Argentina’s new President Javier Milei has begun the rewriting of history, the whitewashing of the crimes against humanity of his brutal and depraved role model during the 1976-1983 dictatorship, and the erasure of its victims.
Like all fascist tyrants, Milei attempts to capture us in a killing jar of echoes and reflections, lies and illusions, rewritten histories, authorized identities, and alternate realities; the Wilderness of Mirrors, to use former CIA Chief of Counter Intelligence Angleton’s iconic metaphor of falsification through propaganda and thought control.
Wilderness of Mirrors, a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s Gerontin, is one I use to describe the pathology of falsification of ourselves through propaganda, lies and illusions, rewritten histories, state secrets, alternate realities, authoritarian faith which devours truths. This I disambiguate in comparison with its opposite, journalism and the witness of history as the sacred quest to pursue the truth. We are made counterfeits of ourselves by systems of elite hegemonic power such as patriarchy, racism, and capitalism, and by those who would enslave us, through capture of our stories as theft of the soul.
James Angleton, on whom John Le Carre based his character of George Smiley, infamously used the phrase in this sense as well, and it has become universalized throughout the intelligence community he shaped and influenced during the Second World War and its aftermath the Cold War. Writing in reference to David Martin’s biography of himself entitled Wilderness of Mirrors, Angleton described it as a “myriad of stratagems, deceptions, artifices, and all the other devices of disinformation which the Soviet bloc and its coordinated intelligence services use to confuse and split the West … an ever fluid landscape where fact and illusion merge.” And of course, everything he ascribed to the Soviets was also true of himself, his own agency, and America as well, and of all states, for all are houses of illusion.
The Netflix telenovela Operation Mincemeat uses the phrase, in a story about the creation of a fictitious officer bearing documents designed to trick the Nazis into preparing for the invasion of Europe somewhere other than Sicily, a series I watched with rapt attention because each of us is created by our stories exactly like this false identity attached to the body of a derelict. Within each of us, a team of authors create our personae through stories, a network of memories, histories, and identity; and they do so for their own purposes, which we do not always understand.
As T. S. Eliot has written in Gerontin, “After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities”
We are such stuff as dreams are made on, as Shakespeare teaches us in Act IV, Scene 1 of The Tempest, a line spoken by Ariel. For if we are ephemeral and insubstantial beings, constructions of our stories, this also means that the ontological nature of human being is a ground of struggle which can be claimed by seizures of power.
The first question to ask of a story is, whose story is this?
Always there remains the struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves and those told about us by others; the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others.
To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become?
Our goal in revolutionary struggle is to seize the legitimacy and authority of the enemy, to take their power, by claiming the moral high ground, shaping opinion through control of the narratives and building solidarity by championing the people against those who would enslave us.
For who stands alone, dies alone; and who stands in solidarity and abandons not his fellows becomes unstoppable as the tides.
When tyrants come to steal our souls with their web of lies, let them find a humankind not divided by fear or abject in despair and learned helplessness, but united in our solidarity and guarantorship of each other’s universal human rights and Unconquered in refusal to submit.
As written by Facundo Iglesia in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘Justification of dictatorship’: outcry as Milei rewrites Argentina’s history; “Human rights groups in Argentina have raised the alarm over President Javier Milei’s attempts to rewrite history on the eve of the annual day of remembrance for the thousands of victims of the country’s brutal 1976-1983 dictatorship.
Thousands of protesters will take to the streets on Sunday to mark the Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice in Argentina, a holiday commemorating the 30,000 victims of the dictatorship, called “desaparecidos”. The date usually sees Argentina’s largest demonstrations of the year, with millions of citizens flooding the country’s streets to declare: “Nunca más” (never again).
However, this 24 March will be different as it will be the first under Milei, a far-right libertarian who has consistently denied Argentinians’ long-standing consensus over the dictatorship’s crimes.
“There were no 30,000,” Milei said provocatively during a presidential debate ahead of his election triumph last November. “For us, during the 70s, there was a war where excesses were committed.”
Numerous Argentinian media outlets have reported that the government plans to release a video with its “official version” of what happened during the dictatorship before the 24 March mobilizations. The video will allegedly include an interview with Luis Labraña, a former member of the Montoneros Peronist organization, who has claimed he “made up” the 30,000 number. Some journalists have also claimed that the government plans to pardon incarcerated regime officials, although both Milei and his vice-president, Victoria Villarruel, have denied this.
Lucía García Itzigsohn, the daughter of two desaparecidos, said: “We are very worried. Beyond our political positioning and the fact that history crosses us personally, this implies breaking the democratic pact.”
“President Javier Milei and the highest authorities of the country repeat forms of denialism and relativism of state terrorism,” the Center of Legal and Social Studies (CELS), a human rights organization founded in 1979, said in a statement.
Villarruel has been even more outspoken in her defense of Argentina’s former military rulers. She is the niece of Ernesto Guillermo Villarruel, who was in charge of the Vesubio clandestine detention center during the dictatorship. Like Milei, she has said that the dictatorship was “a war” between “terrorists” and the armed forces.
Ezequiel Adamovsky said such ideas were fringe in the 1990s, when only small far-right groups put the crimes of the guerrillas on the same level as those committed by the military regime, but became somewhat normalized under president Mauricio Macri. But he warned that the Argentinian right wing has further radicalized its discourse regarding the dictatorship. “What we are talking about now is no longer denialism, it is directly a justification of the dictatorship,” Adamovsky said.
Analysts and human rights groups warn that this discourse has consequences: CELS said tributes were now being paid in military barracks to regime officials convicted of crimes against humanity with the endorsement of the political authorities.
On Wednesday, the organization Hijos – which was founded by the children of desaparecidos – reported that one of its activists had been tied, beaten and sexually assaulted in her home, in what they called a “politically motivated attack”.
The attackers painted “VLLC” on one of the walls, the acronym for Milei’s catchphrase “Viva la libertad, carajo” (“Long live freedom, dammit”). “We are here to kill you,” they reportedly told her.
“Hate speech is the breeding ground for violent actions and crimes,” tweeted the campaign group Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, which was created in 1977 by grandmothers seeking their grandchildren, born in captivity and kidnapped by the dictatorship, and often raised within military families.
García Itzigsohn, a member of Hijos, said Milei had not called the victim or the organization to condemn the attack. Nor has he done so publicly.
Moreover, Milei’s head digital strategist during his presidential campaign, Fernando Cerimedo, claimed on X that the attack was a fabrication. “People want the truth,” Cerimedo said in an interview. “And [the fact that there were] 30,000 is a lie.”
Adamovsky said questioning the number was “an act of bad faith”. “The number is an estimation that was made with the very little information available at that moment,” he said, adding that military documents that were declassified in 2006 revealed that the military had disappeared or killed close to 22,000 people between 1975 and 1978, a whole five years before the end of the dictatorship.
Due to the illegal nature of the repression and the fact that there was a pact of silence in the military, the exact number cannot be attained, Adamovsky said. “The right wing exploits the seeming gap between the reported cases and the symbolic number to imply human rights groups are lying,” he added.
This week Milei’s defense minister, Luis Petri, appeared in a photograph with the wives of imprisoned dictatorship officials, who are demanding their husbands be freed. Argentina held its first trial against such criminals in 1985, and they are still taking place to this day. A spokesperson for the minister claimed Petri appeared in the picture “by chance” and had spoken with them for “less than two seconds”.
García Itzigsohn said that Argentinians would not back down despite the government’s provocations. “There are 40 years of democratic tradition in our country that cannot be thrown away only because these people have a provocative style,” she said. “There are regulations, there are laws, and there will also be a people marching on 24 March who will make it very clear to them.”
As I wrote in my post of November 27 2023, A Fascist Shadow Captures Argentina: Javier Milei; Tyranny now speaks to us through a new mask, as El Loco takes center stage in Argentina. The maelstrom of fear, power, and force which creates tyrannies of force and control, births wars of imperial conquest and dominion, and finds its final form in genocides and dehumanization are universal systems of oppression, legacies of our history from which we must emerge.
Evil originates in fear, often overwhelming and generalized fear given form and a target by authorities in service to power. The centralization of power to carceral states is inherent in human societies because its causes are; hence the elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege which rely on hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness and the subjugation of slave castes.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
Politics is the Art of Fear, as my father taught me, and in Argentina our fear speaks to us as an echo and reflection of our own, and reveals the parasitism of America’s relationships with the world throughout our history.
