Last weekend, a young man tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump. Six hours ahead of New York, the news greeted me Sunday morning, when I woke up in the sleepy Spanish surf town I’m vacationing in for the summer. The headlines read “Violencia Política en Los Estados Unidos.” Political violence in the U.S. All of a sudden, I was a little girl again, reading headlines that made me worry about my friends and family back home. Only the stories from my childhood were about Mexico, not the United States.
Latin America has a long history of political violence, some of it fueled by the U.S., but not always. One year ago, Ecuador presidential candidate Fernando Villaviciendo was killed during a campaign event. Two years before that, Haitian President Jovenal Moise was shot dead and his wife seriously wounded when armed men infiltrated the couple’s home.
Attacks on people in government are as old as government itself. From the brutal stabbing of Julius Caesar in 44 BC to the shooting of Abraham Lincoln in 1845 to the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, radicalized individuals have opted to take the course of history into their own hands. Sometimes the victims had declared themselves dictators, like in the case of Caesar in ancient Rome. But more often than not, the deceased represented a social or political shift that many, at the time, refused to accept.
In recent decades, political violence has been characterized as a symptom of corruption and a general lack of civility amongst a country’s citizens. It’s a crime that happens below the border, in places where the general population are crass, uneducated, bad. Donald Trump himself has repeatedly called Mexico’s government corrupt, preaching to the American people at the announcement of his candidacy on June 16, 2015 how Mexican immigrants fleeing an unstable social and economic situation are “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” This same rhetoric was echoed in Mr. Trump’s 2024 nomination acceptance speech at the RNC when he said, without evidence, that countries like El Salvador were sending their murderers to the United States. It has always been his contention that any violence we see here in America is the result of outsiders.
Yet, in recent years the political landscape above the border has become increasingly violent and corrupt. And it’s not people from Latin America who are carrying out these crimes.
In the fall of 2020, a group of more than a dozen men were arrested for a plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer in an attempt to overthrow the Michigan state government. Nils Kessler, a federal prosecutor, told the judge that the leader of the plot Barry Croft’s conduct “was similar in many ways to the actions of foreign terrorists,” Mitch Smith reported in The New York Times. The masterminds behind the plot, who were white, middle-aged men who enjoyed cosplaying as patriots, had spent a lot of time in the Midwest training for the attempted assassination, and many crossed state borders in order to participate.
In 2022, David DePape broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and assaulted her husband Paul Pelosi with a hammer. The incident happened just a week before the congressional elections, and DePape, a white Canadian who was in the United States illegally, was driven by far right conspiracy theories on QAnon.
And who could forget that fateful day in January 2021, when thousands of radicalized white Americans stormed the U.S. capital to “stop the steal,” attacking Capitol Police and constructing a gallows in the front lawn.
According to PBS News, political violence in America, as well as threats against public officials, have been on the rise over the last decade. Much of this violence can be traced back to divisive political rhetoric coming out of the leaders of both parties. But the other side of the problem, according to Cynthia Miller-Idriss, the director of research at American University’s Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab, is “ordinary citizens who give up and who lean into the idea that violence is a solution to any kind of political ideas or problems.”
Former President Trump’s speech at the RNC urged us all towards unity, while also showing us the alarming talking points that we know too well, talking points that people like me–a Mexican-American, a woman, and a member of the queer community–cannot ignore for the sake of unity. Under a Trump presidency, climate change will be accelerated, deportations rampant, and Christian national values merged into the fabric of American life, whether you are religious or not (I am not). Clocking in at over an hour and a half, the speech is the longest in the RNC’s history. “It’s a Fidel Castro kind of experience,” Rachel Maddow said shortly after.
To me, Trump is but an echo of some of the insane promises I have heard from presidential candidates around the globe, promises that life will get radically better as long as they win. “I could stop wars with just a telephone call,” Trump said after his rant on the influx of Latin American immigrants seeking asylum in the United States. With President Biden sick in bed with Covid and out of the race four months before the election, what I fear most is that the brutality of the current era in America has only just begun. In Mexico, my family’s well being is in the hands of corrupt politicians and cutthroat cartels. I hope that my father didn’t leave his homeland just to have a daughter who faces the same fate.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Wikimedia
