#us intervention in latin america

[flamequil]

Haven’t seen anything about it on my dash, but today’s the 50th anniversary of Agosoto Pinochet taking over Chile with US support. Pinochet maintained power in part by changing the Chilean constitution, and as a result Pinochet’s regime still affects Chile’s government despite pushes to correct it.

Wishing Chile all the best in establishing a new constitution.

[visenyaism]

I always wonder what ethnic group the Dornish are meant to be. The Spanish? Does GRRM think the Spanish are just sucking and fucking with everyone all of the time? I feel like he's too racist to make a North African society sexually liberated, which would be my only other guess.

He keeps saying Moorish Spain is the main influence but it’s clearly like actually works of fiction about the Muslim world and Latin America that were more influential than the actual historical analogue. There exists an older form of orientalism that was more prevalent pre-9/11 (really pre-repression of women being used to justify a lot of American intervention in the Middle East) that framed hyper-repressed Victorian sexual mores against like white male fantasies about the Ottoman harem to assert that the Muslim world was actually more sexually liberated than “the west.” That was present in a lot of the works of fiction GRRM was drawing on to write Dorne. It’s also a lot of stereotypes about Latino people being like fiery tempestuous lovers or whatever that have worked their way in there.

[eretzyisrael]

Every week we are reading about professions that are pushing out Zionist Jews from their fields.

In the field of international law:

...The professor saw a trend among the topics Israeli and Jewish colleagues were pushed to pursue. Those who continued their academic work in international law either wrote about Palestinians as victims or Israel’s violations of humanitarian international law. “Israelis would either write about IP law or business law, or about how Israel is being awful, violating human rights and all of that.”

This stood out because the professor noticed their colleagues from Latin America and China weren’t expected to work on topics that criticize their home countries as a condition for receiving faculty support. Yet when it came to Israelis, it was “clear to us this is what we need to deliver on.”

In the professor’s discussions with the senior faculty, especially the progressive liberal Jewish faculty, it came through clearly that support for Israeli students was conditioned on being the right type of Israeli, “and there were fellowships and scholarships and grants available to students who are willing to do that. In Hebrew we say that a person knows which side of the bread is buttered, right? So it’s pretty clear what pays off is to distance yourself from a mainstream Israeli kind of discourse.”

Understanding who holds the power and influences decisions is important in any profession, the law included. “You need to have the support and the mentors to advance in your career,” the professor explained, “and for that, you look for cues on what should I do, how do I make these people like me. Why would you bother, why would you take the risk of saying something that is controversial or put yourself in the position of protecting Israel or speaking on behalf of Israel when there is only a price to pay for that?”

“For example, there is an institute that gives out scholarships to doctoral students who are writing dissertations about Israel. I was advised not to take their money because then it’s going to be on my CV and people will interpret that as if I don’t have the right kind of politics. So even when there are economic incentives to write different kinds of scholarship,” under the current academic incentives, the professor concludes, scholarships and point-interventions will not work “because it’s more about selection and authority and networks and connections and less about economic incentives.”

Mental health professionals:

The anti-Zionist blacklist is the most extreme example of an anti-Israel wave that has swept the mental health field since the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks and the resulting war in Gaza, which has seen the deaths of thousands of Palestinian civilians. More than a dozen Jewish therapists from across the country who spoke to Jewish Insider described a profession ostensibly rooted in compassion, understanding and sensitivity that has too often dropped those values when it comes to Jewish and Israeli providers and clients.

At best, these therapists say their field has been willing to turn a blind eye to the antisemitism that they think is too rampant to avoid. At worst, they worry the mental health profession is becoming inhospitable to Jewish practitioners whose support for Israel puts them outside the prevailing progressive views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Authors:

Over the past several months, a litmus test has emerged across wide swaths of the literary world effectively excluding Jews from full participation unless they denounce Israel. This phenomenon has been unfolding in progressive spaces (academia, politics, cultural organizations) for quite some time. That it has now hit the rarefied, highbrow realm of publishing — where Jewish Americans have made enormous contributions and the vitality of which depends on intellectual pluralism and free expression — is particularly alarming.

It feels like history is repeating itself.

Jews founded the Jews' Hospital in New York in 1855, now known as Mount Sinai Hospital, partially as a response to the need for a place that Jews could be treated without feeling like outsiders, as every other hospital at the time was aligned with various Christian groups. It followed the founding in 1850 of the Jewish Hospital in Cincinnati. When Mount Moriah Hospital Mount Moriah Hospital opened in New York in 1908, the Forward reported that Jews "can open the door and enter as if to your own home without a racing heart and without fear."

Brandeis University was founded in 1948 "at a time when Jews and other ethnic and racial minorities, and women, faced discrimination in higher education."

Jews who were facing discrimination formed professional associations and schools in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for physicians, scientists, and trades, like the Hebrew Technical Institute in New York and the Kehillah which attempted to be an umbrella of professional and educational associations in New York (and that the antisemite Henry Ford railed against.)

It appears that it is time for Jews in the professions where they are being blacklisted must start to form Jewish professional organizations, educational networks and institutions anew, where Jews can network and publish as they want without having to please the "progressive" crowds.

But the arc of history is going backwards, and this is only a Band-Aid. The problem is with America and the world itself, and Jews cannot solve this problem alone - the dangers of the progressive bigots are a threat to the free world and that needs to be addressed at the macro level.

[elbiotipo]

I'm not as well versed in the Philippines' history since I read this a long time ago, but the Philippines were taken from Spain as colonies after the US war with Spain in 1898. At the time, the Filipinos were already waging their own independence war against Spain. The Filipinos declared the First Philippine Republic in June 12 1899. However, the United States refused to accept it, which led to a bloody independence war that lasted decades, where the US military commited genocidal acts:

After World War II and the end of Japanese occupation, because of the obvious drag of holding a colonial possession of millions of people across the Pacific* during an era of decolonization, the US eventually "gave" the Philippines their independence in 1946 after World War II. The fact that they choose the 4th of July was not casual at all: they very much tried to imprint themselves, the former colonial power, as the gentle benefactors of a "daughter republic". There are INCREDIBLY racist cartoons of the US setting itself up as a "teacher" to its conquered nations, "preparing" them for self-determination.

This was a common practice by the US. I've read this in depth a long time ago and I'm sure you can find this in better detail elsewhere, but as the US was rising as an imperial power, it presented itself as an "Empire of Freedom", in suppossed contrast to the European powers, at the same time it did the same, if not worse (as shown in the Philipines) exploitation and crimes across the Pacific and Latin America. If they had could, they would have extended an entire plantation economy all around the Caribbean. Countless interventions testify this.

Of course the Philippines became independent, but it wasn't out of the benvolence of the United States. The US was perfectly willing and able to annex places on the Pacific. Of course you know about Hawai'i and Puerto Rico, which centuries after, still does not have self-determination. But how many Usamericans know about the "associated states" of Palau, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands, of the military bases at Guam? And let alone the countless genocides in the continental US in the name of manifest destiny.

Anyways. My point is, if you saw a post claiming the Philippines' independence was in the 4th of July, maybe you should have asked yourself why, exactly.

