Clownish Start For Trump Puppet In Colombia

 Michael K. Smith

www.legalienate.blogspot.com

First published by Counterpunch on August 18, 2026

If Abelardo de la Espriella’s first four days are any indication of what his entire term will be like, we are in for some very dark comedy over the next four years. Here are eight highlights from his inauspicious beginning.

(1) On Inauguration Day a clip of him looking like a fool marching in place and saluting during military honors went viral after it was seen to have his own military officers looking at him with a look of bewilderment as to what on earth he thought he was doing. Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department revealed that Colombia will receive a $1 billion support package for its participation in Trump’s Shield of the Americas project, which uses the drug war as a pretext to attack political enemies. A car bomb exploding the same day seemed to highlight the renewed chaos such policies are sinking the country into.

(2) President de la Espriella showed up hours late to announce Colombia’s 7.4 earthquake on August 10, smiling and blowing kisses to his supporters while offering them a “Look at me! Look at me! How ya doin?” greeting, apparently oblivious to the buckled roads, crashed vehicles, and collapsed buildings devastating half the country. A Latin American mini-Trump, he has captured the required spirit of buffoonery well.

(3) His first press conference was a video of himself talking about freedom of expression.

(4) With the country reeling from the earthquake, he took time to re-establish relations with Israel, broken off due to Tel Aviv’s mass extermination in Palestine, and recognize the Holy State’s sovereignty over Syria’s Golan Heights. Making Colombia great again.

(5) He also recognized Morocco’s colonial claim to the Western Sahara.

(6) He backed Colombia out of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which the country had spent over a decade trying to get into. The U.S. ambassador-designate to Colombia made the announcement, not De la Espriella.

(7) He talked up Plan Patriot 2, which aims to re-start the country’s militarized coca eradication program, though it had devastating social and environmental consequences the first time around, and is opposed by anti-government parties and environmental, peasant, and indigenous organizations this time. A form of chemical and biological warfare, its goal is to clear undesired populations off rural lands desired by transnational corporations – de la Espriella’s constituency – in favor of cattle ranching, oil extraction, and vast plantations.

(8) With lives hanging in the balance in the early aftermath of the earthquake, he refused international earthquake aid. We don’t need no stinking welfare!

Even before being sworn in, De la Espriella met with Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, a higher priority than doing anything to help ordinary Colombians. He also met with Javier Milei, telling the Argentine president that the policies he is implementing served as inspiration for his own proposed economic policy, a strange confession given that Milei’s policies have plunged Argentina’s currency to its lowest value in history and provoked massive protests, occasioning frequent street brawls outside Congress, which are forcibly broken up with water cannons, rubber bullets, and tear gas.

Or perhaps it’s not so strange. After all, De la Espriella is only tangentially related to Colombia. A U.S. citizen who until recently lived in Italy, his constituents are the owners of massive private wealth, their professional servants, and Israel fanatics. Struggling Colombians are for him no more than a minor irritant to be quickly brushed aside, like ants at a picnic.

His career focus has been as a lawyer for the AUC, a paramilitary conglomerate that sowed terror and massacre in Colombia for decades, a war on the poor that painstakingly evolved into a peace and reconciliation process in 2016, which De la Espriella now eagerly seeks to unravel. The negotiations ended Colombia’s forty-year civil war, disarmed over 11,000 combatants, transformed the rebel group into the Comunes political party, and established the Special Jurisdiction for Peace to deliver transitional justice and landmark restorative sentences for victims while reintegrating thousands of ex-combatants into civilian life through community and cooperative projects. For many of those who laid down their arms, however, their reward has been getting assassinated or disappeared by death squads.

In the recent elections, outgoing Gustavo Petro and his would-be successor Ivan Cepeda represented the path of continuing the peace process in order to complete a social transformation that would eliminate the mass poverty and injustice that are the driving force behind political violence, which the right seeks to repress, not resolve. In short, the choice Colombian voters faced at the ballot box was between striving for social peace nonviolently or taking a giant step towards unrestrained state warfare against the common people, a policy that cannot bring social peace short of complete extermination. The overwhelming majority of Colombians didn’t endorse De le Espriella’s iron fist agenda, either by staying home or voting for other candidates.

Unpopular though it may be, De la Espriella honed that agenda for years as a lawyer helping figures like Jorge Caballero, Rocio Arias, and Eleonora Pineda, spokespersons for the paramilitary AUC in Congress who were convicted of parapolitics, as well as Juan Carlos, “El Tuso Sierra,” a former drug-trafficker and also a member of the AUC. But his most prominent client was ex-president Álvaro Uribe, whom he has advised regarding the judicial process opened by former House representative for Bogotá, Iván Cepeda. Today Cepeda says, “Paramilitarism created an apparatus of death that erected an immense mountain of corpses upon which the pinnacle of power in Colombia was reached.” His recent presidential candidacy sought justice against the narco-paramilitary Uribe and his most ardent defender–De la Espriella–who as a U.S. citizen had to swear absolute loyalty to Washington, effectively an oath of patriotic loyalty to the empire that sponsors all the political violence.

Uribe’s election in 2002 inaugurated one of the bloodiest campaigns of state terror in Colombia’s history, with Colombian state and paramilitary forces committing about 80% of the country’s human rights crimes, compared to 16% by guerrillas. The death squads were not independent of the Colombian state, as was frequently declared by Washington, but an outgrowth of it: police even patrolled alongside the paramilitaries.

