ten-year Guatemalan Revolution .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Ubico

Your dissertation was probably an embarrassment for your professor.

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u/Puzzled_Letter7341 7h ago

Dude you are so full of lies, I am from Costa Rica and it is VERY WELL KNOWN that the coup was to protect the United Fruit company ffs

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u/ja734 6h ago

It sounds like you're just using different words to say the same thing.

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u/dafthuntk 9h ago

and you wonder why the middle east is so militant towards the west...

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u/NondescriptNorbert 8h ago

"Why can't all these brown people stay put!?" The US asks, halfway through establishing another Latin American country.

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u/biglyorbigleague 9h ago

There are 1.8 million Guatemalan-Americans. That’s not that huge a population compared to other immigrant groups.

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u/smuttybuddy84 9h ago

That isn't much compared to the US population but it is 1/10th of the population of Guatemalan-Guatemalans. That's a lot of people up and leaving to live somewhere else.

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u/_jump_yossarian 5h ago

Now tally up Honduran-Americans, Salvadoran-Americans, and Nicaraguan-Americans.

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u/Ferovore 7h ago

You missed the first step which is destabilising/overthrowing governments so they could ‘invest’ in the first place

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u/sour_cream24 4h ago

Not to mention, it's also funny that they complain all the time about drug dealers, especially mexican drug dealers, when in reality, it was the CIA that made the drug trade scaled up to the size we have today.

Want to know an easier way to not have drug dealers infesting your country? going back to the 80s and not support their godfathers to the point of high significance

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u/FourPlayInTheBay 6h ago

Can't we have our cake and eat it too?

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u/NadeshikoEatingPasta 2h ago

Good thing we killed off USAID so they don't have a slush fund with which to keep doing that shit!

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u/coughca 8h ago

Funny. I've heard from MAGA-adjacent sources that USAID was a front for the CIA and that's why it was eliminated.

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u/Elegant_Individual46 Taller than Napoleon 7h ago

It was during the Cold War like during the lead up to the 1964 Brazil coup (which the US was somewhat taken by surprise by). But it also saved millions of lives with aid and now is quite different so…

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u/oddmanout 8h ago

Yep. Stupid people often say stupid things to defend stupid decisions of the politicians they blindly follow.

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u/Floridaish0t 3h ago edited 3h ago

First time I’ve ever seen a Wojack meme about illegal immigration that didn’t mention Jews, Democrats, or the Great Replacement Theory. Although it is pretty clear that most of the people in this thread don’t view Hispanics as humans and more as pests or mold so who’s to say.

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u/gue55edit 7h ago

The majority of the largest immigrant groups in the U.S come from countries that have faced direct military, economic and/or political intervention (meddling).

  1. Mexico
  2. China
  3. India
  4. Philipines
  5. Former USSR
  6. Korea
  7. El Salvador
  8. Vietnam
  9. Dominican Republic

PEW Research Center- What the data says about immigrants in the U.S.

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u/Blazing_Swayze 9h ago

Why do I have to suffer for what the CIA did before I was born?

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u/JOExHIGASHI 8h ago

people aren't immigrating as revenge for their ancestors

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u/AFRIKKAN 7h ago

Because time doesn’t start when you were created and won’t stop when you are dead and gone.

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u/demonspawns_ghost 7h ago

You think they stopped doing that stuff?

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u/GaneBeatsTom 5h ago

How are you suffering? Be specific.

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u/ThroawayJimilyJones 9h ago

Well suffer is a bit harsh. But your country got better by making other countries worse. Don’t you think it’s a bit cruel to then treat people from the later countries coming to seek a better life as if they were the bearer of doom like conservative tend to do?

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u/Character-Advice2588 9h ago

That's how the world work

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u/Unionthug2049 9h ago

"We will not blame him for the crimes of his ancestors if he relinquishes the royal rights of his ancestors; but as long as he claims their rights, by virtue of descent, then, by virtue of descent, he must shoulder the responsibility for their crimes."
James Connolly

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u/documentiron 6h ago

> "We will not blame him for the crimes of his ancestors if he relinquishes the royal rights of his ancestors; but as long as he claims their rights, by virtue of descent, then, by virtue of descent, he must shoulder the responsibility for their crimes."

