Latin America has spent more than fifty years as what John Pilger calls Washington's "backyard," propped up by coups, compliant strongmen, and interventions meant to keep the region's poor majority out of power. Pilger's film traces that history from Chile under Pinochet to Venezuela under Hugo Chavez, sitting down with CIA veterans, Chilean torture survivors, and Venezuelan slum residents who describe what changed when oil revenue started reaching their neighborhoods. Archival footage covers the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende and the failed 2002 coup against Chavez, who Pilger notes won at least six elections with turnout topping eighty percent, a record he sets against Washington's continued efforts to unseat him. The film draws a straight line from these episodes to more recent US conduct in Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon, arguing that the same playbook keeps resurfacing. Pilger narrates throughout, letting his interview subjects, particularly the Chileans recalling torture under Pinochet, carry the film's argument that democracy in the region has long been negotiable when it produces the wrong winner.