[transmutationisms]

@cubeghost sure, here are some places to start:

"Spectacles of Difference: The Racial Scripting of Epidemic Disparities", Keith A. Wailoo (Bulletin of the History of Medicine 94.4, 2020, 602–625, DOI 10.1353/bhm.2020.0085)

This essay explores how epidemics in the past and present give rise to distinctive, recurring racial scripts about bodies and identities, with sweeping racial effects beyond the Black experience. Using examples from cholera, influenza, tuberculosis, AIDS, and COVID-19, the essay provides a dramaturgical analysis of race and epidemics in four acts, moving from Act I, racial revelation; to Act II, the staging of bodies and places; to Act III, where race and disease is made into spectacle; and finally, Act IV, in which racial boundaries are fixed, repaired, or made anew in the response to the racial dynamics revealed by epidemics. Focusing primarily on North America but touching on global racial narratives, the essay concludes with reflections on the writers and producers of these racialized dramas, and a discussion of why these racialized repertoires have endured.

"Epidemics Have Lost the Plot", Guillaume Lachenal & Gaëtan Thomas (Bulletin of the History of Medicine 94.4, 2020, 670–689, DOI 10.1353/bhm.2020.0089)

This article draws on Charles Rosenberg's classic essay "What Is an Epidemic?" (1989) to reflect on the complex narrative structures and temporalities of epidemics as they are experienced and storied. We begin with an analysis of Rosenberg's use of Albert Camus's The Plague and a discussion of how epidemics have been modeled in literature and in epidemiology concomitantly. Then, we argue that Charles Rosenberg's characterization of epidemics as events bounded in time that display narrative and epidemiological purity fails to account for the reinvention of life within health crises. Adopting the ecological, archaeological, and anthropological perspectives developed within African studies enriches the range of available plots, roles, and temporal sequences and ultimately transforms our way of depicting epidemics. Instead of events oriented toward their own closure, epidemics might be approached as unsettling, seemingly endless periods during which life has to be recomposed.

"Revisiting "What Is an Epidemic?" in the Time of COVID-19: Lessons from the History of Latin American Public Health", Mariola Espinosa (Bulletin of the History of Medicine 94.4, 2020, 627–636, DOI 10.1353/bhm.2020.0086)

This essay considers what thirty years of scholarship on the history of epidemics in Latin America and the larger hemisphere can bring to a current reading of Charles Rosenberg's influential 1989 essay, "What Is an Epidemic? AIDS in Historical Perspective." It advocates that taking a broader geographical view is valuable to understanding better the arc of an epidemic in society. In addition, it proposes that, to see the ways in which the United States is experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to place the United States alongside the experiences of other countries of the Americas rather than making comparisons to Europe.

"The model crisis, or how to have critical promiscuity in the time of Covid-19", Warwick Anderson (Social Studies of Science 51.2, April 2021, 167–188, DOI 10.1177/0306312721996053)

During the past forty years, statistical modelling and simulation have come to frame perceptions of epidemic disease and to determine public health interventions that might limit or suppress the transmission of the causative agent. The influence of such formulaic disease modelling has pervaded public health policy and practice during the Covid-19 pandemic. The critical vocabulary of epidemiology, and now popular debate, thus includes R0, the basic reproduction number of the virus, ‘flattening the curve’, and epidemic ‘waves’. How did this happen? What are the consequences of framing and foreseeing the pandemic in these modes? Focusing on historical and contemporary disease responses, primarily in Britain, I explore the emergence of statistical modelling as a ‘crisis technology’, a reductive mechanism for making rapid decisions or judgments under uncertain biological constraint. I consider how Covid-19 might be configured or assembled otherwise, constituted as a more heterogeneous object of knowledge, a different and more encompassing moment of truth – not simply as a measured telos directing us to a new normal. Drawing on earlier critical engagements with the AIDS pandemic, inquiries into how to have ‘theory’ and ‘promiscuity’ in a crisis, I seek to open up a space for greater ecological, sociological, and cultural complexity in the biopolitics of modelling, thereby attempting to validate a role for critique in the Covid-19 crisis.

Constructing the Outbreak: Epidemics in Media and Collective Memory, Katherine Foss (2020, ISBN 9781625345271)

Constructing the Outbreak demonstrates how news reporting on epidemics communicates more than just information about pathogens; rather, prejudices, political agendas, religious beliefs, and theories of disease also shape the message. Analyzing seven epidemics spanning more than two hundred years―from Boston's smallpox epidemic and Philadelphia's yellow fever epidemic in the eighteenth century to outbreaks of diphtheria, influenza, and typhoid in the early twentieth century―Katherine A. Foss discusses how shifts in journalism and medicine influenced the coverage, preservation, and fictionalization of different disease outbreaks. Each case study highlights facets of this interplay, delving into topics such as colonization, tourism, war, and politics. Through this investigation into what has been preserved and forgotten in the collective memory of disease, Foss sheds light on current health care debates, like vaccine hesitancy.

"Reconsidering the Dramaturgy", Dora Vargha (Bulletin of the History of Medicine 94.4, 2020, 690–698, DOI 10.1353/bhm.2020.0090)

This essay reconsiders epidemic narratives through the lens of polio to examine temporal shifts and overlapping and conflicting temporalities and assess some of the stakes in how we conceptualize the epidemic dramaturgy. I argue that while the dramaturgy of epidemics serves as a thread around which people, state actors, and institutions organize experiences, responses, and expectations, consideration of the multiplicity of epidemic temporalities is crucial in understanding how medical practice and knowledge are shaped and transferred, particularly with attention to actors that might be rendered invisible by the conventional narrative arc.

i also recommend the September 2023 special issue of the IsisCB, Bibliographic Essays on the History of Pandemics. these essays cover more than disease narratology but many of them do discuss it, and they are intended to serve as guidelines / commentary on their accompanying bibliographies, so they can be really helpful in getting further reading recs or an introduction to any of these sub-topics. also, this entire special issue was published open access (CC-BY license), so you don't have to screw around with bypassing paywalls paying for these essays.

[seulszn]

WHAT’S GOING ON IN HAITI 🇭🇹

Haiti is a country in the Caribbean and Latin America that has been exploited and oppressed by colonial powers and imperialist forces for centuries. Its people have suffered unimaginable horrors and atrocities. Haiti was the first Black republic in the world, and the second independent nation in the Americas and the first Latin American country It achieved its independence in 1804, after a successful slave revolt against France. Haiti's independence was a threat to the racist and capitalist system that dominated the world. It inspired other enslaved and oppressed people to fight for their freedom and dignity. Haiti was also punished for its independence by the colonial powers. It was forced to pay a huge indemnity to France, and faced trade embargoes, diplomatic isolation, and military interventions.

Haiti was also exploited by multinational corporations and NGOs, who profited from its cheap labor, natural resources, and humanitarian aid. They also imposed their agendas and policies on the Haitian people, undermining their sovereignty and democracy. Haiti was also devastated by natural disasters, such as earthquakes ( a earthquake they are still recovering from that happened in 2010 and then a earthquake that happened in 2021 that killed 1,419 people) hurricanes, and floods, which worsened its already dire situation. Haiti was also victimized by diseases, such as cholera, malaria, and COVID-19, which ravaged its population and health system. The diseases were often introduced or exacerbated by foreign actors, such as the UN peacekeepers who brought cholera to Haiti in 2010. Haiti was also marginalized and silenced by the mainstream media, which portrayed it as a hopeless and helpless case, ignoring its history, culture, and achievements. The media also spread misinformation and stereotypes, fueling racism and stigma.