Herein I speak of the Red Scare, the Hollywood Blacklist, and other nationalist forms of social force which used fear to manufacture consent, centralize power, and legitimize authority in the wake of the Second World War.
This was our Second Imperial Period, from the end of World War Two to the Fall of the Soviet Union, influenced by our assimilation of the Nazi elite into our intelligence and special forces communities at their founding, as the OSS became the CIA and the Jedburg teams became the Green Berets.
The First American Empire being the Conquest and policies of Manifest Destiny which began with the genocide of the Native Americans, become global with the war against the Barbary Pirates of North Africa which founded the Marines, reached apogee in our 1898 conquest of the Spanish Empire which gave us The Philippine Islands, Cuba, and Guam while we stole the Hawaiian Islands because we could, and ended with the fall of civilization in The War to End All Wars.
The Third Empire or Imperial Period of American history begins with Nine Eleven and the antidemocratic Patriot Act, and possibly ends with our abandonment of Afghanistan; this remains unwritten, and rests now in our hands.
How has the anticommunist hysteria of the post World War Two era, which I call the Second Empire, reshaped America and the world?
First a cultural total war waged by the state against its own citizens which gave us reversals of our values like In God We Trust on our money which asks us not to believe in the Infinite but in the authority of the state to speak in His name, the Pledge of Allegiance which substitutes the state for ourselves as its co-owners as the source of authority in a free society of equals and for our loyalty to one another as solidarity and a band of brothers, sisters, and others.
Second a war of imperial dominion which enforces elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege throughout the world, sometimes focused on seizures of oil as a strategic resource but also simply occupying spaces as in a game of go. Examples of America’s global campaign of terror and tyranny through proxy states proliferates quickly from the codification of the Jakarta Method by the CIA in 1965 versus Sukarno, and become an endless litany of woes, atrocities, depravities, genocides and slave labor; the Mayan Genocide in Guatemala and the covert Central American wars which resulted in the Iran-Contra Scandal, America’s ferocious and depraved alliance with the Apartheid regime of South Africa, the Thousand Day War in Vietnam, a whole Gordian Knot of nastiness and interventions including our mad assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, and other heroes of liberation struggle whom an America true to our founding ideals would have hailed as brothers in anticolonial revolution and stood with rather than against.
In Argentina, the echoes and reflections of our history confront us with the consequences of failure of empathy as the subversion of democracy, and we should all pay attention to the man behind the curtain as the lights of liberty wink out and fall into darkness one by one across the world.
For as George Santayana teaches us in The Life of Reason; “Those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it.”
As written by Tom Phillips in The Guardian, in an article entitled Who is Javier Milei? Argentina’s new far-right president ‘El Loco’ takes the stage
Likened to Wolverine and Trump and nicknamed ‘the madman’, the former TV pundit is known for his prolific swearing and pledge to take a chainsaw to the machinery of state; “Friends and foes of Argentina’s next president compare him to his fellow right-wing populists Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. Others have called the wild-haired economist a mix of Boris Johnson and the killer doll Chucky.
But when Javier Milei’s image consultant conceived his unorthodox hairdo, she had two different men in mind: Elvis Presley and Wolverine.
“He looks like Wolverine. He acts like Wolverine. He’s like an anti-hero,” Lilia Lemoine, a professional cosplayer turned congresswoman-elect, said of her anti-establishment ally during a recent interview in Buenos Aires.
Lemoine, whose stage name is Lady Lemon, said she saw striking similarities between Argentina’s president-elect and the volatile Marvel character.
“[Wolverine] is very loyal and brave … He can get really mad and be aggressive with his enemies – but only when he’s attacked. He will never ever kill someone or attack someone for no reason,” the 43-year-old said, insisting Milei also had a softer side.
“He’s adorable,” Lemoine claimed in a pre-election interview, calling the far-right libertarian “the most wanted man in Argentina right now”.
That has not always been the case. An unauthorised biography of Milei – who on Sunday trounced his Peronist rival in Argentina’s most important election in decades – paints him as a mercurial loner who suffered a childhood of parental abuse and schoolyard bullying during the 1980s and was given the nickname El Loco (The Madman). “More than Milei’s ideas, what worries me is his state of mind and emotional stability,” said the book’s author, Juan Luis González.
A music-lover, Milei was the lead singer of a Rolling Stones cover band called Everest and, according to Lemoine, also enjoys Bob Marley and Verdi. “He loves opera. He sings opera. He’s not very good – but don’t say I said that,” she confided.
Milei was more successful as a media personality, finding fame as an economic pundit on Argentinian TV shows where he would pontificate about both the misery of inflation and the joy of tantric sex. “Each man has his own dynamic. In my particular case, I ejaculate every three months,” Milei once boasted on air.
Such titillating declarations – and Milei’s propensity for attention-grabbing foul-mouthed outbursts – made him a household name and helped him kickstart a career in politics around five years ago. The libertarian economist was elected to congress in 2021 for his party Libertad Avanza (Freedom Advances) party and was swept into the presidency this week by an tsunami of voter fury at the corruption and mismanagement that millions of voters blame for Argentina’s worst economic crisis in two decades.
“The vote represents a desperate attempt at something new, come what may,” said Benjamin Gedan, an Argentina specialist from the Wilson Centre. “The option [voters had] was more of the same in catastrophic economic conditions or a radical gamble on a potentially bright future with a lot of downside risk.”
Gedan believed there would be “a lot of buyer’s remorse in Argentina” if Milei pursued even a small fraction of his ideas. Those ideas include legalising the sale of human organs, dramatically slashing social spending, downplaying the crimes of Argentina’s 1976-83 dictatorship, and cutting ties with Argentina’s two most important trade partners, Brazil and China. On the campaign trail, Milei vowed to abolish Argentina’s central bank and dollarise the economy, and brandished a chainsaw intended to symbolise ferocious cuts he believes will help stabilise the economy and “exterminate” rampant inflation.
Milei’s biography suggests some of those ideas may have come from his five cloned mastiff dogs who are named after economists including Murray Rothbard and Robert Lucas. “They are like two metres tall, they weigh like 100kg … He calls them his four-legged children,” said Lemoine, laughing off claims that Argentina’s future leader takes political advice from those animals.
Many experts believe Milei will be forced to moderate after taking power next month and will struggle to implement his more controversial proposals. Milei’s party controls just 38 of 257 seats in Argentina’s lower house and eight of 72 in the senate.
But on Sunday night Milei showed little sign of diluting his vision for South America’s second largest economy. “The changes this country needs are drastic,” he declared, announcing Trumpian plans to make Argentina great again.
Even before Milei’s victory was complete, Lemoine said she was certain her friend – and his sideburns – would prevail.
“I’m just happy because I saw it from the beginning. It’s nice to know that you were right even when nobody believed in it,” she said.”
What is the meaning of this disruptive event? As written by Tom Phillips, Josefina Salomón, and Facundo Iglesia in The Guardian, in an article entitled Argentina presidential election: far-right libertarian Javier Milei wins after rival concedes: Victory for TV celebrity turned politician catapults South America’s second-largest economy into an unpredictable future; “Javier Milei, a volatile far-right libertarian who has vowed to “exterminate” inflation and take a chainsaw to the state, has been elected president of Argentina, catapulting South America’s second largest economy into an unpredictable and potentially turbulent future.
With more than 99% of votes counted, the Mick Jagger impersonating TV celebrity-turned politician, who is often compared to Donald Trump, had secured 55.69% of the vote compared with 44.3% for his rival, the centre-left finance minister Sergio Massa.
“Today the reconstruction of Argentina begins. Today is a historic night for Argentina,” Milei told jubilant supporters at his campaign headquarters in Buenos Aires, calling his victory a “miracle”.
Milei promised “drastic changes” to tackle Argentina’s “tragic reality” of soaring inflation and widespread poverty. He also sent a message to the international community: “Argentina will return to the place in the world which it should never have lost.”
Earlier, Massa – who received 11.5m votes to Milei’s 14.4m – conceded defeat.
“Argentinians have chosen another path,” said Massa, who said he had called Milei to congratulate him on his victory and hinted he would retire from frontline politics.
