August 22 is the anniversary of The 1971 Bolivian Coup. This was the day that the dictator Hugo Banzer launched a US supported coup to depose South America’s first marxist president. Bolivia was in a period of extreme political turmoil, and his murderous 7 year reign would be the longest that the country had seen in more than a century.
The US of course had gotten involved primarily because they couldn’t tolerate a Marxist leader. The corrupt president Richard Nixon provided money and support to Banzer during the coup, and helped ensure he kept power after the coup. Banzer himself was a graduate of the infamous School of the Americas which was a US operated school for South American military personnel. Many of them would go on to take over their governments.
Banzer would go on to ban all opposition to his government, and torture and kill his enemies. There is also considerable evidence that he participated in Operation Condor, which was a US backed right wing conspiracy to torture and kill political enemies across all of South America.
The US regime once again showed the world that it didn’t care about human rights. This was entirely about suppressing leftist ideology around the globe no matter the cost.
Honourable mention to The Camden 28. They were a group that attempted to sabotage the draft for the Vietnam war. The FBI had them dead to rights, but the jury refused to convict. The war was THAT unpopular, but the government still took people off the streets and sent them halfway around the world to kill people who did nothing to them. That sounds pretty totalitarian to me.