In Latin America, a region unfamiliar with attacks on democracy, the attack by pro-Trump extremists on the US Capitol in Washington awoke on Wednesday – and dark memories of political upheaval in the region.
The phrase “GolpeDeEstadoEnEEUUU,” (“coup d’etat in the United States”) tended on Twitter as analysts and others compared the political chaos in Washington to historical and contemporary unrest in their homelands.
“The USA has become part of Latin America,” said Lester Ramírez, of the Assn. for a More Just Society, a non-governmental organization for social justice in Honduras, said in an interview.
Scenes of the violent mob in Washington are reminiscent of a 2009 coup in the Central American nation that forced President Manuel Zelaya into exile. The collisions also recalled protests that erupted after Honduras President Juan Orlando Hernández was re-elected in a 2017 vote tainted by allegations of fraud – but called legitimate by President Trump’s administration.
“Authoritarianism is the rule here,” Ramirez said, and now the United States is getting a taste.
According to him, future regional leaders may react with disbelief to American criticism of their democratic processes: ‘You have no moral authority. Your country has serious problems. How are you going to say what I’m doing is bad? ‘
For many in Latin America, there was considerable irony in the outbreak of political unrest in a country often accused of fueling coups throughout the region.
The left-wing Venezuelan government, which wanted to openly remove the Trump administration from power, said in a statement that “with this unfortunate episode, the United States is experiencing what it has generated in other countries with its aggression policy.”
Chilean academic Boris Yopo H tweets: “Trump’s legacy: United States, Banana Republic, 21st Century.”
Elected President Joe Biden acknowledges the damage to America’s world reputation. “The world is watching,” he said during a speech on the takeover of the American Capitol. “Think about what the rest of the world is looking at.”
Photos spread on social media of bearded extremists rummaging through the offices of U.S. representatives led tongue-in-cheek tweets, claiming that ‘Conan the Barbarian’ and his henchmen had seized the holy halls of Congress.
In Peru, the scenes in Washington evoked for many the 1992 pandemonium, when President Alberto Fujimori, a right-wing populist, dissolved the national congress, justifying the coup as a step against rebels and drug traffickers. Fujimori was later captured for human rights violations.
“Today, Trump looks a lot like Alberto Fujimori,” Peruvian journalist José Alejandro Godoy tweeted. “The extreme right is the biggest threat to democracy in the world. And be careful, it has its followers here. ”
In El Salvador, the American bed lamb for some remembered the scene in San Salvador last year, when President Nayib Bukele – a close American ally and Trump fan – sent troops to Congress in what critics called an attempt to take over the legislature branch name.
“Trump and Bukele are very much in agreement with the fact that both came to power via democratic channels, but both started in office, both started attacking democratic institutions,” said Celia Medrano, a political analyst in San Salvador. said an interview. “Both want to keep themselves in power by force.”
In Chile, some observers saw parallels between what happened on Capitol Hill and the bombing of La Moneda Presidential Palace in the capital, Santiago, on September 11, 1973, when General Augusto Pinochet led the coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende.
But Chilean President Sebastian Piñera, a center-right billionaire, said Chile “has confidence in the strength of American democracy to guarantee the rule of law and justice.”
Critics across the region have attacked Trump supporters.
“What are our pro-Trump compatriots saying right now,” tweeted Carlos F. Galán, a former senator in Colombia, a close ally of the United States. ‘Everything is quiet. … Extremes are the biggest threat to democracy. ”
Some opinion polls have shown a decline in American popularity in much of Latin America since Trump took office. The Washington riots nevertheless surprise many observers accustomed to seeing the United States as a standard-bearer for democracy and the peaceful transfer of power – even if Washington’s foreign policy supports non-democratic regimes in Latin America.
Carlos Bravo Regidor, a political analyst and a professor at CIDE, a public research center in Mexico City, said the violence in Washington exposed the United States as ‘just another country where there is political disruption’.
“The masks are off,” he said.
Special correspondents Cecilia Sánchez and Liliana Nieto del Río in Mexico City, Alexander Renderos in San Salvador, Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires, Adriana León in Lima, Peru, Jorge Poblete in Santiago and Mery Mogollón in Caracas, Venezuela, contributed. report.