“Obviously these are not the results we hoped for and I have spoken to Javier Milei to congratulate him because he’s the president that the majority of Argentines have chosen for the next four years,” added Massa, whose Peronist movement has governed for 16 of the last 20 years.
Pro-Milei activists rejoiced at the triumph of their 53-year-old leader, whom they describe as an economic visionary poised to lead Argentina out of one of the country’s worst economic crises in decades.
“[I’m] happy, happy, happy,” said Francisco Jiménez, a 30-year-old delivery driver and Milei activist from Villa Soldati, a working-class area outside Buenos Aires.
As he set off to join the party at Milei’s campaign HQ, Jiménez said he knew the result was likely to send Argentina’s peso tumbling against the dollar and cause more economic pain. “But I don’t think there is another option than trusting him. Now more than ever,” he added. “The situation is dire.”
During his campaign, Milei – who will take office on 10 December – vowed to abolish the central bank and dollarise the economy in order to overcome a financial calamity that has left 40% of Argentina’s 45 million citizens in poverty and pushed inflation to more than 140%. “I know how to exterminate the cancer of inflation,” Milei proclaimed during last Sunday’s final presidential debate which most pundits believed Massa had won.
Milei’s victory was celebrated by other big beasts of the global far-right including Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro, who had championed his campaign and has promised to attend his inauguration. “Hope is sparkling in South America once again,” Bolsonaro wrote on X, hailing what he called a victory for “honesty, progress and freedom”.
The former US president Donald Trump wrote: “The whole world was watching! I am very proud of you. You will turn your country around and truly Make Argentina Great Again.”
His victory was also celebrated by X’s owner Elon Musk, who posted: “Prosperity is ahead for Argentina”.
Brazil’s leftwing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – who Milei has repeatedly insulted as a corrupt “communist” – recognised Milei’s victory in a tepid social media post. “Democracy is the voice of the people and must always be respected,” Lula wrote, without mentioning Milei by name. “I wish the next government good luck and success. Argentina is a great country and deserves our complete respect,” Lula added.
Colombia’s leftwing president, Gustavo Petro, lamented: “The extreme right has won in Argentina … [It is] sad for Latin America.” “Now say it without crying,” El Salvador’s right-wing president, Nayib Bukele, posted ironically in response.
Milei’s leftwing opponents reacted with shock and dejection to the election of a notoriously erratic figure whose radical ideas include legalising the sale of organs, cutting ties with Argentina’s two biggest trade partners, Brazil and China, and closing more than a dozen ministries.
Milei – a climate-denying populist who is known by the nickname El Loco (the Madman) – has also enraged millions of Argentinians by questioning the four-decade consensus over the crimes of its 1976-83 dictatorship, during which an estimated 30,000 people were killed by the military regime. His vice-presidential running mate is Victoria Villarruel, an ultra-conservative congresswoman who has played down the dictatorship’s sins.
“He is way more excessive and unstable than [Jair] Bolsonaro and Trump. So it’s highly unpredictable what this person could do [in power],” Federico Finchelstein, an Argentinian historian who studies the global far right, said on the eve of Sunday’s election.
Benjamin Gedan, the head of the Wilson Centre’s Argentina Project, said he believed one word explained the scale of Milei’s victory: desperation.
“This vote just reeks of desperation. A lot of Argentines voted knowingly against their economic interests because they recognise that the status quo is catastrophic. And there was no reason to believe that the current finance minister could plausibly be the answer,” Gedan said. “It’s a huge gamble but not a completely irrational one.”
Gedan said the election of such a radical and inexperienced political outsider thrust Argentina into uncharted waters.
“The real risk is that Argentina melts down in his attempt to radically transform the economy. That would look like massive social unrest, national strikes by unions, potential political violence and stresses against the democratic institutions. There is a pretty dark scenario if in fact he pursues aggressively his maximalist vision for Argentina.”
After hours of tension, there was an explosion of noise on the streets of Buenos Aires as news of the result spread and citizens reacted with a mixture of joy, apprehension and anger.
“Vamos Milei, the change is coming!” one woman could be heard shouting from a balcony in Recoleta, not far from the president-elect’s campaign HQ.
“Never again!” a male voice bellowed, in reference to the human rights violations that took place under Argentina’s military regime. “Milei is the dictatorship”.”
As a historical force, Milei represents anti-Peronist and anti-Catholic capitalism very like that which America exported in Operation Condor, which included the assassination of the glorious Salvador Allende, and echoes the anti Liberation Theology rhetoric and ideology once used to capture Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras as de facto colonies under the Reagan Plan.
As written by Uki Goñi in The Guardian, in an article entitled The ‘false prophet’ v the pope: Argentina faces clash of ideologies in election; “ In one corner of the ring stands Javier Milei, 52, self-described former tantric sex coach, outsider anarcho-capitalist and frontrunner in Argentina’s upcoming presidential elections; in the other, his compatriot Pope Francis, 86, world champion of the poor, repeatedly derided by Argentina’s likely next president as “a fucking communist” and “the representative of the evil one on Earth” for promoting the doctrine of “social justice” to aid the underprivileged.
Milei, a political unknown until 2020, has pledged to wage a “cultural battle” to transform Argentina into a libertarian paradise where capitalist efficiency replaces social assistance, taxes are reduced to a minimum and cash-strapped individuals are allowed to sell their body organs on the open market.
From Rome, Pope Francis has expressed grave concern about the rise of such callous policies in his home country. “The extreme right always reconstructs itself, it is the triumph of selfishness over communitarianism,” he said in a television interview in March when asked about Argentina’s upcoming elections.
In words that seemed to be referring to Milei, the only candidate in the 22 October vote with no political experience prior to 2021, the pope added: “I am terrified of saviours of the nation without a political party history.”
The pope’s doctrine of social justice is synonymous to theft in Milei’s Liberty Advances party because it relies on tax revenues. “Jesus didn’t pay taxes,” Milei once tweeted, tagging the Pope’s official account.
In a vein-popping victory speech after Argentina’s open primaries on 13 August, a tousle-haired Milei promised the demise of government benefits because they are “based on that atrocity that says that where there is a need, a right is born, its maximum expression being that aberration called social justice”.
Milei has trolled Francis with repetitive toxic tweets calling him a “communist turd”, a “piece of shit” and accusing the pontiff of “preaching communism to the world”.
Juan Grabois, a progressive Peronist with close links to the pontiff, and who lost the Peronist candidacy to current economy minister Sergio Massa, calls Milei a “false prophet” but attributes his rise to Argentina’s dire economic crisis.
“With inflation over 115% plus a 25% drop in the purchasing power of informal workers in the last seven years, voters would have to possess impossible political maturity to vote again for those who have failed them so completely,” Grabois told the Observer.
Voters disenchanted with both the rightwing Together for Change party, which held office up to 2019, and the incumbent Peronists have migrated in droves to newcomer Milei. “The music of the pied piper sounds sweet to those who have lost all hope. But there’s no point in blaming voters or the pied piper himself, we have to address the mistakes made by those of us who have a humanist concept of politics,” says Grabois.
Humanist is not a term that could be applied to Milei’s economics. Apart from legalising the sale of body organs, his spiky agenda proposes “dynamiting” the Central Bank, abolishing Argentina’s tuition-free public education system and disbanding free public health services. Milei is also treading fearlessly into anti-woke territory saying he will reinstate the ban on abortion, legalised in 2020, shut down the ministry of women, gender and diversity, as well as the ministries of science – “climate change is a socialist lie” – health, education, labour and public works, and will legalise the sale of firearms.
Despite this heady mix, Milei is broadly considered the undisputed shoo-in president appealing particularly to young underprivileged men. Milei took 30% of the vote in the open primaries earlier this month against 28% for Patricia Bullrich of United for Change and 27% for Peronist candidate Massa. Milei’s rise has been nothing short of mesmerising. A long-time economist for Argentinian billionaire Eduardo Eurnekian, he became a television star five years ago as a wild-haired economist and tantric sex coach who boasted on air about his sexual stamina and his taste for threesomes, assuring him wall-to-wall appearances on daytime talkshows.
These televised outbursts have many wondering if Milei could become unhinged under the stress of an eventual presidency.
“What happens if an unstable country is ruled by an unstable leader?”, asks journalist Juan González, author of a Milei biography titled El Loco (The Madman) published last month. “I’m worried he will actually try to push through his impracticable economic theories further devastating the economy and provoking violent social unrest.”
