(sinister ambient music)
- [Narrator] There's a weapon that powerful countries use
to get rid of leaders they don't like,
leaders from other countries.
It's called a coup.
It's a French word that means a punch or a blow,
because it kind of means coming in
and forcibly punching out a government from power.
No elections, no process, just power being seized,
just someone being pushed out and someone being put in.
Coups happen in so many different ways,
but I wanna show you how the coup has been used
by the United States of America
as a tool to get what they want on the world stage.
So let me walk you through
some of the major US-led coups over the years
to show you that, while it sometimes seems like
we live in a world full of order and rules,
the reality is that the most powerful countries
will often get their way by whatever means necessary.
Okay, so here's how I'm defining
the US-led coups that I'm gonna put on our list here.
Number one, they were successful.
There's a lot of failed coup attempts.
We're leaving those out.
Number two, there must be
at least one US government official involved in the coup.
And number three, we need concrete evidence that
the US was actually involved, not just speculation.
While the US has been involved in
tons of regime change efforts around the world,
we landed on a much shorter list.
These are the coups that I think
best exemplify how this tool has been used
for international power over the years.
Let's start here,
(distorted, cheesy Hawaiian music)
in the independent country of Hawaii.
it's 1893 and the US is feeling like the Hawaiian queen is
a threat to American control over sugar.
It's sugar that's being grown by
the descendants of white American missionaries
who had settled in Hawaii over the years.
So the US sends a military ship with hundreds of troops
to show up to Honolulu,
and they overthrow the queen, installing
one of those descendants of the Christian missionaries
Sanford B. Dole as the new president.
Notice his last name?
Yeah, this coup was one of the US's first,
and it set the stage
not only for the new Hawaiian president's family
to grow their powerful international corporation,
which was based in Hawaii,
but also for Hawaii to be annexed,
to become a part of the United States.
I made a whole video on this coup because it's pretty wild
and there's so much going on here.
And it was really a turning point in
showing how the US could remove leaders from power
in far away places,
something that they start to do a lot more of.
We're gonna move on to the next coup,
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Let's get back into the map.
I gotta get outta here because things are about to heat up.
We got a lot more to cover on these coups.
The next coup has to do with Spain.
Well, actually more like Spain's colonies.
(percussive ambient music)
Spain's glory days have come and gone.
They are a declining empire
and there is major resistance in their colonies,
especially in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.
Meanwhile, the US is a rising empire
and they already are pretty uncomfortable with
Spain having colonies like a hundred miles off their coast.
But at the same time, they don't love the idea of
true independence for places like Cuba or Puerto Rico.
These are strategic islands right in the US's neighborhood.
And like Hawaii, American companies have money invested,
particularly in Cuba.
Independence might mean them getting kicked out.
So the US delves into this fight
between Spain and their colonies.
They use the explosion of an American Navy ship
as their excuse,
even though it was likely an accident, not an attack.
But sometimes stories matter more than truth.
So the US sends in troops to liberate the rebels
fighting against their Spanish colonizers,
promising them independence,
not only in Cuba and Puerto Rico,
but later, over here in the Philippines and Guam.
These local uprisings eventually drive out the Spanish,
and in all of these cases, the US reneges on their promise
to give independence to these locals.
And they figure out ways to govern Cuba and Puerto Rico
indirectly themselves.
The US has just piggybacked off
several independence movements
to enact several coups at once,
allowing them to install pro-American leaders
and a Navy base in Cuba,
and eventually annexing Puerto Rico and Guam,
which they still control,
and the Philippines, which they held for 48 years.
Again, I made a whole video about this one too
if you wanna go deeper.
Anyway, we gotta move a little quicker here
because we're not gonna get through all these coups.
Let's move on.
Okay, so we're over here in Nicaragua, it's 1909.
(bright, quaint piano music)
There's a bunch of powerful American companies here,
but a new president comes to power, vowing to regulate them.
The US is not gonna let this happen.
So the Secretary of State starts spreading rumors
to smear this guy, this president,
saying that he's building a canal
that would compete with the Panama Canal.
