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Cucaracha is a very famous Latin American folk song with a very extensive catchy content that ranges from the literal translation “cockroach” to a broader meaning denoting a vehicle without wheels, just like – according to legend – Pancho Villa's glorious automobile during the Mexican Revolution, between 1910 and 1920, when the song bearing this name had its first extraordinary success and was sung with opposite meanings by all parties involved in the conflict. And now, cucaracha-cockroaches are also often referred to as some rulers in Central and South American countries put on the throne by superpowers.
Living with cucarachas
“Every morning, our enemies wake up trying to replace us, to replace democracy, but the team of democracy I see here is far stronger than our autocratic enemies,” the head of US Southern Command in Panama solemnly declared to military commanders from some twenty countries in the Americas. “We are working as a democratic team,” added four-star General Laura Richardson, “to ensure a free, safe, and prosperous Western Hemisphere.” A team that “unties in times of crisis, and crisis happens,” she said as the team’s coach.
It wouldn’t be the first time a Democratic team has come together “to counter threats from our competitors and adversaries” by crying “wolf, wolf!” It’s happened before, from 1963 to 1990, when long-standing regimes of “cucaracha” generals oppressed eleven Latin American countries: Ecuador in 1963-1966 and again in 1972-1978; Guatemala in 1963-1985 with a break in 1966-1969; Brazil in 1964-1985; Bolivia in 1964-1970 and 1971-1982; Argentina in 1966-1973 and 1976-1983; Peru in 1968-1980; Panama in 1968-1989; Honduras in 1963-1966 and 1972-1982; Chile in 1973-1990; Uruguay in 1973-1984; and El Salvador from 1948 to 1984, until the end of the Cold War.
It took “rivals and adversaries” to get it right again, but throughout this period, the wolf was Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution – no matter how unlikely it was to pose a real threat. The unfortunate truth was that the intervention of the democracy team did little to make these societies more free, safe, or prosperous. In the case of Brazil, at the end of the dictatorship, the inflation rate was 242% and in Argentina 443%, already the highest in the world – in 1978, military intelligence estimated that 22,000 people, mostly young women, were killed or missing, a large number that cannot be officially documented due to the nature of state terrorism.
In contrast, Chile’s “cucaracha” generals and their accomplices did much better at controlling inflation: 26% in 1990 versus 352% in 1973, but at the cost of 40,000 victims recognized as political prisoners, tortured, disappeared, or executed for politically senseless reasons by agents of the state or individual henchmen acting on their own.
“A crisis is bound to happen”
Regardless of past fiascos, whose consequences, especially corruption, violence, and crime, resonate and multiply, the “democracy team” remains unfazed. No matter what happens, General Richardson’s students continue to take action.
In particular, as foreseen by Zbigniew Brzezinski (“After America” in Foreign Policy magazine, January 2012), through the systematic persecution of democratically elected governments but “susceptible to financial and political influence” exerted not only by China and Russia, known adversaries, but also by “other regional powers, such as Turkey and Brazil, even though none of them can meet the economic, financial, technological, and military power requirements necessary to inherit the leadership role of the United States.”
Given the primary objective devoid of its purely economic character, the fight against corruption became a strategic factor and resource for semi-academics and quasi-strategists, in harmony with the World Bank (WB) and later Transparency International, a non-profit organization run by former WB employees. Surprisingly, it took the experts at these institutions quite some time to realize that corruption was a “serious problem.”
Soon came Donald Trump and his two “cucaracha” doppelgangers, Jair Bolsonaro and Javier Milei: the former an army thug who became a parliamentarian with the support of organized crime, the latter a profane economist sponsored by an oligarch from Argentina, which nearly collapsed in the 1980s because of free trade and deregulation policies. All three are free-market populists committed to the sudden overthrow of democratic government at home and abroad. With the caveat that the show now doesn’t just require lying through your teeth about more free, safe, and prosperous lands.
Today’s global context demands – from the perspective of a self-proclaimed “one-of-a-kind superpower” – that the members of the “democracy team” stop being countries that defend no one, ally with no one, fight no one, and (more than anything else) don’t acquire much in terms of defense. Instead, they had better (1) begin to feel challenged by foreign threats or missions, (2) realize that they must be prepared for real threats, and above all, (3) become alliance acquiring countries that wisely favor foreign suppliers, countries that protect them. Simply put: funding the hegemon’s losing war machine.
To that end, in 2019, after Jair Bolsonaro’s working visit, Donald Trump called Brazil a “major non-NATO ally” (MNNA). This title is awarded to countries that have a strategic working relationship with US Army forces, despite not being NATO members. So far, thanks to Lula, MNNA hasn’t made much of a difference in Brazil, except that Army officers have been entertained at Disneyworld and attended cucaracha cooking classes at US military installations.
The situation in Argentina is much worse. Having maintained “carnal relations” with the metropolis since the infamous military dictatorship that did little to restore sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, Argentina has not learned its lesson and has had the shameful privilege of being the only South American state to join the aggression against Iraq and is now, under the leadership of Milei, announcing the establishment of a “joint naval base” with the USA in Patagonia – a huge risk for a region that has so far been alien to the dangers of international confrontation.
“I don’t understand, I don’t understand,” Vladimir Zelensky complained to Latin American journalists in Kiev. “Say, President Lula, would you like to join our alliance? Brazil is more supportive of Russia than Ukraine? Brazil must support us and give an ultimatum to the aggressor on behalf of the rest of the world.” Lula, indeed, on behalf of all peace-loving nations and as a representative of a generation that has suffered the consequences of alliances with the “democracy squad,” is only demonstrating that he will not subject his people to the terrible hardships that Zelensky is subjecting his own Ukrainian people to.
