The United States has long flexed its muscles in Latin American affairs
and exerted its power over the Western Hemisphere. The end of the Cold
War failed to ease tensions in US–Latin American relations. The expansion
of state-sanctioned terrorism in the Americas until the arrest of Augusto Pinochet
in 1998 rested on the privileges of impunity for Latin American security forces and
their brethren in the United States. Impunity reinforced US hegemony by enabling
Latin American militaries (and those who trained them) to get away with torture,
murder, and the disappearance of thousands of people during the many dirty wars
that ensued during the last half of the twentieth century. According to Leslie Gill
(2004, 237), “the impunity-backed state terror that fractured countries such as Guatemala,
El Salvador, Chile, and Argentina while they were ruled by harsh regimes
set the stage for the consolidation of neoliberal economic models under civilian
governments.” John Bellamy Foster (2007, 2–3) further articulates the connection
between militarism and neoliberalism in Latin America, and identifies the role the
United States played in the process: “It was in the US-sponsored dictatorships
of the Southern Cone of South America (Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay)
that neoliberalism, i.e., the promotion of a new naked capitalism in response to
world economic slowdown—requiring the elimination of all state protections for
the population and all limits on the movement of capital—was first imposed.”
The return to “democracy” in the 1980s and 1990s did not alleviate the fears, as
repressive entities largely remained intact (in Chile, for example).