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fascism
First They Came for the Immigrants
Minneapolis, ICE, and the urgency of worker power against American fascism.
Mar 07, 2026
On December 2, 2025, the first public reports emerged about the impending launch of “Operation Metro Surge,” a deployment of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to target undocumented Somalis in Minneapolis. Five weeks later, on January 7, 2026, ICE thug Jonathan Ross fired three shots that killed American citizen Renee Good as she attempted to drive away from him.
Good’s murder marked an inflection point in the Trump regime’s iron-fisted war against immigrants across the U.S. — a war that has proven to be about much more than targeting “criminal aliens” as more activists find themselves caught in ICE’s brutal dragnet. Less than three weeks after Good was killed, federal agents gunned down Alex Pretti, another American whose murder enflamed a nation already in tumult over ICE’s tactics and its indiscriminate targeting of whole communities, citizen and non-citizen alike.
Both murders during Operation Metro Surge were followed by a similar pattern. First, Trump regime officials immediately assassinated the characters of Good and Pretti as “domestic terrorists.” When that backfired as the public learned about the victims — one, a poet and mother of three, and the other, a VA hospital nurse and registered gun owner — the regime quickly moved to cover up details of the murders, blocking Minnesota officials from the federal investigations.
But something else also took place in between the mayhem. The day before Pretti was killed, more than 50,000 Minnesotans packed the streets of Minneapolis in subzero temperatures and a biting negative 30-degree windchill to demand the withdrawal of all federal agents from the city. The march was in response to calls for a general strike by local faith and labor leaders and saw hundreds of businesses closed in support of the protests.
This was a natural response for a city already primed for mass mobilization after weeks of building networks for community organizing and resistance to ICE’s draconian crackdown. Federal agents had all but suspended civil rights as they laid siege to Minneapolis, abducting at least 3,000 people, terrorizing neighborhoods, and conducting warrantless home raids. ICE aggressively targeted residents with harassment and assault based on nothing more than their skin color and accents.
At first, the campaign of terror only escalated as the city fought back. Masked agents rammed into civilian vehicles; sprayed tear gas and pepper spray at families and children; beat protestors and threw bystanders to the ground; and, ripped people out of their vehicles. School attendance dropped by as much as 50 percent and businesses suffered. At the same time, resistance drew popular support, with residents turning out in droves to ICE observer trainings, joining Signal groups to rapidly respond to ICE activity, and supporting mutual aid for immigrant families too afraid to leave their homes.
While not a general strike in the traditional sense, the culmination of this organizing on January 23 showed a highly organized, popular movement growing in size and strength. That is significant because protests against Trump’s anti-immigrant shock-and-awe crusade have often been spontaneous outbursts of riotous fury, including last June in Los Angeles where Trump deployed thousands of National Guard troops to provide cover for ICE raids. This was followed by similar deployments and protests in Portland and Chicago.
At the same time, ICE's overreach prompted a national backlash. When agents in Minneapolis kidnapped and detained a father and his five-year-old son, Liam Conejo Ramos, heart-wrenching images of the child — his innocence evoked by the blue bunny ears hat and Spiderman backpack he wore — provoked a national outcry that ended in Liam and his father's release from ICE detention. Many other children, however, have not been as fortunate.
Whereas during the first Trump regime the images of children being separated from their families and held in camps outraged much of the world, today the regime detains children and parents together in detention centers with abhorrent conditions. At notorious facilities like the one in Dilley, Texas, children and families are subjected to verbal abuse by guards, inedible food, 24-hour fluorescent lights, and rampant medical neglect.
Now, with two-thirds of Americans opposed to ICE, it seems Trump’s manufactured anti-immigrant hysteria — drummed up by a steady stream of racist vitriol and demonizing tropes — cracks easily under the boot of ICE’s savage attacks. But how that public opposition to ICE is mobilized also matters. Rapid-response confrontations with federal agents are necessary and provide tantalizing content for social media but are generally less effective at drawing wider layers of society into the struggle.
