>>17782775That being said, what I personally see is that South American leftists aren't really that interested in the CIA hypothesis, maybe with the exception of the country you mentioned. But even there, like everywhere else, the typical South American left-wing revisionist narrative is about a reactionary, landed, commodity exporting oligarchy that undermined democracy and paved the way for a military coup to sabotage social reforms and overall political turns to the left. They don't claim that the CIA destroyed their democracies, but rather that they economic elites did. While this explanation fails to acknowledge or give the due importance to the severe institutional deterioration all of these countries went through before the coups, it's saner and closer to reality than the CIA orchestrating everything to own the commies. The CIA hypothesis is preferred not by leftists in South America, but leftists in Europe and above all in North America. That, too, is the result of a combination of things.
It's normal for an American to see history from an American perspective and, in situations like this, overemphasize the negative role his nation might've played in the world. An American can be less interested in how South American dictatorships came to be and more in how his government supported dictatorships. That's fine. But I cannot help but feel like much of this comes from people being very opinionated over countries they have absolutely no knowledge about, and the Western vice of ignoring the agency and autonomy of other nations around the world. Even for progressive, left-leaning people, the idea that South Americans dug graves for themselves independently of the rest of the world sounds radical compared to the idea that they were victims, tools used by the great powers of the world in their grand strategy.
