A novel the CIA spent a fortune to suppress

Decent Interval was an interesting book, can recommend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Se%C3%B1or_Presidente is pretty detailed

Ha, Streisand effect. I'm going to buy that book now.

>It is difficult to understand the world ‘in real time’ but looking back into history more things make sense.

Gotta be careful with this though, as when it comes to reading history, it really depends on what sources you are reading. The old saying "history is written by the winners" which leads to the opposing side's views being suppressed if not outright omitted. So hopefully, when it comes to "real time" views or historical views, the sources are from more than one viewpoint and are more than one.

On the shorter side, there is a very good article from the New Yorker which was published last October for the 75th birthday of the CIA entitled "Has the C.I.A. done more harm than good?" [1]

The journalist is clearly verging on the side of more harm.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/10/has-the-cia-do...

Is that true? Last I heard (I just looked it up) over half of people in the US read at least one book per year.

Refuting adopted positions on complex issues usually requires more than the five minutes allotted either in video programming format or in the conditioned mind you describe. Concision reinforces the conventional narrative as explained in this 5 minute video https://youtu.be/xIbfl7OQ0y4.

They have been playing the long game, clearly!

But someone probably will read those books and make a TikTok about it

The truth is that few American voters really give a shit if the CIA blows up a bunch of foreigners in Arabistan.

The role of censorship that the government used to have has shifted to companies like Visa, Mastercard, Amazon, etc. If you try and sell a spicy enough book, they will make sure nobody reads it, and the government can be completely "hands-off".

They can fail to process the customer's payment, remove your book from the marketplace, and ban your account. If you try to build your own marketplace, you won't be able to use any major payment processors.

Modern dissidents are building alternatives, but still there are roadblocks. All this to say, books are still very much being suppressed.

FTA: "Mr. President—out last summer in David Unger’s lucid new translation"

I assumed that was a translation into English.

Wikipedia has a list of selected editions.

The first english edition was in 1963, the first american one in 1964.

It's been translated and is widely available in English. It's an excellent book and one of the most important Latin American novels of the mid-1900s.

They didn’t. They helped with suppressing its notoriety after Asturias was exiled. This part of the article should probably have seen better editing.

The official formation of the CIA was also only a formality, it essentially already existed in its components and other forms, e.g., the OSS. You can’t get so fixated on the official title, it’s the underlying people and their motivations that are the thing. It’s why people have such a hard time understanding and believing the “deep state” and why it hates even being called that because it identifies them.

What the worst people hate the most is being identified and named and associated with their nefarious actions. It’s why they like “classifying” to keep their evil deeds covered and hidden behind an vail of authority. It is how a minority of evil people control the majority of the world, often while claiming to be the good guys.

It didn't. Nor do the sentences you quote say that.

This piece covers a period of time from the 1930s into the 1960s.

What is actually inaccurate? The CIA was doing the things the piece mentions from its inception onward.

The title is correct: the CIA spent a significant amount of money to suppress the book. That the CIA was founded shortly after the book was published doesn't make that impossible.

> The author of the article could have said US Intelligence Assets, and forgone the clickbait of CIA.

The author makes specific claims about the exact ways that the CIA tried to suppress the novel and author. Do you dispute any of them?

It's pretty rich to talk about "easily fact checked" when you don't engage at all with the factual basis for the claims your are disputing.

If this book interests you, here are a couple additional books to add to your reading list with similar subject matter:

Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala - Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer

Las venas abiertas de América Latina - Eduardo Galeano

The English translation is titled, Open Veins of Latin America

(Isabel Allende said she carried a copy of Galeano's book with her as she fled the 1973 US backed coup that overthrew the democratic government in Chile and installed the brutal far-right murderous dictator Pinochet)

Did you not read the article or are you disputing the facts of it?

Even in democratic countries you have a milder version of this: the most successful politicians are usually those that can get the backing of the political class. Acting against the interests of the political class means you're without the bureaucratic apparatus that would have allowed you to make meaningful and lasting change.

There really does seem to be an "optimal amount of corruption" in absolutely any sufficiently complex society.

In this scenario, the CIA is not protecting against greater evil for the people of the country. They are just protecting the interests of the US. Now, the CIA's mission is to protect the US interests, there is nothing wrong. However, the means they use to do so may have something wrong with that. Installing and protecting dictators that are favorable to the US is unethical. Also the CIA does not furter "American values" in these interventions, for instance when suppressing weak democracies with strong dictators (Think Chile's Pinochet). This kind of intervention can easily go wrong, and will often do go wrong (Chile's case was but one example, the Guatemalan novel discusses another).

>Is that necessarily a bad thing?

One could argue that. I know an Egyptian that had to leave after critique of previous and current regime but now has some appreciation for the current one whilst still acknowledging it's terrible authoritarianism. Similarly I'm very close Saudi that recognizes how democracy protests were brutally suppressed with beheadings but considers them to have had no chance of success whilst also recognizing the presence of fundamentalists types that led to the grand mosque seizure and it's subsequent effects on the country and is thus somewhat of a monarchist despite supporting democracy in Europe. I imagine there's similar situations all over the world from Armenian views on Russian influence in the light of Azerbaijani threat to Africans choosing between resource extractors.

However those are locals seeing local nuance and not foreign interventionists with something to gain and I'd say the CIA has a horrid track record when it comes to choosing the lesser evil (Perhaps born from a cold war time when allowing non alignment and the like was sadly not considered an option.) to the point where you're better of looking at the interests they represent in a given scenario than any plainly stated claims about goodwill or lesser evils.

