15 December 2021 — TRicontinental

Photographs by Victor Basterra (Argentina) / collage by Daniela Ruggeri, Unknown victims and prisoners at the Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA), 1976-1983.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

At the US State Department’s Summit for Democracy (9–10 December), US President Joe Biden announced a range of initiatives to ‘bolster democracy and defend human rights globally’. These measures are to be funded by $424.4 million from the United States. This money will go towards the same institutions that have – for the past sixty years – intervened to undermine the sovereignty of democratic processes from Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) to Honduras (2009) and Bolivia (2019). The US focuses on falsely portraying governments that are unwilling to accept US leadership as corrupt – as was with the case Brazil’s ‘soft coup’ against former Presidents Dilma Rousseff and Lula da Silva – all while shielding its allies who have documented evidence of corruption – such as the outgoing Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, whose political bloc was defeated by the left in the recently conducted presidential election. Washington’s measures amount to a ‘Plan to Destabilise the Planet’, a stark contrast with the ‘Plan to Save the Planet’ recently launched by twenty-six research institutes.

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