SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
colonialism
Trump's White Nationalism Will Only Lead to Division, Poverty, and Mass Violence
The advice of President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to the European Union to adopt a white nationalist domestic and foreign policy and attempt to initiate a new round of colonialism is monstrous, both morally and in practical terms.
Mar 12, 2026
Under President Donald J. Trump, the United States has now become an engine for the promulgation of white nationalism. Not since the 1930s has such an ideology, which exalts those ethnic groups it codes as “white,” while denigrating all others, underpinned the domestic and foreign policies of a major world power.
Typically (for our moment), Trump’s recent National Security Strategy (NSS) depicted Europe as in distinct “civilizational decline” because of the European Union’s commitment to multiracial democracy and international humanitarian law. These days, thanks to its racial policies, the Trump team even finds a way to inject racial hatred into dry economic statistics, complaining that “Continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP [gross domestic product]—down from 25% in 1990 to 14% today.”
A Mayor Named Khan
As it happens, though, on a per-person basis, Europeans are more than twice as wealthy today in real terms as they were 36 years ago. The dictum once cited by Mark Twain that there are “lies, damned lies, and statistics” is exemplified in Trump’s National Security Strategy. In 1991, just two years before the European Union (EU) was first formed, the per-capita GDP there was $15,470 (in today’s dollars). In 2024, that figure was $43,305. What changed since then wasn’t that Europe began decaying, but that the well-being of the people in the global South, in what Trump dismisses as “shithole countries,” has actually also improved significantly, whether he likes it or not, changing Europe’s share of global GDP.
In his National Security Strategy, Trump admits, however, that Europe’s supposed economic degradation doesn’t bother him nearly as much as another issue: “This economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure,” thanks to Europe’s migration policies. In short, Trump’s government has now adopted a modernized version of the Nazi Great Replacement ideology, slamming “migration policies that are transforming the [European] continent and creating strife,” along with “cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.”
The only thing that outstrips Trump’s Islamophobia is his horror of Black people.
Trump claims that he’s no longer sure Europeans will even remain European. He supposedly worries that, two decades from now, the continent will be unrecognizable and EU countries no longer capable of being Washington’s “reliable allies.” That barb is, of course, clearly aimed at Muslim immigrants to Europe, even though they are a distinct minority of those arriving there. In an interview about his NSS, Trump snidely remarked, “If you take a look at London, you have a mayor named Khan.” And he then went on to exclaim in horror that immigrants aren’t just coming from the Middle East, “they’re coming in from the Congo, tremendous numbers of people coming from the Congo.” In other words, the only thing that outstrips Trump’s Islamophobia is his horror of Black people.
Of course, he’s completely misinformed about immigration to Europe, which means his NSS is as well. As a start, the largest influx of people into the EU in recent few years has been 4.3 million Ukrainians. The major sources of immigration to Germany in 2024 were Ukraine, Romania, Turkey, Syria, and India. For Spain, it was Colombia, Morocco, Venezuela, Peru, and Argentina. As for Europe’s future reliability, Trump has already said that he “can’t trust” Denmark, no matter that its population is solidly Lutheran and predominantly blond, because that country won’t give him Greenland. And since the president has expressed a willingness to break up the NATO alliance, if necessary, to add 57,000 Greenlanders to his feudal domains, his doubting of European dependability should be considered richly ironic.
Aryan Reliability
The underpinnings of Trump’s reasoning can (or at least should) be described as Nazi in style. After all, he’s assuming that the immigrants he loathes are inherently incapable of becoming Europeans and will make those countries intrinsically untrustworthy as allies of the United States. Of the EU countries, he recently asserted that “they’ll change their ideology, obviously, because the people coming in have a totally different ideology.” Yet British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, born in Southampton to an immigrant Indian-East African family of Hindu faith, was widely viewed as having restored British-US diplomatic relations after years of strain.
In reality, studies show that socioeconomic status, not national origin, best predicts how immigrants will vote. In Germany, the better-off Russian Germans, who far outnumber largely working-class Turkish Germans, tend to vote for right-of-center parties. Both groups, however, seem happy to participate in European politics in accordance with local norms. If, for Trump, the term “immigrants” in this context is a dog whistle for Muslims, it might be noted that 9 of the 22 countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, that have been formally designated by Trump as “major non-NATO allies” are Muslim majority.
