US-Backed Regime Changes

Mossadegh was democratically elected and wildly popular. He nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later BP) because Iran received only 16% of oil profits. The CIA spent $1M bribing Iranian military officers and orchestrating street protests. After the coup, the Shah ruled for 26 years with SAVAK — a secret police trained by the CIA and Mossad — that tortured and killed thousands of dissidents. The blowback was the 1979 revolution that created the Islamic Republic of Iran, America's primary adversary in the Middle East ever since. Every dollar spent on Iranian sanctions, every warship deployed to the Persian Gulf, every proxy conflict with Iranian-backed groups traces back to this single CIA operation.

Árbenz was democratically elected and implemented modest land reform, redistributing unused land from the United Fruit Company (which owned 42% of Guatemala's arable land but cultivated only 5%) to 100,000 peasant families. The CIA branded him a communist, armed and trained 480 exiles in Honduras, and used psychological warfare (fake radio broadcasts) to simulate a larger invasion. The coup installed a military dictatorship that began decades of repression. A 1999 UN truth commission found that US-backed forces committed acts of genocide against the Maya people, with 83% of victims being indigenous. The Guatemalan civil war produced waves of refugees to the US — the very migration crisis that American politicians now decry.

Patrice Lumumba was the Congo's first democratically elected prime minister. CIA station chief Larry Devlin received orders to assassinate him. While the CIA's specific poison plot was never carried out, the agency actively supported Mobutu's coup and Lumumba was captured and murdered by Katangan separatists with Belgian and likely CIA complicity. Mobutu ruled for 32 years as one of Africa's most brutal kleptocrats, embezzling an estimated $5 billion while his people starved. He was a reliable Cold War ally, receiving billions in US aid. After his fall in 1997, the country collapsed into the deadliest conflict since WWII. The Congo remains one of the poorest countries on earth despite sitting on $24 trillion in mineral wealth — including the cobalt in your phone battery.

The CIA trained and armed 1,400 Cuban exiles (Brigade 2506) for an amphibious invasion at the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy withdrew air support at the last minute. The invasion was crushed in 72 hours — 114 killed, 1,189 captured. The humiliation pushed Castro deeper into the Soviet embrace, directly leading to the placement of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba and the October 1962 Missile Crisis. The US then spent 60+ years on an embargo that has failed to remove Castro's government but has impoverished Cuban civilians. The CIA also launched Operation Mongoose — at least 8 assassination attempts against Castro, including the infamous exploding cigar and poisoned wetsuit. Castro died of natural causes in 2016 at age 90.

When a popular uprising sought to restore democratically elected President Juan Bosch — who had been overthrown by a military coup in 1963 — LBJ sent 42,000 US troops to prevent it. The invasion killed over 3,000 Dominican civilians. Johnson publicly claimed he was protecting American lives, but privately told aides he was preventing "another Cuba." The US installed Joaquín Balaguer, a former puppet of the assassinated dictator Trujillo, who ruled on and off for 22 years. This was the first US military intervention in Latin America since the "Good Neighbor Policy" of 1933 — and it signaled to Latin American nations that democracy was only acceptable when it produced US-friendly results.

Diem was America's hand-picked leader — installed in 1955 with CIA backing. But by 1963, his violent repression of Buddhist monks (including self-immolations broadcast worldwide) became a political liability. The CIA gave South Vietnamese generals a green light to overthrow him. Diem and his brother were murdered in the back of an armored personnel carrier. Kennedy was reportedly shocked, but the US had signaled it would not oppose the coup. The result was chaos: South Vietnam went through seven governments in two years, each more unstable than the last. This instability drew the US deeper into direct military involvement, leading to the full-scale war that killed 58,220 Americans, an estimated 2 million Vietnamese civilians, and ended in American defeat in 1975.

