We should not tolerate it--in this act against the president of Bolivia, or in its many other injustices and horrors, such as the recent U.S. slaughter of one hundred thousand innocent Iraqis and the current anonymous U.S. drone bombings all over the world--no arrest, no accusations, no trial, and with no consideration for bystanders.
Indeed, Evo Morales was targeted by the U.S. in September 2008 for a coup d'etat by the white separatist elite, who were organized and funded right out of the U.S. embassy in Bolivia. No apologies from the Obama administration for that outrage, nor for any of the outrages and enormous crimes of the Bush Junta, including many in Latin America. In fact, the U.S. crimes in LatAm have continued under Obama, with the U.S.-supported rightwing military coup in Honduras in 2009, the more recent rightwing coup in Paraguay, and Obama's refusal to recognize the election of socialist Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela this year--an election recognized by all of Latin America and the rest of the world, in an election system that Jimmy Carter recently called "the best in the world."
Speaking of Jimmy Carter, I want to correct the impression you gave that Carter supported imperial policies in Latin America in a continuum with Reagan. This is not true. Carter's aid package to El Salvador, for instance, was intended (by Carter) to support a moderate government, supported by moderate military, that was ousting an atrocious fascist government, after a civil war in which the fascists had triumphed.
See: http://www.fsmitha.com/h2/ch24salvador.htm
But yet more importantly, Carter is most notable for his vigorous efforts to STOP the U.S. "military-industrial complex" and secret government (CIA, NSA, et al) from supporting fascist regimes in Latin America and elsewhere who were committing gross human rights violations.
See "The Carter Years," here:
http://www.statecraft.org/chapter13.html
This article details the struggle within the U.S. government between human rights and pro-democracy advocates (led by Jimmy Carter) and the U.S. military/CIA war establishment, with Carter trying to bring the U.S. more into compliance with its democratic ideals.
"There is some evidence that the civilian policymakers, and notably the president, were not kept fully informed of the ongoing assistance to governments that were nominally on the United States' list of (human rights) villains. The flood of arms and the backdoor training in special warfare seems too patently a mockery of his foreign policy for the president to have been aware of it. But the level of covert training and arms procurement going on at the height of Carter's human rights offensive was too extensive to have continued without a go-ahead at high levels at the Pentagon and from CIA headquarters in Langley. The Reagan administration would later reveal, if unwillingly, some of the ways through which legislative prohibition of covert action could be circumvented through clandestine action orchestrated from within the White House itself. The contra supply operation of the 1980s would be insulated from the CIA's conventional mechanisms of covert action, albeit imperfectly, by calling in contract personnel like General John K. Singlaub and by handling procurement and logistics through second governments and the same human and commercial "proprietaries" more commonly under direct CIA supervision and control." http://www.statecraft.org/chapter13.html
Although Carter was certainly not faultless on U.S. military and covert operations, his administration is a noteworthy and virtually unique example of presidential effort to reform our military and secret government establishment. The difficulties of that effort--and, in fact, the impossibility of reform, due to the power of this MIC establishment--is sobering and, indeed, frightening. It is more powerful now than then, and has just about extinguished democracy in the USA.
Here is the conclusion of the article, about Carter:
"The End of Ideals
The Carter administration's preoccupation with human rights had by mid-term been largely overwhelmed by the inertia of the foreign policy establishment and by demands for a traditional response to the unforeseen events overseas. The Cold War chorus at home shrilly attributed the collapse of stalwart anticommunist regimes in Nicaragua and Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to the administration's lack of resolve. The administration responded with new resources for special operations forces and with open-ended military engagements in the secret wars of Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Central America.
The exhaustion (although not the reversal) of the human rights policy was almost complete. The administration's response to the bloodbath in El Salvador was to pour in military aid and plug into the situation its own unconventional warriors. This, and the commitment to a range of new secret wars, reflected the very policies whose sequelae of atrocity Jimmy Carter had most vigorously opposed. The renewed commitment to unconventional warfare paved the way for the open-eyed amorality of the next administration."
As the Carter administration staggered to an end, its commitment to place the defense of human rights in the forefront of foreign affairs lay in tatters. A new era, in which Cold War ideology would inform U.S. policy without dissimulation, was about to begin. The great hope offered by Carter's idealism was ultimately finished off by Islamic fundamentalism, Central American revolution, and international terrorism, but it had long since been stymied by institutional resistance to the fundamental changes that Carter envisioned. The Reagan administration, in contrast, would find the great bureaucracies of the state ready and willing to return to the pre-Carter status quo and to relaunch the Cold War on the periphery.
http://www.statecraft.org/chapter13.html
I don't agree with everything in this article, but it does give you an accurate sense of the stark differences between the Carter and Reagan administrations--in some respects, an almost black and white contrast. Carter strongly supported human rights as a foremost U.S. policy. He was sincere about it and has proven it, after his presidency, by his passionate, lifelong commitment to human rights and to democratic rights. Reagan, on the other hand, was guilty of genocide in Guatemala and other horrors, and was the most anti-democratic U.S. president except for Bush Jr.
Carter eventually succumbed to the unreformable MIC, but not in his heart of hearts, which became evident later.
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