His foreign policy reasoning in that NSS eerily mirrors the crackpot logic of Adolf Hitler, who saw France as an enemy of Germany’s because it had allegedly fallen irretrievably under non-Aryan Jewish influence, and who held out hope in the 1920s and early 1930s that Aryan elements would prevail over Jewish ones in Britain, a country he preferred as a strategic partner because of the Germanic ancestry of part of its population. In Trump’s NSS, immigrant Europeans from Africa and the Middle East play the role that Jews did in Hitler’s thinking—that is, non-Aryan underminers of national integrity. Hitler’s conspiratorial racism was, of course, all too grimly insane, and so, too, is that of Trump’s NSS.
“Mongols and Negroes”
Central to the NSS is the Great Replacement. The idea, though not the phrase, goes back to 1900 when the French nationalist parliamentarian and novelist Maurice Barrès wrote, “Today, new French have slipped in among us… who want to impose on us their ways of feeling.” He warned of Jewish, Italian, and other immigrants. “The name of France might well survive,” he commented, but “the special character of our country would nevertheless be destroyed.” Amid a political crisis over the wrongful conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus (of Jewish and Alsatian heritage) for supposed espionage for the German embassy, Barrès denounced the famed French novelist Émile Zola, a supporter of Dreyfus, as “not French” but a rootless cosmopolitan from a Venetian background.
Fifty years later, the French Nazi René Binet (1913-1957) coined the phrase “Great Replacement.” An ex-Communist, he had served as a Nazi collaborator during World War II in the Waffen Grenadier Brigade of the Charlemagne paramilitary Protection Squadron (Schutzstaffel or SS). After the war, in his 1950 book Theory of Racism, he wrote in dismay about how Western Europe had been invaded by “Mongols and Negroes”—that is, by the Soviets and the Americans. He lamented that Jewish-dominated capital also supposedly controlled Europe (it didn’t, of course) and falsely alleged that Jewish CEOs were bringing in immigrants in a deliberate attempt to replace civilized white Europeans.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had it right when he said that Spain faces a choice between “being an open and prosperous country or a closed and poor one.”
Sadly enough, Binet’s ideas have been revived in this century by French thinkers and politicians. Renaud Camus published his 21st century version of the theory in 2010, entitling his book The Great Replacement. Such falsehoods were echoed in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, when American Nazis chanted, “Jews will not replace us” (and President Trump called the assembled protesters, as well as those who opposed them, “very fine people”). Camus came around to supporting like-minded politicians in the far-right French National Rally (formerly the National Front) party, led by Marine Le Pen, who also became a Trump ally. When a French court convicted her of embezzlement in 2025 and excluded her from politics for five years, Trump denounced the verdict and launched the slogan, “Free Marine Le Pen.” Holding Le Pen, a far-right racist politician, accountable to the rule of law is part of what Trump was complaining about in his NSS when he cited European “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition.”
Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, had been a paratrooper in the ruthless Algerian War (1954-1962) that killed between half a million and a million Algerians in a bid to keep that country under French colonial domination. The elder Le Pen came to lead the newly founded National Front in 1972 and was surrounded by far-right figures who had collaborated with the Nazis. While the party reinvented itself under Marine Le Pen in 2017 as the National Rally and has moved slightly toward the center, many of its supporters harbor neo-Nazi ideas about racial purity, now typically aimed at Arab and Amazigh Muslims.
Forget 1776 and All That
The central concerns of that National Security Strategy now animate the Trump administration’s foreign policy. At the annual Munich Security Conference in early February, for instance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio took up what the Victorian jingoist writer Rudyard Kipling once termed the White Man’s Burden, crowing that “for five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding.” He neglected to mention all the massacres, destruction, and looting that European colonialists perpetrated over those centuries. Belgium’s King Leopold II alone, for instance, instituted policies in the Congo from 1885 to 1908 that may have killed as many as 10 million people. That bloody episode inspired Joseph Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness, in the final sentence of which the protagonist utters, “The horror! The horror!“
After the end of World War II in 1945, Rubio lamented, a Europe in ruins contracted. “Half of it,” he added, “lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow.” He mourned that “the great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.”
