Trump is the "Perfect Latin American Idiot"

The "caudillo" from Queens is a well known commodity in the region

Shortly after Spain’s Latin American colonies gained their independence, mostly in the 19th century, the political polarization stemming from the region’s jarring socioeconomic inequality was set in stone and, tragically, has been with us ever since. Without a stabilizing Broad Middle Class (CMA), politics in Latam has swung — often violently, always destructively — from the “revolutionary”, mostly imbecilic left to the reactionary, often decadent right. By 1996, just a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union, when regional leaders — mostly democratically-elected, which was quite new at the time — were hard at work triaging their respective State apparati, the political tide across practically the entire globe had unequivocally turned hard right.

It was in this context that “El manual del perfecto idiota latinoamericano” (“Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot”) was published. At the time, it served for many Latin Americans as a welcomed antidote to the tired leftist dogmas that, from the authors’ vantage point, had caused so much suffering: from armed conflict and hyperinflation to, then recently, an entire “lost decade” of economic growth, as multiple sovereign debt crises made some countries in the region practically ungovernable in the 1980’s.

Unfortunately, not unlike the “sacred cows” it sought to defenestrate, this rather long essay was written by three of what in the (Latin) Caribbean are called comemierdas, or people who eat shit with a grin. After delivering a scathing, pretty spot-on critique of their stereotypical villain, the authors: Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, Carlos Alberto Montaner, and Álvaro Vargas Llosa (son of the celebrated Peruvian writer), provide a ringing endorsement of what eventually became known as the Washington Consensus: a set of IMF-sanctioned policy prescriptions based on the gospel of neoliberalism — The Market giveth, the Market taketh away. Blessed be the Market — and spread ‘round the world by zealots whose halo could only be brought upon by a degree in “economics”, ideally, from the University of Chicago.

As if the enormous, historically-rooted differences in power and, particularly, capital accumulation would all of the sudden, like some miracle, be “competed away”, this trio insisted the cure to Latin America’s backwardness lay in more globalization, more foreign direct investment (FDI), and more technocratic discipline — even when the results, in practice, often took the form of mass layoffs, crumbling public infrastructure, and profound want in the face of (generally) self-imposed austerity.

And yet this wildly successful polemic still provides the reader with a keen understanding of just how susceptible to demagoguery and magical thinking we all are. The Latin American Idiot who praises Che and quotes “Las venas abiertas” — “The Open Veins of Latin America”, a sort of sacred screed of the regional left, caricaturing its underdevelopment as the result of “five centuries of the pillage of a continent” at the hands of imperialists, from the Spanish and Portuguese to the “Yankees” — believes that all problems come from abroad and that, in fact, he (it’s mostly men) and his people (the “real” nation) are the victims of injustice of one sort or another.

Obviously, this isn’t just true of Latin America. As we’ve seen throughout plenty of countries around the world, societies hobbled by extreme inequality eventually develop a particular set of symptoms, including scapegoating and a desire, by a considerable chunk of the population on either side of the political spectrum, for authoritarianism: mano dura, as some of our “tough” local politicians like to call it. This desire, historically, has been driven by a sense of insecurity, even fear among the population, which manifests — especially if left to fester — as political violence.

In the U.S., where socio-economic stagnation now haunts so many poor, working, and even middle-class families — at the same time that a small elite enjoys levels of luxury previously unknown to humanity — the same political cancer is now spreading rapidly. For a considerable number of struggling, deeply frustrated gringos, the wrecking ball that is Donald Trump’s populism, especially this second time around, represents nothing short of salvation, of soul or nation.

But exactly like his Latin American counterparts, the (Anglo-)American Idiot’s promises are too hollow slogans and political pipe dreams, designed not to fix a system that is, indeed, terribly broken, but to capture said system for personal benefit, even if it means burning down the entire village “in order to save it”. From railing against China, the “Deep State”, or any of the other “hoaxes” perpetrated against him — and, by extension, against We the People — to shamelessly building a (mafia) family fortune via crypto and similar scams, Donald Trump is the textbook example of our region’s most famous (political) export: the tinpot dictator.