Organized Labor Vs. ICE Fascism
Last June in Los Angeles, a large rally of union members and other activists gathered in Grand Park. Protesters demanded the immediate release of David Huerta, president of SEIU California and SEIU-United Service Workers, who was arrested during ICE worksite raids days before. Following a weekend of raids and violent clashes between federal agents and protesters, the rally in Grant Park was backed by the L.A. County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, and drew thousands in a defiant protest against ICE and National Guard troops.
In similar fashion, organized labor’s involvement has been integral to Minneapolis asserting itself as the latest flashpoint of resistance to the Trump regime’s authoritarian agenda.
No, January 23 did not see an economic shutdown of workers on strike across core industries. But the Minnesota AFL-CIO-endorsed “general strike” did show the capacity and appetite for such escalation in the future. Perhaps just as important, it elevated the call for a “general strike,” from the marginal domain of fringe leftist communities, further into popular consciousness.
Of course, Minneapolis is no stranger to struggle and mass strikes. Even before the city thrust the Black Lives Matter movement onto the national stage following the police lynching of George Floyd in 2020, Minneapolis was home to one of the most significant general strikes in U.S. labor history when Teamster truck drivers spurred an economy-wide work stoppage that shut down the whole city in 1934.
But in terms of power and militancy, today’s labor movement looks entirely different from what existed in 1934. Most workers are unorganized and unions are weak, paralyzed by anti-union laws and weighted down by their own institutional bloat and sclerotic leadership. With the top brass of most major labor unions more at home in their corporate-style offices while mingling with Washington DC’s professional class and Democratic Party functionaries, it’s no wonder there is an entire generation of workers in the U.S. today that lacks any literacy in working-class struggle and trade union principles.
This matters because unions have, in the past, commanded a unique juncture of society — a critical conduit for mass mobilizing among broad sectors of the population, recruiting whole communities into struggle while inoculating them against the racist and reactionary forces that sought to divide working people against each other.
Today’s war on immigrants is the opening salvo of a broader war against dissent and toward an American fascism that serves caviar for the corporate oligarchs and chains for the rest of us. Worse, we lack the collective class power to effectively fight back.
Building upon the regime’s anti-immigrant repression, Trump has expanded law enforcement power to target “anti-fascist” and “left-wing activities.” That means more government witch hunts against political dissent, like the activist in Texas currently facing federal charges and up to 40 years in prison for merely transporting “Antifa” literature.
As federal agents have withdrawn from Minneapolis in recent weeks, they leave in their wake communities that are organized but also deeply scarred. While local businesses begin to recover, the trauma lingers for many families and children who remain fearful of leaving their homes. There is also deep distrust and persistent doubts that ICE’s rampage has truly wound down.
The collective trauma in Minneapolis is by design, part of the intended pay-off of a massive surge in ICE funding to the tune of $75 billion. Alongside the funding surge, the DHS’s “Defend the Homeland” recruitment campaign — replete with xenophobic overtones and neo-Nazi iconography — has more than doubled the number of ICE agents with a fresh crop of deputized MAGA adherents now menacing communities nationwide.
“ICE is a descendent of violent systems, like slave patrols, boarding schools, Jim Crow law enforcement, and political policing,” writes Cris Batista of Mijente, a Latinx and Chicanx-led immigrant justice organization. “Immigration enforcement is deeply embedded in the racist, white supremacist foundation of the United States. Like their slave catcher ancestors, ICE and CBP disregard human rights to uphold systems that benefit the rich and the powerful.”
From this history, it follows that the propaganda of the Trump regime has been a barrage of callous and juvenile trolling to feed the far-right’s sadistic revelry in human suffering, including ASMR-style videos from deportation flights and “Alligator Alcatraz” merchandise. This posturing also makes sense given the ghoulish architect behind the regime’s anti-immigrant, culture-war agenda. While Stephen Miller has spawned so much of Trump’s policies and approach, he does not hide the larger dystopian future to which he hopes his war on immigrants will lead. It’s no secret that Miller’s obsessive homages to “Western Civilization” aspire to a nation dominated and led by whites only — a social and political order that can only be enforced by despotic repression.
Building Resistance from Within and Without Unions
In the midst of all the chaos and cruelty, something unexpected happened over the past year: more workers in the U.S. have joined the labor movement.