Not surprisingly, Uribe’s name turned up in the files of the U.S. DEA and the CIA as a narcotrafficker, one of the most wanted international drug traffickers, in fact. A declassified National Security Agency report dated September 23, 1991 described him as a collaborator of the Medellin cartel and a personal friend of the notorious Pablo Escobar, who former Colombian presidential candidate and one-time FARC hostage Ingrid Betancourt described as a “monster who had shown his fourteen-year-old son how to dig out a victim’s eyeball with a red-hot spoon.” Such are the realities of iron-fist politics in Colombia. The DEA report states that Uribe was one of the “more important Colombian narco-terrorists contracted by the Colombian narcotics cartels for security, transportation, distribution, collection, and enforcement of narcotics operations in both the United States and Colombia. These individuals were also contracted as ‘hit men’ to assassinate individuals . . . . and to perform terrorist attacks against Colombian officials, other government officials, law enforcement agencies, and groups of other political persuasions.”

A key feature of the vicious class warfare of those years was the funding of a 31,000-member-strong death squad that sowed terror throughout the country, killing thousands of peasants wherever the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrillas were influential. Hundreds of trade union activists were assassinated by hit men in broad daylight in towns and cities occupied by the army. Human rights workers, as well as journalists and professors who dared to report on military massacres, were kidnapped, tortured, and killed, some beheaded or disemboweled.

Millions of peasants were driven off their land and herded into wretched urban slums, the land taken over by prominent paramilitary chiefs or large landowners. This purging of political undesirables was strictly in accordance with Pentagon counter-insurgency training, which counseled the Colombian military to destroy the “social infrastructure” of the FARC, including its longstanding and extensive family, community, and social ties with the peasantry. The goal was to annihilate the social support the guerrillas depended on to survive, not negotiate a way for them to survive differently. Not without reason was Colombia called “the genocidal democracy.”*  Virtually all of its human rights abuses went unpunished.

Instead of addressing the savage poverty that was the root of the war, Uribe perpetuated it while viciously attacking the inevitable guerrilla response. In a country of 45 million people, about 11 million could not afford even one nutritious meal a day and close to two-thirds of the population could not afford to meet its most basic subsistence needs. In rural areas, there were virtually no decent roads, schools, or hospitals, and the poverty rate rose as high as 85%. Such a status quo could only be maintained by major applications of state violence, which is to say, death squads.

A complete bill of indictment against Uribe would take considerable time to draw up. He openly collaborated in the crimes of the death squads; caused massive forced displacement – over four million Colombians were uprooted from the land; ignored structural problems in the economy perpetuating massive unemployment and under-employment; allowed funds for the poor and social sectors to be systematically transferred to drug lords, paramilitaries, rich industrialists, and personal friends; denationalized companies in the telecommunications, oil, and mining sectors; closed down some of Colombia’s biggest hospitals, eliminating over four thousand medical jobs; systematically murdered union organizers, illegally invaded Ecuador; used the judicial system to attack civilians and political opponents; illegally assigned contracts to personal relatives; violated Colombian sovereignty by permitting seven U.S. military bases in Colombia (the Colombian Constitution does not allow the stationing of foreign troops on Colombian soil). In short, he worked long and diligently to convert the Colombian state into a major criminal enterprise.

De la Espriella differs from Uribe in depending more on personal charisma than traditional party structures, but he clearly builds on Uribe’s hardline security legacy while only superficially breaking with the Colombian establishment. According to Mexican journalist Sasi Alejandre, De la Espriella, who ran for president as a political “outsider,” is possibly the most well-connected “outsider” that Colombia has ever had. He comes from a wealthy family close to Álvaro Uribe in the department of Cordoba. In his youth, he founded a “peace foundation,” FIPAZ, which was actually funded by the paramilitaries themselves, specifically by Salvatore Mancuso, the historic and bloodthirsty commander of the paramilitary AUC, who promoted candidates close to the paramilitaries, including Uribe, and dedicated the organization to making public speeches on university campuses promoting the paramilitaries.

Espriella focuses on the “free market” and “merit,” and has promised to reduce the size of the Colombian state by up to 40% in order to provide what the late Edward Herman called a “favorable investment climate.” That’s a climate where taxes are low, profit repatriation allowances generous, poor people too terrified to lift their heads, independent journalists dead or in jail, and workplace and environmental regulations weak or non-existent. This is practically a description of utopia from De la Espriella’s point of view (right-wing libertarianism), and he’s eagerly pursuing the capitalist promised land. He favors “flexible” labor (subordinate to capital) and “productive” environmental regulation (pro-growth), and since taking office on August 7, has announced the repeal of the wealth tax, a levy applied only to those holding liquid assets in excess of 20 million pesos, a tiny minority of Colombians. Meanwhile, his Finance Minister Miguel Gomez Martinez plans a budget cut of at least 20 trillion Colombian pesos, approximately six billion U.S. dollars, which would require a halt to almost all government spending to implement.

In short, the DOGE plan. What could go wrong?

Note.

*Geraldo Javier, S. J. “Colombia: The Genocidal Democracy” Common Courage Press, 1996

Sources.

Kurt Hackbarth, “Soberanía, The Mexican Politics Podcast,” You Tube, August 12, 2026. (Segment two of this episode deals with De la Espriella)

“Cuba: breaking with the island shows ‘clear subordination’ of Abelardo de la Espriella to the U.S.” La Jornada, (Spanish) July 28, 2026″

“De La Espriella: The Candidate of the Establishment,” Sasi Alejandre, La Otra Voz (The Other Voice), June 19, 2026

“A Razor-Thin Victory for the Colombian Right,” Sandra Rátiva Gaona,” ZNET, June 27, 2026

James Petras, “Colombia: State Terror in the Name of Peace,” www.petras.lahaine.org, May 4, 2010

Hans Bennett, “Neo-liberalism Needs Death Squads in Colombia,” http://upsidedownworld.org , September 3, 2009

Manuel Rozental, “The Circle Opens Out: New Evidence of Criminality in Colombian Regime,” http://upsidedownworld.org, May 25, 2010

Laura Violeta Davia Lopez, “A Government Opposed to Peace is a Government Opposed to Life,” ZNET, July 20, 2026.