Haiti was also betrayed and abandoned by its allies and neighbors, who turned a blind eye to its plight, or worse, contributed to its misery. The United States of America, in particular, has a long history of meddling and undermining Haiti's sovereignty and stability. Taking 500,000 dollars from Haitian banks and still collecting money. The United States of America has invaded, occupied, and intervened in Haiti numerous times, imposing its political and economic interests. It has also exploited Haiti's labor and resources, and blocked its development and trade. sugar refining, flour milling, and cement and textile manufacturing, clothing, scrap metal, vegetable oils, dates and cocoa are all things given to other countries by Haiti. The United States of America has also supported and funded the Core Group, a coalition of foreign powers that has interfered in Haiti's internal affairs, manipulating its elections, constitution, and government. The United States of America has also failed to protect the human rights and dignity of the Haitian people, both in Haiti and in the US. It has deported and detained thousands of Haitian refugees and asylum seekers, and discriminated and criminalized them.

Here are a list of countries who agreed to help the United States and Canada evade Haiti:

Germany

France (the same country that we had to pay just to be free)

Benin

Jamaica

Kenya

Yes I am Haitian my dad side is from Haiti. My fathers family moved up here to Seattle because Haitian was going through a small silent genocide and have been since they have been free from France in 1804, France took my countries money and told them that they have to pay reparations just for existing and they had to pay France just to be free from the French. And then America jumps onto the bandwagon and decides to take billions of dollars from Haiti. Haiti was once the richest country but became the most poorest because of ignorance.

My people are being killed everyday just for speaking out against their government, my people are being killed because nobody was their for them when the 2010 and the 2021 earthquake happened because “Haiti is a bad country and helping them won’t do anything” and they are still recovering from that to this very day. Families are being displaced, the violence is getting worse, innocent people are dying and are fighting trying to stay alive, women and children are being r$ped and kidnapped. I have family that live in Haiti that I lost all contact with because they are fighting everyday, and who knows if they are even alive.

Here are some important links to help you get a better understanding on what’s going on in Haiti and stuff to donate to

Donations:

Haitian Health foundation

Partner in Health: Haiti

Hope For Haiti

Haiti Aid

Haiti Children

Haiti Twitter Link for More Donations. P2 P3

Videos

FYI a lot of these videos are from last year but a lot of them speak really well on what is always going on and why they are going through it

Haiti Debt

What is Happening in Haiti

Haiti and the Rice

Listen Part 2

Free These countries as well

What we want to free in Haiti

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE TAKE THE TIME OUT OF YOUR DAY TO AT LEAST LOOK AT THESE LINKS. For the sake of My dad and the sake of my family I want to see them happy they wanna go home but won’t be able to until Haiti is free I will update this if I need to and please Like, comment, reblog anything is appreciated

[grogumaximus]

Generally speaking, if you think the Liberty Media intervention is unbelievable, then it is not

Horner said "We had an inquiry from Flavio Briatore [about Fernando] and from Liberty Media but the position within Red Bull has always been very clear" (BBC, 2018)

Then it happened again a year later

Marko confirms the Red Bull hypothesis – Alonso: “Liberty asked us for a seat, but we said no” (Autobild, 2019)

Rumors about Liberty Media intervention date back to the beginning in 2020, before checo even got the redbull seat. There was concern that they might lose the Mexican GP if checo was not on the grid

“We all want to see Checo at the start next year,” commented Ross Brawn. “It would be a tragedy if he couldn’t find a car, and then it’s undoubtedly a business.” The opinion of the CEO of Formula 1 is not exactly a random one, just as the rumors that Liberty Media could put pressure on Red Bull in favor of Perez are probably not unfounded, because there are all the reasons. (2020, Motorsport)

And now back to the present, one of the reasons redbull extended checo's contract was because he sells better in Latin America

Helmut Marko on why they extended checo's contract "We want to ensure continuity and both drivers get on really well, there are simply no conflicts," reveals the man from Graz. "'Checo' is also incredibly popular in Latin America. We sell more merchandise of his there than of Verstappen and when he has a good day, he's almost unbeatable." (Kleine Zeitung, June 6, 2024)

I read rumors that Carlos slim has shares in F1TV but there is no reliable or unreliable source so, so far its bs (I checked all the stocks holders as well) HOWEVER, he does have partnerships

3 out of the 6 current partners of F1TV are owned by Carlos Slim (source: formula 1 website, Claro, Telcel, Telmex)

And one thing that I found very sus in my opinion there was a podcast where Carlos Slim denied any connection or influence regarding checo's seat literally 4 days before redbull confirmed checo's seat after the summer break

Speaking on the podcast “Desde el paddock” hosted by former Mexican driver Memo Rojas Jr, Carlos Slim Domit said that any type of decision falls solely on the Red Bull management and not on the number of caps or shirts that Checo can sell. (ESPN, July 25, 2024)

Sergio Pérez remains at Red Bull Racing. Confirmation from the team. (Erik Van Haren, Jul 29, 2024)

[communistkenobi]

i’d love to get your take on the physical geography/human geography “divide”. we spent a lot of time debating the merits of having both in my first year phd course and in my opinion as a physical geographer the opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration far outweigh any of the issues with housing physical and social scientists together

my familiarity with this debate primarily comes from the academic discourse around the concept of the “Anthropocene” (ie the period in Earth’s history where human beings have made a measurable, global impact on the environment, almost always spoken about in the context of climate change). The way I’ve seen this term used is to argue that the period of the Anthropocene is collapsing the physical/human geography divide, that even if we could separate these disciplines in the past, we can no longer partition the environmental from the social.

I’m partial to critical interventions in this discourse (which is how I will answer your question) - that the ‘human impact’ we’re talking about is actually a function of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, not some abstract universal ‘human impact’. Modern human beings have existed on Earth for nearly two hundred thousand years, and human-made climate change has only occurred in roughly the last two centuries - a microscopic timeframe when talking about Earth’s climate. People in the Global South, in imperialized countries, and indigenous and Black peoples in settler colonies are not the classes who produce industrial levels of carbon emissions or wreak industrial-scale environmental devastation - that is the ruling class & the imperial states of the world. Hoelle & Kawa (2021) argue in Placing the Anthropos in Anthropocene that we should call it the plantationocene or capitalocene, because human-made climate change is a function of specific historical and material processes, not some generalized, ahistorical "human impact." Likewise, "human impact" is an imprecise and colonial definition of human involvement with the environment, which dismisses Indigenous peoples' complex and highly sophisticated relationships with what are understood by the Western world to be "pristine environs" (arising from the doctrine of terra nullius, or empty land, which justified colonial expansion into the American continent because there was "no civilization there") such as the Amazon Rainforest, which should be understood as a human-made ecological system the same way we understand farmlands to be human-made (see Roosevelt's 2014 The Amazon and the Anthropocene: 13,000 Years of Human Influence in a Tropical Rainforest).