He also displayed a striking mixture of white nationalism and colonial nostalgia—and with it, an ignorance of the history of decolonization, which neither occurred only after 1945, nor was in the main communist led. After all, the United States launched its anti-colonial struggle in 1776. Most of Latin America was liberated from the Spanish Empire in the early 19th century by Simón Bolívar and other fighters who would have been characterized at the time as liberals. As for the post-World War II liberation movements, most leaders of former colonialized countries, including India, Kenya, Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, Senegal, and Sudan, among other places, tilted either to capitalism or to social democracy.
Marco Rubio’s mixing of white nationalism and colonial nostalgia is, of course, nothing new. A return of German colonies in Africa, lost in World War I to Britain and France, was among the Nazi regime’s most insistent demands in the late 1930s, and dreams of a new version of German imperialism in Africa were part of what was meant by the Third Reich.
Rubio has depicted decolonization as a failure of the European will to power. Most historians, on the other hand, point to the way their colonies mobilized for independence. Political scientists point to two crucial kinds of mobilization. The first was “social mobilization,” which involved urbanization, industrialization, and increased literacy. By 1945, ever more Asians and Africans were no longer illiterates living in small, disconnected villages. As for political mobilization, parties, chambers of commerce, and labor unions put millions of the previously colonized in the streets. New social classes of entrepreneurs, professionals, and workers demanded the right to control their own destinies.
And in the wake of World War II, attitudes were changing even among the colonial powers. The British public, for instance, could no longer be persuaded to spend money in an attempt to quell an India where the Congress Party of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru had brought millions into the streets demanding independence. And while the Netherlands did fight viciously to roll back Indonesia’s declaration of independence in 1945 (despite having itself been occupied by Germany during World War II), after four years of massacres, it was forced out. The impoverished French had no choice but to give up most of their African possessions, but in a sanguinary failure attempted to keep their colonies in Algeria and Vietnam by military force. American President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a wiser man than Rubio, twisted French President Charles De Gaulle’s arm to get him out of Algeria lest the revolutionaries there turn to Moscow and Communism.
Kinder, Küche, Kirche
Given that history, the advice of President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to the European Union to adopt a white nationalist domestic and foreign policy and attempt to initiate a new round of European colonialism in the global South is monstrous indeed, both morally and in practical terms. Without immigration today, Europe would soon face Japan’s dilemma of rapid population loss, along with the loss of international economic and political power.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had it right when he said that Spain faces a choice between “being an open and prosperous country or a closed and poor one.” As for the white nationalist pronatalist dream of keeping women barefoot and pregnant in accordance with the old German slogan, Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church), it’s a chimera given the electoral power of women in today’s Europe (and the United States).
In reality, the European Union’s project of multicultural democracy has yielded enormous prosperity, while expanding and deepening human rights.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s cruel, heavily ICED anti-immigrant campaign has already hurt the American economy and Europeans would be deeply unwise to emulate it in any way, including colonially. The neoconservative project of rehabilitating American colonialism crashed and burned in this country’s disastrous 21st-century wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (and won’t be aided by the present assault on Iran either) for reasons similar to those that made European colonialism impossible in the post-World War II period.
In reality, the European Union’s project of multicultural democracy has yielded enormous prosperity, while expanding and deepening human rights. Trump’s white nationalism, on the other hand, is a formula for division, poverty, and mass violence, as was demonstrated in the 1930s and 1940s when a form of that ideology was last tried in Europe.
And count on this: Trump and crew are going to give the phrase “the white man’s burden” a grim new meaning.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Britain Is Complicit in US Imperial Aggression
Britain’s role in US wars during the Trump administration has been much more significant than many people realize.
Mar 12, 2026
Britain’s role in the recent machinations of the US empire has been central, despite going underreported and little criticized. Britain has a significant hand in the ongoing US war of aggression against Iran and its recent invasion of Venezuela. Britain’s empire and overseas bases, and associated intelligence and surveillance capabilities, are cornerstones of its contribution to these ongoing wars.
Just as Britain’s colonial bases in occupied Cyprus served an intelligence and surveillance role in the Gaza genocide, so to did they help surveil Iran and prepare intelligence in preparation for US attacks, and are now being used as a staging post for those attacks. The ongoing United Kingdom-Mauritius Chagos Islands deal and subsequent US-UK rift over Diego Garcia’s use in the attack on Iran show the potential for decolonial practice in international law and is a case that the US-UK Bases off Cyprus campaign can learn from.