But really they're just upset because
Nicaragua was taking loans from Europe.
The US keeps painting this guy as a war criminal
and someone worthy of being thrown out.
So, push comes to shove
and the US sends ships to both of Nicaragua's coasts.
They assemble a bunch of Marines in Panama,
basically just flexing on Nicaragua
and telling the president to step down.
And the benefit of being a rising superpower is that
it worked, he has no choice but to step down.
And soon a leader that the US likes comes to power.
The coup is complete.
And really, this is the first of many instances of
the US meddling in Nicaragua.
A few years later, the US is back in the region
for another coup in next door Honduras.
This one was plotted by a band of private American citizens
and it follows a similar pattern.
A new president comes to town,
in this case directly inspired by Nicaragua's president,
and he wants to take back control of the country
from American businesses.
In this case we're talking about bananas.
The banana companies were not gonna let this happen.
And it was mostly this guy,
a banana businessman named Sam the Banana Man.
He's not gonna let this pesky president run his country, no.
So he assembles his own militia,
he literally buys a surplus Navy ship,
loads it up with weapons,
and starts his campaign to get this president out.
He sails from New Orleans to the coast of Honduras
and he literally invades the country
with, like, a private army.
Wait, what? Where's the US government in all this?
They also didn't like
the political direction of Honduras either.
So they just sort of stood back,
let this private invasion happen.
And then at the critical moment,
the US steps in to order a ceasefire,
basically bullying the president to step down.
He had no way forward, no defense, so he resigns.
(urgent synth music)
And the Banana Man's leader of choice takes the presidency,
giving the banana businessman land and a unique status
to import anything he needs tax free
and, wait for it, he refunds him
for all of the coup expenses using public Honduran money.
This Banana Man literally overthrew the government
and made Honduras pay for it. Wow.
Okay, so let's move forward to the '50s where
the coup becomes a more useful tool in the American toolkit.
There's this new US agency
dedicated to collecting and analyzing information
from all over the world, meaning for spying.
They call it the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA.
And it completely revolutionizes the art of the coup.
Oh, and at this point,
the US is now a full-blown global superpower.
No longer just looking in their own neighborhood,
but rather at the whole world map,
investing huge resources into
fighting their global rival and its communist ideology.
So this gets us to Iran 1953, where Iran had just elected
a new star politician, Mohammed Mosaddegh.
He rises the power believing that
Iran must take back control of
its most valuable natural resource, oil,
which at the time was completely controlled by
a British company called the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
We know it today as BP.
Mosaddegh is done with this.
"Let's kick the British out and take back our oil."
But like the US, Britain is not happy with
Iranians trying to take back their resources.
So they warn that if they do this,
there will be consequences.
So the British catch a quick meeting
with the CIA's Middle East guy,
who was passing through London,
and they pitch him on this idea.
"Let's throw out Mosaddegh."
The CIA's like, "Okay."
And they kind of sniff communist vibes on Mosaddegh
with this big desire to nationalize Iran's oil.
Or at least they tell themselves they do.
So the CIA agrees, and they secretly send this guy to Iran.
He's the Middle East Bureau chief, Kermit Roosevelt,
he's like in his thirties.
Oh, and yes, he is the grandson of
another big coup guy, Teddy Roosevelt,
who I have gone into in other videos.
Roosevelt sneaks into Iran
and is given a million taxpayer dollars to use, quote,
"in any way that would bring about the fall of Mosaddegh."
So now there's American CIA agents in Iran
secretly trying to overthrow the government.
And it's a rocky start at first, with a bunch of failures.
But they start using their money to get traction,
bribing politicians, religious clerics, and other leaders
to say divisive and controversial things about Mosaddegh.
They hire locals to stage attacks against religious leaders,
making it look like
they had been ordered to do so by Mosaddegh,
but really, they were getting paid by the CIA to do this.
And with enough time and money,
they create an atmosphere of chaos and hostility
and distrust among the public.
Oh, and there's weapons.
The CIA stashes enough weapons and explosives to support
a, quote, "10,000 man guerilla organization for six months."
