"Former Bolivian President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, who is facing charges relating to government suppression of a protest in February 2003 resulting in the death of 30 people, fled to the US later that same year and American authorities have refused to extradite him. “The [US] government feels it’s necessary to ally itself with people in power, and a lot of times those people are dictators,” said Dave Kane of the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns" The latter statement is true, but an implication of it is not. Gonzalo Sanchez wasn't a dictator, and he is currently being tried in the US for potential extradition in response to Bolivia's request. The deaths he was responsible for were the result of attempted suppression of wide scale rioting against his legally elected coalition government. The general tendency for the US in the post-Cold War world has been a more mild version of what the US did during the Cold War because the same ends justifies the means arguments can no longer as convincingly be applied. Notably for instance the US has tried to set up democracies in both Iraq and Afghanistan (though it is apparently failing on the latter front). Under a president like Bush, the US will more closely resemble its Cold War practices, and under a president like Clinton or Obama it will act less badly. Lame as that may be, progress has been made, though there is still plenty distance left to cover.