therefore I think it's productive to think of the divide between the physical and the human geographies as a colonial framework, or at least one that is deeply implicated in colonial thinking - it positions the environment as an ‘object’ terrain that ‘subjects’ are situated on top of, as opposed to understanding human beings as part of nature. This is part of the logic that relegates Indigenous people to the status of animals ("savages"), as "part of" nature, while human 'subjects', ie white bourgeois Europeans, are separated from nature (see Quijano's 2000 Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America). This type of thinking is attributed to climate change-denialism in fascist circles (see Acker's 2020 What Could Carbofascism Look Like?), whose denialism is premised on a settler colonial understanding of the environment as a resource to be dominated and extracted from - the environment has no agency in this framework, no ability to react to the violence of colonial extraction, it is a purely inert economic resource. Likewise, this psychical/human divide obfuscates the fact that historical processes like colonialism are also environmental processes. In North America, the genocides of indigenous peoples carried out by European settlers over the past five centuries have been so monumental that the resulting reduction in carbon dioxide output by human bodies is measurable in the geological record (see Hoelle & Kawa again). The environmental devastation of silver mining in South America led by Spanish colonizers, and the resulting misery inflicted on colonized peoples forced to conduct this mining (see Galeano's 1971 The Open Veins of Latin America) was foundational to the forming of the modern Spanish nation-state, who imported so much stolen silver into Europe that they crashed their own economy (see chapter 3 of Perry Anderson’s 1974 Lineages of the Absolutist State).

Likewise, efforts at environmental protections from Indigenous nations has resulted in unique advancements in the law, such as enshrining legal personhood on rivers, as was the case with the Whanganui River in Aotearoa (see Brierly et al's 2018 A geomorphic perspective on the rights of the river in Aotearoa New Zealand), or the forsaking of sovereign mining rights by the state in order to protect indigenous land claims for environmental protection, as was the case in Ecuador (see Gümplova's 2019 Yasuní ITT Initiative and the reinventing of sovereignty over natural resources). These are social, political, and legal efforts at environmental protection, done with an eye towards decolonization (or at the very least, decolonial policy regimes), and separating the environmental from the social in trying to understand this subject would be absurd.

And so the question of discipline specificity is obviously bound up in these debates, and the academic production of environmental scientists on the one hand and geographic social scientists on the other is part of the maintenance of that divide. Environmental protection policy requires specialised knowledge of the environments being protected, and that specialised knowledge likewise requires expertise in how state policy functions. And it has required decades and centuries of resistance and legal challenges for Indigenous people to be involved in these respective sites of knowledge production - all of this is bound up in debates about if we should keep the physical and human geographies separated. I think the example of medical doctors talking about “shit life syndrome” (ie the medical problems faced by people as a result of poverty and inequality) speaks to a consequence of the debates around disciplinary divides - most medical doctors are not social policy experts, it’s not their job to write legislation or policy programs, their job is to provide medical services to people, but they are nonetheless identifying in their supposedly separate discipline of medicine and human biology the harmful social outputs of capitalist societies, which is intense systemic poverty

[lilyliveredlittlerichboy]

it's time now. it's time to imagine the brightest future you can, and talk about it.

a future where people only work 8 hours a week and everyone's basic needs are met. a future where we are more connected to nature and eat seasonal, local produce. a future where you look out for your neighbours and they look out for you. a future where you actually know who your neighbours are. a future where everyone is just a lot more relaxed and able to do whatever they want to do - this 8 hour working week has given people their lives back and now they're able to make community events, work in community gardens, sing and dance and spend time with their kids, play whatever sport they want, travel, read, create art and music.

People are interacting with each other in good faith again because money as an ulterior motive has all but disappeared. Cus you see a few decades ago they made profits illegal. All money has to be put back into the company and CEOs can take home a salary only, no bonuses and it can't be more than 3x what the lowest paid employee makes. You can go to jail if your company is found to make profits, advertise on a large scale or pay its high ranking members more than what's allowed.

Jail still exists but mostly people go in for financial crimes (greed still exists); drugs are decriminalised and available to use safely. people are not as desperate now so there's been a massive reduction of violent and petty crime and most of the people who still do this are teenagers who get away with a slap on the wrist. police are not armed anymore and are heavily penalised if they abuse their power or hurt a civilian, and their role is more that of mediator, signposter (to community services, social services, and free and accessible healthcare including for mental health) and security. together with the former military they make up an "emergency task force" which are called upon in times of need and crisis, for floods, fires, other such disasters.

the stock market completely collapsed after profits were made illegal and people had to find other ways to figure out what a company was worth: such as how they treat their staff or how accessible their processes are. as a result of this, as well as more widespread disability thanks to Covid and an ageing population, accessibility is fucking incredible now. most places are accessible to the vast majority of disabled people even without them having to ask for a single thing. If they have to ask, accommodations are made quickly and without fuss and this is completely normal now. disabled people are more visible than ever in public life and this has led to a generally kinder, more tolerant public life.

Everything is slower now. Social media as we know it died decades ago and Internet 4.0 is efficient, will find you accurate answers and the websites you're looking for very easily and fast. there's monopoly laws restricting how large companies operate online. online ads are all but illegal - there's "phone book" esque pages where you can promote your business or service and that's allowed but not anywhere else. Lots of people are still annoying and some of them are still cruel but overall living together as humans has gotten so much more chill. We've tackled climate change and reversed much of it, now it's a global day of mourning whenever a species is found to be extinct through human intervention. these days used to happen much more frequently but it's very rare these days. Most everyone gets the day off and is encouraged to read about the lost species or hold themed funerals. Globally everything has gotten better - there's much more global equality now after a bunch of western/formerly colonising countries almost self destructed and then instead decided to own up for colonialism, pay reparations to a lot of countries in Africa Asia and Latin America, as well as indigenous nations of North America, Oceania, even in Europe. The USA doesn't exist anymore instead its a whole host of separate nations all managed by the native people whose land it is. The UK doesn't exist anymore. England is still sad about it but Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Cornwall are called Cymru, Alba, Eire and Kernow again and they've formed a Celtic Union for better collective bargaining power in the EU (which still exists, somehow. Its better now. England may still be out of the EU I'm not sure). Migration is common and foreigners are welcomed into any country with open arms.

I may try to write something about this. I have a vision for a future and it's so lovely. Here, on earth, with the starting point being now. We have a lot to work with and only a few changes could make such a difference. Demilitarisation, UBI and maximum working hours, greedy financial practices made illegal. Conservation and education on local plants and nature and food. Community building on every level. Giving people their lives back.

This is all extremely possible. If it were up to me, very little in society would be left unchanged but it would all be people friendly changes. changes that aim to support the poorest and most marginalised, changes that aim to punish greed and exploitation. It's a work in progress of course. But I have a vision for a better world and dammit if I'm not going to share it with you.

[kropotkindersurprise]

December 26, 2023 - A migrant caravan marches through Mexico to the American border chanting slogans. The migrants are looking for a better life in the rich country, fleeing their homes to escape poverty and violence largely caused by decades of US intervention across Latin America. [video]

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Noah Berlatsky at Everything Is Horrible:

As several commenters have pointed out, it’s hard to know how to react to Trump’s recent threats to conquer Greenland and/or Canada and/or Panama by force and/or economic coercion. Is this actually a plan? Is it a weird phantom his rage-calcified synapses produced when the microphone got thrust in front of him? Does taking it seriously lend it credence it shouldn’t have? Does mocking it downplay the danger? World leaders are in fact taking it seriously; France and Germany both warned Trump not to attack the borders of the EU. On social media, as you’d expect, people have taken a more mocking tone. One commenter joked that they would accept annexing Canada if every province got two senate votes. Fwiw, I very much doubt that Trump will actually try to annex Canada or Greenland. I fear that some sort of military intervention in Panama is a good bit more likely, given Trump’s racism and the long history of US presidents stealing shit from Latin America whenever they feel like it. But whether or not Trump implements any of his imperial schemes, I think it’s worth thinking through what conquest of Greenland, or Panama, or Canada would actually mean. Trump may not pursue this particular evil plan, but it’s worth explaining at least briefly why it’s evil, if only as a reminder of just how ugly Trump’s disdain for democracy is.