Like, just in case they need to start a full-on conflict.
The result of all of this is
more violence and chaos that engulfs the capitol.
Shops are being destroyed, bullets are flying into mosques,
people are beaten,
and thousands of paid demonstrators flood the street.
The city falls into anarchy,
all of it orchestrated by CIA money.
And in the end, this all results in
a bloody shootout at Mosaddegh's house.
He eventually gives up and turns himself in.
He's put through a sham trial and found guilty of treason
and sentenced to three years in solitary confinement
and then house arrest, where he stayed until his death.
The previous ruler of Iran,
Mohammed Reza Shah, which just means "King,"
had fled the country.
But now, with the democratically elected Mosaddegh gone
and with the backing of the US and UK,
he could charter a flight back into Iran and take control.
- [TV Reporter] The Shah crowns himself
in a tradition which goes back 25 centuries.
His title is King of Kings,
and he becomes emperor of his nation.
(suspenseful string music)
- [Narrator] The US really came out on top here.
They got what they wanted.
They now have an American-friendly dictator
in a powerful country in the Middle East
who is now welcoming American oil companies
to get in on one of the largest oil reserves on Earth.
Under the Shaw, Iran becomes a brutal police state.
He executed military officers, student leaders,
anyone associated with Mosaddegh.
He set up a secret police force, and life was brutal.
So brutal that in 1979, the frustration of Iranians
burst forth in mass protests
that ran the Shaw out of office
and replaced him with an inspiring new leader
who would turn Iran into an Islamic Republic
built in part off a foundation of resentment
for the US having meddled in their country.
The Islamic Republic has held power ever since,
and has morphed into the oppressive theocracy we know today,
though maybe not for long.
Before we go on, a quick reminder that all of these coups,
these plans to overthrow leaders in other countries,
did not require American votes or consensus
or approval of Congress.
It was usually just a few key men
in government buildings in Washington DC
making this happen.
These people would go on to define the Cold War
and shape so many covert operations around the world,
many of which we'll never know about.
Okay, let's keep going. (urgent drum music)
The next year in Guatemala,
the CIA tried to pull the same playbook
that they used in Iran,
once again targeting a leader that the people had elected,
but who wanted to take back the country's resources
for the people,
to break up these American monopolies
that controlled the country's electricity and railroad.
The president even starts to seize land
from one massive banana company.
It was often unused land that he wanted to redistribute
to the locals who could farm it and feed their families
and hopefully climb out of
the system of endemic poverty in the country.
Once again, I made a whole video on this,
the geopolitics of bananas in Central America.
But the fact is that the US decided that
they had to defend the banana companies
or else more communist reforms would spread.
So the US president and secretary of state
ordered an overthrow,
and the CIA got right to work.
The CIA hand selects a leader that they want to be in power
and then they start giving equipment and training to
a bunch of Guatemalan exiles and private soldiers.
They set up a secret operation base
on the outskirts of Miami.
They start delivering weapons to the Panama Canal.
But like the other coups,
it can't just all be about weapons.
They gotta own the information space.
So they create a radio station
that sounds like it's a local Guatemala radio station,
but really it's being operated
out of a small town in Florida.
And they start publishing fake news
about an uprising, unrest, a rebellion.
And then at the same time,
the fighters that the CIA had trained and armed
invades Guatemala.
Pilots start dropping bombs
on fuel tanks and military posts and airports.
But they weren't starting a full-on war.
They weren't trying to cause real damage.
They wanted it to feel like a domestic uprising,
like a war was on the horizon,
to freak people out, and for many it totally worked.
They thought that this was a real uprising
and had no idea that the CIA was behind it all.
But the president knew what was up.
He had messed with the USA and now he's hearing about it.
Military leaders in his circle are feeling the pressure
from the big bully from the north
and they turn on him and he eventually surrenders.
On his way out, the president addresses his people,
makes it very clear that, quote,
"The United Fruit Company,
in collaboration with the United States,
is responsible for what is happening to us."
And just like that, one president is out
and the handpicked CIA option is in.
