Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a prominent member of Congress and leading voice of the American left, has called on the US government to issue an apology to Latin American countries for decades of meddling in their affairs and causing instability in the region.

The Democratic congresswoman from New York was speaking after a visit to Chile in advance of the 50th anniversary of the coup against Salvador Allende, a democratically elected socialist president actively opposed by Washington.

“I believe that we owe Chile, and not just Chile but many aspects of that region, an apology,” Ocasio-Cortez told the Guardian in an interview at her campaign headquarters in the Bronx. “I don’t think that apology indicates weakness; I think it indicates a desire to meet our hemispheric partners with respect.

“It’s very hard for us to move forward when there is this huge elephant in the room and a lack of trust due to that elephant in the room. The first step around that is acknowledgement and saying we want to approach this region in the spirit of mutual respect, and I think that’s new and it’s historic.”

Since President James Monroe effectively announced a protectorate over the hemisphere in the early 19th century, known as the Monroe doctrine, the US has interfered in nations across Latin America, often in pursuit of its own commercial interests or to support rightwing autocrats against socialists.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the US helped overthrow Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz and Brazilian president João Goulart and made various attempts to assassinate Soviet-backed Cuban leader Fidel Castro. In the 1970s, Argentina and Chile launched brutal crackdowns against perceived socialist threats, often with US support.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s administration supported anti-communist Contra forces against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, backed the Salvadoran government against leftist rebels, invaded Grenada after accusing the government of aligning with Cuba and invaded Panama to oust dictator Manuel Noriega.

And in what became known as Operation Condor, eight US-backed military dictatorships – Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru and Ecuador – jointly plotted the cross-border kidnap, torture and murder of hundreds of their political opponents.

Ocasio-Cortez believes a reckoning is long overdue. She said: “Latin America, I believe, due to its proximity, was absolutely unique in US interventionism during the cold war, and that was under [secretary of state] Henry Kissinger and President Nixon.

“I think a lot of Latin America is still very much grappling in the present day with the consequences of coups that were supported by the United States, with Operation Condor that Henry Kissinger helped largely lead. What we see is the ramifications of decades of those policies and how they shape US-Latin American relations today, I think primarily around trust.”

Successive US administrations have struggled to win back that trust. Washington was accused of giving at least tacit support to coups in Venezuela in 2002 and Honduras in 2009. When Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro claimed that the US was trying to orchestrate his overthrow in 2019, he knew the allegation would still have resonance in the region.

There are implications for everything from climate cooperation to immigration initiatives to trade relations. Joe Biden has faced criticism for neglecting Latin America as he seeks to rebuild alliances in Asia and Europe, even as the US faces growing competition from China for influence in the region. Democratic senator Tim Kaine told a recent Senate foreign relations committee hearing: “I struggle to see what this administration is doing in Latin America that has any heft to it.”

But Ocasio-Cortez was part of a congressional delegation – all Latino and Spanish-speaking – who recently travelled to Brazil, Chile and Colombia with the aim of opening a new chapter. In what she describes as a break from past US foreign policy, “we were sending a message not of paternalism or consequences or telling people what to do, but truly saying we’re here to reset this relationship in a new light”.

Climate diplomacy was a central focus of the visit. Brazil is a major driver of deforestation but Ocasio-Cortez – a member of “the squad” of progressives in the House of Representatives – said it was important to communicate that the Amazon is not Brazil’s responsibility alone.

In Chile, the group visited the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, which remembers the victims of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Ocasio-Cortez has introduced legislation to declassify documents that could shed light on the CIA’s involvement in the coup.

“The first element of it is just acknowledgement,” she said. “We’re not even at the point of an apology because we haven’t even gotten to an acknowledgement, and that’s why I believe the declassification of these documents is going to be so critical to our relationship to Chile, as well as also acknowledging the unified rightwing movements that the US has very much historically been exporting to Latin America. I don’t say that just in a governmental respect. I say that in terms of the rightwing movements that are growing in the United States.”

Ocasio-Cortez notes that Steve Bannon, a longtime adviser to former president Donald Trump, has convened far-right figures from around the world and coordinated with extremists in Brazil. Bannon’s playbook was in evidence in the 8 January 2023 attacks on government buildings in the capital, Brasilia, she says.

“I think we’re seeing something similar happen in Chile, where there is a concerted effort to erase history and a concerted effort to manipulate public perception of what happened in the 11 September 1973 coup against Salvador Allende and for the United States to declassify these documents, in addition to their diplomatic significance, could also be inoculative against those who seek to erase the history of what has happened in this region.”

A cross-border alliance of rightwing populists has emerged over the past decade to share ideas and pool resources. Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and former Brexit party leader Nigel Farage have all addressed the US Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Bolsonaro’s son, Eduardo, also a politician, said he and Bannon “share the same worldview”. Tucker Carlson, a former host at Fox News, has lavished praise on Orbán.

Asked if the left needs to build a counterweight network, Ocasio-Cortez, whose trip to Latin America was branded “AOC’s socialist sympathy tour” by Rupert Murdoch’s conservative Wall Street Journal newspaper, replied: “I absolutely believe that the battle for democracy must be transnational and it must be global, and it especially must be hemispheric.

“What we are seeing is not just a progressive left that must unify. I think we are also talking about basic principles of defending democracy. As we’ve seen with Bolsonaro and of course with the very recent history of Pinochet, Chile just began to make its steps into democracy in 1990. That is just when they first started taking these steps out of an authoritarian rightwing regime.”

That means finding a way through the messiness of multiparty democracy to prove it can produce results that autocracy cannot. The congresswoman added: “At the end of the day, for democracy to prevail, democracy must deliver, and I believe that’s where progressive politics come in. We must secure material improvements to the lives of working people, from healthcare to the climate crisis.”