According to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics last month, union membership rose to a 16-year high in 2025. While reports frame this increase as taking place despite Trump attacks on labor, including thousands of union workers in the federal government, one can argue that the boost in union ranks is also because of the regime’s anti-worker policies. That’s particularly likely in the face of Trump’s dismissive attitude toward the affordability crisis, perhaps leading more cash-strapped workers to look for the higher wages and workplace protections secured in collective bargaining.
This growth in union membership also occurred despite the fact that most unions in the U.S., with some important exceptions, have declined to take on significant and sustained organizing efforts.
“Evidence abounds that many millions of workers would join the unions but for any opportunity to do so,” writes veteran union leader and organizer Chris Townsend. “Without unions organizing actively on any significant scale, there exist few avenues for the unorganized to connect with the unions, let alone join them. The assorted labor leadership in the unions for the most part consider new organizing to be too difficult, too expensive, too controversial, or too exhausting to seriously pursue. This justifies their inaction and profiteering from the unions, with lavish lifestyles and pursuits taking the place of the hard slogging work to reach out and mobilize the unorganized masses.”
Stronger unions are needed now more than ever to confront the oppressive machinery of Trump’s authoritarianism. But building union strength starts with a deep commitment to new worker organizing and aggressively educating existing union members, especially the 75,000-plus newly organized members who voted to unionize workplaces over the past year. These are tasks that existing union leaders have been either unable or unwilling to carry out.
For activists, there is no simple path to addressing these needs within the labor movement. It will take rank-and-file leaders agitating and building worker power inside of their unions, with militant caucuses pressuring leaders to answer the call of history to fight against the totalitarian oppression of working people and the poor. And, where union leadership is unresponsive and derelict in this struggle, the work of building organizations of workers outside of official union structures must be undertaken.
While none of that work is easy, it is existential for immigrant communities and the working class as a whole.
Yesterday’s firing of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, like the removal of senior border patrol official Greg Bovino several weeks prior, is a profound testament to the power of Minneapolis’s fierce, union-backed resistance. Much like Bovino became the Gestapo-outfitted face behind Operation Metro Surge, Noem's tenure ends with an ugly legacy of shamelessly leading one of the most racist and violent crackdowns on immigrants and activists in U.S. history. And that's owing, in no small part, to the steadfast organizing of Minneapolis communities.
“One senior ICE official I asked about Noem’s firing attributed it in large part to the Minneapolis protests, saying the whole episode has been devastating for ICE and its morale,” journalist Ken Klippenstein reported. “The evidence for this seems overwhelming, with Congress repeatedly raising the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good throughout Noem’s Senate hearing yesterday.”
The lesson from Minneapolis is clear: we need movements with the capacity and courage to confront Trump’s nascent police state with mass strikes.
Because if there is an anecdote to ICE and rising fascism in the U.S., it is to be found in an organized and empowered working class.
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The ICE Barbarians Are at the Gates
They’re trying to convince all colors that resistance is futile, that Trump is all-powerful, and that a totalitarian government with him as its head is inevitable.
Feb 27, 2026
In early February, the barbarians reached my gate. There could be no more comfort or denial here on this island where I live. The masked thugs were roving through a town just across the water, a short ferry ride away, harassing and arresting long-time residents.
I was shocked, but not surprised. What do we do now? Yes, we all knew they were coming, still….
I was raised in the post-World War II “it can’t happen here” era. Hadn’t my parents’ generation crushed the Nazis for all time? While we’d been taught that democracy, like a faith or a marriage, did need tending, we had mostly taken it for granted. Yes, I did understand that life as I had lived it was under attack, but there was still, I thought, some time to respond.
The Republicans would come to their senses, right? They weren’t the Germans of a past era. The monster would sooner or later be brought down. And yes, he was bad, but he certainly wasn’t Hitler. And he looked so sickly. Eventually, the court system would kick in or the Epstein files would produce the Big Bang, whatever that might be. This was America, for God’s sake. We didn’t deserve to go down like this.
I also began to understand, however belatedly and somewhat sheepishly, what an enormous difference there was between my leftish friends and me and the mostly white men who now rule America with their cruel selfishness and moral disability.
