The United States has a long history of being in bed with dictators. Here we are, the world's leading capitalist democratic nation and yet our foreign policy finds no conflicts in supporting dictators, as long as they promise to be friendly to the U.S. These dictators usually have suspended elections and oppressed the people in their country. These very two things are what we are always saying that we are against and yet in actuality we have supported these dictators with billions of American dollars. We have even called these guys friends of our country as they tortured and killed their citizens. Why do we do this? I believe that the reason for this is several fold. One reason in the past was that we wanted to keep communism out of these countries and we thought that a dictator was better than a communist Government. Secondly we felt that if we controlled these countries, then we gained better security. Another reason was to gain access to that country's oil and mineral wealth. American companies wanted to go into these countries to drill and mine.

It is strange on the surface, but many of the worst dictators wanted to befriend the U.S. Well maybe that is not so strange because they wanted to acquire U.S. dollars, weapons and support. With the U.S. backing them they felt a lot more secure. If we work backwards, the latest dictator that we were supporting was Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan. He came to power in 1999 through a military coup d'etat and one of the first things he did was suspend the constitution of Pakistan on two different occasions. His ploy to get in good with us and Great Britain was that he announced he would fight extremists. That was all it took for the U.S. to embrace him. The truth of the matter was that terrorists continued to operate out of Pakistan's lawless border areas and there was nothing being done about it by him. He resigned in 2008 on 18 August. No doubt that we had something to do with that since we were very unhappy with his performance even though his words would have indicated that he was doing a good job. Today we have taken things into our own hands and are suspected of having launched several missile attacks into Pakistan's border areas to the consternation of the new Government.

In 1989 a deck of playing cards was released and each one contained what was known as the picture of a friendly dictator. That was one that was friendly to the U.S. Here is a partial list of those dictators:

Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez – El Salvador
Fulgencio Batista – Cuba
Rafael Leonidas Trujillo – Dominican Republic
Humberto Branco – Brazil
Hugo Banzer – Bolivia
Anastasio Somoza Sr. - Nicaragua
Anastasio Somoza Jr. - Nicaragua
Jorge Rafael Videla – Argentina
Efrain Rios Mont – Guatemala
Roberto Suazo Cordova – Honduras
Francois Duvalier – Haiti
Jean Claude Duvalier – Haiti
Alferedo Stroessner – Paraguay
Augusto Pinochet – Chile
Manuel Noriega – Panama
Vinicio Cerezo – Guatemala
Alfredo Cristiani – El Salvador
Chiang Kai-Shek – Taiwan
Ngo Dinh Diem – South Viet Nam
Ferdinand marcos – Philippines
Mohammed Zia Ul-Haq – Pakistan
Sir Hassanal Bolkiah – Brunei
Sitiveni Rabuka – Fiji
Suharto – Indonesia
Samuel Doe – Liberia
Mobutu Sese Seko – Zaire
Mohammad Reza Pahlevi – Iran
Hussan II – Moracco
Francisco Franco – Spain
Antonio De Oliverira Salazar – Portugal

I left some of the names off my list because I thought they may have been in doubt.

Let's look into the background of some of these guys:

Anastasio Somoza Sr. was installed as president of Nicaragua by the the U.S. The marines had been in Nicaragua in 1912 and fought there until 1933, but they couldn't defeat the revolutionaries. When the revolutionaries signed a cease fire, Somoza killed their leader Sandino. Franklin Delano Roosevelt stated that, “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch.” It is interesting to note that the General was in charge of the Marines there, Smedley Butler stated, I [was] a high class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and for the banks. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism…I helped purify Nicaragua for [an] International banking house.”

Alfredo Stroessner became president for life in Paraguay in 1954. European correspondents described his rule as the, “poor man’s Nazi regime”. Indeed many Nazis had escaped to Paraguay after the war. The native Ache Indians were hunted down and murdered under his regime so that the forests would become available to sell to American companies along with mines and grazing lands. The U.S. sent millions of dollars to Stroessner, but in 1971, the country was implicated in the Marseilles drug ring. The Government was allowing the drug traffickers to use the country as a transfer point. In 1988 a coup was staged by Andres Rodriguez a general and known drug dealer and yet President Bush Sr. called this a democratic opening.

Augusto Pinochet was a brutal dictator. A very famous event occurred under Pinochet's rule. An eighteen year old girl and a photographer were walking through a slum when they were set upon by Pinochet's security forces. They were set on fire and beat while they burned. Their bodies were then taken away and dumped into a ditch. Any witness that spoke about this was taken away. Pinochet was famous for saying, “Democracy is the breeding ground of communism”, When he seized power during a coup, he killed the president Salvador Allende in 1973. It is said that he had the backing of the CIA at the time. Prisoners were tortured in various ways. It is also said that his Government was responsible for blowing up Chile's former ambassador to the U.S., Orlando Letelier with a car bomb.

Is it any wonder that many of the world's countries don't trust us? What we have to do is stop trying to backup these cruel regimes that turn the people of those countries against us and push for free elections, even if we are not happy with some of the candidates. As they say, if we talk the talk, we have to walk the walk. We shouldn't express one policy and secretly back another. We really aren't fooling anyone with this anymore.