Disenfranchising millions

The quip about Canada electing Democratic Senators is telling I think, because it underlines a central problem of colonialism in democratic polities That problem is that, in theory, claiming more territory is also claiming more voters. If you engineer a hostile takeover of a territory, you’ve just added an electorate which hates you. If Canadians or Panamanians are allowed to vote in US elections, they will generally vote to regain independence first and foremost. At the very least, they are likely to vote against the asshole that launched the invasion. This is not a new or unique problem. Colonial representation, or the lack thereof, was the cause of the American Revolution; Britain wanted control over the colonists, but it did not want to give them votes in Parliament. Or, as another example, there’s Israel—a “democracy” only if you ignore the fact that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank can’t vote, because if they could vote they’d quickly demand an end to the occupation and control over their own territory and lives, which Israel’s government does not want to give them.

Trump is a fool, but he does have some sense of who votes for him and who doesn’t. And he’s consistent in saying that people who don’t vote for him should not be allowed to vote at all. Any annexation of Canada, or Greenland, or Panama, would be done on MAGA terms—which means that the people in those countries would be disenfranchised. Remember that Puerto Rico and other US territories still don’t have full US voting rights! Trump would absolutely not let Canadians vote for Democratic Senators. MAGA would say that Canadians needed time to learn the ways of American democracy, or he would say they were not loyal, and demand that anyone who wanted to vote had to swear an oath to the US, and to Trump personally. You might then get Senators from Canada—elected by an all pro-Trumpist far right rump electorate.

Colonialism is bad

Trump has of course claimed that Canada/Greenland/Panama would be better off under MAGA. The pretense is thin though; it’s obvious that Trump wants additional territory because he thinks it would make the US bigger and more powerful, and perhaps just because he likes the idea of taking stuff by force. This duplicates the historical disconnect between colonial rhetoric and colonial policy. Colonizers always say that they are working for the good of the colonized. Rudyard Kipling famously encouraged the US to invade the Philippines for the good of the Filipinos; “Fill full the mouth of famine/and make the sickness cease.” Walter Rodney in his classic How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) notes that “colonial apologists” claim that colonial rule was responsible for “economic modernization” and “political uplift and emancipation.”

Rodney puts a wrecking ball through those pro colonial arguments. He points out that European development in Africa was all aimed at extracting resources for the benefit of the colonizers, not the colonized. Europeans only built roads where they needed to get goods from the interior to the coast; they did not invest in infrastructure to allow Africans to travel in their own countries, or between two countries. When Africans wanted to learn new technologies and build new industries, they were systematically stifled; the British made it illegal for Ugandans to own cotton gins, for example.

[...]

Why aren’t you laughing?

Again, it feels ridiculous to talk seriously about what an invasion of Canada or Greenland or Panama might mean practically. It’s not going to happen. Why talk about the consequences for democracy, or the potential for exploitation and cruelty, or the consequences for reproductive rights? It’s all silliness. It’s just Trump babbling.

Disenfranchising Canadians by annexing Canada is a foolish move.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved in our archive (Daily updates!)

An editorial published in October about the silent long covid pandemic.

By

Francisco Westermeier and Nuno Sepúlveda

1 Context There is an urgent public health problem due to the rising number of individuals who remain with their health and daily functions impaired for months and even years after a SARS-CoV-2 infection (1). This impairment is encapsulated by a new medical condition known as post COVID-19 syndrome, post-acute COVID-19 syndrome, post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection, and persistent post-COVID-19 syndrome. The general public knows this condition as long COVID (LC), a coined termed by patients at the beginning of the pandemic (1).

Individuals with LC report experiencing many symptoms, including fatigue, post-exertional malaise (PEM), and sleep disturbances (2). Coincidently, these specific symptoms are the heart of the most consensual case definitions of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), a “older” disease often triggered by an infection (e.g., infectious mononucleosis) and also causing high levels of physical and mental distress (3). It is then no surprise that individuals with LC can also receive an ME/CFS diagnosis (4, 5). This diagnostic overlap is the main reason for the growing interest in understanding the medical relationship between LC and ME/CFS in order to accelerate the development of efficacious pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions for the benefit of the patients (6–8).

The present Research Topic aimed then at gathering new data on the public health and medicine of LC and ME/CFS. The Research Topic compiled 11 papers of which nine were original research. Seven papers concerned LC directly or indirectly. The remaining four papers focused on ME/CFS specifically or together with LC. Below the reader can find a brief account of the research conducted.

2 Contributions to current knowledge on the public health impact of LC Four large-scale studies on LC surveyed more than 1,000 individuals. These studies evaluated different health-related metrics after a SARS-CoV-2 infection using retrospective data or convenient cross-sectional surveys.

From the United States of America, Sandoval et al. reported a retrospective study on 91,007 adult patients from Southeast Texas. The study aimed at evaluating the chance of hospital readmission after a SARS-CoV-2 infection. The main finding is that 21% of the individuals were readmitted to the hospital within 90 days after infection. The chance of hospital admission seemed to be dependent on different factors, including a dose-response relationship with area deprivation index.

From 16 countries in Latin America, with the special focus on Ecuador, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, and Chile, Angarita-Fonseca et al. estimated the prevalence of individuals with LC using an online survey of 2,466 people. In this survey, 1,178 individuals (47.8%) reported experiencing symptoms after 3 months of a SARS-CoV-2 infection. This survey also suggested several risk factors for LC, including a COVID-19 episode earlier in the pandemic, old age, no vaccination against SARS-CoV-2, and a high number of pre-existing co-morbidities.

From Brazil, Malheiro et al. conducted a telephone-based survey in the city of São Paulo on 291 hospitalized and 1,118 non-hospitalized patients with COVID-19. The study also aimed at estimating the prevalence of LC at least 3 months after infection and to determine the respective risk factors. The study estimated the LC prevalence at 47.1 and 49.5% for these two populations, respectively. These estimates were in almost perfect agreement with the ones reported by Angarita-Fonseca et al.. Again, pre-existing co-morbidities such as hypertension are possible risk factors for LC manifestations.

From Italy, Gagliotti et al. estimated the incidence and determined the factors affecting the access to specific healthcare services up to a year after the acute phase of a SARS-CoV-2 infection. The study was conducted in a large number of healthy individuals (n = 35,128 and 88,881 from Emilia-Romagna and Veneto, respectively). This study found that more than 20% of the surveyed individuals accessed a health service, mostly outpatient care more than drug prescription as follow-up of their SARS-CoV-2 infection. Whether this access was a direct cause of LC specifically remained an open question from this study.

