Like Cassandra, I Speak the Truth: US Army Psychological Operations in Latin America, 1987-89

This article examines US Army psychological operations (PsyOp) as practiced during the waning years of the Cold War in Latin America. Certain themes, especially legitimacy, in-group/out-group, and safety/fear are demonstrated to be recurrent in regional PsyOp campaigns, largely because they seem to activate rich inference systems in the human brain. Yet anthropologists and other scholars of Latin America have paid little attention to military PsyOp. Despite our natural susceptibilities, we can best evaluate propaganda (and other claims to knowledge) by following the advice of Karl Popper: competing theories, including politically loaded ones, should always be explanatory and subject to criticism.