Description of Pablo Escobar is from Ingrid Betancourt, “Until Death Do Us Part – My Struggle Tp Reclaim Colombia,” (Harper Collins, 2002)

Israel's Crimes Against Humanity In The Americas

• by Michael K. Smith
• www.legalienate.blogspot.com 
• (This article was published previously in Counterpunch, July 17, 2026)
  

"They will try to tell us that democracy, international law, human rights, and human dignity exist and are alive and well; that the genocide against the Palestinian people was merely an aberration, an exception within the global democratic oasis . . . 

-----Mexican journalist Sasi Alejandre

"Latin America has experienced the same tactics of state terrorism that Palestine faces at the hands of regimes armed, trained and advised by Israel."

-----Jack McGrath, Washington Report On Middle East Affairs

A greatly under-appreciated aspect of Zionist murder and dispossession is how truly international the policy has been from the beginning.

There might never even have been an Israel without arms shipments from the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua to the Zionist paramilitary Haganah in 1939 during the British Mandate over Palestine. Nine years after that helping hand was extended, the Haganah, with assistance from the Irgun and Lehi, erased Palestine from the map on orders of U.S. and British authorities (along with banking dynasties like the Rothschilds), building the state of Israel literally on top of where Palestine had been while recruiting Nazis from Europe to help the fledgling Jewish state build up enough weapons. Not long after that, Israel took charge of assisting bloody repression in Latin America.

Israel actually trained the army of Castillo Armas that overthrew Guatemalan democracy in 1954, later shoring up repression across the entire Southern Cone by providing the same training and arms to the military dictatorships of Chile, Argentina, and Paraguay. It also financed Colombian paramilitaries and developed the tactics and weapons used in Mexico's "Dirty War," which included forced disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial killings, carried out against student protesters, political dissidents and campesinos.

The Central America connection was established early on. Israel started sending automatic weapons, tanks, and military planes to the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua in the 1950s, later increasing its support when the dictatorship faced an ultimately successful popular revolution in the 1970s. Israel was Nicaragua's sole source of arms after Jimmy Carter belatedly cut off military aid to Somoza in 1978, who killed tens of thousands of people in his last two years in power, ultimately using Israeli planes to bomb Managua in a final paroxysm of futile violence. After the Sandinista revolution took power, Israel acted as a conduit to arm and train cocaine-trafficking mercenaries (the Contras) attacking schools, farming cooperatives, and medical clinics throughout Nicaragua in an attempt to destroy the popular achievements of the revolution.

By far the bloodiest Israeli policy in the region was directed against Guatemala from the 1970s to the 1990s, when indigenous Mayans rose up against European-descended oligarchs defended by a brutal Mestizo Army. Tel Aviv's arms, intelligence, advisors, surveillance technology, and torture tactics helped kill two hundred thousand people and displace a million more in what the Catholic Church and Guatemalan courts determined to be genocide. Guatemalan army officers credited Israel with turning the tide against the popular uprising via mass extermination in the countryside and counter-insurgency techniques that wiped out guerrilla networks in the cities. 

Such repression was by then a well-established Israeli policy in the region. In 1972, Tel Aviv had put itself at the service of the Salvadorean army, secret police, and death squads, and the following year El Salvador became the first country to receive a major shipment of Israeli military aircraft. From 1975 to 1979, the last years before El Salvador erupted in civil war, Israel provided 83% of Salvadorean military imports, and agreements between the two states continued throughout the war years, including deals for napalm, armaments, and military technology and training.

The scorched earth campaigns that Israel repeatedly relied on were deliberately focused on destroying Central America's resources and crops in order to deprive popular guerrilla movements of the means to sustain themselves, thus forcing displaced populations into small, controlled spaces, which were easily subjected to targeted repression. 

Civilian slaughters were a key feature of these efforts, and they occurred with mind-numbing regularity throughout the Cold War, the more famous among them being the Rio Sumpul massacre, where hundreds of civilians were mutilated and killed trapped between the Salvadorean and Honduran armies, Operation Scorched Earth (El Salvador), during which bodies were partially dissolved in acid and then dumped in a river, and the El Mozote massacre of 1981, when nearly one thousand Salvadoreans were variously shot, raped, beheaded, and burned alive in Church. There were also assassinations of priests and liberation theologians like Archbishop Oscar Romero and Ignacio Ellacuria, the former ordered by Israel-trained Roberto D'Aubuisson and the latter one of six Jesuit priests murdered by the U.S.-trained Atlacatl Battalion along with their housekeeper in 1989.

These were not episodes of merely gratuitous violence, but rational repression that successfully crushed the threat of popular democracy posed by labor organizers, peasant associations, cooperatives, unions, and church-based Bible study groups "infected" by liberation theology's preferential option for the poor, along with others working to improve the lives of ordinary people. A negotiated end to the Salvadorean civil war was finally signed in 1992, but the underlying class conflict remained unresolved, with land and other crucial resources concentrated in the hands of a microscopic minority, which is what produced the civil war in the first place.

