Throughout its long history of wars and transcontinental occupations, the United States has raised the banners of freedom while hiding beneath them fangs that know no mercy. From the jungles of Vietnam to the plains of Mozambique, and from the mountains of Colombia to the islands of the Philippines, the United States has left behind scorched and devastated lands, crucified peoples, and generations born on the ashes of wars ignited by a hand that never hesitated to turn green earth into graveyards, resources into spoils, and human beings into mere numbers in ledgers of killing.

This is a history written only with the blood of millions, the screams of mothers, the tears of the displaced, and the rubble of cities crushed under bombardment, looting, and destruction. It is a history revealing that brutality has long been a fixed and institutionalized method in American policy, one that shows its ugly face whenever wealth is to be plundered, a country is violated, or a people are punished simply for daring to dream of freedom.

Examples of American Brutality

Between 1959 and 1975, U.S. forces dropped nearly 8.4 million tons of bombs and napalm, and 18 million barrels of chemicals on Vietnam, destroying more than 40 percent of its fields, gardens, forests, and much of its water sources.

Several millions were killed in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia; millions more were maimed or poisoned, and nearly ten million were displaced. From 1979 through the 1990s, the U.S. assisted elements of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in undermining the country’s socialist-leaning government, fueling a civil war that killed tens of thousands.

Regarding the targeting of national economies, the U.S. pressured Mozambique into privatizing around 1,500 state-owned enterprises, leading to severe unemployment, deep poverty, the closure of factories, a sharp decline in humanitarian services, and a rise in unemployment, crime, homelessness, and prostitution.

Colombia is another country with a history of U.S.-funded repression, including the systematic killing of tens of thousands of workers, students, farmers, and clergy by armed forces and militias for opposing their overseers. Since 1986, around 2,000 Colombian trade unionists have been killed by CIA-supported squads. In addition to weapons and helicopters, the U.S. military also provided defoliants that harmed Colombia’s environment and people.

American multinational corporations have paid police and military forces in countries such as Indonesia, Nigeria, India, Burma, and Colombia to beat, arrest, and even kill labor activists or individuals protesting environmental damage and displacement.

In the late 1980s, the U.S. National Security apparatus helped Mexico eliminate progressive reformist elements. Mexican authorities admitted to torturing and killing at least 275 political dissidents. One survivor described being raped and tortured and then forced to watch her husband and one-year-old daughter being tortured.

Election Manipulation

U.S. agents have repeatedly interfered in elections in Jamaica, Chile, El Salvador, Panama, Yugoslavia, and other countries using large sums of money, election fraud, and fear campaigns. If the results remained unsatisfactory to American leaders, they would declare them “rigged” or “false,” regardless of the assessments by international observers.

This occurred in revolutionary Nicaragua in the 1980s, socialist Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000, and reform-seeking Haiti in 2000.

Such countries become targets of U.S. destabilization. After Hugo Chávez became president of Venezuela and used oil revenues to fund social programs for the poor, the White House labeled him a dictator, warmonger, and enemy of the United States. It accused him of distorting American efforts toward friendly relations, declared him “illegitimate,” and recognized an alternative president without elections or legal basis.

Occupation of Countries

In 1846, with majority approval from the U.S. Senate, the United States declared war on Mexico. After two years, it occupied vast Mexican territories, including California and parts of Nevada, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, annexing them into American territory.

The United States attacked Honduras in 1860, purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, and in 1881 supported Peru in its war against Chile in exchange for the use of Chimbote port as a military base, along with coal mines, mining lines, and the port itself.

In 1887, the U.S. occupied Pearl Harbor and transformed it into a naval base under the pretext of “protecting trade.” In 1893, it overthrew the monarch of Hawaii and formally annexed the islands in 1898, while also intervening in Venezuela in 1895.

In 1898, Spain lost most of its colonies in the Americas. Cuba and Puerto Rico, long under Spanish control, were embroiled in internal revolutions. Under the slogan of “defending democracy,” the U.S. waged war on Spain, occupying Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Guam. Under an agreement with Spain, it occupied the Philippines for $20,000.

Although Cuba gained formal independence in 1902, it remained under American military occupation. The U.S. imposed constitutional reforms allowing it to reoccupy Cuba whenever it wished “in the name of freedom,” while maintaining rights to purchase or lease islands for American bases.

The purchase and occupation of the Philippines demonstrated U.S. expansion beyond the “Monroe Doctrine,” as the Philippines lay far outside the Western Hemisphere.

The Philippines produced sugar and coconut oil and consumed U.S. goods. American imperialists argued that Filipinos were “too backward” for independence to lead to progress. Filipinos, having fought Spain for independence, opposed U.S. annexation and established the Philippine Republic in 1899 under Emilio Aguinaldo, leader of the liberation wars.

Despite its slogan of “liberation and democracy,” the U.S. sent General MacArthur to the Philippines in 1901. After massacring pro-independence fighters, American forces arrested Aguinaldo and crushed the independence movement, proving themselves—according to the narrative—“more barbaric than the Spanish and British colonialists.” Roughly 200,000 Filipinos died in the conflict.

After suppressing northern resistance, American forces turned to the Muslim Moro population in the southern islands of the Philippines. Beginning in 1903, the Moro province was placed under American occupation, with three harsh military governors appointed for a decade.

Conclusion

When the threads of this blood-stained record are woven together, a complete system of American brutality emerges—one that views the world as an open field for experiments in power. Every weak nation becomes a potential battleground, every non-American resource a target for plunder, and every people who raise their heads or dream of independence become legitimate targets for bombs, sanctions, coups, or smear campaigns cloaked in the language of freedom and democracy.

Reflecting on this violent legacy exposes the falseness of American claims about human rights. The United States burns Arab and Islamic countries just as it once burned the forests of Vietnam with napalm, supported death squads in Colombia, crushed the will of peoples in Latin America, and violated the Philippines, Mexico, Hawaii, and others under the banner of “liberation.”

Worse than military occupation is political and economic domination, which empties nations from within, turns their futures into the property of multinational corporations, and leaves millions trapped in cycles of poverty, hunger, and homelessness.

Experience after experience has shown, according to this narrative, that America values human beings only insofar as they serve its interests, and supports nations only when their lands are corridors for its fleets or markets for its wealth.

As long as this approach persists, the peoples of the world will remember that behind the modern face of the “empire” lies a brutality untouched by conferences, unpolished by media, and undisguised by diplomatic language, no matter how refined.

This report serves as a mirror revealing what the United States has attempted to bury—a mirror that retells the truth as lived by afflicted nations: that American brutality was never an exception, but the rule.