The US provided logistical support (Operation Brother Sam positioned a carrier task force off Brazil's coast) and political encouragement for the Brazilian military to overthrow the democratically elected President Goulart. The resulting military dictatorship lasted 21 years, during which thousands were imprisoned and tortured, hundreds "disappeared," and basic civil liberties were suspended. Brazil's military regime became a key participant in Operation Condor — the US-backed network of South American dictatorships that coordinated the kidnapping, torture, and murder of political opponents across borders. The dictatorship's economic policies also deepened Brazil's massive inequality, effects that persist today.

Salvador Allende was the world's first democratically elected Marxist head of state. Nixon and Kissinger were determined to prevent a "second Cuba." The CIA spent $8M destabilizing Allende's government — funding opposition media, encouraging trucker strikes, and cultivating military contacts. On September 11, 1973, the military bombed the presidential palace. Allende died (officially by suicide). General Pinochet seized power and unleashed a reign of terror: 3,200+ people murdered, 40,000 tortured (including electric shock, sexual violence, and mock executions), and 200,000 forced into exile. Chile became the hub of Operation Condor. Pinochet also became the testing ground for Milton Friedman's "Chicago Boys" — radical free-market economics imposed under military dictatorship, a model later exported to other countries.

Grenada is a Caribbean island smaller than Detroit with a population of 91,000. After a Marxist internal coup killed Prime Minister Bishop, Reagan invaded with 7,600 troops — outnumbering the entire Grenadian military 10:1. The administration claimed American medical students were in danger; the students themselves said they weren't. The real target was a Cuban-built airport that the US claimed (without evidence) would serve as a Soviet military base. The invasion was condemned by the UN General Assembly 108-9. Britain — America's closest ally — was not informed and was furious (Grenada is a Commonwealth nation). The operation was a military success against negligible opposition but set an important precedent: the US could invade a sovereign nation based on manufactured threats with minimal domestic opposition.

Manuel Noriega had been on the CIA payroll since the 1960s, receiving $100,000+ per year. He was a key US ally during the Contra wars, allowing the US to use Panama as a staging ground. But when Noriega became too independent — and too publicly linked to drug trafficking — he became a liability. Bush invaded with 27,684 troops. The US military used the Stealth fighter in combat for the first time, dropped bombs on the densely populated El Chorrillo neighborhood (destroying 4,000 homes), and blasted Noriega's refuge with rock music until he surrendered. The Panamanian Defense Forces were overwhelmed. Civilian casualties were heavily disputed: the US claimed 202; Panamanian human rights groups documented over 3,000 deaths. The UN General Assembly condemned the invasion 75-20. The irony: America invaded to arrest a man it had employed for decades.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti's first democratically elected president, was overthrown in a 1991 military coup. The coup leaders had connections to the CIA. After 3 years of brutal military rule that killed 3,000-5,000 Haitians, Clinton sent 20,000 troops to restore Aristide in 1994. But when Aristide was re-elected in 2000 and began pursuing policies the US opposed, including demanding France repay the $21 billion (inflation-adjusted) it extorted from Haiti for the crime of ending slavery, the US supported his removal again in 2004. Aristide was flown out of the country on a US plane — he says he was kidnapped. Haiti has never recovered from the cycle of intervention. It remains the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with 60% of the population living on less than $2/day.

The Iraq War was launched on the basis of intelligence that the Bush administration knew was dubious or fabricated. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no connection to 9/11 or Al-Qaeda. The Downing Street Memo revealed that intelligence was being "fixed around the policy" of invasion. The war killed over 300,000 Iraqi civilians, displaced 9.2 million, destroyed the country's infrastructure, disbanded the Iraqi army (creating 400,000 unemployed, armed, trained men), and ignited a sectarian civil war. The disbanded army became the backbone of ISIS. Iran — the very country the US had been trying to contain — became the dominant regional power in Iraq's vacuum. Twenty years later, Iraq remains unstable, its oil wealth largely controlled by foreign companies, and a generation of Iraqis knows nothing but war. The architects of the war — Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz — faced no consequences.