This new regime is brutal and goes on to do horrible things,
detaining people they thought were communists,
killing prisoners, breaking up labor unions,
and in the process restoring the banana company's land
and ensuring that they maintained
their hold on this economy.
This kicks off an era in Guatemala
of more political assassinations and instability,
something that still plagues the country today.
And yet to this day, there is no evidence that
the Soviets were ever slightly interested in Guatemala.
Communism was once again the excuse,
but really this was about
securing American business interests,
tearing a country apart for bananas.
♪ Bananas taste the best and are the best for you ♪
All right, let's go to Africa.
So, it's 1960 here in the center of Africa,
a country called Congo.
They just gained independence from Belgium,
and they have an election,
and this guy Patrice Lumumbau wins,
becomes the prime minister.
But immediately, over in Washington,
the communist alarm bells instantly start sounding off,
because we're in the middle of the Cold War
and Congo is a place full of tons of natural resources,
including loads of uranium,
the main ingredient for nuclear bombs.
This is at a time when
Americans are keeping gas masks next to their bed
and have hordes of canned goods in their basements.
And officials in Washington can't risk
Congo falling into the influence of the Soviet Union.
So they start focusing on this prime minister.
The CIA director called him, quote,
"An urgent and prime objective" that should
quote, "be a high priority of our covert action."
So they pull a more political coup than the ones before.
They start allying with Lumumbau's political enemies
and Congo's former colonizer, Belgium.
They bribe politicians,
they fund protests and labor movements,
and they circulate propaganda,
similar ingredients to the previous coups.
And when the moment is right,
all these bribed politicians do what the CIA asked them to.
They'd remove Lumumba from power, and the CIA is right there
giving money and intelligence and advice
to the new government.
This political solution was actually not the first try.
The CIA had tried to assassinate Lumumbau in the past,
but all of those attempts failed,
which is why they turned to
hijacking and manipulating Congolese politics,
a brand new democracy,
supporting the people who would eventually go on to
put Lumumba in front of
a Congolese and Belgian firing squad,
making this effectively a political assassination
supported from an ocean away.
And yet there's so much gray area in these coups.
In this case, it's really tough to prove
that the CIA's support was
the key factor in Lumumbau's assassination.
It's debated to this day.
An effective foreign-sponsored coup works like this,
operating in the shadows, fueling divisions,
appealing to the worst demons of the people on the ground
through money, through influence.
All right, let's move on to the Caribbean in the 1960s.
(urgent synth music)
There's a brutal dictator here in the Dominican Republic.
I mean, this guy's really bad.
He's rumored to feed his opponents to sharks.
But anyway, what the US cares about is that
there's fear that a communist revolution
could happen at any moment.
So the CIA sends weapons to a group of of hitmen
who go assassinate this guy.
It ends up being an ambush and a car chase.
They're successful in taking him out,
ending his 31-year rule.
And eventually the US sends in forces to occupy the DR,
to make sure that a leftist candidate doesn't come to power.
They restore order,
and eventually a US-friendly candidate is elected.
Okay, so now we have to head over to Vietnam in 1963.
(suspenseful string music)
And boy, this is a way bigger one than we have time for,
but we're trying to focus on the coup element of this.
Vietnam was divided in two,
between communist and pro-Western governments.
The US needs the South to stay on their side,
but Washington starts to lose confidence in this guy,
the South's leader, he's losing a grip on the country,
and the US fears that communism will
take over the whole country of Vietnam.
So the CIA rolls up its sleeves, it's time for another coup.
This time they focus on a South Vietnamese general
who also doesn't love the president,
and he agrees to do the CIA's bidding.
And when given the signal, the general directs his military
to seize the airport and radio stations,
and they block off highways.
They march to the presidential palace,
a bloody shootout goes down,
and this president, President Diem, escapes.
He happens to be with his brother,
but it's not going well for them, so he realizes that
he needs to set up a meeting to surrender.
They're gonna meet at a Catholic church.
This was probably gonna be a peaceful meeting,
but when the generals arrive,
they just kill him on the spot, saying, quote,
"To kill the weed, you must pull up the roots."