Milei is aware of the likelihood of violent street protests. “I’m going to put the leaders of those who throw stones in jail and if they surround the Casa Rosada [the presidential palace] they’re going to have to carry me out dead,” he said recently. More pragmatically, he has announced plans to incorporate the military into battling the “new threats” of narco gangs, human traffickers and possibly internal strife.
In a country that will celebrate four decades of uninterrupted democracy after decades of military rule when the new president takes office on 10 December 10, the prospect of the military reassuming a role in “internal conflicts” is raising alarms.
“The remiliarisation of security and intelligence is being proposed with military commandos ready for quick strategic intervention at the national level: this idea of national security is very problematic,” said Paula Litvachky, director of the Centre for Legal and Social Studies human rights organisation.
The pope has not said if Milei’s tirades have got under his skin. “I know they say things about me but I ignore it for my mental health,” he said in a television interview. “I will pray for them.”
To place this disruptive event in historical context, we must see it as an echo and reflection of Operation Condor.
As I wrote in my post of January 19 2023, Echoes and Reflections of American Imperialism and Operation Condor in South America’s Destabilized Democracies; By my writing desk hangs a reproduction of Théodore Géricault’s painting of 1818, The Raft of the Medusa, so brilliantly interrogated in Julian Barnes’ History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, which I think marvelous and a perfect allegory of our current political, economic, and environmental dilemma as a metaphor of capitalism and fascism as forms of cannibalism of humankind and of democracy, the primary causes of the immanent collapse of our civilization, and possibly also of the extinction of our species. Just to remind myself of what is at stake in this moment of history and in revolutionary struggle, and in my writing here as a witness of history and a sacred calling in pursuit of truth.
Monstrous evils of systemic inequality have yet again emerged from the darkness like an ambush predator to seize the nations of Central and South America in its jaws, and it is no accident but by design. Tyranny seeks the fall of democracy through the falsification, infiltration, and subversion of its institutions, in an echo and reflection of the CIA’s Operation Condor which once enacted imperial conquest and dominion of our hemisphere as Manifest Destiny.
In the destabilization and capture of the state through economic, social, and political warfare in Peru, the ruin of Venezuela in relentless assaults which have rendered it a failed state, and in the absurd and horrific January Insurrections in Brazil and in America itself two years ago led by Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, the United States of America has acted as a proxy and sock puppet of the Fourth Reich.
Far more than this can be laid at our door, including the collapse and ruin of Central America and the Columbia-Venezuela no man’s land of barbarism, the failed state of Mexico and the monumental challenges facing the people of Chile, all results of American intervention driven by the elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege which our nation serves.
These are the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle we now face throughout the Americas and the world. We are abandoned by our leaders and those who would enslave us and adrift on a tiny raft of civilization founded in the forum of Athens as a free society of equals which questions itself, as we are eating each other in learned helplessness and despair.
To this existential crisis of faith in one another and hope for our future we may answer with the powers which yet remain to us as human beings; love, hope, faith, refusal to submit to authority, and solidarity of action in resistance.
Here is the great test of our humanity posed by the Rashomon Gate Event of our historical moment; who do we want to become, we humans; masters and slaves doomed to failure and nothingness, or a United Humankind living now at the dawn of our glory?
Of Operation Condor I have written in my journal of April 7 2021, How American Imperialism Created Our Humanitarian Crisis at the Border; Forty six years ago this April, America launched Operation Condor, a global campaign to destabilize and repress socialist governments and movements and defend capitalism as a hegemonic force and its elite hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege. This remains relevant to us today because it is the origin of many of the push forces driving waves of refugees to our border, and the horrific humanitarian crisis and test of our democracy created by American imperialism.
Migration is a word which conceals both the conditions which trigger it and our own complicity in creating them as consequences of our decades long policies of colonialism, anticommunist militarism, and economic warfare; ecological devastation with its drought and famine, poverty and social and political destabilization, an age of tyranny and state terror, genocide and ethnic cleansing, weaponized faith and its patriarchal sexual terror, and multigenerational wars.
In terms of refugees fleeing to America for safety and survival as well as liberty and equality we are mainly speaking of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, though the hell zone of Columbia and Venezuela now accounts for many, and with the collapse of central authority in Mexico and its degeneration into a region of warlords, oligarchs, and feudal crime syndicates we have refugees from Mexico itself as well as the traditional seasonal laborers.
Migrant labor is slave labor; this is the great truth America has never confronted and must now answer for in the suffering masses at our border. Entire sectors of our economy run on it; agriculture in which labor becomes a strategic resource as we starve without it, but also child and elder care, hospitality, and some manufacture. America’s wealth and power is created for us by others to whom we export the real costs of production, others who must remain invisible and exploitable as unregulated illegal labor to wring every ounce of value from them for our elites. Thus we weaponize economic disparity in service to power and privilege, and create and maintain hierarchies of exclusionary otherness and white supremacy.
Interests of elite hegemonies of wealth and power converge here with those of racial privilege and white supremacy in historic toxicity, in parallel with the rise of the carceral state as an instrument for the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison labor and the repression of the Civil Rights Movement, and have done so from their origins. One such origin point is America’s appropriation, concealment, and instrumentalization of Nazi war criminals in the repression of dissent and the conquest of the world.
The Fourth Reich of which Trump was a figurehead did not emerge from nothing like Athena from the head of Zeus, but was an invention of American imperialism. As such its history and character as a global threat to democracy can be studied in the crisis of refugees and migration to which it has given birth, and in the legacies of our nation’s use of fascism as an instrument of dominion in the Americas, for as we were using it to conquer others, it was using us to seize the United States of America and the world.
As I wrote in my post of February 18 2020, Guatemala: Our Heart of Darkness; As we abduct and lockdown refugees in concentration camps and secret prisons, and drive others back into a Mexico whose government is supine before the power of its criminal organizations, we must reflect on the causes of this historic mass migration from Central America’s Dry Corridor of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua; why is this happening, and what can be done to fix the problems which are driving it?
Drought and famine caused by global warming and climate change are clear immediate causes and triggering stressors of the current migration, which are rooted in the history of American colonialism and capitalist economic warfare. These conditions have worsened longstanding issues of endemic poverty and pervasive violence and criminality, legacies of historical colonialism and American imperialist and capitalist policies and interventions, which I have described in my post of September 4 2019; There is an interesting connection between the chaos we created in Central America which is driving a mass exodus of immigration to our borders and the conspiracy theory of Islamic replacement of Europeans which inspires our greatest terrorist threat today; many of the white supremacists who ruled Algeria as a colony of France, mainly former Nazi soldiers who joined the Foreign Legion after the end of World War Two, were after its fall in 1962 hired by the government of the United States to rule El Salvador and Guatemala as puppet regimes to protect our corporate profits.
With them came the same ideology and dream of a homeland and asylum for escaped Nazis, and a secure base of operations and launchpad for the Fourth Reich, as with those who fled the fall of the colony of Algeria as a white ethnostate to France and blamed Charles de Gaulle for its abandonment, and whose descendants now form the core of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front.
Among the direct effects of the secret partnership between America and our former Nazi adversaries include:
The 1954 seizure of Guatemala by Eisenhower’s CI.A., which replaced a Marxist who had seized land owned by United Fruit and redistributed it to Indian peasants with a furniture salesman from Honduras, Castillo Armas. During the course of this coup America bombed Guatemala City, killed 9,000 communists, disbanded the unions, drove off the squatters, drew up a blacklist of some 70,000 leftists, built death squads and secret prisons, gave torture and brigandage free reign, created an enduring political front, the MLN, and started making a profit from our plantations.
The 1961 seizure of Guatemala by C.I.A. officer Willauer leading 200 men, a Harvard lawyer who had flown as Chennault’s first officer with the Flying Tigers in China. Guatemala was the staging area for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. One day I may explore this incident with all of you, but in this context I wish only to cite a source and witness of history; for my cousin Raymond Eigell trained and led the force which landed in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs.
Throughout the 1960-63 period of a civil war which continued until 1996, America crushed a pro-Castro rebellion using six C.I.A. bombers, exiled Cuban shock troops, and Green Berets who used the opportunity to test counterinsurgency theories later used in Vietnam and against American dissidents including the Black Panthers, American Indian Movement, and the Students For A Democratic Society.