Like most of my friends, I’d been thinking of little else for much too long and talking about it incessantly in a tone of wonder. Can you believe this shit? Yet living here on my island allowed me the destructive luxury of refusing to understand that we were all Minneapolitans, no matter where we were, even if our portfolios kept rising. Sure, we felt anxious and depressed, were wary of Trumpish neighbors, more generous donors to liberal causes, and active consumers of the media, but we were able to deflect the dangers, given our blind belief that being right was the best defense.
And I had an extra advantage: I was protected by a moat.
Shelter Island is a 28-square-mile town near the eastern end of New York’s Long Island in a region called the East End. It’s surrounded by water, but accessible by ferries from Greenport to the north and North Haven to the south. A third of the island is a protected nature conservancy. There are no street lights. The population in winter is around 3,000, which triples in the summer with tourists and second-home owners.
I’ve owned a home here for more than 30 years and lived here full-time for almost a decade, just about the right amount of time to appreciate the local mythology without entirely absorbing it—that Shelter Island is a quasi-independent republic, populated by rugged individualists who take care of their neighbors, especially seniors, through volunteer organizations (including a fire department and ambulance corps), while stoutly eschewing the glamorous greed of the nearby Hamptons.
It’s not been hard to feel above this country’s recent rush toward autocracy. Meanwhile, in recent decades, the island has been revising its sensibility in some progressive ways. For example, when I first arrived here in the 1980s, Shelter Island’s early history as a place of enslavement and provisioning for the slave trade was not a topic of polite conversation. Now, Sylvester Manor, once one of the earliest and northernmost slave plantations in this country, is internationally known for research and the preservation of slave remains and artifacts. It is also an integral local pillar through its educational farm.
The Pharmacy
It wasn’t until last year that I even realized just how vulnerable this island was to the whims of wealth and power. Yes, rich people routinely built houses and renovated hotels on the island that violated local zoning rules and they got away with it. But it wasn’t until one of our very own oligarchs casually betrayed our trust that I realized just how naïve we had been.
The Soloviev Group, one of the nation’s largest property owners, particularly of agricultural land, had bought a number of buildings on the island, including an iconic hotel, several stores, and the only pharmacy. Town officials mostly applauded the newcomers as “saviors.” Thanks to them, there would be an injection of money and jobs that would cover up the failures of those officials to come up with a comprehensive plan for taking care of Shelter Island, installing affordable housing, and protecting the water supply. They wouldn’t have to raise taxes, already low by regional standards.
“Shelter Island is like a womb,” said Stacey Soloviev, the ex-wife of Soloviev Group CEO Stefan Soloviev and the company’s cheery local face. “You feel very good when you come to Shelter Island.”
And for a while, the Solovievs did indeed go about their business on the island quietly feeling good without doing much good. Their parent corporation was busier. It tried and failed to build a gambling casino in midtown Manhattan. It negotiated with a nearby town to create a large residential development that would include a luxury spa. And then, out of the blue, in a stunning move with little notice, it suddenly shuttered the local hotel and closed the pharmacy, the only dispenser of medicine for a population that (like me) skewed elderly.
Like most Shelter Islanders, I was furious. As a board member of the town’s Senior Citizens Foundation, a support group for municipal senior services, I understood what an existential problem this could pose for people with limited mobility and resources, which just happens to be a large part of the population.
Us and Them
I also began to understand, however belatedly and somewhat sheepishly, what an enormous difference there was between my leftish friends and me and the mostly white men who now rule America with their cruel selfishness and moral disability. Our compassion, our tendency toward basic decency, our belief in fairness and equality were an enormous disadvantage in the battle against Trumpism, as was the faint shame so many of us felt for what seemed like a righteous posture, a sense of simply being better than those MAGA voters, handicapped as they were by manufactured fear and distinct inferiority complexes.
As for those super rich and intricately well-connected guys like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Peter Thiel, they were just more intellectually refined models of the genuine nightmare of our world, Donald Trump!
Sadly, of course, like so much else, it was even more complex than that. The rich guys were acting out of their best interests and were not even secretly ashamed, while the rural poor who had played such a role in getting us into this mess with their votes in 2016 and 2024 had not acted malevolently. They were flailing against a society that had ignored their needs.