Meaning in order to solve the problem, Diem must die.
Exile was not enough.
Now the US actually didn't plan for this to happen.
They didn't want to kill this guy.
It was not an official order from Washington.
But they made this coup happen.
JFK is said to be really distraught about this.
The first American Catholic president behind the coup
that killed the first Vietnamese Catholic president.
And incidentally, JFK was assassinated 20 days later.
And one national security journalist
argues that Diem's assassination actually had
a greater impact on American history than the murder of JFK
because it locked the US into
a decade of conflict in Vietnam,
which ballooned into a long war
ending in an embarrassing defeat
and a political crisis at home.
One of the few coups where
the US actually had to deal with the aftermath.
Okay, let's blast through a few of these really quickly.
I'm gonna skirt over some details here.
It's 1964, and Brazil is
potentially veering off into communism,
with the rise of a new leftist leader.
Lucky for the CIA,
there's already a coup being plotted against him.
So the US military just shows up with ships
off the coast of Brazil.
They airlift in a bunch of ammunition and supplies.
They didn't end up having to do much, actually.
Instead, they just stood by with reinforcements
and watched the Brazilian coup go down.
The leftist leader goes down and a new leader comes in.
In 1973, there's a coup in Chile
that is a very complicated story with conflicting accounts
and we went down a super deep rabbit hole
and we've decided that
because the evidence is not rock solid,
we're going to cut it for time,
but definitely some crazy shit went down,
I'm not saying it didn't.
(urgent jazz drum music)
Okay, we're back in Africa and it's the eighties.
And over here in Libya, the dictator Muammar Gaddafi
was making lots of trouble in the region,
funding terrorist groups
and working to expand his influence all over the region.
Then he gets a call from his neighbor Chad
asking for help against a rebellion.
Gaddafi eagerly sends 4,000 troops
to occupy a huge part of the country
and makes friends with the new president
by helping him exile his rival.
And soon Gaddafi is getting greedy
and threatening to merge Chad into Libya.
The US is not into this.
So Ronald Reagan fires up the well-oiled coup machine,
launching a covert war,
sending weapons and cash to rebels in Chad,
and supporting that political opponent who was ousted,
helping him fight back, and it works.
The president of Chad has to flee
and the US backed and supported leader comes to power
and now there's a conflict,
and the CIA continues arming the war
even after this guy is in office.
The new US-backed leader rules brutally for eight years
until he's eventually overthrown by a military officer.
And in 2013, he was charged with crimes against humanity,
torture and war crimes.
Okay, now let's go to this little island in 1983.
(percussive jazz music)
It's communism again, and the US sends 2,000 troops
to invade this small remote island
and remove their communist leader.
They didn't really know much about this small island,
and they literally had to use tourism maps
to plan their invasion. Anyway.
American forces move in, overwhelm the Grenadian fighters
who happen to be joined by their Cuban allies,
the government collapses
and the US-friendly leader comes to power.
Okay, back down to Central America.
It's 1989 and we're here in Panama
where the US has control of a very important canal.
And luckily the Panamanian dictator has been
very friendly to American interests.
But the US starts losing confidence in this guy,
wondering if he's really the best choice,
ensuring the US maintain easy access to their vital canal.
Oh, and it didn't help that this guy was indicted in Florida
on drug trafficking and money laundering charges.
We gotta get him out.
But the straw that broke the camel's back for this guy was
when Panamanian troops killed
an unarmed American soldier in Panama City.
The US is done with this guy,
so they invade Panama with 27,000 troops.
Panama's military is crushed
and the dictator is eventually arrested
and sentenced to 40 years in prison,
and the US ensures access to its canal after all.
Okay, so now it's the end of the 1980s
and the Soviets are invading Afghanistan
(urgent string music)
and are meeting resistance from a bunch of fighters
from all over the world who have come to Afghanistan
to fight back against the Soviet occupation,
many of them with fundamentalist religious motivations.
But the US doesn't care about their motivation.
They just care that that they're willing to fight
against the Soviets
and the Soviets' puppet, the Afghan president.
And it totally works.