The 1974 accession of an officer of Armas named Alarcon to the Presidency of Guatemala, who institutionalized the MLN, declaring “I am a fascist, and I have tried to model my party on the Spanish Falange.” He was, of course, a C.I.A. agent. Nixon once brought him along on his annual pilgrimage to consult with what he called his spiritual advisor, the infamous Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele.
The 1982 seizure of power and Presidency of Rios Montt, an evangelical Sunday school teacher and personal friend of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who suspended the constitution, replaced the courts with secret tribunals, escalated the scorched earth warfare, torture, and disappearances of his predecessors, and one thing more. During this the most terrible period of civil war throughout Central America, when Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were in fact a single nation ruled by remnants of the Nazis we had transplanted from French Algeria as American puppet regimes, and with the full authority of Ronald Reagan, Rios Montt weaponized Protestantism against encroaching Catholic Liberation theology.
During the 18 months of the Mayan Genocide, in which his death squads killed 3,000 people each month and annihilated 600 villages, he also instituted a system of forced labor in concentration camps modeled on the Apartheid system of South Africa and ruled by terror using former British police and Protestant Orange Militia units hired from Belfast, a mercenary force who had splendidly legal Hong Kong passports courtesy of the Thatcher government.
During over 35 years of civil war in Guatemala including Rios Montt’s genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the native Indians, about half a million Indians were killed, over one million conscripted into military service and used against their own people, tens of thousands driven into Mexico as refugees, and most of the rest worked to death in the concentration camps. No American Army came to liberate them; they were not white, and no one cared so long as the profits flowed. Guatemala is America’s Belgian Congo; our heart of darkness.
I think of this every day as I eat my morning banana, for each one is the living form of a silent cry, the ghost of a tear, the memory of atrocity and horror, a thing like many others of fragile beauty and fleeting pleasure won by brutality and the theft of hope, pain and blood and death made manifest. For the dead and for wrongs past I can do nothing; it is the living who must be avenged and the future that must be redeemed.
The 1981 founding of ARENA in El Salvador and the 1982-3 Presidency of Roberto D’Aubuisson Arrieta, son of one of the original French Algerian OAS/Afrika Corps legionnaires and immigrants and leader of death squads since 1972, when he was trained at the US School of the Americas, often called a school for war criminals. During the peak of the civil war in 1983-84, about 8,000 people were killed every month in El Salvador.
The 1963-75 Honduran coup and military dictatorship of Arellano, for whose regime the term Banana Republic was coined, and of course the conduct of the Contra War beginning in 1980, which included the 1984 Honduran invasion of Nicaragua supported by 5,500 American troops.
Together Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were ruled for over a generation by America through our puppet tyrants and the ARENA and MLN parties we created. But there is more; much more, of which I will mention only four more brief examples here.
The 1964-85 rule of Brazil by the Arena Party and its legacy of torture and state terror which was ended by the total bankruptcy of the nation.
The 1976 military coup in Argentina and the civil war which followed, during which some 20,000 persons were disappeared. Of our earlier involvements; Peron had been a protégé of Franco and Mussolini, and Evita was assassinated not by us but by Vatican Intelligence with radiation poisoning due to Peron’s campaign against the Church; very like the fate of the Hapsburg Emperor Maximilian of Mexico whose scheme to seize Church property created a mass revolt and abandonment by European allies, except for France which sent the Foreign Legion whose atrocities delegitimized colonial rule. The Vatican also ran the Swiss escape route used by Otto Skorzeny and other SS officers at the fall of the Third Reich whom we later hired, in intact units at their former ranks, and blended with their counterparts to create the CIA and Special Forces. The most brazen flattery I have ever heard directed toward Oliver North was to compare him to Skorzeny.
The 1973 assassination of Allende in Chile and support of the Pinochet regime which killed as many as one in every hundred of its citizens.
Regarding Mexico, we long ago seized the southwest including Texas and California, drew a line in the sand to weaponize disparity and create a mass resource of illegal and therefore exploitable quasi slave labor, and now call aliens everyone on the wrong side of it who comes here to pick the fruit, wash the dishes, and clean the toilets that our own nephews and nieces, children and grandchildren, would laugh in your face at the suggestion they get their hands dirty doing themselves.
Fascism is a sin of pride whose effects reverberate still, propagating outward in ever-widening circles as a force of contagion like the ripples of a stone cast into a pond. And we are all complicit in it, who call ourselves Americans.
We must make a better future than we have the past.
Raft of the Medusa https://torchoflibertyhome.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/b6dbc-gericault_medusa.jpg
1984, George Orwell, Thomas Pynchon (Foreword)
The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, by Jonathan Rauch
The Decay of Lying and Other Essays, by Oscar Wilde
Wilderness of Mirrors: Intrigue, Deception, and the Secrets that Destroyed Two of the Cold War’s Most Important Agents, by David C. Martin
‘Justification of dictatorship’: outcry as Milei rewrites Argentina’s history
Blaming the victims: dictatorship denialism is on the rise in Argentina
Argentina’s National Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice – Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities
Javier Milei: who is Argentina’s new president? – video profile
Who is Javier Milei? Argentina’s new far-right president ‘El Loco’ takes the stage
Argentina presidential election: far-right libertarian Javier Milei wins after rival concedes
El loco: La vida desconocida de Javier Milei y su irrupción en la política Argentina, Juan Luis González
Economists warn electing far-right Milei would spell ‘devastation’ for Argentina:
More than 100 economists including Thomas Piketty and Jayati Ghosh publish open letter ahead of country’s 19 November election
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/08/argentina-election-javier-milei-economists-warning
‘Bad and dangerous’: Argentina’s Trump on track to become president
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/22/argentina-javier-milei-presidential-election
The ‘false prophet’ v the pope: Argentina faces clash of ideologies in election:
Javier Milei, a culture war populist and sex coach who won country’s open primary, rages at ‘communist’ pontiff as he sets his sights on becoming president
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/11/operation-condor-cia-latin-america-repression-torture
Argentina, a reading list
The Real Odessa: How Peron Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina, Uki Goñi
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/759171.By_Uki_Goni_The_Real_Odessa
Guerrillas and Generals: The “Dirty War” in Argentina, by Paul H. Lewis
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4787741-guerrillas-and-generals
A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture, by Marguerite Feitlowitz
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/284483.A_Lexicon_of_Terror
Imagining Argentina, by Lawrence Thornton
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44762.Imagining_Argentina
The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War: Fascism, Populism, and Dictatorship in Twentieth Century Argentina, by Federico Finchelstein https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18813872-the-ideological-origins-of-the-dirty-war
Spanish
24 de marzo de 2024 Día del Recuerdo de la Verdad, la Justicia y la Falsificación de la Historia en Argentina
El nuevo presidente de Argentina, Javier Milei, ha comenzado a reescribir la historia, a blanquear los crímenes de lesa humanidad cometidos por su brutal y depravado modelo durante la dictadura de 1976-1983 y a borrar a sus víctimas.
Como todos los tiranos fascistas, Milei intenta capturarnos en un frasco asesino de ecos y reflejos, mentiras e ilusiones, historias reescritas, identidades autorizadas y realidades alternativas; el desierto de los espejos, para utilizar la metáfora icónica de la falsificación a través de la propaganda y el control del pensamiento del ex jefe de contrainteligencia de la CIA, Angleton.
El desierto de los espejos, una frase de T.S. El Gerontin de Eliot lo uso para describir la patología de la falsificación de nosotros mismos a través de propaganda, mentiras e ilusiones, historias reescritas, secretos de estado, realidades alternativas, fe autoritaria que devora verdades. Esto lo desambiguo en comparación con su opuesto, el periodismo y el testimonio de la historia como búsqueda sagrada de la verdad. Nos convertimos en falsificaciones de nosotros mismos por sistemas de poder hegemónico de élite como el patriarcado, el racismo y el capitalismo, y por aquellos que nos esclavizarían, mediante la captura de nuestras historias como robo del alma.