Almost three decades of severe gang violence then ensued, after which Nayib Bukele was elected president promising to solve the nation's crime problem. Descended from Christian Palestinians on his father's side, Bukele believes the problem in Gaza is Hamas, not Israel, and is part of a group that makes up one percent of the Salvadorean population. Many members of this group fought on revolutionary fronts during the civil war, such as Schafik Handal, one of the general commanders of the FMLN guerrilla forces. In fact, Bukele's own family collaborated with the FMLN after it became a political party, managing its communications for years through the family's marketing firms, opening the way for Mauricio Funes to win the presidency in 2009. The FMLN later recruited Nayib for a political career, and he became mayor of San Salvador in 2012, and president seven years later. 

Having crafted an anti-Marxist, anti-establishment, "cool" dictator image for himself, Bukele today upholds the legacy of the military dictatorship the FMLN fought against, relying on Washington's counsel and Israel's weapons. "To achieve good results in the war against gangs, it has been necessary to equip our institution. Today we are handing over 800 Arad rifles to Armed Forces units," said Bukele's Defense Minister René Merino in 2022, during a $1.2 million re-armament effort involving Israeli equipment. As a direct result of Bukele's policies, one out of forty Salvadorean adults is now in jail, the highest incarceration rate in the world, many held at CECOT, a massively over-crowded mega-prison notorious for beating and starving prisoners who have have been granted no rights, no trial, and no visitors. 

CECOT actually fits the definition of a concentration camp more than a jail, as prisoners are locked up there not for individual offenses they have been proven to have committed, but because they allegedly fit certain characteristics associated with gang membership. They are dissidents, the abysmally poor, and now even Venezuelans abducted from U.S. soil and trafficked to El Salvador. 

In this incarceration model El Salvador receives $20,000 for each prisoner, a highly lucrative arrangement with prospects for limitless growth, since the ultimate target is not crime per se, but anyone who fails to comply with the aims and practices of the Bukele dictatorship. According to internal Salvadorean intelligence documents, 36% of those Bukele has jailed have no prior criminal history. Data from the National Civil Police originally claimed there were 58,270 gang members outstanding, but as of the end of March 2026, 91,000 gang arrests had been made. Meanwhile, Bukele's "state of exception" suspending constitutional guarantees continues into its fifth year on the pretext of needing to arrest even more. 

The lawless Bukele model has won the admiration of aspiring dictators throughout Latin America, which finds itself in the midst of an accelerating campaign to replace constitutional crime fighting with institutionalized state violence. In Chile, the Pinochet-aligned Jose Antonio Kast ran for president on a promise to suspend constitutional guarantees. In Ecuador, Daniel Noboa is replicating the state of permanent emergency and moving ahead with plans to construct Bukele-inspired mega-prisons. In Costa Rica and Paraguay, preventive detention and harsh criminal penalties are increasingly entrenched. In Argentina, Javier Milei openly champions fascist Israel while his "zero tolerance" crime policy includes ritual public display of prisoners in degrading conditions. Niceties like the presumption of innocence are reserved for white collar cases.

At the other end of the spectrum are vast Latin American protest movements that know from bitter experience that some of the fiercest partisans of "never again" are actually committed to a policy of "over and over again" at their expense, having perfected extermination in Palestine and then exported it throughout Latin America.

It can't be long before Bukele's dungeons include dissidents trafficked from the U.S. for acting on the conviction that "we are all Palestinians." 

Sources:

Salvadorean Defense Minister Rene Merino quoted by Sasi Alejandre, "Palestine and The Global State of Exception," (Spanish), https://www.naiz.eus/es

"The Dangerous Expansion of Bukele-ism," La Jornada (Spanish), March 29, 2026

Isabel Rikkers and Noeli Brigden, "Christian Zionism in Bukele's El Salvador," NACLA, October 9, 2024

"Israel's Role in the Guatemalan Genocide," Middle East Monitor, October 5, 2015

"Israel's Bloodstained Legacy in Latin America," Jack McGrath, Washington Report On Middle East Affairs, March 24, 2025

"Israel's Latin American Trail of Terror," Al Jazeera, June 5, 2003

On Israel's recruitment of Nazis to build up its base of weapons, see Trita Parsi interview on Breaking Points, "Israel's Puppet Plan: Recruited 'Terrorist' To Run Iran," July 14, 2026

The 250 Year Pregnancy: Will U.S. Democracy Ever Be Born?

 

“Those who own the country ought to govern it.”
First Chief Justice of the United States John Jay

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” 
Thomas Paine, Common Sense

 

As we contemplate the majesty of our 250 years as a democratic republic, with our glorious president recently threatening to murder his negotiating counterparts on their way back to Iran, an ancient civilization he threatened to exterminate to the last man, woman, and child, let us pause to consider that perhaps the “Miracle in Philadelphia,” as we modestly call the pact that barely holds us together, was something more than a noble experiment to bring democracy to a fallen world. 

Although by our own telling the Founding Fathers (a term better suited to a nursery story than an account of political history) were free of any taint of the extremes of wealth and poverty that characterized the “Old World,” in actual fact they were part of a circle of men that had received vast land grants from the British crown from the very earliest English settlements. By 1700, three-fourths of the acreage in New York State belonged to fewer than a dozen people, and by 1750, fewer than five hundred men in five colonial cities owned most of the land and controlled most of the commerce, banking, mining, and manufacturing, as well as a majority of the newspapers and journals on the eastern seaboard. 

This makes it rather problematic to characterize the emerging United States as an egalitarian, middle-class society in any politically substantive sense. By 1787, the year of the Constitutional Convention, property qualifications left about one-third of the white male population disenfranchised, and more than a majority permanently excluded from running for office. Women, Indians, and Africans – whether slaves or “free” – were completely excluded as well. Finally, there were no secret ballots at the time, which meant that even those who were qualified to vote could not cast their ballots free of promised rewards or threatened punishments put forth by the wealthy.

