The Mexican opposition – determined to make a battle that originates beyond the border a national one – has found shelter under the mantle of the stars and stripes. The opposition is vintage.
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Unable to win a single one against the party in power, the national reaction has placed its hopes on the one who promises to defeat it. Needing a strong boost, the right has replaced one hope with another without realizing that the defeat of its adversary will not imply its own.
The opposition – as the word indicates – denounces authoritarianism and invokes the rule of law; announces the ruin of democratic institutions and demands their autonomy; deplores the capture of the Judiciary and demands justice; denounces corruption and calls for limits on power.
It is mistaken: Trump’s paths do not lead to that place. The new Latin American right that gravitates around the United States detests liberal democracy, is blind to justice, and loves all corruption.
The paths of the magnate and company – alien to the nostalgia in which our opposition guard lives – obey less passionate matters: the great battle of the United States against China, the appropriation – a euphemism for theft – of resources useful to its interests, and the subordination of local priorities to whatever it desires.
As examples, there is no shortage. It has been repeated two, four, six, eight, and ten times. There is no need to predict what has already happened.
I start with Argentina. Javier Milei’s government plans to hand over the port of Ushuaia to the United States as a military enclave and as a bargaining chip to cover the billion dollars it costs to join the Peace Board. Its new United Nations.
Colombia serves as the most recent example of the same path. Abelardo de la Espriella – whose victory Trump claims paternity of – has authorized joint military operations with the US on Colombian territory. Even if it is unconstitutional. Fifty years of debate for peace have fallen into the hands of an outsider.
In Brazil, the right embodied by Flávio Bolsonaro – son of a man convicted of attempting a coup d’état and protected by Trump – aspires to conquer at the polls what his father tried to obtain without them.
Let’s go to Honduras. The victory of the right in that country with Nasry Asfura returns power to the shadows. Asfura belongs to the same National Party as Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president convicted in New York for drug trafficking and arms offenses and later pardoned by Trump. A pardon is well worth a country.
In Peru, Keiko Fujimori – the dictator’s daughter – is willing to have Trump’s will done in her. Her government has chosen to approach Washington and contain China’s advance in the South Pacific.
Even within the United States itself – a former bastion of democracy and the rule of law – Trumpism has revealed its contempt for the rules: it has already disregarded the result of an election whose fraud it could never prove; it governs without regard for the rest of the government, grants impunity or discretionary punishments, and practices unparalleled patrimonialism.
Given this, it should not be difficult for the Mexican opposition to anticipate – as in a chess move – the consequences of its next play. Not for the sake of variety, Donald Trump will stop being himself.
What the national reaction should understand is that the effect of Trump’s intervention in Mexico would not be limited to the loss of Morena’s power. That is as far as the short-sightedness of an opposition that imagines interference as a simple trigger for alternation goes. Who has time for such delicacies as imagining the day after tomorrow?
If they hand the country over to Trump, democracy will die in their arms. In the Donroe Doctrine [the Trumpist version of the Monroe Doctrine], human rights and democracy have been erased.
The United States will not intervene in Mexico to restore the institutions they long for nor to return the power they lost. If Washington’s will manages to impose itself on Mexican soil, the outcome will be a subordinated country, the exploitation of our resources, and criminal governments tolerated by the docility that surrenders to the magnate.
That is where Trump’s paths lead.
He lies who promises that there is a middle way. And he lies – worse still – who claims the cunning to use Trump and, when the time comes, be able to contain him.
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