James Angleton, en quien John Le Carré basó su personaje de George Smiley, también usó la frase en este sentido de manera infame, y se ha universalizado en toda la comunidad de inteligencia en la que moldeó e influyó durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial y sus secuelas, la Guerra Fría. En referencia a la biografía que David Martin escribió sobre sí mismo, titulada Wilderness of Mirrors, Angleton la describió como una “infinidad de estratagemas, engaños, artificios y todos los demás dispositivos de desinformación que el bloque soviético y sus servicios de inteligencia coordinados utilizan para confundir y dividir al mundo”. Oeste… un paisaje siempre fluido donde la realidad y la ilusión se fusionan”. Y, por supuesto, todo lo que atribuyó a los soviéticos también se aplicaba a él mismo, a su propia agencia y también a Estados Unidos, y a todos los estados, porque todos son casas de ilusión.
La telenovela de Netflix Operación Carne Picada usa la frase, en una historia sobre la creación de un oficial ficticio que porta documentos diseñados para engañar a los nazis para que se preparen para la invasión de Europa en algún lugar que no sea Sicilia, una serie que vi con gran atención porque cada uno de nosotros es creado por nuestras historias exactamente como esta identidad falsa adherida al cuerpo de un abandonado. Dentro de cada uno de nosotros, un equipo de autores crea nuestras personas a través de historias, una red de recuerdos, historias e identidad; y lo hacen para sus propios fines, que no siempre entendemos.
Como escribió T. S. Eliot en Gerontin: “Después de tal conocimiento, ¿qué perdón? Piensa ahora
La historia tiene muchos pasajes astutos, corredores artificiales
Y los problemas, engañan con ambiciones susurrantes,
Nos guía por vanidades”
Somos la materia de la que están hechos los sueños, como nos enseña Shakespeare en el acto IV, escena 1 de La tempestad, una línea pronunciada por Ariel. Porque si somos seres efímeros e insustanciales, construcciones de nuestras historias, esto también significa que la naturaleza ontológica del ser humano es un terreno de lucha que puede ser reclamado mediante tomas de poder.
La primera pregunta que cabe plantearse ante una historia es: ¿de quién es ésta?
Siempre persiste la lucha entre las historias que contamos sobre nosotros mismos y las que cuentan otros sobre nosotros; las máscaras que hacemos para nosotros y las que otros hacen para nosotros.
Esta es la primera revolución en la que todos debemos luchar, la lucha por la propiedad de nosotros mismos.
¿En quiénes entonces nos convertiremos? Se pregunta a nuestro yo por superficies, imágenes y máscaras que en cada momento negocian nuestros límites con los demás.
A lo que responde nuestro yo secreto, el yo de la oscuridad y de la pasión, el yo que vive más allá del espejo y no conoce límites, libre de tiempo y espacio e infinito en posibilidades; ¿En quién quieres convertirte?
Nuestro objetivo en la lucha revolucionaria es apoderarnos de la legitimidad y la autoridad del enemigo, tomar su poder, reclamando autoridad moral, moldeando la opinión a través del control de las narrativas y construyendo solidaridad defendiendo al pueblo contra aquellos que nos esclavizarían.
Porque quien está solo, muere solo; y quien se solidariza y no abandona a sus semejantes se vuelve imparable como las mareas.
Cuando los tiranos vengan a robar nuestras almas con su red de mentiras, que encuentren una humanidad no dividida por el miedo ni abyecta en la desesperación y la impotencia aprendida, sino unida en nuestra solidaridad y garantía de los derechos humanos universales de cada uno e invicta en la negativa a someterse.
27 de noviembre de 2023 Una sombra fascista captura a Argentina: Javier Milei
La tiranía ahora nos habla a través de una nueva máscara, mientras El Loco ocupa un lugar central en Argentina. La vorágine de miedo, poder y fuerza que crea tiranías de fuerza y control, genera guerras de conquista y dominio imperial y encuentra su forma final en genocidios y deshumanización son sistemas universales de opresión, legados de nuestra historia de los cuales debemos emerger.
El mal se origina en el miedo, miedo a menudo abrumador y generalizado al que las autoridades al servicio del poder han dado forma y objetivo. La centralización del poder en estados carcelarios es inherente a las sociedades humanas porque sus causas son; de ahí las hegemonías de riqueza, poder y privilegios de las élites que se basan en jerarquías de pertenencia y alteridad excluyente y la subyugación de las castas de esclavos.
Hacer una idea sobre un tipo de personas es un acto de violencia.
La política es el arte del miedo, como me enseñó mi padre, y en Argentina nuestro miedo nos habla como un eco y reflejo del nuestro, y revela el parasitismo de las relaciones de Estados Unidos con el mundo a lo largo de nuestra historia.
Aquí hablo del Terror Rojo, la Lista Negra de Hollywood y otras formas nacionalistas de fuerza social que utilizaron el miedo para fabricar consentimiento, centralizar el poder y legitimar la autoridad después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial.
Este fue nuestro Segundo Período Imperial, desde el final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial hasta la caída de la Unión Soviética, influenciado por nuestra asimilación de la élite nazi a nuestras comunidades de inteligencia y fuerzas especiales en el momento de su fundación, cuando la OSS se convirtió en la CIA y la Jedburg. Los equipos se convirtieron en los Boinas Verdes.
Siendo el Primer Imperio Americano la Conquista y las políticas de Destino Manifiesto que comenzaron con el genocidio de los Nativos Americanos, se globalizaron con la guerra contra los Piratas de Berbería del Norte de África que fundaron la Infantería de Marina, y alcanzaron su apogeo en nuestra conquista del Imperio Español en 1898, que nos dio las Islas Filipinas, Cuba y Guam mientras robamos las islas hawaianas porque pudimos, y terminó con la caída de la civilización en La guerra para acabar con todas las guerras.
El Tercer Imperio o Período Imperial de la historia estadounidense comienza con Nueve Once y posiblemente termine con nuestro abandono de Afganistán; esto no está escrito y ahora está en nuestras manos.
¿Cómo ha remodelado Estados Unidos y el mundo la histeria anticomunista de la era posterior a la Segunda Guerra Mundial, que yo llamo el Segundo Imperio?
Primero, una guerra cultural total emprendida por el estado contra sus propios ciudadanos que nos dio reversiones de nuestros valores como In God We Trust on our money, que nos pide que no creamos en el Infinito sino en la autoridad del estado para hablar en Su nombre. el Juramento a la Bandera que sustituye al Estado por nosotros mismos como sus copropietarios como fuente de autoridad en una sociedad libre de iguales y por nuestra lealtad mutua como solidaridad y un grupo de hermanos, hermanas y otros.
En segundo lugar, una guerra de dominio imperial que impone hegemonías de riqueza, poder y privilegios por parte de las élites en todo el mundo, a veces centradas en la apropiación del petróleo como recurso estratégico, pero también simplemente en la ocupación de espacios como en un juego de go. Los ejemplos de la campaña global de terror y tiranía de Estados Unidos a través de estados proxy proliferan rápidamente a partir de la codificación del Método de Yakarta por la CIA en 1965 contra Sukarno, y se convierten en una interminable letanía de males, atrocidades, depravaciones, genocidios y trabajo esclavo; el Genocidio Maya en Guatemala y las guerras encubiertas en Centroamérica que resultaron en el Escándalo Irán-Contra, la alianza feroz y depravada de Estados Unidos con el régimen del Apartheid de Sudáfrica, la Guerra de los Mil Días en Vietnam, todo un Nudo Gordiano de maldades e intervenciones incluyendo nuestra locos intentos de asesinato contra Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba y otros héroes de la lucha por la liberación a quienes un Estados Unidos fiel a nuestros ideales fundacionales habría aclamado como hermanos en la revolución anticolonial y habría apoyado en lugar de estar en contra.
En Argentina, los ecos y reflejos de nuestra historia nos confrontan con las consecuencias del fracaso de la empatía como subversión de la democracia, y todos deberíamos prestar atención al hombre detrás de la cortina mientras las luces de la libertad se apagan y caen en la oscuridad una a una. uno en todo el mundo.
Porque como nos enseña George Santayana en La vida de la razón; “Quienes olvidan su historia están condenados a repetirla”.
Para ubicar este evento disruptivo en un contexto histórico, debemos verlo como un eco y reflejo de la Operación Cóndor.