As for the men who drew up the Constitution, it should come as no surprise to learn that there were no dirt farmers or indentured servants at Philadelphia. People who have only their labor with which to pay bills cannot take four months off to discuss their views on political and economic arrangements, much as they might like to. Those who did enjoy such luxuries dominated the events at Philadelphia, consisting almost exclusively of financially successful planters, slaveholders, merchants, creditors, bankers, and manufacturers. Their concerns were overwhelmingly property-related, and they wrote farmers, artisans, and workers out of the Constitution.

What they wanted was not an inclusive democracy, but a strong central government to deal with three prominent challenges: (1) better management of conditions in trade and industry, (2) better handling of relations with rival states internationally, and (3) a cure for the chronic rebelliousness and “insurgent spirit” of the mass of common people, who were engaged in broad political agitation to the point of having taken over a number of state governments. Strong popular resistance dated back thirteen years, in fact, having been particularly fierce in the lead-up to the Declaration of Independence, when British rule was routed throughout the colonies. In 1774, for example, in every county seat in rural Massachusetts thousands of farmers had dragged British officials into the streets and made them repeatedly run a gauntlet, removing their hats and writing and announcing their resignations again and again before thousands of commoners thronging them on both sides. 

Initially conceived to amend the Articles of Confederation, the Constitutional Convention evolved into a forum on establishing a unified nation out of the thirteen states. Waves of popular protest succeeding those that had replaced British rule with local democracy before the battles of Lexington and Concord were regarded by the Founders as a threat to be subdued, not a stimulus to establishing full democracy. No matter that an overwhelming majority of the “free” population – about 85% of Americans – then lived in the agrarian sector, most of them small farmers, tenants, or indentured servants, with interests quite distinct from those of wealthy elites. 

These people were burdened by high rents, low incomes, and a series of ruinous taxes stemming from the Seven Years War. To survive, they often had to borrow money at very high interest rates. Desperate to pay off their debts, they then had to mortgage their future crops, which only deepened their indebtedness. In those days debtors’ prison was a fixture of American life, and jails were crowded with economic prisoners, the overwhelming majority of them poor and working class. Given this situation, many felt that the American Revolution had been fought in vain, leading to violent uprisings in a number of states. 

Perhaps the best known such revolt occurred in 1787 when debtor farmers in Western Massachusetts led by Daniel Shays took up arms. Their rebellion was crushed by state militias after skirmishes that claimed eleven lives and left scores wounded. Shays was not an advocate of “free trade” as a solution to common economic woes. On the contrary, he wanted relief from oppressive debt, taxes, and rigid adherence to paying debts in hard currency. He desired not “limited government,” but more state intervention to protect against waves of speculation that bankrupted commoners. More specifically, he supported court shut-downs to impede debt collection that was ruining farmers. 

The causes that animated revolts like Shays Rebellion were suppressed, not rationally debated and resolved in Philadelphia, where the Founding Fathers acted on their belief that persons of good breeding and ample fortune should dominate the affairs of state and check the leveling impulses of the fickle and unruly masses, ever prone to irrational passions and wicked projects (like debt relief). James Madison, who played the most crucial role among the Founders, focused on how to construct a government that would win some popular support while conceding only a minimum of democratic substance, so as to preserve the existing class structure favoring the wealthy.

It had to be a government strong enough to serve the expanding needs of an entrepreneurial class while holding off the democratic, egalitarian demands of the common people. The way to do that, Madison thought, was by excluding commoners from most points where power was exercised. Madison correctly noted that “the various and unequal distribution of property” was what fueled class conflict, although he called it “faction.”

“Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society,” said Madison in Federalist Paper #10, sounding a lot like Karl Marx. “The first object of government is the protection of different and unequal faculties for acquiring property,” he went on, without noting that inheritance, a primary method of “acquiring” property, cannot plausibly be described as being the result of exercising a human faculty.

Roger Sherman, a delegate to the convention from Connecticut, expressed a common sentiment among the fifty-five assembled dignitaries, saying that “the people should have as little to do as may be about the government.” Alexander Hamilton agreed, arguing that the people “seldom judge or determine right.” Another delegate, Elbridge Gerry, a wealthy, Harvard-educated merchant from Massachusetts who died in office as Vice President to Madison, felt conceding any power at all to commoners constituted an “excess of democracy,” calling such a system the worst of all evils because of its “leveling spirit.”* He even opposed popular elections for the House of Representatives.

Ultimately, the House of Representatives was subject to direct election by the people, but even that concession required an argument to get it established, which shouldn’t have been the case if Jefferson’s high-minded reference to “we the people” eleven years before actually referred to national independence instead of merely class interest.

But in the delegates’ view “the people” referred only to a very select portion of the population. It didn’t mean the half of the population that was female, the hundreds of thousands of slaves or even “free” Africans in the north, or the hundreds of indigenous peoples who Thomas Jefferson referred to as “merciless Indian savages” in the Declaration of Independence. It also didn’t mean the poorest of white males, who were disqualified by property qualifications, nor those who were barred from the polls by literacy tests. As for the rest, though not formally excluded, many simply could not manage a ten or fifteen mile horse-and-buggy ride over muddy roads to the county seat to cast a ballot, a typical practical obstacle to voting.

Such were the political realities at the dawn of the self-proclaimed greatest democracy in world history.