The intervention began as a UN-authorized no-fly zone to "protect civilians" but immediately became a regime change operation. NATO flew 26,500 sorties and dropped thousands of bombs. Gaddafi was captured by rebels, sodomized with a bayonet, and killed — Hillary Clinton laughed on camera: "We came, we saw, he died." Libya had the highest Human Development Index in Africa under Gaddafi. After his fall, it became a failed state with open-air slave markets where sub-Saharan African migrants are bought and sold. Gaddafi's massive weapons stockpiles were looted and spread across Africa, fueling conflicts in Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and beyond. Libya became an ISIS stronghold and a primary departure point for the Mediterranean migration crisis that destabilized European politics. Obama later called the failure to plan for post-Gaddafi Libya the "worst mistake" of his presidency.

The CIA spent $1 billion per year on Timber Sycamore, a program to arm and train Syrian rebels. Many of those weapons ended up with jihadist groups including Al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate (al-Nusra Front). Pentagon-trained rebels were captured and their weapons taken by extremists. In one notorious case, a Pentagon-backed group and a CIA-backed group fought each other. The US also directly intervened militarily against ISIS, dropping over 30,000 bombs on Syria. The city of Raqqa was leveled in the anti-ISIS campaign, killing thousands of civilians. Assad remained in power with Russian and Iranian support. The war produced 6.8 million refugees (the largest refugee crisis since WWII at the time), destabilized European politics, and contributed to the rise of far-right movements across the continent.

When the Honduran military kidnapped President Zelaya at gunpoint and flew him out of the country in his pajamas, the Obama administration notably refused to call it a "coup" — because doing so would have legally required cutting off US military aid. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton worked behind the scenes to prevent Zelaya's return and legitimize the new government. In the years following the coup, Honduras became one of the most violent countries in the world, with homicide rates exceeding those of active war zones. Environmental activists, journalists, and indigenous leaders were systematically murdered. The resulting instability drove the migration "caravans" to the US border that became a political flashpoint in American politics. Once again, US intervention created the very crisis it later decried.

In January 2019, the US recognized opposition leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela's legitimate president — despite Guaidó never winning a presidential election. The strategy relied on military defections that never materialized. A bizarre 2020 private military operation (Operation Gideon), involving former US Green Berets, attempted to capture Maduro and was defeated by Venezuelan fishermen. Meanwhile, US sanctions — among the harshest ever imposed — devastated the civilian economy. A 2019 study estimated sanctions contributed to 40,000 deaths from lack of medicine and food. Venezuelan oil production collapsed from 2.5 million barrels/day to under 400,000. Over 7 million Venezuelans fled the country, creating the largest refugee crisis in Latin American history. Guaidó was eventually sidelined by his own opposition coalition. Maduro remains firmly in power.

The US spent an estimated $5 billion on "democracy promotion" in Ukraine between 1991 and 2014 (per Victoria Nuland). The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) — a CIA cutout founded in 1983 — funded dozens of Ukrainian opposition groups and media outlets. When protests erupted in Maidan square after Yanukovych chose a Russian trade deal over an EU agreement, senior US officials openly intervened. Senator John McCain stood on stage with opposition leaders including the far-right Svoboda party's Oleh Tyahnybok. Nuland handed out cookies in Maidan square. In a leaked phone call, Nuland told US Ambassador Pyatt "Yats is the guy" — hand-picking the next prime minister. An EU-brokered peace deal signed Feb 21 was abandoned within 24 hours when armed groups seized government buildings. Yanukovych fled. The new government's first act repealed Russian-language protections, inflaming eastern Ukraine. Russia annexed Crimea; civil war erupted in the Donbas (14,000 killed over 8 years). George Friedman of Stratfor called it "the most blatant coup in history." The direct line from 2014 to Russia's 2022 invasion is undeniable.