Como escribí en mi publicación del 19 de enero de 2023, Ecos y reflejos del imperialismo estadounidense y la Operación Cóndor en las democracias desestabilizadas de América del Sur; Junto a mi escritorio cuelga una reproducción del cuadro de Théodore Géricault de 1818, La balsa de la Medusa, tan brillantemente interrogado en la Historia del mundo en diez capítulos y medio de Julian Barnes, que creo que es maravilloso y una alegoría perfecta de nuestra actual situación política y económica. y el dilema ambiental como metáfora del capitalismo y el fascismo como formas de canibalismo de la humanidad y de la democracia, las causas principales del colapso inminente de nuestra civilización, y posiblemente también de la extinción de nuestra especie. Sólo para recordar lo que está en juego en este momento de la historia y en la lucha revolucionaria, y en mis escritos aquí como testigo de la historia y un llamado sagrado en la búsqueda de la verdad.
Los monstruosos males de la desigualdad sistémica han surgido una vez más de la oscuridad como un depredador de emboscada para apoderarse de las naciones de América Central y del Sur en sus fauces, y no es casualidad sino intencionalmente. La tiranía busca la caída de la democracia a través de la falsificación, infiltración y subversión de sus instituciones, en un eco y reflejo de la Operación Cóndor de la CIA que una vez promulgó la conquista imperial y el dominio de nuestro hemisferio como Destino Manifiesto.
En la desestabilización y captura del Estado a través de la guerra económica, social y política en Perú, la ruina de Venezuela en ataques implacables que la han convertido en un Estado fallido, y en las absurdas y horribles insurrecciones de enero en Brasil y en los propios Estados Unidos hace dos años. Liderados anteriormente por Nuestro Payaso del Terror, el Traidor Trump, los Estados Unidos de América han actuado como representantes y títeres del Cuarto Reich.
Se nos puede achacar mucho más que esto, incluido el colapso y la ruina de Centroamérica y la tierra de nadie de barbarie entre Colombia y Venezuela, el estado fallido de México y los desafíos monumentales que enfrenta el pueblo de Chile, todos ellos resultados de la intervención estadounidense. impulsado por las hegemonías de élite de riqueza, poder y privilegios a las que sirve nuestra nación.
Estas son las condiciones impuestas de la lucha revolucionaria que enfrentamos ahora en todo el continente americano y el mundo. Estamos abandonados por nuestros líderes y aquellos que nos esclavizarían y a la deriva en una pequeña balsa de civilización fundada en el foro de Atenas como una sociedad libre de iguales que se cuestiona a sí misma, mientras nos devoramos unos a otros en erudita impotencia y desesperación.
A esta crisis existencial de fe mutua y de esperanza en nuestro futuro podemos responder con los poderes que aún nos quedan como seres humanos; amor, esperanza, fe, rechazo a someterse a la autoridad y solidaridad de acción en resistencia.
Aquí está la gran prueba de nuestra humanidad planteada por el Evento de la Puerta Rashomon de nuestro momento histórico; ¿en quién queremos llegar a ser los humanos? ¿Amos y esclavos condenados al fracaso y a la nada, o una Humanidad Unida que vive ahora en los albores de nuestra gloria?
Sobre la Operación Cóndor escribí en mi diario del 7 de abril de 2021, Cómo el imperialismo estadounidense creó nuestra crisis humanitaria en la frontera; En abril de este año hace cuarenta y seis años, Estados Unidos lanzó la Operación Cóndor, una campaña global para desestabilizar y reprimir a los gobiernos y movimientos socialistas y defender el capitalismo como fuerza hegemónica y sus jerarquías de élite de riqueza, poder y privilegios. Esto sigue siendo relevante para nosotros hoy porque es el origen de muchas de las fuerzas de empuje que impulsan oleadas de refugiados hacia nuestra frontera, y de la horrible crisis humanitaria y prueba de nuestra democracia creada por el imperialismo estadounidense.
Migración es una palabra que oculta tanto las condiciones que la desencadenan como nuestra propia complicidad en crearlas como consecuencia de nuestras políticas de colonialismo, militarismo anticomunista y guerra económica que duran décadas; devastación ecológica con su sequía y hambruna, pobreza y desestabilización social y política, una era de tiranía y terror estatal, genocidio y limpieza étnica, fe armada y su terror sexual patriarcal, y guerras multigeneracionales.
En términos de refugiados que huyen a Estados Unidos en busca de seguridad y supervivencia, así como de libertad e igualdad, estamos hablando principalmente de Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras y Nicaragua, aunque la zona infernal de Colombia y Venezuela ahora representa a muchos, y con el colapso de la región central autoridad en México y su degeneración en una región de señores de la guerra, oligarcas y sindicatos del crimen feudal, tenemos refugiados del propio México, así como trabajadores estacionales tradicionales.
El trabajo migrante es trabajo esclavo; Esta es la gran verdad que Estados Unidos nunca ha enfrentado y por la que ahora debe responder ante las masas que sufren en nuestra frontera. Sectores enteros de nuestra economía funcionan con él; agricultura en la que la mano de obra se convierte en un recurso estratégico ya que pasamos hambre sin ella, pero también el cuidado de niños y ancianos, la hospitalidad y algunas manufacturas. amer La riqueza y el poder de Ica son creados para nosotros por otros a quienes exportamos los costos reales de producción, otros que deben permanecer invisibles y explotables como mano de obra ilegal no regulada para exprimirles hasta el último gramo de valor para nuestras elites. De esta manera utilizamos la disparidad económica como arma al servicio del poder y los privilegios, y creamos y mantenemos jerarquías de alteridad excluyente y supremacía blanca.
Los intereses de las hegemonías de riqueza y poder de las élites convergen aquí con los del privilegio racial y la supremacía blanca en una toxicidad histórica, en paralelo con el surgimiento del estado carcelario como instrumento para volver a esclavizar a los ciudadanos negros como trabajo penitenciario y la represión de la Movimiento por los Derechos Civiles, y lo han hecho desde sus orígenes. Uno de esos puntos de origen es la apropiación, el ocultamiento y la instrumentalización por parte de Estados Unidos de los criminales de guerra nazis en la represión de la disidencia y la conquista del mundo.
El Cuarto Reich del que Trump fue una figura decorativa no surgió de la nada como Atenea de la cabeza de Zeus, sino que fue una invención del imperialismo estadounidense. Como tal, su historia y su carácter como amenaza global a la democracia pueden estudiarse en la crisis de refugiados y migraciones que ha dado origen, y en los legados del uso del fascismo por parte de nuestra nación como instrumento de dominio en las Américas, durante tanto tiempo. lo usábamos para conquistar a otros, nos estaba usando a nosotros para apoderarnos de los Estados Unidos de América y del mundo.
Como escribí en mi publicación del 18 de febrero de 2020, Guatemala: Nuestro Corazón de Tinieblas; Mientras secuestramos y encerramos a refugiados en campos de concentración y prisiones secretas, y expulsamos a otros de regreso a un México cuyo gobierno está inactivo ante el poder de sus organizaciones criminales, debemos reflexionar sobre las causas de esta histórica migración masiva desde el Corredor Seco de Guatemala en Centroamérica. , El Salvador, Honduras y Nicaragua; ¿Por qué sucede esto y qué se puede hacer para solucionar los problemas que lo provocan?
La sequía y la hambruna causadas por el calentamiento global y el cambio climático son causas inmediatas claras y factores desencadenantes de la migración actual, que tienen sus raíces en la historia del colonialismo estadounidense y la guerra económica capitalista. Estas condiciones han empeorado problemas de larga data de pobreza endémica y violencia y criminalidad generalizadas, legados del colonialismo histórico y de las políticas e intervenciones imperialistas y capitalistas estadounidenses, que describí en mi publicación del 4 de septiembre de 2019; Existe una conexión interesante entre el caos que creamos en Centroamérica, que está provocando un éxodo masivo de inmigración a nuestras fronteras, y la teoría de la conspiración del reemplazo islámico de los europeos que inspira nuestra mayor amenaza terrorista hoy; Muchos de los supremacistas blancos que gobernaron Argelia como colonia de Francia, principalmente ex soldados nazis que se unieron a la Legión Extranjera después del final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, fueron contratados después de su caída en 1962 por el gobierno de los Estados Unidos para gobernar El Salvador y Guatemala como regímenes títeres para proteger nuestras ganancias corporativas.
