This documentary is a must watch; exposing the truth about the 2002 CIA-backed coup against the Chavez government in Venezuela. Students of history and Iran’s own MI6-CIA backed coup of 1953 which ousted the nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh after his nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company will note a plethora of similarities between the two cases.
There are of course important differences, but as former New York Times journalist Stephen Kinzer has argued, the coup in Iran acted as a ‘test case’ for the CIA’s covert policy of ‘regime change’ vis-a-vis those regimes which resisted, rejected or weren’t amenable to US interests; a policy that would go on to be implemented in a host of developing nations, Guatemala and Chile, perhaps being two of the more prominent examples in Latin American. Comparable events took place in Argentina, Columbia, Brazil and Paraguay. These historical examples are integral to understanding what happened in Venezuela and also past and present American policy toward Iran and the Middle East more generally; but they’re also crucial to understanding the unabated imperial and predatory attitude taken towards Latin America at large, initially by the European powers in the horrific course of the Americas colonization and later in the course of the twentieth century by the United States.