With the help of the US,
these fighters push the Soviets back
and successfully run the Afghan president out of office.
And as he's being run out of office,
he forebodingly warns the Americans that
if they leave Afghanistan in the hands of these fighters,
that it would, quote,
"Be turned into a center for terrorism."
And his prophecy was completely fulfilled.
Those US-funded fighters were people
whose names we know today: Osama bin Laden,
Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the guy who started the group
that would eventually become ISIS.
Those same weapons that the US sent to counter the Soviets
and to effect regime change in Afghanistan
would go on to be used against American soldiers years later
when the US was back
orchestrating yet another regime change after 9/11
against the very groups they once enabled.
The US would eventually leave Afghanistan, only to find
the country immediately falling back into Taliban rule.
We're almost to the end of our list
and we're now in modern day, it's 2003,
and 150,000 American troops invade Iraq.
They say that they are there to find and destroy
weapons of mass destruction,
but their main focus is taking out this guy, Saddam Hussein,
which they do in a matter of weeks.
Saddam fleeing into hiding
and President Bush declaring "mission accomplished,"
establishing an American-friendly government in Iraq,
creating once again a negative byproduct
by alienating huge swaths of the Iraqi people and army
who form a bunch of anti-American rebel groups
that go on to fight against the American occupation,
some morphing into groups like ISIS
who wreak all kinds of havoc on the region to this day.
Once again, I made a whole video about this topic.
Go check it out.
Iraq remains a place of deep political instability.
Trust in government is extremely low.
And the question of how and why we did this
expensive, horrific, destructive coup
is still something that there aren't really good answers to.
Again, you can go watch my video for more on that.
(pensive piano music)
And this gets us to the final coup on our list.
It's 2011, during a wave of protests
spreading throughout this region,
trying to take down all these strongmen dictators,
one of which was this guy Muammar Gaddafi.
The same Gaddafi we were talking about earlier
who was like taking over Chad?
He's still here and he's still a very horrible dude.
And there's worry that he's gonna potentially
massacre all of these pro-democracy protestors.
So the US feels like it must get involved
to save these protestors.
They rally their NATO allies to help them,
but at some point the mission switches
to total regime change.
We don't know exactly how this happened,
only the people in the room do.
But is it surprising?
We've seen this long arc of the US using the coup
as a force for getting their way
in an international conflict.
It's a tried and true tool
in the American foreign policy toolkit.
So it's not surprising that a coup becomes a solution
during these difficult decision-making processes.
So anyway, the target becomes Gaddafi,
and now NATO drones are firing missiles at his convoy
and he eventually gets captured and gets killed on the spot.
Libya has been in chaos ever since,
but it's not like it was a great place under Gaddafi.
And once again, we're in a gray area where
we don't know the history that didn't happen
or how things could have turned out different
if the US didn't get involved.
That debate lives on.
Okay, so that's our list.
These are our coups
that we decided to go over in this video.
And there are so many more that we could have mentioned.
My purpose in doing this broad back-to-back history
of American led coups
was so that we can see patterns that emerge.
How a rising superpower
became really good at removing leaders
that didn't align with their way of seeing the world
or, in a lot of cases,
who were not friendly to American business interests.
But let's be clear, the US didn't invent this.
This is something that
powerful countries and empires have always done.
What characterizes US-led coups,
especially during the Cold War,
was how the overthrow of these governments
often stamped out new democracies,
budding democratic movements,
replacing them with authoritarian leaders
who would go on to oppress the people
with the support and backing of the United States,
and in the process, redirecting the country's history.
Lately, Russia has been meddling in
the election process of the United States,
and I've been reflecting on my feelings towards that.
The violation of having an external power
sowing doubt and polarization and fear
in my own democracy, in my own society.
It feels like such a violation, and it is.
This is giving me just a tiny taste of what it feels like
to have an outside power
pulling this strings in your country,
tearing it apart for their own purposes,
and in the process, creating more problems for the people
and for the United States itself,
undermining any semblance of democracy or development,
all in the name of keeping the US on top
and dominant over the globe.
(wistful ambient music)