Fifty-nine years later the “empire of liberty” (Thomas Jefferson) invaded and later annexed over half of Mexico in the name of its civilized master race, and then commenced to finishing off  indigenous peoples in the West through disease, deliberate starvation, and war. In the midst of that campaign the contradiction of a free and democratic society rooted in slavery erupted in a civil war that butchered hundreds of thousands of Americans and nearly destroyed the “democratic experiment” altogether.

Then followed twelve years of “reconstruction,” during which time ex-slaves proved themselves remarkably adept at lifting themselves up by their bootstraps, a practical necessity given that a briefly instituted policy of “40 acres and a mule” given to freed slaves reached perhaps one percent of the ex-slaves who desperately needed it. Tragically, the brief progress that was made during Reconstruction was brutally cut short when federal troops occupying the south were withdrawn in 1877, leaving ex-slaves to the mercy of white supremacist terror that continued into the civil rights era, including thousands of lynchings, often in front of cheering throngs who considered such wholesale degradation a form of entertainment.

It would be gratifying to report that with the (in principle) enfranchisement of the entire adult population, unrestrained democracy finally flourished in the U.S., replacing the horrors of our anti-democratic past. Alas, such was not the case. The successors to the “rich and well born” at Philadelphia in 1787 created the modern public relations industry during WWI to destroy the labor movement by drafting its members into what was then the bloodiest war in history. This initial success at “manufacturing consent” to crush the main threat to capitalism encouraged further development of the industry, leading to an utterly debased form of political “democracy” that shattered the merest hint of working class unity into a galaxy of market niches along racial, ethnic, religious, gender, age, and even dietary lines, among others. “Democracy” was reduced to selling identity cliques to the highest bidder, an electoral circus that was finally taken over by a complete clown, an outcome that should have surprised no one.

Because whatever else may be said about him, Donald Trump is the most representative president the U.S. has ever had, in that his absolute shamelessness embodies our collective narcissism to near perfection. He appears fully capable of passing off a noisy flatulence attack at the presidential podium as the introduction of a new line of White House perfume while denouncing reporters fleeing the scene with burning eyes for delivering “fake news.” It is easy enough to condemn those who still believe the barrage of idiotic claims issuing forth from our Dear Leader, but the fact remains that – politically speaking – he, and we, are the product of a specialized class of media mind managers which has convinced us that we are the greatest democracy in history, immaculately conceived by philosopher kings in Philadelphia, and utterly incapable of criminality, though not of an occasional inadvertent atrocity,** and that any opposition to what we like to call “the American way of life” represents irrational hatred on the part of those who just have to be in league with the Devil (Evil Empire, Axis of Evil, etc).

In other words, reports of an Age of Reason having woven Enlightenment values deep into the fabric of “our democracy” are greatly exaggerated. Though the “alternative media” can and do spew out many a myth-making minnow, we-the-people collectively swallowed an ideological whale long before Donald Trump appeared on the scene. In fact, that’s why he appeared on the scene.

There simply is no getting around the fact that ideological absurdity forms the political bedrock of team USA. Our freedom-loving forebears rescued Africans from savagery and gave them civilization? Check. The Indians they exterminated were savages? Check. Capitalism working people to death in mines and factories built character? Check. Communism is satanic? Check. Women factory workers didn’t need their wages? Check. Chinese workers spread leprosy? Check. God gave Palestine to Israel? Check. Arabs are terrorists? Check. Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? Check. Attacking and destroying Vietnam was an act of self-defense? Check. Normandy was the key battle of WWII? Check. There is no alternative to capitalism? Check.

The way out is the way forward, and even the way back, for there was a path not taken advocated by the likes of Thomas Paine, who regarded the American revolution as not just a tax revolt, but a global fight to establish human rights and liberty, including freeing and retroactively compensating slaves, a truly revolutionary stance. He was struck by the mobilization of mechanics and laborers, and the formation of committees to enforce colonial resolutions, and felt that the American Revolution was for all people, not just the rich and well-born.

The law itself should be “King,” he thought, accountable to democracy, not a monarch. He believed legitimacy – the right to rule – could only be granted by the people, and rejected unchecked elite privilege and hereditary monarchy. In Common Sense, he argued that ordinary people were capable of governing themselves and should have sole authority to form their own government and write a constitution. That did not happen in Philadelphia in 1787.

Crucially for his descendants today, Paine argued that political democracy required a certain level of economic equality to function properly. He was an early advocate of social welfare provisions, such as pensions and direct inheritance rights for young people, the latter a lump-sum cash payment he advocated be given to every citizen on reaching adulthood, to be funded by a tax on inherited property. 

Paine did not believe that the earth was a commodity to be monopolized by the few. Private property was necessary for its cultivation, but concentrated in few hands it deprived the community of its “natural inheritance.” Paine favored compensation to make sure no citizen was worse off under civilization than prior to its establishment, arguing that over-concentration of wealth led directly to despotism. The rich end up buying “democracy” and destroying people’s rights in the process, as financial precarity breeds political submission. Progressive taxation and redistribution of wealth were the antidote, he argued, without which the poor could have no meaningful liberty. 

Paine did believe the American Revolution was unique, but not because of the brilliance of U.S. elites, but because of the common understanding of freedom and self-government held by ordinary Americans. In contrast to revolutions elsewhere, Paine thought, “here the value and quality of liberty, the nature of government, and the dignity of man, were known and understood, and the attachment of the Americans to these principles produced the Revolution, as a natural and almost unavoidable consequence.” 

Although Paine has been criticized for not living up to his radical democratic ideals, they are  our true and honorable revolutionary heritage. We can either reclaim them, or continue to watch the pathetic attempts to create a trillionaire class, which might inspire a Democratic Party hack to hail billionaires as “the new middle class.”