Royal Air Force (RAF) Akrotiri has been very important in the US attacks on Iran to date. For example, it provided a base for air refueling planes that refueled the bombers that struck Iran’s nuclear sites in June last year, and the bases likely provided intelligence and surveillance support for this operation too. Between March and May last year, the base also refueled US bombers, which attacked Yemen, an attack in which the RAF also directly participated. The base is used for all UK bombing of Iraq and Syria, which still happens sometimes, and it was almost certainly an intelligence hub for the American support for the successful counterrevolution in Syria. British F-35s are currently stationed in Akrotiri, reportedly to conduct ELINT (electronic intelligence) against Iran, essentially to use their advanced sensors to gather intelligence on Iranian air defenses as part of the current war. Any strike on Iran would commence with SEAD (suppression of enemy air defense) operations, necessitating mapping those air defenses out beforehand, which is what the F-35s are doing.
Now the British government has allowed the use of the bases on Cyprus for attacks on Iran, despite earlier denying this. Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the National Security Agency’s (NSA) main Middle Eastern intelligence base is in the British base area, which is extremely important to any military operations in the region. The NSA controls part of these bases more than GCHQ, meaning that there would be no oversight of US intelligence operations by the UK, let alone democratic accountability for the people of Britain or Cyprus to decide if they want this kind of thing happening on their land and in their political jurisdictions.
In the UK, we are facing the trumping of our own government and legal system by US imperial diktats, and our military and certainly this government, are choosing to actively promote it.
Britain’s role in US wars during the Trump administration has been much more significant than many people realize. Britain actually suspended Caribbean and Eastern Pacific-related intelligence sharing with the US in November 2025 because of the US strikes on fishing boats, which killed innocent people. The British state was briefing, ie, telling journalists anonymously, that this was because the strikes were illegal murders that Britain didn’t want to be implicated in legally, which was, of course, a self-interested position, not a moral one.
Yet by the start of this year, Britain had started to contribute to the Southern Spear mission directly, this time in relation to the oil blockade of Venezuela. Essentially, the UK drew a line between these different parts of US actions in the area, even though the tanker seizures are clearly illegal too. There were at least four examples where this is evidence of a direct British role in the seizure of tankers. Britain helped the US seize three tankers in the Caribbean with a total of 2.5 million barrels of oil—the M Sophia, the Olina, and the Sagitta—between January 7 and January 20. Britain contributed to this with surveillance flights, probably operating from British colonies in the Caribbean, from Florida, and from the Azores.
So once again, we see the intelligence and surveillance role that Britain plays in the imperial alliance; in lieu of a powerful navy, Britain seems to have specialized to an extent in its role. This type of activity is by its nature quite secretive—it would be politically difficult to have sent navy ships to interdict ships off Venezuela. But the surveillance contribution, enabled by the remaining empire’s geographical footprint, has not been picked up by the media here at all, and is also pretty unaccountable to parliament, and not subject to much democratic oversight. This, of course, mirrors Britain’s role in the Gaza genocide, where its surveillance contributions have been shrouded in secrecy and the details hidden even from members of Parliament who are supposed to have some oversight of the military or at least its participation in foreign wars.
The other case is that of the ship, the Bella 1, renamed the Marinera, which the US seized in the North Atlantic, between Iceland and Scotland, on January 7. This was a Russian-flagged tanker sailing from Venezuela to Russia. What happened here was more direct—US special forces flew to Britain, which was tracked by flight trackers following known special ops planes. Then, they undertook the seizure operation after flying from Britain in helicopters, and meeting US Navy ships. Britain provided more intense logistical and surveillance help in this instance, as it happened so close to Britain. The ship was stolen and brought to Scotland, and the 26 crew were kidnapped and falsely imprisoned in Scotland, with most being able to leave after the US had determined they were allowed to.
The captain and first mate of this ship, the captain being a Georgian citizen, were not allowed to go home by the US once detained in Scotland. The wife of the captain made an appeal to the Scottish courts, arguing that her husband was being illegally detained without the right to the proper extradition procedures. A Scottish court granted an interim interdict, an emergency injunction, prohibiting the removal of the captain from Scotland, while the case was heard and the courts made their decisions. However, immediately after that court decision, the very same night, the two men were taken from Scotland to a US Navy ship, which set sail for the US. A couple of days ago, the captain had his first court hearing in Puerto Rico, where he will be transferred to DC and put on trial for "preventing a lawful seizure" and failure to stop the vessel during the Coast Guard chase. The Scottish government condemned the US actions, but the Green Party of Scotland led a more serious analysis of the situation in the Scottish parliament, arguing that the US had basically illegally kidnapped people from Scotland, ignoring the courts.