Trust us on the sunscreen

As I’ve written before, the Latin American republics were born into the so-called international system with an almost congenital inequality so profound that, to this day, it remains the principal (though not only) source of the region’s seemingly inescapable political instability — and, for some countries, state collapse. Beginning in the early 20th century, this inequality would come to a head as the first wave of globalization and mass migration from Europe hit the region, along with the global reverberations of two World Wars and a Great Depression, convulsing its societies in ways not seen since their wars of independence.

Not all countries responded to it equally, though. Cuba, for example, had an eventually-communist revolution in which armed rebels overthrew a U.S.-backed dictator. In Chile, the people elected an avowed socialist, while in Argentina and Brazil (and Panama), charismatic military figures, some rabid anti-communists, offered “the masses” a chance to recover the national wealth that foreigners had “stolen”, through violence, guile, or both — and which these leaders, in turn, duly nationalized.

Almost all, however, were highly critical and at least suspicious of democracy, which they saw mostly as a tool of the oligarchy to maintain their almost complete control over the country, i.e. its productive capital. In short, they were no institutionalists, and none had a problem cultivating the pathological cult of personality that today is having a definite resurgence in domestic politics around the world, even in the long-established democracies of North America and Western Europe.

Most even vaguely familiar with the region know the Latin American Idiot in the form of Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan dictator that, from the (free and fair) presidential election he won in 1998 until his death from cancer in 2013, ruled over the largest petrostate in the region and, in an act of national suicide, drove it into some of the most depraved poverty of the 21st century so far — including through his hand-picked successor, Nicolas Maduro — for the most part, by implementing utterly self-destructive public policy.

Not surprisingly, many have already noted the eery similarities between him and Donald Trump, especially regarding how much pain the latter’s domestic policies, as codified in his so-called One Big, Beautiful Bill, will inflict on the U.S. economy long-term. It is almost universally believed that the massive, unruly piece of legislation will blow up the U.S. deficit to the tune of, at least, $3.4 trillion, mainly, to provide even more tax cuts for the richest Americans, cede to China quite a few of the most important value chains of the 21st century, and give corporations free range to keep poisoning U.S. land, air, and water.

As Chávez, though, Trump is very much the end result of decades of institutional decay, not its cause. Actually, both of these tinman tyrants came to power riding huge waves of popular resentment at systems (and their leaders) that no longer responded to the majority of the population, if they ever did, by highlighting the rot that had, in their view, taken over their countries’ respective “elites”.

Both promised to “drain the swamp” — acabar con la corrupción, as every politician and their mother says they will but never actually does — only to fill their own governments, as soon as they got to power, with uber-loyalists and local profiteers from the “private sector” who could prove useful to the regime. These people, in effect, have become the country’s new oligarchy.

Referred to as la boligarquía in Venezuela, these new U.S. oligarchs would probably include, aside from those already in the Trump (crime) family tree: the tech-and-crypto-bros that financed a great deal of the President’s rise, the ancien-régime politicians who sold out to him and his movement, “Make America Great Again” (MAGA), and, in general, those who ended up benefitting, whether randomly or not, from the “revolution” — Chavista, Trumpian, or otherwise.

Most destructively, however, both these bonafide media superstars weaponized the State, in particular domestic and foreign (trade) policy, to reward themselves and their “allies” (no honor amongst thieves) and punish those who would not submit. Quite similar to what Trump is doing today with the U.S. economy in general, Chavez decided to use Venezuela’s goose that lay the golden egg — Petróleos de Venezuela, Inc. (Pdvsa), the up-til-then rather well-run State oil company — as his ideologically partisan and personal piggy bank. This was done, as it usually is, “for the people” (pa’l pueblo) — and yet it has never (ever) ended in a peaceful, sustainable redistribution of access to the country’s productive capital.

Trump’s populism or caudillismo, “strongman rule”, whether you support it or not, will undoubtedly drain public coffers, kneecap investment in newer, more dynamic industries, and in general leave the United States much more vulnerable to economic crises and, therefore, authoritarians like himself and Chavez. It’s no coincidence that Trump’s favorite U.S. President, Andrew Jackson, was often accused of being a populist (among other, more gruesome crimes) and founded what was, until relatively recently, the closest thing the United States has ever come to having a real workers’ party: the Democrats. But that was almost 200 years ago, while Latin America’s ongoing history with authoritarian populism goes back almost a century.

