By Carlos Aznárez
“I am here to tell you, that we will recover our people’s morale and dignity, that in a short time they will not believe how big it has grown and it will challenge the future. We are refunding with a spirit of greatness what others have turned a lack of jobs, misery, and loss of our self-esteem. Now, we stand and it will be forever.” ¿Donald Trump? No, Hitler, in 1926. There is a similitude between the speeches of both leaders and there could be also similarities in their policies, if he is not stopped in time. Both sensed what the masses resonated with, what the silent majorities that had been left behind. People that were promised being part of the great utopian dream and were stranded halfway and in constant recession
Thanks to his ability to sense the right time to give the great sting, this herald of intolerance, authoritarianism and provocation, called Trump, arose. Crazy? No. This guy knows pretty well what he is doing and who is he speaking to. He also guessed that the receptive ears that listened to him during his campaign look at him as the man who has a lifeline in the middle of the sea. This is why he’s confident when he applying a xenophobic policy against immigration or when applying an islamophobic filter against citizens of many Arabic countries. Trump feels supported by all those voters who fear and hate anything that is different. Except they use those people to do the work they do not enjoy.
In this singular onslaught, there also is the singular “war” that the U.S. leader has begun against Mexico and its inhabitants—both against those who already are on American ground (over 34 million) and those who try to enter the country every day. Insulting those indispensable individuals that tamed the aggressive and unfriendly lands of the Empire (and therefore allowing them to access the best parts of it), Trump intends to build a wall, or, more precisely, enlarging the existing one.
Despite the usual acquiescence that the President of Mexico, Peña Nieto, has always shown to the powerful neighbor, this time he had to bite his teeth and bow down, not out of dignity, but because he realizes that if he does not agree, the Northern nation will crush him. Trump’s challenge is begging to have multiple responses among Mexican people, even among those political parties that once idolized the American flag. Hearing Vicente Fox saying that the wall is “unacceptable” is pathetic, knowing how complacently the former Mexican president behaved during his time with Trump´s predecessors, but it is clear that he said that because people are getting angry, and no one wants to be called a “cipayo” (sell-out) like Peña Nieto.
What should concern us now is not who will pay for the wall: the strength of our protests must destroy the wall from all flanks. In order to achieve this, a necessary condition—which many in Mexico are pointing out—, is for the popular revolt to have a higher degree of unity and patriotism, and therefore anti-imperialism. It is also necessary for this recipe of resistance and struggle to expand throughout the rest of the continent, challenging those erroneous predictions that validate Trump’s “nationalism”. The only nationalism that makes sense for those who live between the Rio Grande and Tierra del Fuego to embrace is the one that expels transnational companies and their backers from our lands. It’s Latin America’s revolutionary nationalism, represented since 1959 by the heroic Cuban Revolution and strengthened by Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Venezuela, Evo Morales, and others.
Just as Hillary Clinton represented the worst kind of war-mongering, Trump, his McCarthyism, and his dreams of expansion through new and equally-dangerous free-trade treaties or his hatred of the Arab nations that the U.S. invaded and destroyed, can’t be praised under any circumstance.
Today, Mexico and its people are in the front line of a battlefield that the imperial North imposes on them. And the rest of the continent must align with Mexico’s people, never with its rulers, without any sort of doubt.
