The United States has a long legacy of coups. During the Cold War, Washington participated in no less than sixty-four covert coups. They did not end with the Cold War. Since then, the U.S. has carried out or facilitated several coups, including in Haiti, Venezuela, Brazil, Honduras, Paraguay, Bolivia, Egypt, and Ukraine.
Recently, the United States has been accused of participation in three more coups. The degree of evidence and clarity varies, and, unlike in the above cases, these cases are not yet closed.
Haiti has a horrible history of American interference and coups. The latest chapter reads like a convoluted novel. The United States, who at first seemed to be backing the enormously unpopular and increasingly authoritarian president of Haiti, Jovenal Moïse, has now been accused of involvement in his assassination.
Moïse was assassinated in 2021 in a confusing plot by men armed with high-caliber weapons who claimed to be with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, a claim the U.S. State Department says is “absolutely false.”
But two of the plotters of the assassination now seem to have been revealed as DEA informants and a third as an informant for the FBI.
Floridian Walter Veintemilla, who has been accused of financing the assassination, reportedly received legal advice and an endorsement to capture Moïse from a U.S. intelligence agency informant. If that informant were allowed to testify, his testimony, according to Veintemilla’s defense, would provide evidence “that several investigative and administrative agencies of the United States Government were aware of the actions and intentions of his alleged co-conspirators in Haiti and supported those actions.”
One of Veintemilla’s co-defendants, Arcangel Pretel Ortiz, who is said to have recruited the mercenaries who assassinated Moïse, is an FBI informant. According to The Miami Herald, Ortiz “was so emboldened as an FBI informant that the Miami-area resident met with agents and promoted ‘regime change’ in Haiti ahead of the brazen presidential assassination.”
Christian Sanon, a Haitian-American, is the man the coup group allegedly planned to instal as president. He has been accused of being a plotter of Moïse’s assassination. Six weeks before the assassination, Sanon sent a letter to U.S. Assistant Secretary for the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs Julie Cheng outlining his intention to lead a transition government in Haiti. In the weeks before the assassination, Sanon held a meeting in Fort Lauderdale that Veintemilla attended.
The Haitian coup is not the only one the United States is accused of being involved in. More recently, Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheik Hasina resigned and fled to India after student-led protests became violent and the Bangladeshi military declined to prevent protestors from storming her official residence.
But several news outlets in India are now reporting that Hasina had planned to deliver a speech in which she would have accused the U.S. of “plotting a regime change in Bangladesh.” Hasina claims that Washington orchestrated her removal from power because she refused to give the U.S. two military facilities in Bangladesh. She accused “a white man” of conditioning her power on granting the bases to a “foreign country.” According to Jeffrey Sachs, Hasina had also delayed the signing of military agreements with the United States, including one that would have tied Bangladesh to closer military cooperation.
Relations between Bangladesh and the U.S. have been deteriorating, and Hasina has frequently accused the U.S. of working to remove her from power.
Intriguingly, Sachs points out that Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia and Central Asia Donald Lu had recently gone to Bangladesh for meetings. That is the same U.S. official who met with Pakistani officials just before Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan was removed from office in a non-confidence vote that he insists was a U.S.-supported coup.
Then-Pakistani Ambassador to the U.S. Asad Majeed Khan met with Lu who expressed that the United States is “quite concerned about why Pakistan is taking such an aggressively neutral position” on the war in Ukraine. Lu then says, “I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington…Otherwise, I think it will be tough going ahead.” In case the threat was not clear enough, Lu then explained what “tough going ahead” meant: “[H]onestly I think isolation of the Prime Minister will become very strong from Europe and the United States.”
One month later, Khan was removed from office in a non-confidence vote. And all was “forgiven.”
Like Hasina, Khan claims that he was removed in part because of a refusal on basing agreements with the United States. Khan had “distanced” Pakistan’s foreign policy from the U.S., including swearing that he would “absolutely not” allow the CIA or U.S. special forces to use Pakistan as a base ever again: “There is no way we are going to allow any bases, any sort of action from Pakistani territory into Afghanistan. Absolutely not.”
And across the ocean in Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro has accused the U.S. of aiding a coup attempt after the recent Venezuelan election. At dispute is an election that Maduro claims to have won by a margin of 51.95% to 42.18%, and the opposition claims to have won by a margin of 67% to 30%.
Maduro asked the Venezuelan Supreme Court to review the voting data and validate the results. The court accepted the request and summoned all the candidates to appear before it. All the candidates appeared in the session except opposition leader Edmundo González, who did not show up. The court confirmed that the National Electoral Council delivered all the election evidence requested by the court, including detailed voting records and totals.
On August 22, Venezuela’s Supreme Court backed Maduro’s verdict and said that the voting tallies published online by the opposition to demonstrate its landslide victory were forged. González was the only candidate who refused to participate in the Supreme Court’s audit.
U.S. President Joe Biden initially said he supported new elections in Venezuela before the White House walked the president’s statement back, claiming that Biden was only “speaking to the absurdity of Maduro and his representatives not coming clean about the July 28 elections,” which it was “abundantly clear” Maduro lost. Maduro and the opposition both dismissed the idea of a new election with Maduro reminding the U.S. that “Venezuela is not an intervened country, nor do we have guardians.”
Whether or not the election was fair, and whichever side interfered in the election, the United States was a party to that interference. The U.S. has a long and consistent history of interfering in Venezuelan elections against the party of Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro. It has been a consistent financer of the Venezuelan opposition and influencer of the Venezuelan media.
But the largest influencer in the current Venezuelan election has been the threat that the stranglehold of American sanctions on the Venezuelan economy will not be relieved until the people of Venezuela yield to the U.S. and vote Maduro out of power. Mark Weisbrot, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told me that the sanctions “prevent the country from having democratic elections, because there is overwhelming evidence that the harsh collective punishment of the sanctions will continue until Venezuela gets rid of its current government.” That evaluation was echoed by the governor of the state of Anzoátegui, Luis Marcano, who told historian and political scientist Steve Ellner, “The voter is going to feel a gun pointed at their head. Vote for Maduro and the sanctions remain.”
In addition to Pakistan, these three new charges of regime change are being brought against the United States. Imran Khan’s case against the U.S. seems pretty clear with Donald Lu’s threat on the record. The three new cases—in Haiti, Bangladesh, and Venezuela—may, to varying degrees, be less clear. But they should not be dismissed. And the aged specter of American coups still pervades the world.