The choice is ours.

From Counterpunch . . . .

June 18, 2026

The Second Coming of Manifest Destiny

Michael K. Smith

No one with the slightest respect for diplomacy would ever name Ronald Johnson ambassador to anyplace but Hell. Hiring him to be top diplomat is like hiring Jeffrey Epstein to be the recreation director at a girls high school. His appointment as ambassador to Mexico indicates a hard-line policy of force over diplomacy towards Claudia Sheinbaum and the Fourth Transformation.

Johnson is a retired Colonel, a “former” CIA agent, a super-hawk, an expert in undercover psychological operations and asymmetric irregular warfare, and a seasoned ex-Green Beret with extensive tours of duty in three imperial slaughterhouses – El Salvador, Afghanistan, and Iraq. His current role is to impose Trump’s national security agenda on Mexico, reducing it to a U.S. protectorate, which is what the U.S. means by “partnership.” He has vast experience in dissimulation and deception, espionage and counterespionage, otherwise known as systematic lying, as well as military intervention, which is the U.S. “solution” to drug-trafficking.

He graduated as a Green Beret with a master’s in strategic intelligence, and specializes in undercover operations and unconventional warfare. In the 1990s, he was dispatched to the Balkans as a senior military officer in charge of a team made up of personnel from the CIA, the NSA, and Special Missions Unit to arrest people accused of “war crimes,” which conveniently excluded U.S. and NATO officials committing large scale atrocities in the region at the time.

Johnson was appointed to get Mexico back in line with Washington’s to-hell-with-the-people agenda. Days after he arrived in the Mexican capital he was guest-of-honor at a far-right dinner hosted by Eduardo Verástegui, a wealthy far-right actor aligned with Bolsonaro, Milei, and Trump. He was also at another gala welcome with members of the American Society, an “independent” business group of which Johnson is the honorary leader, and which dedicates itself to blaming Mexico for drug-trafficking while ignoring massive U.S. involvement in the same trade, as though drug-kingpins weren’t well stocked with U.S. military grade weapons and nourished by its recreational drug culture, money laundering, distribution gangs, and CIA drug-running going back many decades.

Since his appointment, Johnson has been turning the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City into a C.I.A. operations center. Obviously uninterested in strengthening trade, investment for development, or even intelligence for legitimate security purposes, his priority is to prevent Mexico’s Morena party from remaining in power. For Donald Trump, allowing Washington’s “back yard” to be governed by a reformist government outside established imperial guidelines is an invitation to popular rebellion that must be crushed lest it ignite a regional conflagration. Morena’s slogan alone is deeply offensive: “for the good of all, poor people first,” which flies directly in the face of capitalist dogma putting rich investors first, last, and always, with trickle-down pieties for the poor and vanishing middle class.

Obviously, Johnson’s background and abilities go directly against the staples of diplomacy, which are courtesy, non-judgmental dialogue, and negotiation, all of them indispensable to sane international relations but useless for capitalist plundering. Thus, Johnson has to follow an imperial policy of pressure and destabilizing force, in order to deepen Mexican dependence on the U.S. and undermine the once defensive containment policy of the Mexican Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of National Defense, an effort primarily focused on reducing immigration through the use of productive investment at the most common migration origin points.

Johnson has a deep understanding of Latin America and the Caribbean (but not Mexico), because of a career spent in the area of responsibility of the Pentagon’s Southern Command, until 1999 at the network of U.S. bases in the Panama Canal Zone. In the 1980s, he served as military advisor to the Salvadorean army during its war of virtual extermination against the FMLN.

The Salvadorean military officials carrying that policy out had been indoctrinated at the U.S. School of the Americas (also known as the school of coups) in fanatical anti-Communism, then went out and tortured and massacred civilians to the tune of 70,000 killed from the late seventies to the early nineties, most of them peasants and indigenous peoples.

Johnson retired as a colonel in 1998 and joined the CIA, where he participated in world-wide combat operations including counterinsurgency, state terrorism, espionage, “scientific” torture, and unconventional warfare, among other responsibilities. He led air, land, and sea deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq, and was in charge of CIA paratrooper operations.

From 2019 to 2021 Johnson was ambassador to El Salvador, during which time Nayib Bukele laid the foundations for repressive dictatorship, featuring arbitrary mass incarceration, concentration of executive power, imprisonment of journalists, closing down of human rights groups, and digital spying on journalists and the public.

Johnson works closely with Marco Rubio, who accused ex-president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrabor (AMLO) of handing  Mexico over to drug cartels, a routine smear applied to unsubmissive Mexican governments. During his term in office (2018-2024) AMLO had the nerve to impose the National Security Law on the U.S., which has limited the covert activities of foreign agents like those of the DEA, FBI, NSA, DIA, and CIA, who since December 2020 have been required to inform the Mexican government about their operations inside Mexico, an intolerable affront to American imperial marauders who consider the entire world a U.S. trophy.

This past April 19 Johnson announced the deaths of two U.S. agents in a car accident in Chihuahua, alerting the world to CIA involvement in dismantling a drug lab in Sierra Tarahumara, which put Chihuahuan governor Maru Campos of the National Action Party (PAN) under fire from the Mexican federal government and the Morena party for authorizing foreign agents to operate without permission on Mexican territory. Morena initially threatened to impeach Campos, but later declined to pursue the option.

On April 29 Johnson posted in his social media the U.S. filing of criminal charges against Sinaloa governor Ruben Rocha and nine others by the U.S. federal prosecutor’s office in the Southern District of New York. In ensuing days President Claudia Sheinbaum rebuked the United States for abruptly making the Rocha case public, and questioned the legitimacy of implicating Rocha and other Morena officials without demonstrating clear evidence of their supposed guilt.