And I was finally becoming truly woke myself.
As long as we stay in denial, in the bubble, clinging to the dream that goodness or Bad Bunny can save us, we are lost.
In late January, while I was still wallowing in rage at the closing of that pharmacy, a massive snowstorm hit the island. I was sitting in my warm house watching three Latino men wrestle with the foot of snow outside that held me hostage. I knew and liked them from past work, but I had no idea what their citizenship status was (or wasn’t), though I could imagine them becoming targets of the same sort of gang of thugs terrorizing Minneapolis and making sporadic forays into the East End. I assumed, of course, that I was safer than they were. But maybe that was only true for now. After all, out in Minneapolis, white American citizens were being executed—“cruel and unusual punishment”—for bearing witness to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Only a day before that Island snowstorm, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, Alex Pretti, had been gunned down in Minneapolis for observing and recording masked ICE agents too closely and trying to help a female protester they had assaulted. He should have known better. After all, two weeks earlier, poet and mother of three Renee Good had been killed for a similar “offense” in the same city.
The Vigil
A week later, on an 18°F night, we Shelter Islanders held a vigil in front of the community center.
Such a passive demonstration evokes both pathos and courage. It’s pathetic in the sense that nonviolence always seems weak in the face of blatant Trumpian-style aggression, however brave it may, in fact, be in its restraint and promise of commitment. In the long run, however, it is also the strategy most likely to succeed. The campaigns for civil rights and women’s rights provide the best historic lessons about that reality: Just keep coming out and ultimately the secret police and the criminal lunatic who sent them will get the message.
Because of that, I felt very proud that night of my 70-odd neighbors at the vigil, including the local Presbyterian pastor who read the names of the 32 people who had died in ICE custody last year. Most of them had Latino names, a grim reality which obscures for all too many whites the degree to which everybody remains in danger. I remembered that the killer thugs of 1964, the Ku Klux Klan, in their campaign to intimidate resistance and suppress Black voting, killed two young white men, Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, along with their Black fellow civil rights activist, James Chaney. As then, it was the killing of whites that got national attention, the bad guys’ intent.
By the night of that vigil, the early tutorials about dealing with ICE—including reminding people of their right not to speak to agents or allow them to search their homes and cars without a judicial warrant—seemed almost quixotic. After all, President Trump’s belligerent rhetoric had clearly set the stage for them to disregard both our rights and court orders. More important now, according to an activist friend I called in Minneapolis, was organizing groups to lower the vulnerability of people who might otherwise be prime targets of “our” secret police—drive them to work sites, do their shopping, and act as their lookouts. The shrilling of warning whistles, he said, had become the soundtrack of resistance to the totalitarian goons.
Arrests at the Gate
As the media has shrunk from its responsibility to bear witness and inform (while also shrinking in size), the involvement of everyday people (who might not yet be directly affected by the crisis) becomes ever more critical—as is sending money to legal defense groups. That need became even more apparent to me one early weekday morning in early February when ICE raided a line of cars waiting at the North Ferry terminal in Greenport, New York to come to our island for their jobs. Three men were arrested, all long-time residents of the area, none with criminal records (other than alleged illegal entry from Mexico many years ago). One of them, Hugo Leonel Ardon Osorio, was on his way to work at Marcello Masonry on the island. My wife and I remembered him from the crew that had rebuilt our driveway several years ago.
The next week, the snows returned and so did the three men who had cleared it away the last time around. I was happy—and relieved—to see them again.
Make no mistake: The barbarians are still at the gates. The Shelter Island Town Board has been holding meetings to determine what to do if they come across the water and land on our island. Will our local police department cooperate with them in any way? Will ordinary citizens be restricted in their demonstrations? Will the school lock its doors to ICE? (On the day ICE breached that ferry line, a quarter of Greenport’s students stayed away from school.)
The barbarians are now coming for most of us. Their mission has extended well beyond deporting some brown-skinned people. They’re trying to convince all colors that resistance is futile, that Trump is all-powerful, and that a totalitarian government with him as its head is inevitable.