The three remaining studies on LC contemplated a moderate number of surveyed individuals. From Castellón in Spain, Pérez Catalán et al. provided evidence that the quality of life of 486 Spanish patients tended to remain affected after 1 year of their COVID-19-related hospitalization. This particular study was already criticized due to its reliance on telephone interviews (9). From Vancouver in Canada, Magel et al. followed up 88 patients previously hospitalized due to COVID-19 complications. This study focused on how the levels of fatigue evolved over time. The study that 67% (n = 58) of individuals experienced fatigue at 3 months post-infection, but this percentage dropped to 60% (n = 47) after 6 months. The same drop was observed in patients experiencing substantial fatigue (16–6% after 3 and 6 months after infection, respectively). Accordingly to other studies published in this Research Topic, the study also provided evidence for a positive association between the number of pre-existing comorbidities and fatigue. From Bari in Italy, Resta et al. reported the single study conducted in a clinical setting. The study focused post-COVID exertion dyspnoea in 318 patients at 3 months after SARS-CoV-2 infection. In this study, the study participants performed a 6-min walking test after which 59.7% showed evidence of dyspnoea. This finding showed that exertion dyspnea might be part of the PEM spectrum in LC.

3 Research on ME/CFS with possible implications to LC Four papers concentrated their attention on ME/CFS with possible implications to LC. For example, the new study of Hannestad et al. provided evidence for an increase of IgG antibodies against human adenovirus after a SARS-CoV-2 infection in a Swedish cohort of patients with ME/CFS. This finding suggested that a SARS-CoV-2 infection could prompt the reactivation of the human adenovirus. Such a reactivation might explain the worsening of symptoms in some patients with ME/CFS after a SARS-CoV-2 infection, as suggested elsewhere (10). Another example is the perspective paper of Scheibenbogen et al. who compiled and discussed a list of candidate drugs that could treat both ME/CFS and LC patients. This perspective paper also provided an important concept for developing clinical trial networks in this era of LC and ME/CFS. In turn, Grabowska et al. discussed the concept of extending current large-scale prevalence studies of LC to ME/CFS, a disease whose incidence and prevalence remain largely elusive (11). According to these authors, estimating ME/CFS prevalence comes at a minimal cost in such studies, but requires the recognition of PEM as one of the cardinal symptoms for ME/CFS diagnosis. The recognition of PEM in medical care is also important, as demonstrated by a new study of Wormgoor and Rodenburg on a cohort of Norwegian ME/CFS patients. However, data from this new study suggested that PEM remains a neglected symptom by specialized medical staff and healthcare providers.

4 Two final remarks Most of the new contributions published in this Research Topic were based on the evaluation of simple metrics aiming at capturing different sequelae facets of a SARS-CoV-2 infection. These metrics are fundamental to understand the impact of the problem on public health and society, as reviewed elsewhere (1). At the same time, the abundance of descriptive studies suggested that we are still at the early stage of addressing the LC problem. In this scenario, the great benefit of this Research Topic seemed to come from an integrated collection of papers where LC and ME/CFS are somehow put side-by-side. This is the case of Scheibenbogen et al. who aimed at leveraging pre-existing knowledge on ME/CFS pathogenesis and treatment with a potential impact on the healthcare of LC patients.

All the original research articles published in this Research Topic had the curiosity of coming from studying European, North American, and South American populations. This illustrates the wide extension of the LC challenge across the world. However, no papers from Asia and Africa were published in this Research Topic. In the case of Asia, it was a simple coincidence with several papers being submitted, but subsequently rejected for one reason or another. This contrasted with Africa from which no submission was received. Interestingly, the current prevalence estimates of LC in Africa (12) are similar to the ones found by Malheiro et al. in São Paulo Brazil and Angarita-Fonseca et al. across Latin America. Given this statistical coincidence, we had the expectation to collect some research studies on LC from this continent. Does this mean that the interest on LC is fading away in Africa even if there is evidence for an accumulation of cases elsewhere? Perhaps this is the right time for revitalizing the LC research in Africa to determine whether this continent is an exception in the global burden of this new post-pandemic condition.

Author contributions FW: Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. NS: Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.

Funding The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. NS was partially financed by national funds through FCT-Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia under the project UIDB/00006/2020. doi: 10.54499/UIDB/00006/2020.

Acknowledgments We thank the editorial offices of Frontiers in Medicine and Frontiers in Public Health for giving us the opportunity to organize and handle this Research Topic.

Conflict of interest The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

The author(s) declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision.

Publisher's note All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

References 1. Al-Aly Z, Davis H, McCorkell L, Soares L, Wulf-Hanson S, Iwasaki A, et al. Long COVID science, research and policy. Nat Med. (2024) 24:6. doi: 10.1038/s41591-024-03173-6

2. Davis HE, McCorkell L, Vogel JM, Topol EJ. Long COVID: major findings, mechanisms and recommendations. Nat Rev Microbiol. (2023) 21:133–46. doi: 10.1038/s41579-022-00846-2

3. Cortes Rivera M, Mastronardi C, Silva-Aldana CT, Arcos-Burgos M, Lidbury BA. Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome: a comprehensive review. Diagnostics. (2019) 9:91. doi: 10.3390/diagnostics9030091

4. Jason LA, Dorri JA. ME/CFS and post-exertional malaise among patients with long COVID. Neurol Int. (2022) 15:1–11. doi: 10.3390/neurolint15010001

5. Tokumasu K, Honda H, Sunada N, Sakurada Y, Matsuda Y, Yamamoto K, et al. Clinical characteristics of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) diagnosed in patients with long COVID. Medicina. (2022) 58:850. doi: 10.3390/medicina58070850

6. Annesley SJ, Missailidis D, Heng, B, Josev EK, Armstrong CW. Unravelling shared mechanisms: insights from recent ME/CFS research to illuminate long COVID pathologies. Trends Mol Med. (2024) 30:443–58. doi: 10.1016/j.molmed.2024.02.003

7. Komaroff AL, Lipkin WI. ME/CFS and long COVID share similar symptoms and biological abnormalities: road map to the literature. Front Med. (2023) 10:1187163. doi: 10.3389/fmed.2023.1187163

8. Arron HE, Marsh BD, Kell DB, Khan MA, Jaeger BR, Pretorius E. Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome: the biology of a neglected disease. Front Immunol. (2024) 15:1386607. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2024.1386607

9. Finsterer J. Commentary: one-year quality of life among post-hospitalization COVID-19 patients. Front Public Health. (2024) 12:1417068. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1417068

10. Malato J, Sotzny F, Bauer S, Freitag H, Fonseca A, Grabowska AD, et al. The SARS-CoV-2 receptor angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) in myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome: a meta-analysis of public DNA methylation and gene expression data. Heliyon. (2021) 7:e07665. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2021.e07665

11. Lim EJ, Ahn YC, Jang ES, Lee SW, Lee SH, Son CG, et al. Systematic review and meta-analysis of the prevalence of chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME). J Transl Med. (2020) 18:100. doi: 10.1186/s12967-020-02269-0

12. Frallonardo L, Segala FV, Chhaganlal KD, Yelshazly M, Novara R, Cotugno S, et al. Incidence and burden of long COVID in Africa: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Sci Rep. (2023) 13:21482. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-48258-3

Keywords: post-COVID-19 syndrome, long COVID, post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2, post-acute coronavirus (COVID-19) syndrome, quality of life, healthcare, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Citation: Westermeier F and Sepúlveda N (2024) Editorial: On the cusp of the silent wave of the long COVID pandemic: why, what and how should we tackle this emerging syndrome in the clinic and population? Front. Public Health 12:1483693. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1483693

[daisyachain]

It’s been read into the record that the US Army committed egregious civilian massacres in Vietnam, killed an estimated 100-500 thousand civilians in total in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, caused thousands more poisonings, birth defects, and related deaths in the Agent Orange ecocide. Vietnam is considered by most residents of developed countries to be an unfortunate policy bungle in which US soldiers suffered trauma.

