Politics & Power Quote by John Perkins

Perkins isn’t just alleging a covert operation; he’s staging an indictment of how ignorance gets manufactured at home. The sentence opens with courtroom certainty - “no question in my mind” - a rhetorical move that dares the audience to treat doubt as naivete or complicity. By naming the C.I.A. so bluntly, he skips the coy euphemisms (“intelligence community,” “national security”) that usually soften this territory. The effect is confrontational: he’s forcing a moral frame onto what’s often discussed as mere geopolitics.

The pivot is the real engine: “many Latin American investigators have come to the same conclusion.” Perkins borrows legitimacy from the people closest to the consequences, implying that truth is geographically asymmetrical. Those on the receiving end of U.S. policy piece together patterns because they live with the wreckage; Americans, protected by distance and narrative control, are left with sanitized versions.

Then comes the quiet punch: “Of course, we never heard about that in our country.” “Of course” is doing heavy work, treating domestic ignorance as predictable rather than accidental. The subtext is not simply media failure but a systemic filtration process - classification, propaganda, selective coverage, and the cultural comfort of believing the empire is benevolent. Perkins’s intent, as an economist turned whistleblower persona, is to connect macroeconomic power to covert enforcement: when money and persuasion fail, coercion follows, and the public story gets rewritten. The line weaponizes that gap between what’s known abroad and what’s sayable at home, turning American innocence into evidence of American design.