There are a few things to pick up on here. Firstly, like all the US actions around Venezuela and the tankers, there was no legal basis for them to do any of this. A ship isn’t "illegal" or part of a "dark fleet" just because it’s "sanctioned" by one country. Venezuela and Russia are, in theory, sovereign nations that can conduct trade and sail ships between them; no one gets to randomly call any of that illegal. There is this pretense that somehow these sanctions represent international law, but they are just edicts by one country, with no relation to international law, treaties, the United Nations, or any multilateral decision-making body. In fact, Bella 1 was not even sanctioned by the UK, so what was the possible legal justification for the UK’s involvement in this?
The second part is the US flouting of Scottish and British law. Scotland has its own judicial system that is separate from the rest of the UK. It is under the UK Supreme Court and the British Parliament, but it can exercise judicial authority otherwise. Likewise, the Scottish government has a high level of autonomy within the UK, with its own elected parliament and government. The US violating the law of places where its troops are based is pretty normal—take all the murders and rapes that go along with US bases abroad, cases that have come to prominence in Japan and Korea, especially. A US diplomat’s wife killed a young man in a car crash near a US base a few years ago in England, and flew back to the US, never to face any consequences.
So, regardless of UK law and international law, the US is allowed, and even invited, to do whatever it wants in Britain, and can commission the British military to help. The British military is helping the US commit crimes in Britain, crimes under British law, in the case of the kidnapping of the sailors from Scotland. The British military is literally helping a foreign power defy civilian courts here. In the UK, we are facing the trumping of our own government and legal system by US imperial diktats, and our military and certainly this government, are choosing to actively promote it.
It is a serious crisis of sovereignty for the UK. It is more important to think of the imperial violence that we are dishing out to others rather than ruminating too much on the implications of that violence in the metropole, but there are the seeds of a domestic political and legal crisis here, which could one day help to undermine Britain’s role in all of this.
There was relatively big news in mid-February about the UK denying the US the use of its bases for their coming renewed war on Iran. Namely, bases in England and Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean. President Donald Trump posted angrily about this and again withdrew his support for the Chagos Islands deal. To summarize the current situation regarding the Chagos Islands, there’s a UK colony in the middle of the Indian Ocean called the British Indian Ocean Territory. After World War II, the US leased the main island, Diego Garcia, as an airbase, and it's now one of the most important US bases in the world due to its location. It was one of the CIA's black sites and has supported attacks on the region before, including on Iran. Mauritius went through international courts to force the UK to give it back to them and won, so, in 2025, the UK government made an agreement to hand over the territory but lease the base back from Mauritius for 99 years, guaranteeing the base’s status is basically unchanged.
The fact that the bases are a colonial relic is important because it gives our campaign the leverage to say that this is obviously wrong and obviously contradicts the international law that you, the imperial powers, set up, and this gives us the opportunity to build alliances based on that.
This is good news that there is some kind of rift between Britain and the US on this, but it does raise some interesting questions, and these denials have been rescinded anyway. Namely, can the UK always exercise this right of denial, because then it would proactively have had to have proactively approved US use of bases for attacking Iran last year, or did they approve the torture black site on Diego Garcia, do they approve the use of UK bases as transit for all this equipment to the Middle East which will be used to attack Iran anyway? Secondly, Trump posting that he "may have to use" the Fairford and Diego Garcia bases to attack Iran, despite apparently being told he can’t, should be a big deal! Again, the question of UK sovereignty over its own land and military resources comes up—can we even say no to the US, is it possible at all? And will this government do anything about it if their request is ignored? Highly unlikely.
However, it turns out that this whole issue may have originated in an order to the civil service in the foreign office, telling them to act as if the Chagos Islands deal had already gone through. In this case, it seems that the UK government asked the Mauritian government about the US request, and they must have said no, and so Britain said no. Alternatively, the foreign office may have said no based on the specific wording of the deal, where Britain must consult Mauritius on an attack on a third state from Diego Garcia, and have judged Trump’s intended actions to be an attack on the Iranian state, rather than self-defense, which would not require consultation.