This is not counting massacres by allied forces. It is unsealed public knowledge that the United States either installed or propped up military dictatorships in a majority of Latin American countries and Indonesia, which engaged in political killings. The United States backed the governments which carried out the genocide of the Maya. US interventions in Latin America are considered by most residents of developed countries to consist of a heroic opposition to Cuban dictatorship, where they are considered at all. Indonesia does not exist.

The word ‘genocide’ was coined to describe the Armenian genocide. Descendants of Armenian survivors have risen to prominence in US pop culture (Cher, System of a Down). Armenians have suffered crimes, military aggression, and civilian killings by Azerbaijani and allied forces multiple times within the past five years. The US government recognized the Armenian genocide for the first time in 2019. The United Nations organized COP29 in Baku with no formal dissent or objection from developed countries, and I’ve seen accounts on here with my own eyes praising the current Turkish government (more of a case of ‘you do not under any circumstances have to hand it to a far-right nationalist regime because they’re geopolitically opposed to Israel’s far-right nationalist regime’). Most residents of developed countries couldn’t point to the Caucasus on a map.

These atrocities and many, many more are cases of factual unarguable history that have been acknowledged by hegemonic governments. There is no public or intellectual debate on the fact of the Armenian genocide, American installation of Pinochet, the My Lai massacre. It’s gone down in history.

It’s also true that the average resident, even the average sensible political moderate in the suite of developed countries has an understanding of the world that denies or excludes these facts. Tumblr fandom blogs will share a video of Erdogan if he’s saying something politically convenient, a mildly left-wing guy will disbelieve me when I mention the Pinochet thing until I make him look it up on friggin Wikipedia, there are 2 Vietnam War films focusing on heroic American characters released in or after Anno Domini 2020. One of which is by a solidly progressive director.

I’ve seen the sentiment frequently that history will show the Israeli genocide as the most vicious, cruel, inhuman assault on humanity since the turn of the millennium. That is true. It will show as fact, records will be unsealed, media distortions will die down. Already, internal Israeli news sources Haaretz and +972 have disproven many of the claims used by the US government as an excuse to dismember children on the basis of ethnicity.

At the same time, I think that there’s a lot of evidence that factual atrocities will be ignored by the liberal hegemony as long as they’re inconvenient. The Shoah is remembered as a tragedy in part because it fits into a narrative that portrays the US as a morally just world power. Universally acknowledged genocides mass killings have little to no impact on the memories or politics of ‘normal people’ in developed countries. Most people don’t know that the UAE is currently playing a key role in the decimation of Sudan’s population and most people, if they ever did find out, would not see any reason for the US to use its economic leverage to have any impact on the UAE at all.

The record does and will show that Israel is guilty of genocide. It will go away sooner or later because of the efforts of Palestinians and allies to free Palestine from occupation, apartheid, and genocide. I don’t think that anyone who cheered on genocide will be aware of any of this, reflect on any of it, or do anything at all make up for the people they’ve killed. Vindication by history might not change them at all. Which is why it makes sense to keep bringing up the Palestinian genocide in all contexts whether ‘appropriate’ or not, because all historical evidence shows that it will be swept under the rug, forgotten, or misremembered if it doesn’t remain a conversational landmine forever

[elbiotipo]

Honestly surprised the rest of south America doesn't hate Brazil. We were such pieces of shit in the 19th century lol. Constantly installing puppet governments in Uruguay and Argentina, killing 80% of Paraguay's male population, etc. Real empire stuff lol

It was a big deal between the mid XIX and early XX century, the Argentina-Brazil rivalry today is mostly fútbol but back then it was a real geopolitical thing (see the South American Dreadnought Race, one of the stupidest episodes of the continent). I'm not sure when the modern sense of Latin American unity started to develop (since the idea predates independence) but I think it was in the period of relative peace in the XXth century. Perón is one of the first Argentine leaders of note who especifically talks about an union with Brazil to overcome imperialism.

When I look back at the sad mess that was the XIX century and the wars of independence and "national organization" it only reinforces my belief that you can't understand Latin American history without taking it as a whole. Brasil intervened in Argentina, Argentina intervened in Brasil, Chile with Bolivia and Perú, Colombia with the Caribbean, and all with the interventions of the European powers (IIRC Spain tried to invade Perú as late as the 1840s) and the US, it's all connected.

[orfeolookback]

¡Hola!

¿Hay recursos que recomiendes para leer y aprender más sobre que esta occuriendo en argentina? He leido su post de fascismo en su país, y, como un estadounidense, quiero ayudar, pero no sé exactamente qué esta occuriendo en más detalle o qué puedo hacer para ayudar.

(puede responder en ingles o español, este mensaje es en español porque trato communicar más en español, lo siento si hay errores)

I'll answer in English since the post was in English. Thank you for reaching out!

Unlike many other crisis, we don't have a place for donations. You can help by organizing in your own country, being anti-capitalist and making sure the right doesn't spread elsewhere. If you live in the USA you can join strikes, rallies and protests, and anti fascist groups locally. Unionize. Demand rights. Reject US intervention. When Musk buys shit, boycott him, organize against him. Support Indigenous people's fight for Land Back and make sure no billionaire buys their land In your own country first. When you hear the people in power talking about Argentina (or any country!) as 'an important asset' make sure there's outrage.

I won't share sources that are easily digestible. If you really want to be educated, you can read about Operación Cóndor, read The Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano, watch 1985 (a movie about the last dictatorship's aftermath) and read through the comments of my post, lots of people linked articles. Most sources will be in Spanish.

If you really REALLY want to immediately support Argentina financially, support Argentinian businesses. If you commission artists often, consider us. If there's an Argentinian band you like, buy their stuff. I won't pretend like this will do much but a single dollar is 1000 Argentinian pesos, so you might change someone's month just with 10 dollars. I make a living through my art, personally.

Thank you for the interest, have a nice weekend

[mariacallous]

Ahead of November’s U.S. presidential election, several right-wing Latin American leaders have been open about their support for Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump. Among them are Argentine President Javier Milei, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, as well as their allies and supporters. “With Trump’s election, we can see a major turnaround. And we will, God willing,” Eduardo Bolsonaro, the former president’s son and member of Brazil’s Congress, said at Brazil’s Conservative Political Action Conference in July.

Trump supporters across Latin America identify with the former U.S. president’s various culture war crusades and economic policies. Many also suggest that his return to the White House would put an end to U.S. interventions abroad and create a more peaceful world. In 2022, Jair Bolsonaro said, “Some think the war in Ukraine would not have happened if [Trump] were still been in power. I agree with that.” Bia Kicis, a politician and Bolsonaro ally, recently told the New York Times, “Back when Trump was a candidate, there was talk of a possible third war. But there was no war—until Trump left office, and now war is affecting the whole world.” Agustín Laje, an Argentine writer and Milei supporter, said that Trump’s return is essential “to guarantee peace.”

