COMMENTARY When MAGA Latinos liken former President Trump's indictment to political persecution in Latin America, it's an unconscionable insult to real pro-democracy victims in that region.
A venerable hero like the late Oswaldo Payá doesn’t deserve to be compared to a disgraceful scoundrel like former President Donald Trump.
But that’s essentially what Trump’s Latino supporters in South Florida — los MAGAtinos — have so disgracefully done this week, by likening his federal indictment to the persecution of opposition leaders back in Latin America.
Of all the many pro-democracy leaders I’ve had the privilege to interview in Latin America, I hold Payá — the Cuban dissident who shook up Fidel Castro’s communist dictatorship in unprecedented fashion — in especially high esteem. Payá stunned the world two decades ago when, with Gandhi-esque guts and smarts, he gathered enough petition signatures for a constitutional referendum on democratic reform.
Castro of course didn’t permit that plebiscite — in fact, he melted down and jailed scores of Payá’s associates instead — but Payá set the example for the dissident defiance we’ve seen since in Cuba. “We’re the first non-violent force for change this island has ever known,” he told me at his Havana home in 2003. “Castro can’t crush that, no matter how hard he tries.”
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Which makes it less surprising, but no less saddening, to hear the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights conclude this week that Cuban regime agents played a role in the car crash that killed Payá and another democracy activist in eastern Cuba in 2012. The government in Havana denies the charge. But the IACHR’s findings are just the latest reminder of the genuine threat that genuine champions of democracy like Payá so often face from both left-wing and right-wing tyranny in Latin America.
As opposed to the fabricated threat that a traitor to democracy like Trump says he faces here.
How, por Dios, can any Latino — especially a Cuban or Venezuelan exile — conscionably equate a) the unjust oppression unleashed on democracy's torchbearers south of America’s borders with b) the justifiable prosecution of a democracy-trashing megalomaniac like Trump? One who allegedly handled U.S national security secrets more recklessly than gossips treat personal confidences in a barber shop.
Trump, the comb-over caudillo, had a real knack as President for making us think we'd been transported to Honduras or Nicaragua.
Trump acolyte Kevin Marino Cabrera — a Cuban-American Miami-Dade County commissioner — told the Associated Pressthis week that Trump’s legal woes are “the sort of things that you see in the Caribbean and Latin America, where you have the party in power persecuting the opposition.”
Really, Commissioner? You mean, like the time Trump — when he was the party in power — tried to subvert the U.S. Justice Department, the U.S. Congress and U.S. state election agencies into overturning a presidential vote he legitimately lost and the opposition legitimately won?
Goon squads
That, too, is the sort of thing you often see in Latin America and the Caribbean, Commissioner. In fact, the comb-over caudillo you worship so slavishly had a knack when he occupied the White House for making us think we’d been transported to Honduras or Nicaragua.
We felt it when Trump loosed his neo-Nazi enforcers, the Proud Boys, on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to terrorize his political opposition. It was a revival of goon squads like Manuel Noriega’s Batallones de la Dignidad (Dignity Batallions) in Panama.
We smelled it when he had National Guard troops fire pepper spray at peaceful anti-police brutality protesters in Washington, D.C.’s Lafayette Square in 2020 — an eerie reminder of socialist Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro’s notorious attacks on pro-democracy demonstrators.
You want to know where we’re seeing actual persecution of political opposition right now, Commissioner? It’s not at the federal courthouse in Miami. It’s in Guatemala, where a justice system wedged deeply and shamelessly in the pocket of the political establishment is busy disqualifying opposition presidential candidates by filing bogus charges against them. Meanwhile, journalists investigating said establishment’s epic corruption are getting locked up — including José Rubén Zamora, who this week was sentenced to six years in prison.
I know, Commissioner, that you and the rest of the MAGAtinos insist (as Trump does) that only left-wing regimes like Cuba’s and not right-wing regimes like Guatemala’s are guilty of “that sort of thing” in Latin America. But it’s real on both sides.
And to hear you and MAGAtinos trivialize the plight of its very real victims, from Payá to Zamora, by associating them with Trump’s very made-up victimization?
It's nothing short of disgraceful.