And as long as we stay in denial, in the bubble, clinging to the dream that goodness or Bad Bunny can save us, we are lost. I know that my whistle and enhanced wokeness won’t be anywhere near enough. And I don’t have a plan yet, other than to stay the course, fight despair, support the most vulnerable, and preach to the choir that they—that all of us—should hang tough.
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Marco Rubio’s Munich Speech Sanewashed US-Backed Dictatorships
The implication, delivered with straight-faced solemnity in Munich, is that the US-backed campaign against leftist movements in the Cold War was a noble defense of freedom, democracy, and Christian civilization.
Feb 16, 2026
Much has already been written about Secretary of State Marco Rubio's damage-control mission to the Munich Security Conference, sent to cool transatlantic tensions mere weeks after President Donald Trump hinted multiple times at annexing Greenland by force. But beneath the conciliatory tone was Rubio's explicit defense of the fight against “godless communist revolutions” and “anti-colonial uprisings” throughout the world, a horrific sanitization of the US-backed dictatorships that terrorized Latin America and beyond in the last century.
Rubio painted a sweeping narrative of Western civilization under threat. “The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline,” he declared, “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.”
That line is a direct homage to the doctrines of Cold Warriors Henry Kissinger and Jeane Kirkpatrick, both of whom infamously argued that right-wing dictators were acceptable allies in the fight against communism—regardless of their brutality—because they were “authoritarian” rather than "totalitarian.” Yes, even if those “communists” were democratically elected, popular, and nonviolent.
The implication, delivered with straight-faced solemnity in Munich, is that the US-backed campaign against leftist movements in the Cold War was a noble defense of freedom, democracy, and Christian civilization.
The United States can continue down the path outlined by Rubio’s speech, but it will only accelerate its decline, alienate its allies, and create the very chaos it claims to fight.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the US helped set up Operation Condor, a network that far-right dictatorships operated throughout the 1970s and 1980s as a coordinated system of state terror across South America. The Chilean intelligence service chillingly described it as “something similar to what Interpol has in Paris, but devoted to subversion.” It was, also important to mention, explicitly framed by the US government to defend Christian civilization (also called the Banzer Plan).
Rubio's Christian civilization trope is an ode to a very specific, pro-corporate, pro-authoritarian, and white-supremacist Christianity, the same ideology championed by Donald Trump's MAGA movement. This is the same ideology that colonized, enslaved, and subjugated Latin America and the Global South, through the European institutions he lifted up in his speech. Centuries later, the United States resurrected this crusade through the CIA, which funded and even armed the rise of far-right, pro-capitalist Evangelical movements, to actively oppose and dismantle the more redistributive, popular Catholic churches rooted in liberation theology.
Many of the right-wing paramilitaries and dictatorships backed by the US were explicitly Christian. They, however, killed priests who did not adhere to rigid far-right fundamentalism—Catholic groups were central to the resistance. That Evangelical fundamentalism now fuels the region's new wave of right-wing leaders, including Jair Bolsonaro, Javier Milei, Maria Corina Machado, and José Antonio Kast, who are also fanatical supporters of Israel.
The Condor system maintained a centralized database tracking guerrilla movements, left-wing parties, trade unionists, religious groups, liberal politicians, and anyone deemed an enemy of the authoritarian regimes. These designated “terrorists” were hunted across borders, tracked down, and eliminated throughout the Americas and even in Europe, including France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal.
The United States actively designed, funded, and supported this architecture of repression, and then helped cover it up. The infamous, still-open School of the Americas trained torturers, while CIA stations shared intelligence with Condor operatives. US Embassies smoothed relations with allies and propagandized local populations.
In Bolivia, the US backed Hugo Banzer after his predecessor convened a People's Assembly of proletarian sectors to usher in populist reforms. That president was later kidnapped, tortured, and assassinated by the Condor system.
In Brazil, Washington supported the neo-Nazi-backed military coup that deposed social democrat João Goulart after he attempted mild economic reforms, ushering in two decades of brutal military rule.
In Chile, the US organized against socialist president Salvador Allende, who was instituting democratic, redistributive reforms. The Nixon administration famously declared it would “make the economy scream” in Chile, and went on to support Augusto Pinochet's coup, which brought torture, disappearances, and a dictatorship that murdered thousands. Rubio and the US currently back its Pinochet-supporting, grandson-of-an-SS-lieutenant President, Jose Antonio Kast.
