As scenes of Trump supporters storming the US Capitol filled media outlets and social media on January 6th, shocked journalists repeated again and again that was what taking place in Washington was nothing less than a coup d’état, an armed insurrection, sedition. Rioters were labeled as traitors and rebels. While journalists expressed surprise at the relative ease of the white mob’s entrance to the Capitol, the lack of security coordination, and safeguarding the certification of Biden’s election in Congress, they seemed even more in shock over the fact that these scenes of violence were taking place in Washington, in the heart of United States of America, and not in some Third World country. ABC’s Martha Raddatz said to a live audience: “It is so horrible to know we are in America where this is happening, on Capitol Hill. I’m not in Baghdad. I’m not in Kabul. I’m not in a dangerous situation overseas. We are in America (sic).” Jake Tapper, from CNN, overtaken by panic said to his colleague in Washington: “It’s surreal, I feel I am talking to a correspondent in… Bogotá.”
The sentiment of shock and astonishment at the possibility of domestic unrest directed at the US political establishment was shared by politicians from both major parties. Former president George W. Bush, and House Representatives Seth Moulton (Democrat) and Mike Gallagher (Republican) even chose the same formulation to convey their amazement: this is “absolute banana republic crap,” and “not the constitutional democracy that we call ‘America’ (sic).”
The invocation of banana republics is perverse. I am interested in the sentiment of astonishment as a widespread reaction to the Capitol events. If it is genuine, it is telling of an absurd, but fascinating relation to US domestic and foreign politics that I would like to briefly lay out here.
The first striking feature of this attitude is the apparent naiveté with which journalists and politicians treat what happens in these “banana republics” as something distant and disconnected from the United States, as something that happens in a “dangerous situations overseas” with no connection to the US. Politicians should be, of course, fully aware of the role that US imperialism has served in the creation of what O. Henry called “banana republics” in his 1904 novel Cabbages and Kings and, presumably, of all of these nations where civil unrest is constant and coups are enacted on a regular basis.
Just as it happens in Henry’s novel, the uninterrupted hold of the United States in Latin America has been driven by military and commercial enterprises since the end of the 19th century. While the Republic of Anchuria itself may be fictional, its description offers a faithful depiction of how US interventionism has been a determinant factor in the creation of so called ‘banana republics’; through the imposition of an extractivist economy of natural resources and labor, the US has condemned much of Latin America to the polarization of wealth and poverty we see today. In the first half of the 20th Century, the US invaded several countries including Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, Panamá and the Domincan Republic, in some cases more than once. Through these invasions, the US effectively imposed and supported murderous dictatorships and repressive regimes across the region, including among others Cuba (1933), Guatemala (1954), the Dominican Republic (1963), Brazil (1964), Chile (1973), Argentina (1976), Bolivia (1971, 2019), Colombia (1978, 2003). The US has also fostered and funded separatist movements, imposing puppet governments or simply caused destabilization, as in Cuba (1961), Nicaragua (1980), and Venezuela (2002, 2019). These invasions have repeatedly been aimed at crushing progressive movements throughout the continent. And, of course, the US has been in effective control of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Virgin Islands since the end of the 19th century, and it has also imposed blockades on alternative economic and political systems causing misery and death.
Given the US role in the active creation of these nations and their unrest, how should we understand the apparent surprise that violence is at the heart itself of Washington and not only happening somewhere else? It is not a coincidence that Bush, Moulton, and Gallagher all actively participated in the invasion and occupation of Iraq in the last two decades; Tapper and Raddatz have covered armed conflicts and invasions in the world for many years. How can they condemn the (designed) instability of other regions as if it was disconnected from what happened and is still happening in Washington and the Capitol? If it is real, the astonishment and fear at the possibility of domestic unrest is not a sign of ignorance of US imperialism; it cannot be. Rather, it might be indicative of a naïve confidence in the success of an imperialist agenda that has supposedly no domestic consequences and is disconnected from a home-grown white supremacist project.
Over the last four years, we have seen an explicitly white nationalist administration in Washington that has acted in coordination with the Republican establishment and with the implicit permission of the Democrats; we have moreover seen the expansion of white supremacist movements that have been gaining ground in nearly every respect. It is thus intriguing that these journalists and politicians who are so worried that the US is becoming some sort of South American country do not see the connections between international and national white supremacy. Or between the logics of settler colonialism foreign and domestic.