This tradeoff makes much more sense from the outsider’s perspective.

Living in a stable democracy comes with a certain set of values and preferences. One of those is predictability. When stuff runs smoothly , interest rates are low and you can plan your life ten years in advance.

Now from insider’s perspective it’s a different type of a question. It’s increasing the risk of the violent things happening to you in near future vs long term benefits for your children. People value stability much less when they are on the receiving side of the status quo.

IMO information doesn't have the impact most people think it does. It seems to play much more of a role in shaping long-term views rather than driving immediate short-term responses. One would have expected the Snowden revelations to trigger a monumental response. They did not, and so a cynic might say people mostly didn't care. But that also seems wrong. Rather it seems to have played (and is playing) a significant role in shaping people's views of the world over the long-term. Instead of driving people to do some radical action, it instead drove things like a great anti-establishment type sentiment, and more people to acknowledge the role of realpolitik in the world.

Things like the Arab Spring weren't really driven by information such as by well organized Western trained individuals organizing efforts to overthrow their governments. Those groups were largely just waiting for some event to use as a justification for a planned action. And in any large country those events will inevitably happen. This [1] article from the times is quite amusing. In a nutshell, 'No we didn't fund them to start protests, we simply recruited people who despised their government, and trained them in organization, networking, and other forms of advocacy. And then we made sure the protests that did happen received 24/7 positive coverage. But really we played no role whatsoever in these completely organic movements.'

So the point I'd make with this is that information itself is something that should be free. Because it shapes views. Where things get dodgy is in 'inorganic' organizing and promotion. Inorganic is always tough to define both because we live in a global world, and because behind any revolution there are always genuine and real grievances. But I think everybody can agree that the Romanian people overthrowing Ceaușescu after he called everybody into a square for a propaganda rally was completely organic [2], and the CIA overthrowing Iran over oil in 1953 was completely inorganic [3]. Lots of things are going to fall in between those two extremes, but the more foreign involvement (and propaganda), the less organic something is.

But information? Information wants to, and should, be free.

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[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/world/15aid.html

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_Revolution#Revolution...

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat#...

Bad/good is a subjective matter, but I would say it is a mistake to prioritize lesser evil over long term effects and sustainable solutions. You can get away with anything in the lesser evil mindset.

> If the regime collapses even greater violence and general horrible stuff happens.

There might be violence, but in general you can't know this. And in the end you end up arguing against democracy itself; the opposition cannot be allowed to win, even if they have the votes, because of the risk of rioting by pro-regime supporters. And in order to suppress them winning, you have to commit more crimes.

Yes, it really is a bad thing. All dictatorships suck except for a narrow class of people favored by or directly benefiting from the regime. Period. Any other view is either cope or Orientalism (“maybe democracy doesn’t work for X people”).

Sometimes it takes the subjects of a dictatorship multiple generations to realize that dictatorships suck, especially if they are partisans and their dictator is a “hero” fighting their boogeyman (secular dictator fighting religious boogeyman, religious dictator fighting secular boogeyman, chauvinist dictator pretending to fight some other country like in 1984 but really the biggest enemy is him, a minority dictator pretending to protect the minorities as an excuse for carpet bombing and torturing members of the majority to hold onto power, etc…).

Keep in mind that for long lasting dictatorships, half the population or more was raised on their propaganda. They’re literally brainwashed, and the dictator ensures that no one becomes independently successful enough to challenge their authority, so people often have nothing better to do that sit around, smoke, and talk about the regime’s enemies as if they’re the proximate threat. So don’t blindly accept when someone from a country with a dictatorship says their dictatorship is good. Trust me, you have it beyond good in America , you truly have no idea how bad a bad government is.

Consider another view of the scenario:

A small group of dictators and their affiliates holds power in a small country with abundant natural resources, which a foreign entity harvests at relatively low costs - only having to pay and protect the dictatorship, while the vast majority of the population lives in squalor and poverty, only having access to low-wage menial labor.

Democratization of the economy would entail vast economic losses for the foreign power, due to a steep rise in the cost of the raw materials (see Arab oil crisis), or the conversion of the country to an industrial power that doesn't export raw materials or agricultural produce, but instead manufactured goods, causing it to become a global power (see China).

In this scenario, the role of the CIA is to sabotage all economic and political development in the country - much as the British throne and its affiliated Crown Corporations attempted to do in the American colonies for the 100 years preceding the American Revolution. When people say, "the USA acts as an economic imperialist in Latin and South America", this is the kind of thing they're talking about.

>"suppressing the release of that information to protect the fragile stability and prevent a possible greater evil"

It is one thing to not start bloody revolution. Hiding information however is never good in my opinion. Rather criminal in my book,

"Possible" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

This is essentially a version of the colonialist argument - the natives are brutal, uncivilised, and unable to govern themselves properly. So even though our methods are sometimes violent and result in significant death and suffering, we are reluctantly compelled to exercise our civilising influence on this unfortunate situation.

It's just rhetoric. What's really going on is the "civilising" empire is plundering the smaller nation of resources, and is quite happy to act through local despots, dictators, and torturers to further that - until they stop being useful.

Not that I wanna encourage piracy or anything but here the book is in Spanish and English:

https://libgen.rs/fiction/46DAEF09199182E5928922587419E1F3

http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=C8E7CC541E6855E0034FC6D0...

I found two different translations easily available.