On the topic of the SS, the US used Nazis as part of their anti-leftist subversion campaign in the Cold War. After World War II, the US set up “ratlines,” or escape routes, for Nazis and Nazi sympathizers throughout Latin America and Europe, to escape prosecution. They ended up being key architects of the US-backed right-wing dictatorships throughout the world including in Latin America, while many even joined anti-communist death squads.
Final Solution architects Adolf Eichmann, Klaus Barbie, Josef Mengele, and countless others all left for South America with help from the US State Department, which Rubio now commands.
The US also deposed socialist governments and installed brutal right-wing regimes in the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Haiti (multiple times), Mexico, Nicaragua (multiple times through the Somoza family), Costa Rica, Honduras (multiple times), El Salvador, and Panama.
In Guatemala, the CIA overthrew socialist president Jacobo Arbenz after he dared to enact land reform that threatened the American United Fruit Company, whose political connections apparently mattered more than Guatemalan democracy. Guatemala was ruled by brutal military dictators for decades afterward, also regimes the US supported.
Mind you, this is only in Latin America—the US did plenty more of this in Europe, Asia, and Africa. This was all less than 50 years ago, and continues to this day.
Such is the legacy that Rubio defends when he mourns the setbacks to “Western civilization” made by “anti-colonial uprisings.” We must ask, why did those uprisings occur? Is Rubio implying that opposing colonialism is bad? Most of them occurred after centuries of slavery and subjugation, some of which was inflicted by the US.
This historical whitewashing serves Rubio's contemporary objectives. The United States is currently engaged in a multi-front campaign to reshape Latin America into a bastion of pro-American right-wing populism.
The administration has waged economic war on Venezuela, and Cuba, now on the verge of total humanitarian collapse. It swayed the last election in Honduras through disinformation and threats—continuing a pattern of US intervention that began with the Obama administration's 2009 backing of a coup against socialist Manuel Zelaya. Trump's first term engineered a coup in Bolivia against socialist Evo Morales, that Rubio enthusiastically supported.
Trump’s second administration has threatened strikes on Mexico and Colombia, imposed sanctions and tariffs on Brazil, and openly and covertly supported authoritarian parties throughout the hemisphere, including the Bolsonaros in Brazil, Milei in Argentina, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Daniel Noboa in Ecuador, Tuto Quiroga in Bolivia, and opposition figures across the region.
There is something profoundly ignorant in Rubio's performance. He and his boss have championed authoritarian tactics, openly supported neo-Nazi politics, praised dictators abroad, and destroyed democracy and the Constitution at home. To then stand before the world to declare that America defends freedom, democracy, and Judeo-Christian principles against godless revolutionaries is a ridiculous diminution of those very principles.
As Salvador Allende put it mere hours before his death at the hands of US forces at the Palacio de la Moneda, “While they have strength and will be able to dominate us, social processes can be arrested neither by crime nor force.”
In Haiti, more than a century of US interventions, coups, and support for corrupt and violent figures has produced a humanitarian catastrophe that now generates waves of migration, while the American right has the gall to turn around and fearmonger about Haitian migrants invading the country.
As Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva says, “Foreign intervention can cause more damage than it seeks to prevent.” They create the migration crises that then become fodder for right-wing demagogues. They alienate Latin American populations, who increasingly view China more favorably than the United States, because while Washington offers only militarism and domination, Beijing offers infrastructure investment and trade (however problematic its own debt traps may be).
Many Latin American states would rather navigate imbalanced partnerships with China than submit to foreign invasions and coups from Washington.
The United States can continue down the path outlined by Rubio’s speech, but it will only accelerate its decline, alienate its allies, and create the very chaos it claims to fight. Or it could finally reckon honestly with its history and chart a different, humane course.
Eduardo Galeano once said, “Latin America is part of the world, which was for many years condemned to the system of power where intimidation had more strength than the vote.” By sanitizing these atrocities, Rubio is condemning Latin America and the world to that fate once again.
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