Standing alone in the autumn cold: After the Berlin Wall crumbled, anti-Communism went out of fashion in America. Perhaps we should be grateful. McCarthy’s notorious “Red hunts” ruined hundreds of innocent lives, while U.S. support of “anti-Communist” actions in Guatemala and Honduras resulted in the deaths of over 200,000 indigenous people. On the other hand, perhaps we should be more cautious. The Soviet Union’s fall meant very little to the poorest of Latin America’s poor – or to the various rebel movements that have risen up amongst them. Communism, particularly Chairman Mao’s version of Communism, still has a ready audience throughout the Western Hemisphere. The situation in much of today’s South America – a vast, resource-rich, densely-populated area controlled by imperial powers through their hand-picked rulers – closely resembles the China of Mao’s “Long March.” Since the Monroe Doctrine American forces have been playing kingmaker south of their border. Popularly-elected governments have regularly been overthrown with U.S. aid, replaced with brutally repressive military dictatorships kept in power by American weaponry. This has led to long-simmering resentment against the Yanqui Imperialist – a resentment which has not infrequently led to violence. Neither this resentment nor our penchant for interventionism show any signs of subsiding. In our zeal to stamp out “Islamic Fundamentalist Radicals,” we may be neglecting a potential tinderbox. There are over 5 million legal and illegal Latin American immigrants in the U.S., and less than 100,000 from traditionally Islamic countries. Should Latin America get swept up in Marxist/Maoist fervor, we could well find ourselves facing a whole new wave of domestic terrorism – a wave that could originate with either right-wing or left-wing extremists. At worst, we could find ourselves fighting a multi-front war in our own backyard and in various far-flung regions of the globe, trying desperately to contain an ideology which we had consigned to history. What follows are a few places in the Americas which have a strong Maoist presence. I plead guilty to playing fast and loose with the term “Maoism.” For purposes of these essays, I’ve classified any rural-based Marxist-influenced resistance movements as Maoist. This is par for the course; in South American politics just about any populist movement gets called “Communism” sooner or later.
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