The electoral debut of the new strategy The security report released by the White House turned out to be complicated: tensions have been growing in Honduras for hours, with so far unfounded allegations of fraud and with the candidate who would have clinched victory, Nasry Asfura, strongly supported by Donald Trump, questioned by outgoing President Xiomara Castro and even by Salvador Nasralla, who was second in the preliminary count and was barely 40,000 votes (just over 1%) behind the former mayor of Honduras Tegucigalpa. What happened to Castro is somewhere between astonishing and ridiculous. He denounced an “electoral coup” and an alleged manipulation of the system used for the recount: a sincere admission of ineffectiveness that is very rare among the endangered species of Bolivarian populism in Latin America. National Electoral Council (CNE) leader Ana Paola Hall called on the armed forces to defend the electoral process in the presence of a mob convened by the ruling Libre party led by Manuel Zelaya, Castro’s husband. It should be emphasized that the official candidate, Rixi Moncada, former Minister of Defense, has just suffered a very hard defeat with almost 20% of the vote. Castro, Moncada… it’s impossible for these surnames not to point to the pervasive Cuban influence in Central America and the Caribbean.
In 2009, after electoral failure at the national and provincial levels Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Buenos Aires surprised Manuel Zelaya with a loud outpouring of support for his attempt to advance a patently illegitimate reform of the Magna Carta through a referendum that the Supreme Court of Honduras declared unconstitutional, preventing re-election. Together with Chávez’s Venezuela, which gave him oil, Zelaya wanted to stay in power by changing the rules of the game, which CFK could not even try due to another very hard defeat, that of 2013, which would start a disastrous cycle for his ambitions: since that year he lost all elections except 2019, when he marginalized himself in the vice post to maximize the chances of winning in the first round with Alberto Fernández as candidate, aware of the rejection that his figure provoked. In the face of this terrible electoral performance, the patience and generosity of the old judicialist apparatus with Cristina is striking: “Peronism is winning,” Chango Díaz, Menem’s former labor minister, once declared. Was? Questioned now like never before, does the former president prefer at this stage to ignore the misfortunes of her ex-partners? Friends of the great Latin American homeland.
This still includes Nicolás Maduro President and primate dancer of Venezuela who was subjected to a military siege unprecedented in the United States. To identify a cluster of military violence of similar magnitude, we must go back to the firing of Rafael Noriega on December 20, 1989. This dictator, convicted of drug trafficking, assassinations, money laundering and crimes against humanity, died under house arrest in his hometown of Panama in 2017 after serving a sentence of more than two decades in a Miami prison and a shorter sentence in a French prison. According to Trump, the days of Maduro, who has for now avoided the betrayal of the Bolivarian armed forces and the regime’s leaders, are numbered. This could become a new challenge for Washington if it is forced to use force not only against the boats allegedly transporting drugs, which have sparked a legal debate in the North American capital, but also against the Chavista regime. Would this require congressional approval? Some experts argue that this is not necessary as long as there is no formal invasion and that, for example, it is “just” a targeted bombing limited to targets linked to narco-terrorism. In any case, there is a significant risk for the Trump administration: that this ultimately harmless threat to the Maduro regime will result in a significant loss of reputation. It would be a major setback to the aforementioned national security strategy, much more serious than the increasing attrition it is experiencing in Honduras. There have already been protests against the “invasion” in Venezuela in several North American cities and university campuses. In many cases these are the same people who until recently demonstrated against the “genocide” in Gaza. And perhaps out of inertia, the Palestinian flags lie next to the Venezuelan ones. There is nothing better than Washington’s claims and argument that the Maduro regime has close, false business relationships with both Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as their clients in Tehran.
Resilience Maduro explains this by the omnipresence of the Cuban secret service in his government. Havana is not content to lose its privileged and parasitic position vis-à-vis Venezuela, an exceptional strategic resource for this island specialized in withstanding pressure from the United States. Without oil and the countless, especially illegal, businesses, the Castro regime would not have survived. Is there perhaps a happy ending to the labyrinth Trump has fallen into in the Caribbean, which is limited to Venezuela and virtually excludes Cuba? It is clear that such a movement of troops and weapons is not just intended to intimidate Caracas. And the ease with which the US now views Russia’s invasion of Ukraine means it expects a similar response if it decides to use force to oust Maduro and topple the Cuban regime. To limit the wait, Marco Rubio, the main representative of the Descendants of the Exiles (who have just suffered a very hard defeat in the election for mayor of Miami), former Senator of Florida, current Secretary of State and Chairman of the National Security Council and potential presidential candidate in 2028, ordered his country’s diplomacy to suspend the use of the Calibri letter in official documents, as far as culture is concerned woke up easier to read to return to the long-awaited Times New Roman. Perhaps he is inadvertently endorsing the “imperial presidency” characterization given to his boss’ leadership style.
By the way, in a prologue written by CFK for a book by journalist Cynthia Ottaviano and Roberto Caballero reiterates that “Russia never wanted to invade Europe,” clearly defending Vladimir Putin, whose strategy in Ukraine was the result of an alleged “defensive response” to NATO’s advance. Will he remember the invasion of Crimea in 2014? Moreover, it is the same hypothesis that supports the strategy document released by Washington and which, according to leading international security experts, represents the most dramatic turnaround by the United States since World War II. It is true that Lula da Silva himself had made a similar argument at some point, to the dismay of his friends on the European left, who could not think of the communicating vessels implied by Brazil’s membership in the Brics (they have just introduced a new international payment system called UNIT, with the intention of weakening the dollar). The conceptual agreement between CFK and Trump on such a controversial topic as the Ukraine conflict is surprising. “It has nothing to do with his insistence on a pardon for Bibi Netanyahu or with solidarity with another imprisoned former president, Jair Bolsonaro,” said a former Peronist foreign minister with subtle irony.
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