More surprisingly to me, however, is the categorization of this event by media as an insurrection and unrest. In ‘banana republics’ unrest ends quite differently than it did on January 6th in Washington. In 1928, the United Fruit Company (today Chiquita Brands) and the Colombian Government murdered thousands of striking workers in banana plantations in Magdalena for refusing to accept the conditions of exploitation under which they worked. The event was, by the way, proudly reported to the US Secretary of State (in Washington!). In the evoked “dangerous situations overseas,” democratically elected presidents are murdered, as in the CIA coups in Congo (1960) and Chile (1973).
On the contrary, in the Capitol events the Trump mob was practically invited in by the Police. Social media in the US is full of pictures and videos of Capitol Police’s lack of interest in preventing the protestor’s take-over, the friendly response of officers to the attempts at storming the Capitol, taking selfies with armed white supremacists, opening the barriers, gently escorting them out when the show was over. Trump supporters merrily waved at the cameras while they took some souvenirs back home, following the designated paths to tour the building. They were not forced out; they decided to leave. The DC Mayor issued a curfew from 6pm, and media outlets broadcasted how police decided not to enforce it.
Many have already pointed out how different the reaction was during the summer of unrest following the murder of George Floyd, with protests by disability rights leaders and healthcare activists in 2017, or with the #NoDAPL movement in 2016. 302 people were arrested in one day protesting the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court; after the only armed breach into the Capitol in 200 years, there were only 13 arrests inside the Capitol. Some hours later, the same day, Congress was back in session to certify Joe Biden’s win, and many Republicans dropped their planned objections to the Electoral College results.
My point here is not that we should have seen more violence, or police repression, or that an acceptable response to the storming of the Capitol would be hundreds of arrests and more people killed. What I would like to emphasize is how the police stood by in this case, while they routinely and violently repress others for reclaiming the mere right to exist in this country. Tanks roamed downtown Atlanta in the wake of BLM protests; on January 6th, police officers helped some of the rioters down the stairs of the Capitol.
And this leads me to my third point. The astonishment at the Trump’s mob storming of the Capitol reveals that these journalists and politicians have not realized that there is already insurgency, unrest, and resistance in the US. The frenzy with which the media covered the events ignores the real social mobilizations that offer substantive alternatives to the Washington’s agenda. Why is it that only this particular event elicits the painful realization that the heart of the empire might share a similar logic with the Third World countries it has tried to subjugate? How is it possible to ignore the manifest social unrest that states, over and over again, that “America (sic) is [not] so much better than what we’re seeing today”?
What we lived during this past year in the US is unprecedented. This summer, millions of people who defied their fear for the virus and went out to the streets to state and demand that Black lives matter; the uprising constitutes the largest social mobilization in US history. The consequences of this wave of resistance are already felt at all levels of the society, including the recent presidential election and the January senate races in Georgia. At the same level, the multilateral coalition of resistance at Standing Rock poses a genuine threat to the extractivist, settler project of the US. What astonishes me of the widespread reaction to the January 6th events is the perversity of suggesting that they constitute an attack to what the US stands for. To use Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s formulation, what is striking is the establishment’s “[in]ability to distinguish between the ideology of the American Dream and the experience of the American nightmare.” To expect, to participate in “radical resurgence,” as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson calls resistance in her beautiful 2017 book As We Have Always Done, is to show that there are real possibilities of transforming the Washington establishment. The Trump loyalists’ storming of the Capitol is definitively not one of them.
Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez
Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez is an assistant professor in the Philosophy and Religion Department at the University of North Texas. His work focuses on the interconnection between history, politics, and aesthetics in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx contexts, in a philosophical attempt at approaching these topics collectively. He is currently working on a manuscript entitled Decolonial Aesthetics: Theory and Praxis from the Americas.
Interesting philosophical position, what does a world leader do in a banana republic but not in a “developed” country?
Professor Ramirez: Thank you for facing us with these facts, and thank you for “America [sic].” I have often wondered why so few have challenged the way citizens of the US tend to casually claim the entire Western Hemisphere as their own.
One feature of a coup d’état is breaking the lines of communication between the old regime and its supporters, but that is what has been done to Trump, the elected President, not to his opponents. The USA is a state, but seems to lack the kind of social consensus or ethnic unity that characterises a country. Perhaps it will break up, like the former USSR.