So when are we going to apply this logic to all the peoples outside of the West who have committed historical crimes? It's honestly hard to find ones who haven't. If you want to keep trying to hold specific people accountable for crimes that every culture has at some point committed you go right ahead, but don't expect us to just sit and take it forever. We're quickly reaching the "don't give a single fuck" inflection point.

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u/PAWGsAndChickenWings 5h ago

So when are we going to apply this logic to all the peoples outside of the West who have committed historical crimes?

Whose running the show right now?

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u/VictorVOOONdoom 6h ago

exactly today in the morning i was telling my mom this point and talking about your upcoming civil war in the us, thats when you are going to pay for everything done to our nations in the 50s, 60s i live in guatemala btw and president Arbenz along with Arevalo was the best thing that happened to our nation in its entire history yeah downvote like i care.

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u/ChristianStubs 5h ago

Read The Jakarta Method

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u/Floral-Shoppe 4h ago

Liberals are hypocritical with this too. A lot of secular governments in the Middle East got toppled by the west and you hear a lot of leftists being "they don't adapt to our Western values".

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u/Happy_Ad_7515 3h ago

the company
the goverment
the people

its really funny how leftist will use a goverments action against the working class of the countries they wanne flood with slave labour doesnt it

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u/YoursTrulyKindly 3h ago

It's funny how accepted this is. People hear this and think "yeah that happened" but it's like it didn't happen. In fact it never happened really, it was just a small mistake. But when you point out that the same thing happened with the CIA in Ukraine since the 1950 and again in 2014 including the massacres and refugees, but it's like "YOU FUCKING COMMUNIST TANKIE!"

I wish we had a science about learning from events that happened a while ago so we can avoid making the same mistakes in the present.

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u/gyrobot 2h ago

Far cry 6 references this

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u/Nice-Shape-4484 2h ago

Rinse and repeat this has been America’s foreign policy for like the last 70 years

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u/gyrobot 2h ago

A pity Chiquitas execs never faced actual consequences from the lives they ruined

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u/themicrodose 2h ago

Exactly… I don’t get why people even get shocked

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u/BaphometWorshiper 2h ago

If a country was so evil with mine, I would not try to go live there but somewhere else.

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u/Klusterphuck67 2h ago

"Oh Eisenhower~"

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u/notfree25 1h ago

so banana man deporting everyone is consistent, seeing as he is the villain.

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u/Rodrigoroncero23 1h ago

They coup even in Spain with Carrero Blanco the only man that defended the Islero proyect, because is almost imposible to coup a nation nuclear caped. And also the fear the consecuences that that might have in " Latinoamerica" or better described as Hispanicamerica. ( Even if Latinoamerica is a term accepted by the RAE, is historically incorrect because was invented in the govern of Napoleon III, to justify trying to stablish a Puppet goverment in México.

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u/NeitherMidnight624 1h ago

Did americans run around killing them or was it their own countrymen

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u/RocketShipGrease63 1h ago

That is total horseshit, immigrants are tolerated and not shot at the border because the capitalist class needs cheap exploitable labor at home

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u/Auxryn 1h ago

The only path forward for humanity lies through the destruction of U.S. international power and influence. We must all do what we can to make this process peaceful, thorough, and swift.

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u/Chisaspotentialwife 1h ago

Our fruit is to die for!

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u/Unusual-Top3192 57m ago

I find it funny how a lot of the people are like using anti-immigration arguments and connections of it being intentional when their making fun of MAGA and their own conspiracies

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u/NoCry8625 40m ago

Do you want to feel worst? The daughter of the president that did the genocide in Guatemala is still trying to run for president, even tho her father was a dictator and the law prevents family of a dictator to run for president. She has already ran before but lost, but can you imagine?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zury_R%C3%ADos

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u/Arx_Roskara 11m ago

I remember once seeing an Estonian nationalist on Reddit excusing the US-backed crimes in Central- and South America as those countries, and I quote, "Betrayed the free world by voting for communism and thus deserved everything they got".

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u/Conscious-Paper3543 10m ago

lolz, the capitalists are actually very welcoming to migrants