Latin America is a region of huge significance to socialists. Viewed by Washington as its back yard, it has often borne the brunt of imperialist aggression, with a long and bitter history of coups, US-backed military dictators and bloody repression in projects like Operation Condor that killed or disappeared tens of thousands in the war to maintain US supremacy across the continent. 

That tradition continues to this day. We see it in the dirty tricks used to stop Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva running for the presidency in Brazil, smoothing the way for the far-right brute Jair Bolsonaro.

We see it in the repeated attempts at violent destabilisation of Venezuela and the promotion of an unelected charlatan, Juan Guaido, as that country’s “president” appointed by Washington.

We see it in the military and far-right putsch that removed re-elected president Evo Morales in Bolivia in late 2019 because, as US tycoon Elon Musk put it, “we will coup whoever we want.” 

In the whole range of economic war waged by the US against “rebel” governments, from sanctions to outright piracy — US seizure of Iranian oil en route to Venezuela and blocking Chinese ships trying to deliver medical equipment to Cuba.

Yet it is also a region whose defiance and revolutionary spirit inspire: the spirit that saw the Bolivian people mobilise in the face of lethal state terror to force new elections from the coup regime and re-elect a socialist government.

That sees the Cuban people provide unparalleled medical and emergency aid to other countries despite living with a six-decade illegal blockade designed to suffocate their revolution. 

The “pink wave” in Latin America that started with Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela was one of the first signs after the collapse of eastern European socialism that the so-called “end of history” — the permanent universal triumph of capitalism — wasn’t so final after all. That “la luta continua.”

The mainstream media is full of disinformation against all countries that illustrate Che Guevara’s maxim: Another world is possible. 

The negative consequences of US aggression — crippling sanctions like the blockade of Cuba, which does not just cut off US trade with the island, but slaps huge financial penalties on anyone, from anywhere, who dares trade with it, or violent unrest from the US-sponsored racist right as in Venezuela and Bolivia — are attributed to the failures of socialism.

State terror and paramilitary murder in Colombia are ignored while small protests in Cuba over shortages caused by the US itself are spun into a global news story and prompt US politicians to call for air strikes on the country.

Now we have entered a new age of social media new weapons are deployed in the propaganda war.

Tens of thousands of fake Twitter accounts promoted the overthrow of Morales.

Accounts from Venezuelans supportive of their government in the 2019 unrest were shut down as supposedly bogus while those of the right-wing opposition were left alone. 

The US-originated Cuba SOS campaign is this year’s standout example of the manipulation of social media — control of which, in the hands of global tech giants like Facebook and Twitter, is even more concentrated than the traditional press — to attack and delegitimise the left.

It’s more important than ever that we have our own media to fight back. Year in, year out the Morning Star has stood with the peoples of Latin America as they battle imperialism, from securing delivery of copies of our paper to the Miami Five in US jails to calling out the lies and distortions of the rest of the media in coverage of the country’s left governments and movements. 

We kept up the pressure against Bolivia’s coup regime through 2020, ensuring the voices of the Bolivian resistance were aired somewhere in Britain’s daily press, just as we work with solidarity campaigns like those with Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua to get the truth out.

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