The Pink War was started as a reaction to a wave of political change in Latin America.
History shows that while Latin Americans have always had vast natural resources, they had long been marginalized into receiving pennies for the dollars extracted from their lands.
Meanwhile, local elites who protected these inequitable arrangements were kept in power, regardless of the disparate levels of oppression and violence used to keep people trudging under such obvious inequity.
Decades of abject poverty and desperation generated a new, political push for redistribution: People all over the region wanted fairer trade. That was 1998, and that is when the Pink Tide started, in Venezuela.
The movement grew to 15 countries and hundreds of millions of voters in Latin America. They repeatedly voted for a fairer trade, and their governments started to change accordingly. Local institutions for trade, journalism, politics, and finances sprang, such as ALBA, CELAC, BancoSur, Telesur.
As a result the region saw remarkable advances against inequality, poverty, and illiteracy. The leaders were not "red" as in communist, but they were interested in the redistribution of the profits of extraction. Their redistribution was to benefit the vast majority of people who toiled in these countries. Accordingly, that wave of change became known as the "Pink Tide."
There was another effect of the Pink Tide: the entrenched elites and their overlord corporations started to see their obscene profits fall. New contracts had to be negotiated with fairer spreads for all concerned. Try as they might, they could not dislodge these new leaders via elections. So they have been trying something else: covert warfare at the political and military levels - and U.S. government resources have been used to wreak havoc on the the Pink Tide in any way possible.