But there is strong evidence that, at least in the case of Latin America, Trump’s return to the White House would lead to a far more interventionist U.S. foreign policy, as was the case during his first term. At the time, Trump adopted “maximum pressure” tactics against countries like Cuba and Venezuela, and pressured—in vain—countries like Brazil to ban Chinese tech giant Huawei.

A second Trump presidency would likely see the return of more explicit U.S. pressure on Latin American countries to pick sides in the brewing competition between the United States and China. That could create considerable friction in the region, just as it did during Trump’s first term in office, when many countries warmed to China’s embrace. The more aggressive Trump’s approach to Latin America, the faster governments can be expected to balance Washington by fostering closer ties to Beijing.

Most of the recent U.S. administrations have explicitly distanced themselves from the Monroe Doctrine, which, in 1823, asserted Washington’s authority over meddling European powers in Latin America. The doctrine was often used as a pretext for U.S. military or diplomatic interventions in the Western Hemisphere and was largely seen as a form of U.S. imperialism, especially during the 20th century. In 2013, then-Secretary of State John Kerry announced, “The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.”

Trump and his allies, however, have explicitly defended the doctrine. At the United Nations General Assembly in 2018, Trump argued that “it has been the formal policy of our country since President Monroe that we reject the interference of foreign nations in this hemisphere and in our own affairs.” This time, the warning was not directed at Europeans, but at Russia and China, the latter of which became the main trading partner of most South American countries in the last decade.

Perhaps the most extreme element of Trump’s worldview was revealed by his former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who noted in his 2020 book, The Room Where it Happened: A White House Memoir, “Trump insisted he wanted military options for Venezuela and then keep it because ‘it’s really part of the United States.’” In April 2019, Bolton said, “Today, we proudly proclaim for all to hear: The Monroe Doctrine is alive and well.”

All this suggests that Trump’s isolationist foreign policy in the world at large translates into a stronger urge to dominate the Western Hemisphere, a detail often lost on Trump supporters in the region. As Johns Hopkins University professor Hal Brands argued in Foreign Affairs, “‘America First’ would feature a reenergized Monroe Doctrine: U.S. retrenchment from Old World outposts would presage intensified and perhaps heavier-handed efforts to safeguard American influence in the New World, and to prevent rivals from gaining a foothold there.”

In retrospect, Trump’s strategy in Latin American failed to achieve its goals. Despite crippling sanctions and menacing rhetoric, the regimes of Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba—which Bolton dubbed the “Troika of Tyranny”—remain in power. Trump’s efforts to convince Latin American governments to ban Huawei or downgrade their ties to China also did not produce any tangible results. Even during the Bolsonaro administration, Brazil’s trade with China only grew.

The Trump administration’s strategy vis-à-vis Huawei in particular caused bewilderment among Latin American policymakers. The United States pressured Latin American countries to exclude Huawei as a component provider of their 5G networks, arguing that the company could be used as a Trojan horse for Chinese spying activities. At the time, Trump officials threatened governments in Europe and Latin America not to use Huawei, warning them that doing so could lead Washington to stop sharing U.S. intelligence with them.

Yet Washington ignored political realities in Latin America, where there was little appetite among political or economic elites to confront Beijing. Worse, the United States offered no real alternative to Chinese 5G technology; Huawei’s competitors—including Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung—were more expensive, and Washington refrained from offering to pay the difference.

Trump’s warnings about the dangers that Huawei posed also largely fell flat: To most Latin Americans, there is little daylight between being spied on by China and being spied on by the United States, which has—for example—refused to apologize for putting former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff under NSA surveillance, among many other instances of U.S. interventionism and covert activities in the region.

Trump’s muscular approach to the region largely served Beijing’s interests; Latin American governments strengthened ties to China to balance Trump’s posturing. Beijing has emphasized respecting sovereignty in its interactions with Latin American governments, aware of how attractive the prospect sounds to governments across the global south.

While Trump ultimately decided against a military intervention to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, his aggressive rhetoric had the region on edge. Even the remote specter of a U.S. invasion led to a rally-round-the-flag effect that strengthened Maduro’s narrative that Venezuela faces serious threats to its sovereignty. It also became an opportunity to blame all the country’s economic woes on U.S. sanctions. As a result, several regional leaders reluctantly sided with Maduro.

Although Trump’s hostile approach to Latin America during his first term as president failed, he would likely repeat the strategy upon returning to the White House, Juan Gabriel Tokatlian, a professor at Torcuato Di Tella University in Buenos Aires, warned in Americas Quarterly. Republican senators and representatives have presented resolutions reaffirming the Monroe Doctrine’s validity. Numerous leading voices in the Republican Party also regularly employ threatening language toward the region.

Last year, Trump lamented the United States’ loss of control over the Panama Canal. Trump, his vice presidential pick J.D. Vance, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley have all threatened to bomb Mexico to combat drug cartels. Such rhetoric—which promotes U.S. violations of international law—is a boon to anti-American voices and would make it easy for China to position itself as a more attractive partner in the region.

Trump could impose high tariffs against products from countries that are engaged in initiatives to circumvent the dollar. That would likely apply to Brazil, which uses local currencies for some of its trade with fellow countries in the BRICS grouping. Mexico is likely to be one of the countries most affected by Trump’s return, as he pledges to impose hefty tariffs on goods produced in the country, reduce immigration, and cut the U.S. trade deficit.

Trump may back down from some of his most extreme proposals for Latin America, however. If he followed through on his pledge to conduct mass deportations of more than 10 million undocumented immigrants, the majority of whom hail from the region, remittances would drop and returning workers could de-stabilize labor markets. The resulting worker shortage would negatively affect the U.S. economy and potentially increase inflation, making it unlikely Trump fully delivers on his threats.

During Trump’s first term, leaders from Brasília to Buenos Aires were largely able to ride out U.S. pressure to align with Washington and move away from China. Across the region, there continues to be a consensus that multialignment between great powers remains feasible for years to come and that U.S. pressure to reduce ties to China can be resisted at little cost.

Trump is often described as holding a transactional foreign-policy view, and the same applies to most Latin American governments. Brazil is a case in point: While President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s decision to refrain from unequivocally condemning Russia for its war in Ukraine has been couched in moralistic language—accusing the West of hypocrisy—it is, above all, rooted in hard-headed pragmatism. Brazil’s positioning on the war, for example, allowed it to save millions of dollars when purchasing Russian diesel and fertilizers at a heavy discount. Protecting ties to Moscow is seen as crucial to preserving Brazil’s strategic wiggle room and constraining the United States.

For the same reason, Latin American countries care little about U.S. rhetoric about the risks of being technologically dependent on a dictatorship like China, as embodied by the Huawei dispute. Governments would certainly consider excluding Huawei from their 5G networks if doing so would create a measurable economic benefit. But without tangible U.S. incentives or funding, that seems implausible.

Trump’s attempts to reduce China’s role in Latin America via a renewed Monroe Doctrine will likely backfire again. In Trump’s erratic approach to foreign affairs, Latin American leaders perceive instability—and believe that they must hedge relations with the United States to strengthen their ties to other large powers.