The Ruben Rocha extradition request may have been a Hail Mary to rescue Maru Campos from the political consequences of her collaboration with the CIA. If Morena can be put on the political defensive with drug trafficking charges it might not be able to pull off an aggressive full court press against U.S. intervention. Or so Washington may be thinking. Whatever the strategy, the complete lack of reciprocity in extradition requests between the two “partners” demonstrates that it is a political one, not a neutral law-enforcement initiative undertaken in a spirit of fraternal cooperation.

Since Morena came to power in 2018 Mexico has made 269 extradition requests of the U.S., but none have been granted. Thirty-six were rejected outright and 233 are still pending. Some of the requests have to do with the 43 disappeared students at Ayotzinapa in 2014, but the gravity of this crime has not induced U.S. cooperation. Another request involves Thomas Aron, who tortured kidnapped students at Ayotzinapa, and is now comfortably living in Israel where the Holy State widens its genocidal operations and refuses to extradite him.

Ignoring all of this, the U.S. demands instant extradition of Morena officials based on accusation alone. Even if a given accusation is shown to have merit, the U.S. is fully capable of offering a pardon in exchange for a corrupt deal, as it did with Juan Orlando Hernandez in Honduras. It’s not exactly news that pardons and everything else are permanently for sale in the current White House. But the issue goes beyond government relations, as the Mexican people recognize the stakes and have begun to take action.

To protest Maru Campos’s collaboration with the CIA, Morena supporters carried out a protest march on May 16. The march took place in the scorching Chihuahuan heat with local PAN supporters (Governor Campos’s party) doing everything they could to discourage turnout: blocking and tearing-up roads, closing bridges, putting up toll booths, shutting down public transport, and dispatching party thugs to intimidate marchers and attack journalists. Still, 20,000 protesters turned out, replete with Mexican flags and anti-CIA signs to make it known that the Mexican people will not consent to clandestine U.S. operations inside Mexico. For them, Campos’s collaboration effectively ceded authority to the United States, a treasonous act that effectively terminated her right to continue as governor in their view.

Campos brazenly defended her collaboration as a “successful operation,” and clumsily strove to turn it into a presidential bid. Why should I have to answer to the Mexican Senate, she wanted to know, when Senators are being accused of ties to organized crime? Her abject servility and yearning for impunity couldn’t have been more starkly demonstrated.

In her June 2 address to the nation commemorating two years since being elected to power, President Sheinbaum called out U.S. intervention in her strongest terms to date, saying that it was legitimate to question U.S. intentions when it makes extradition requests without offering evidence, and stating that the U.S. may be planning to meddle in Mexican elections. A day later Ambassador Johnson publicly responded with the usual fake neutrality, stating that “the struggle against the cartels should unite us, not divide us,” adding that we should never allow politics to divide us. “Every time we try to convert this shared security challenge into a political discussion, it’s a missed opportunity to strengthen our cooperation and protect the people we serve,” he claimed.

As though it were possible to serve the rich and the poor at the same time.

That the U.S. seeks to destroy Mexican sovereignty couldn’t be more obvious. Early in his second term, President Trump declared the cartels foreign terrorist organizations, and the U.S is now using that designation to target Mexican officials whose political ideology it loathes but cannot debate. It intends to inflict defeat without having to debate, but it can only do this if Mexico cooperates in its own degradation and refuses to publicly state that the Emperor has no clothes, which appears unlikely.

The announced crusade to rescue Mexico from corruption, after all, comes from a government whose president makes millions of dollars off of illegal stock transactions using insider information, then plugs the companies involved during his public speeches, this while the U.S. supports genocidal Israel to the hilt, kidnaps a foreign head of state (Maduro), and launches an unprovoked war of aggression with Iran, pushing the world economy to the brink of another Great Depression.

It should be recalled that General Santa Ana’s slow response to the Texas border crisis 180 years ago resulted in the dismemberment of Mexico and the loss of half its territory. Now the gringo imperialists are coming for the other half. If U.S. intervention is not promptly shut-down, low-grade secession movements could emerge in the border states.

Washington’s goal is to get Mexico to abort its solidarity with Cuba, let the U.S. extract rare earth elements and lithium, and prevent a collapse of the discredited PRI/PAN in real time in hopes of reviving Mexican subservience to the civilized master race in Washington. Call it the second coming of Manifest Destiny.

But this time, the Mexican people are awake, and aware of what happened last time. They’re not likely to surrender the other half of their territory to a fading U.S. empire with a mentally unstable president who is the envy of no sane person in the world.

Sources.

Ernesto Nuñez, “US Ambassador Ronald Johnson, an uncomfortable voice amid Mexico’s defense of sovereignty,” El Pais International, June 3, 2026

“Lost City,” Miguel Angel Velazquez, La Jornada, (Spanish) May 26, 2026

“CIA Out of Chihuahua,” Soberanía: The Mexican Politics podcast, Episode 107, You Tube, May 20, 2026

“The CIA in Chihuahua and the U.S. Counterattack: They didn’t come to train, they came to destabilize,” Soberanía: The Mexican Politics podcast, You Tube, May 1, 2026

C. Fazio, “Trump and Johnson: Bad Omen,” La Jornada (Spanish), December 23, 2024

C. Fazio, “The Johnson Factor,” La Jornada (Spanish), December 22, 2025

“From Cooperation to Intervention,” La Jornada (Spanish), June 1, 2026

Michael K. Smith is the author of  The Madness of King George, and Portraits of Empire