Con ellos vino la misma ideología y el mismo sueño de una patria y asilo para los nazis fugitivos, y una base de operaciones segura y plataforma de lanzamiento para el Cuarto Reich, como el de aquellos que huyeron de la caída de la colonia de Argelia como un etnoestado blanco a Francia y culparon a Charles de Gaulle por su abandono, y cuyos descendientes forman ahora el núcleo del Frente Nacional de Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Entre los efectos directos de la asociación secreta entre Estados Unidos y nuestros antiguos adversarios nazis se incluyen:
La toma de Guatemala en 1954 por la CIA de Eisenhower, que reemplazó a un marxista que se había apoderado de tierras propiedad de la United Fruit y las redistribuyó entre campesinos indios con un vendedor de muebles de Honduras, Castillo Armas. Durante el curso de este golpe, Estados Unidos bombardeó la ciudad de Guatemala, mató a 9.000 comunistas, disolvió los sindicatos, expulsó a los ocupantes ilegales, elaboró una lista negra de unos 70.000 izquierdistas, construyó escuadrones de la muerte y prisiones secretas, dio rienda suelta a la tortura y el bandolerismo, creó una sociedad duradera. frente político, el MLN, y empezamos a sacar provecho de nuestras plantaciones.
La toma de Guatemala en 1961 por la C.I.A. El oficial Willauer al frente de 200 hombres, un abogado de Harvard que había volado como primer oficial de Chennault con los Flying Tigers en China. Guatemala fue el escenario de la invasión de Bahía de Cochinos a Cuba. Quizás algún día explore este incidente con todos ustedes, pero en este contexto sólo deseo citar una fuente y un testimonio de la historia; porque mi primo Raymond Eigell entrenó y dirigió la fuerza que desembarcó en Cuba durante la Bahía de Cochinos.
A lo largo del período 1960-63 de una guerra civil que continuó hasta 1996, Estados Unidos aplastó una rebelión pro Castro utilizando seis agentes de la CIA. bombarderos, tropas de choque cubanas exiliadas y boinas verdes que aprovecharon la oportunidad para probar teorías de contrainsurgencia utilizadas más tarde en Vietnam y contra disidentes estadounidenses, incluidos los Panteras Negras, el Movimiento Indio Americano y los Estudiantes por una Sociedad Democrática.
El ascenso en 1974 de un funcionario de Armas nombró a Alarcón para la presidencia de Guatemala, quien institucionalizó el MLN, declarando “Soy fascista y he tratado de modelar mi partido según la Falange Española”. Era, por supuesto, un agente de la CIA. agente. Nixon lo llevó una vez a su peregrinación anual para consultar con lo que llamó su consejero espiritual, el infame criminal de guerra nazi Josef Mengele.
La toma del poder y la presidencia en 1982 de Ríos Montt, un maestro evangélico de escuela dominical y amigo personal de Jerry Falwell y Pat Robertson, quien suspendió la constitución, reemplazó las cortes por tribunales secretos, intensificó la guerra de tierra arrasada, la tortura y las desapariciones de sus predecesores y una cosa más. Durante este, el período más terrible de la guerra civil en toda Centroamérica, cuando Guatemala, El Salvador y Honduras eran de hecho una sola nación gobernada por restos de los nazis que habíamos trasplantado de la Argelia francesa como regímenes títeres estadounidenses, y con la plena autoridad de Ronald Reagan y Ríos Montt utilizaron al protestantismo como arma contra la invasión de la teología católica de la liberación.
Durante los 18 meses del genocidio maya, en el que sus escuadrones de la muerte mataron a 3.000 personas cada mes y aniquilaron 600 aldeas, también instituyó un sistema de trabajos forzados en campos de concentración inspirados en el sistema de apartheid de Sudáfrica y gobernados por el terror utilizando a antiguos británicos. unidades de policía y de la Milicia Naranja Protestante contratadas en Belfast, una fuerza mercenaria que tenía pasaportes de Hong Kong espléndidamente legales, cortesía del gobierno de Thatcher.
Durante más de 35 años de guerra civil en Guatemala, incluida la campaña genocida de limpieza étnica de Ríos Montt contra los indios nativos, alrededor de medio millón de indios fueron asesinados, más de un millón fueron reclutados para el servicio militar y utilizados contra su propio pueblo, y decenas de miles fueron expulsados a México. como refugiados, y la mayoría del resto trabajó hasta la muerte en los campos de concentración. Ningún ejército americano vino a liberarlos; no eran blancos y a nadie le importaba mientras las ganancias fluyeran. Guatemala es el Congo belga de Estados Unidos; nuestro corazón de oscuridad.
Pienso en esto todos los días mientras como mi plátano matutino, porque cada uno es la forma viva de un llanto silencioso, el fantasma de una lágrima, el recuerdo de la atrocidad y el horror, algo como muchos otros de frágil belleza y fugaz placer conquistado. por la brutalidad y el robo de la esperanza, el dolor, la sangre y la muerte se manifiestan. Por los muertos y por los agravios del pasado nada puedo hacer; son los vivos quienes deben ser vengados y el futuro el que debe ser redimido.
La fundación de ARENA en El Salvador en 1981 y la presidencia entre 1982 y 1983 de Roberto D’Aubuisson Arrieta, hijo de uno de los legionarios e inmigrantes originales del Cuerpo Africano/OEA argelino francés y líder de escuadrones de la muerte desde 1972, cuando fue entrenado en el Escuela de las Américas de Estados Unidos, a menudo llamada escuela para criminales de guerra. Durante el pico de la guerra civil en 1983-84, alrededor de 8.000 personas fueron asesinadas cada mes en El Salvador.
El golpe de estado hondureño de 1963-75 y la dictadura militar de Arellano, para cuyo régimen se acuñó el término República Bananera, y, por supuesto, la conducción de la Guerra de la Contra a partir de 1980, que incluyó la invasión hondureña de Nicaragua en 1984, apoyada por 5.500 tropas estadounidenses.
Juntos, Guatemala, El Salvador y Honduras fueron gobernados durante más de una generación por Estados Unidos a través de nuestros tiranos títeres y los partidos ARENA y MLN que creamos. Pero hay más; mucho más, de los cuales mencionaré aquí sólo cuatro breves ejemplos más.
El gobierno de Brasil de 1964 a 1985 por el Partido Arena y su legado de tortura y terror de Estado que terminó con la quiebra total de la nación.
El golpe militar de 1976 en Argentina y la guerra civil que le siguió, durante la cual desaparecieron unas 20.000 personas. De nuestras participaciones anteriores; Perón había sido un protegido de Franco y Mussolini, y Evita fue asesinada no por nosotros sino por la Inteligencia del Vaticano con envenenamiento por radiación debido a la campaña de Perón contra la Iglesia; muy parecido al destino del emperador Habsburgo Maximiliano de México, cuyo plan para apoderarse de las propiedades de la Iglesia provocó una revuelta masiva y el abandono de los aliados europeos, excepto Francia, que envió la Legión Extranjera cuyas atrocidades deslegitimaron el dominio colonial. El Vaticano también dirigió la ruta de escape suiza utilizada por Otto Skorzeny y otros oficiales de las SS durante la caída del Tercer Reich, a quienes contratamos más tarde, en unidades intactas en sus antiguas filas, y se fusionaron con sus homólogos para crear la CIA y las Fuerzas Especiales. El halago más descarado que he oído jamás dirigido a Oliver North fue compararlo con Skorzeny.
El asesinato de Allende en Chile en 1973 y el apoyo al régimen de Pinochet que mató a uno de cada cien de sus ciudadanos.
En cuanto a México, hace mucho tiempo nos apoderamos del suroeste, incluidos Texas y California, trazamos una línea en la arena para convertir la disparidad en un arma y crear un recurso masivo de mano de obra cuasi esclava ilegal y, por lo tanto, explotable, y ahora llamamos extranjeros a todos los que están en el mundo.
Por otro lado, quien viene aquí a recoger la fruta, lavar los platos y limpiar los baños, nuestros propios sobrinos y sobrinas, hijos y nietos, se reirían en la cara ante la sugerencia de que se ensucien las manos ellos mismos.
El fascismo es un pecado de orgullo cuyos efectos todavía reverberan, propagándose hacia afuera en círculos cada vez más amplios como una fuerza de contagio como las ondas de una piedra arrojada a un estanque. Y de ello somos cómplices todos los que nos llamamos americanos.
Debemos crear un futuro mejor que el pasado.
Torch of Liberty 
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