I’ve wanted to write about this for a while, and this is a good place to start:
The so-called marea rosa, or ‘pink tide’, of allied leftist governments which held sway across Latin America in previous years is being rolled back. Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff was removed from power in a right-wing coup, co-conspirators of which have now managed to imprison the current presidential frontrunner, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Ecuador’s Lenin Moreno has stabbed his former leader Rafael Correa in the back by barring him from seeking re-election, while seemingly purging his cabinet of remaining Correa loyalists and beginning the process of allowing the US military back into the country.
Meanwhile in Argentina, the former President is also under criminal investigation.
This all seems, well, “they did bad things, they should be prosecuted,” but somehow other politicians, often clearly more corrupt, aren’t prosecuted. The prosecution of Lula, in particular, was clearly a way to stay in power, since all polls show he would have won the election.
The norms are breaking down in many nations, including the United States. What is done to win is illegitimate, as with Republican vote manipulation and the 2000 Supreme court decision; what is done afterwards to opponents is also often illegitimate, and if the wrong person wins, they are gone after legally.
Americans will immediately think of the efforts to get Trump, and some will assume it is in the same vein. To some extent it seems to be, in others it isn’t (again, he’s clearly in violation of Emoluments.) But it didn’t start with Trump, it started with Clinton, who had clearly done nothing that affected him as President. (That said, he and Newt Gingrich had an agreement in place to gut Social Security and Medicare, which impeachment sidetracked, so I’m not crying too much. Clinton was a right-winger in every important way.)
Corruption is bad, and should be purged, but when I see corruption investigations which are clearly aimed at one side and not both (as with Xi’s anti-corruption drive in China, which was overall good but somehow took out the other major power blocs in China) I suspect that it isn’t primarily about corruption.
And in Brazil, where most seem to agree that those attacking Dilma were, in fact, more corrupt than her, it’s more than hmmm.
This is an ugly game. In Latin America it is bi-partisan with respect to the US. Having Latin America be left-wing was something neither Democrats nor Republicans wanted.
Meanwhile Argentina is inking an agreement with the IMF for 50 billion in exchange for structural adjustments and the Ecuadoran President is clearly moving towards forcing Assange out of Ecuador’s London embassy. (Yes, yes, you may hate Assange for a variety of reasons, some legitimate, but he is not being targeted because he is not a nice man, but because both Democrats and Republicans, on record, want to punish him various leaks, especially Collateral Murder.)
This is a very dirty game, and left-wingers keep treating it as if it is not; as if there are rules, and both sides play by them. Increasingly, in the US that is not the case, and it is clearly not the case many other places. If your enemies win, they will destroy you by any means. You should think long and hard about what you will do to them if you get into power, because they know what they will do to you.
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