The CIA’s History of Violence
Intended to gather and collate intelligence, the CIA became a secretive organisation accountable to no one. This had disastrous consequences for Latin America.
In the 75 years since it was founded the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has earned a reputation as the covert action arm of the United States government. The reputation is justified: the agency has acted to topple progressive democratic governments, replacing them with brutal, rightwing military dictatorships. We might think of the CIA’s role in the overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz’ government in Guatemala in 1954, after he attempted to expropriate banana plantations from the United Fruit Company to provide land for local peasants, or the removal in 1973 of the elected socialist president Salvador Allende in Chile in favour of Augusto Pinochet. From 1961 Operation Mongoose engaged in repeated, but unsuccessful, attempts to assassinate the Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro. The investigative journalist Gary Webb lost his job, and eventually his life to suicide, when he documented the agency’s extensive links with drug traffickers in its attempts to undermine Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista administration in his 1996 book Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras, and The Crack Cocaine Explosion.
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