This then makes it seem all the less benevolent. This government and the previous government, which started negotiations with Mauritius over this deal, have faced attacks from the right in the UK for giving away British land and throwing away an important base. The government has justified the deal not because it is the right thing to do, or by accepting any of the principles of the arguments around it, but instead, they justify it because they say it is the only way to keep the base operating. They claim that because of the International Court of Justice ruling, they would be forced to cede the territory very soon, and so it was best to make a deal first.
We don’t typically have much faith in these organs of international law, as they were set up to enforce the imperial order. However, it is possible for the subjects of that order to assert some agency and attempt to use that system in an insurgent manner. In this case, it is Mauritius and much of the world supporting it, which has forced this to happen, and indirectly has caused this rift and may prevent the base from being used for these attacks.
I don’t think this will ultimately work, and the US would probably just use them anyway, but these are all interesting things to consider in relation to the base question. It seems that the UK is now allowing the use of Diego Garcia for attacks on Iran, which it deems "defensive" even though that definition includes strikes on ground targets. The potential utility of this model of handover deal, despite keeping the base open, does then seem to restrict the uses of the base in line with aspects of Mauritian sovereignty, disrupting the bases in some way or another, which is a big decolonial win the left has not yet fully grasped.
We could then conclude that a big concerted international campaign against blatant colonial practices may actually work in damaging the effectiveness of these colonial overseas bases to some extent. Mauritius exploited the inherent contradictions between international law on the one hand and the bases’ colonial nature on the other, to build a campaign, get almost everyone onside, and force a reckoning in the international courts, which is binding. So for Cyprus, although it is a different situation in many ways, we can see similarities, and we can learn from what’s happened around Diego Garcia.
The fact that the bases are a colonial relic is important because it gives our campaign the leverage to say that this is obviously wrong and obviously contradicts the international law that you, the imperial powers, set up, and this gives us the opportunity to build alliances based on that. That is actually much easier and much less radical than talking about the bases’ role in genocide, which seems wholly exempt from the international law system, which shows how dehumanized Palestinians and Gaza are.
The US-UK Bases Off Cyprus Campaign that CODEPINK is running has those two integral parts to it, working on the bases in Cyprus’ contribution to genocide and imperial wars, and their inherent status as a colony on occupied land. Linking those two parts of the base question is the central point of what we’re trying to do and trying to expose, as a step toward practical change to the bases’ status.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Bad Bunny Turned the Super Bowl Into a Call for Land Sovereignty
Bad Bunny didn’t just choose a lush set design. He intentionally made history visible, reminding millions of viewers that colonial power doesn’t only claim territory, it reorganizes our whole environment.
Mar 09, 2026
On the world’s biggest stage, amid fireworks and spectacle, there stood the crop that enriched empires while eroding Puerto Rico’s land, labor, and sovereignty.
When Bad Bunny opened his halftime performance walking through what looked like a living sugarcane field, millions simply saw a striking stage design. But those of us involved in agricultural communities saw a protest.
The Link Between Land, Culture, and Self-Determination
Sugarcane once powered Puerto Rico’s economy. Under Spanish rule and later as a territory of the United States, vast plantations consumed the island’s most fertile lands. Once diverse farming systems created by Taíno Indigenous communities gave way to monocultures designed for export. As with all colonial systems, wealth made in Puerto Rico has long flowed outward while the ecological and social costs remain for local people to have to bear.
Across colonized lands, colonial agriculture prioritized single crops for distant markets at the expense of ecological and social prosperity and resilience—a historical legacy that today ripples through communities and commodity markets. In Puerto Rico, as in other Latin American and Caribbean countries—including my own home country, Mexico—forests were cleared and watersheds were destabilized to power the colonial economic machine. Soil health declined. Local communities' cultural ties to land were fractured, and, without power over local resources anymore, they could no longer steward landscapes as they once did. In Puerto Rico, US policies favoring industrialization over agriculture from the early 20th century onward were the final straw. Although Puerto Rico once produced most of its own food on the island, it now imports over 80%.
The image of sugarcane at the Super Bowl reminds us that land is political. It carries memories of exploitation, resilience, and identity.