In fact, Hugo Chavez marked the return of the Idiot in the region. The OG’s — like Juan Domingo Perón (Argentina), Getulio Vargas (Brazil), and even Fidel Castro (Cuba) — had already left, in their own particular ways, a very public record not just of arbitrary, often tyrannical rule, but also of gross incompetence and even the very corruption they had so harshly criticized as “outsiders”. To this day, and rightly so, they’re still blamed by a great many for their respective countries’ relative (in Cuba, absolute) lack of development.

It isn’t idiocy, it’s rage

And yet, almost every authoritarian in the region, like demagogues the world over, has come to power on the heels of seething, often violent public frustration with the preceding regime. Before the advent of Peronism, for instance, Argentina had some of the most underdeveloped parts of the globe, with its Parisian capital — the phenomenally wealthy Buenos Aires — surrounded by plague-infested slums not unlike those in Jacob Riis’s exposé of inequality in the United States at the turn of the 19th century, “How the Other Half Lives”, which preceded the country’s so-called Progressive Era.

In another example, when Fidel entered Havana in 1959, he and his rebel army were greeted as liberators. Since taking power via military coup in 1952, Cuba had been ruled by Fulgencio Batista, a blood-thirsty dictator whose regime had not only impoverished the great majority of the island’s inhabitants, but had grown obscenely rich off its mob-infested “tourism industry”. As ironic as it sounds, la Revolución that would ultimately bankrupt Cuba was almost universally welcomed by its people — along with the public executions of those who had benefitted from Batista’s dictatorship — and, before it was radicalized, represented deliverance for an entire nation from one of the cruelest regimes in Latin America history.

This quite discernible, oft-repeated pattern of 1) legitimate but historically ignored grievances leading to 2) populist uprisings that, in turn, devolve into 3) dysfunctional kleptocracies, isn’t exclusive to Latam, as much as it has, for long periods, ruled domestic politics in the region. The “Perfect Latin American Idiot” is, in fact, just our version of the quintessential authoritarian populist, i.e. the most likely outcome in societies wracked by all kinds of insecurity and drained of institutional trust — and, therefore, with little state capacity to provide real, broad-based security to the majority of the population.

Clearly, this isn’t confined to the left, either. In El Salvador, for example, crypto-bro and self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator” Nayib Bukele has decided to incarcerate his way towards the country’s sustainable development goals (SDG’s). In fact, he seems to have created a domestic industry for export out of it. Back home, Panama’s most popular politician (and folk hero) is a fugitive and former head of an international crime syndicate. Like Trump, our ex-president Ricardo Martinelli calls out the “persecution” against him by his political enemies, playing to his base’s deep insecurities regarding not just their lack of money, but their place near the bottom country’s still rigid social hierarchy.

In one way or another, all populists do a phenomenal job — in the name of addressing inequalities, righting past injustices, or vindicating the nation’s honor — of accelerating the decline and eventual failure of their respective countries; whether they do it from the left or the right matters little. Tinpot dictators around the globe, and throughout history, have managed to convert public rage into personal power, while ensuring that no actual reform — the kind that empowers citizens by investing in their human capital, and seeks to diversify the economy away from extractive industries — takes place.

Instead, authoritarians offer simplistic solutions — catharsis, more than anything — including punishing “the nation’s enemies” (Dems, immigrants, and the Deep State) and directing the country’s wealth towards its “real citizens” (MAGA country) but really towards themselves and their cronies, all while wrapping the entire freakin’ circus in the flag.

Same as dictators like Castro and Chavez always had a convenient “big bad wolf” in el Imperio Yanki — on which to offload the profound popular discontent bred by their severe economic mismanagement — Trump points towards China’s “exploitative” trade practices as well as unfettered migration from the “Global South” as the culprits for what he’s famously called American Carnage.

And while he does this with the worst of intentions, those who have most suffered the slow-motion collapse of U.S. industrial capacity, among others, are surely filled with hope when they hear Trump’s appeals for restitution — even retribution. As much as the Idiot is a global phenomenon, it’s only when inequality crosses a certain threshold that he (or she) is able to capture the public’s imagination or, worse yet, the lesser demons of its nature. U.S. citizens would do well in understanding this dynamic if they are to avoid the worst of this fast-approaching, man-made disaster.