All but 2 countries in South America have had the experience of democratically electing a leader only to have them overthrown in a US-backed coup. The US/CIA started with this obsession with the 1954 Guatemalan Coup specifically to maintain Guatemala as a banana republic. Chiquita owned most land in Guatemala and left is uncultivated to stifle competition. Jacobo Árbenz wanted to (slightly) tax this land to reduce poverty. Chiquita hired Edward Bernays (yes, that guy. The father of modern public relations, nephew of Freud, etc) for an influence campaign and eventually got CIA to launch Operation PBSuccess in 1953. The CIA/Chiquita gave very extensive lists of political opponents to murder during the coup.
So what's really the difference?
One way to view current US politics is that the broader banana republic tendency ran out of South American governments to overthrow and moved back to the domestic government, which has now taken on all the corruption and extractive politics of South American CIA-backed dictatorships. The violence levels are not comparable .. yet. But having an explicitly political paramilitary force that's shot a few citizens in the street is not a good sign.
There's a well-known sociological concept called "imperial boomerang" that describes this. It's also seen in surveillance technologies used against oppressed people. As far back as the surveillance apparatus Britain built in Ireland which eventually came to roost on the British people themselves
You can't spell Chiquita without CIA
Not just South America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_CIA_involvement_in_the...
Of course not.[0][1][2] But nowhere as extensively as South America.[3][4]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_19...
[3] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/26/a-timeline-of-cia-...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...