What appear today as “degraded land” and disempowered communities are the ecological and social residue of economic models designed for extraction. So, in a very real sense, Bad Bunny didn’t just choose a lush set design. He intentionally made history visible, reminding millions of viewers that colonial power doesn’t only claim territory, it reorganizes our whole environment and, in doing so, reshapes culture, labor, and identity itself.
For many Puerto Ricans, the performance summoned the figure of the jíbaro—the smallholder farmer of the island’s mountainous interior, living from and with the land during colonial rule. More than a rural archetype, the jíbaro is a cultural touchstone, carried through generations in music, poetry, and oral tradition. They represent resilience and dignity, and an enduring bond between people and place—a vision of land not as commodity, but as home, heritage, and self-determination. Framed within Bad Bunny’s creative vision, land is not an asset class: It is identity and community.
Restoring Nature-Positive Farming Traditions Isn’t a Luxury—It’s Basic Risk-Management
Modern agricultural practices, many rooted in colonialism, have long degraded land by plundering natural ecosystems and extracting their value, often concentrating ownership in a few powerful hands. This has left us in a dire situation: At least 40% of the world’s land is now degraded, driving increasing food and water insecurity, contributing to climate change, and fueling climate migration.
To ensure our future on the planet, we must urgently prioritize land restoration and transitioning to regenerative agricultural practices. But for restoration to work, the governance model colonialism installed must be inverted. Landscapes cannot be regenerated without local decision-making power. Ecological repair and political agency go hand in hand.
As climate pressures intensify and public budgets shrink, we are seeing governments and businesses alike continue to act like ecological and social resilience is a luxury, an add-on after economic profit has been achieved. But safeguarding agricultural and ecological heritage, and placing power in the hands of local communities to be able to do this on their own terms, is a scientifically sound investment in economic resilience.
If we are serious about healing degraded landscapes—in Puerto Rico, in Mexico, across Latin America and the Caribbean, and beyond—we must ensure that the finance being used to restore does not become a new form of enclosure.
Research shows us that when communities have ownership and governance over local resources, restoration lasts. Yes, this demands real upfront investment—in soil, water, agroforestry, local enterprise, and strong community institutions. But the returns are massive: Every dollar invested in restoration can generate up to $30 in benefits.
If finance continues to channel value outward while communities carry the risk, we simply repackage (neo)colonialism in a greener language. Restoration funding must, therefore, anchor ownership and governance locally, positioning communities as architects of change, not passive recipients. And there are models already demonstrating what this can look like.
In Mexico’s Sierra Gorda, the Grupo Ecológico Sierra Gorda (GESG) has built a system where conservation and livelihoods are inseparable. Working alongside the state government, GESG has designed and implemented a public policy within the Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve where "forest owners" are compensated to steward forests, manage grazing responsibly, and protect biodiversity.
In simple terms, communities receive compensation for maintaining ecosystems that provide measurable public benefits—carbon sequestration, clean water, biodiversity conservation. Instead of extracting value from the land, value is generated by caring for it.
In the Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve, more than 300 people directly benefit from a PES (payment for ecosystem services) program covering over 14,000 hectares. GESG operates through a co-management model between civil society and the federal government, grounded in strong local participation and recognition. The goal is not short-term subsidy, but long-term institutional self-sufficiency through sub-national public policy—creating funding streams that sustain conservation while advancing community-led development.
It is a powerful example of conservation that reinforces, rather than erodes, local sovereignty. But PES alone cannot finance restoration at landscape scale; this requires a different kind of financial architecture. Regenerative blended finance offers one pathway. By combining public funds, philanthropic capital, and private investment, it can reduce risk and unlock larger flows of capital for landscape recovery. When designed well, blended finance mechanisms can accelerate ecological restoration while (and by) giving communities control.
A regeneratively-designed blended finance model treats communities as owners and co-investors, not beneficiaries. It embeds social and ecological returns alongside financial ones. It builds local financial capacity, enabling communities to negotiate, manage, and reinvest capital themselves, and strengthens local institutions so landscapes can ultimately generate their own sustainable revenue.
The image of sugarcane at the Super Bowl reminds us that land is political. It carries memories of exploitation, resilience, and identity. If we are serious about healing degraded landscapes—in Puerto Rico, in Mexico, across Latin America and the Caribbean, and beyond—we must ensure that the finance being used to restore does not become a new form of enclosure. Only then will restoration break from the patterns of the past.Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular