Group of indigenous women dressed with the customary Cholo attire. Photo: Wikipedia.
By Rafael Bautista S. – Dec 17, 2022
“I am a Cholo and don’t pity me,
those are coins that are worthless
nothing
and that the whites give like those who give
money.
We cholos don’t ask for anything,
because if we lack everything, everything is enough for us”.
Luis Abanto Morales
The seigniorialist coup d’état carried out in Lima against President Castillo once again reveals the fallacy of “democracy” made in the USA, which is what we suffer from as a “democratic system.” Since democracy has been reduced to fetishist institutionalism, democracy itself has been abducted as a discursive guarantee of the defense of the existing order; that is, democracy ceases to be democracy and becomes merely a political convention of the powers that be. In this sense, the people are no longer of interest; that is, the subject of democracy is displaced, and power is emptied of legitimacy, leaving politics as a captive market at the mercy of speculators.
That is why the presence of the people bothers, because it delays business, because the times of capital do not allow for delay or hesitation. That is why gringo mythology has devised an “ideal democracy” to undermine any possible democratization of power; that “democracy” responds to the famous Powell memorandum of 1971, adopted by the Trilateral Commission in its 1975 report, Crisis of democracy, which, in short, says that democracy enters into crisis when the people become protagonists; that is why governance, since then, has been imposed as the only democratic dilemma.
All the hybrid coups we are witnessing, which mislead the unwary because they appear in democratic guise, are part of the repertoire of the new doctrines of imperial geopolitics. The appropriation by dispossession of the democratic discourse by the elites is what has been dislodging the left and cornering it, in the public perception, to the anti-democratic spectrum.
This deserved a thorough and systematic critique of the concept of democracy that the political-academic establishment brandishes, but the Latin American left, disguised as “progressivism”, never did its homework and was content to conform to the hegemonic language that charged the left with all the anathemas that gringo mythology had imposed as a social curse. This inevitably produces early capitulation and even if political power is achieved, the fate of the left is already excommunicated when its only bet is to accommodate, that is, to subordinate itself obediently to accept “rules of the game” that were never democratic and even less popular.
Now that the left of wine and tapas accuses Pedro Castillo of being ignorant, foolish, weak, or innocent, shows its arrogance and does nothing more than portray its stately origins; because that is the same qualification that the right-wing gives to someone who, according to the miserable Lima elite, did not deserve power. If the Peruvian people opted for a professor from the provinces who, in effect, had no political experience, it is because the left itself no longer smells of the people (the usurper Dina Boluarte is proof of this, even Antauro Humala, in the decisive hour, cannot offer any certainty either).
This is the misery of politics thought “from above.” It is the legacy of colonialism and colonization, which the elites suffer above all because they are deformed in the intellectual universe of the dominator (thus taming their revolutionary passions at an early stage).
This is also why “progressive” governments only advocate the preservation of democratic institutionality in the face of a flagrant constitutional violation of that very institutionality. It seemed that they had learned something from the Zelaya, Lugo, Lula, Dilma, Correa, Evo, and now Cristina episodes, but nothing. When coloniality has been subjectivized, that is, naturalized in the social consciousness, the left itself is too obedient to the gringo democratic mythology. That is why they prefer to get along with the powers that be rather than with the people because, ultimately, they do not believe in the people. And that is also why we see their political capitulation reiterated each time. Even their “progressive” intellectuals flaunt their clairvoyance and paternalistic inculpation without ever admitting their clear epistemic limitations (they abound in academic circuses and become famous thanks to our processes, appearing as sacred cows in the media spectrum, dominated by the dictatorship of “fast information”).
Knowing the ungovernability provoked in Peru by the Congress, our governments should have immediately disowned this spurious declaration of “moral incapacity” and the slight dismissal that betrayed, even to common sense, something already obscenely sacramentalized. But the discourse of Latin American unity is only a pretext for lavish “summits” because what we saw is, once again, regional abandonment (abandoning another legitimate president to his fate, as usual, is costing us the minimum consolidation of popular processes).
None of our processes will be able to remain stable under internal subjugation, and this focused threat cannot be confronted only locally. Our governments must realize that internal threats are part of imperial geopolitics in our region and that, under the same script, the purpose is not diluted at the local level but opens up to generalization and the spread of regional chaos. Political perspectives can no longer be confined to localism. As a region, the response to imperial geopolitics can only be regional. Up to now, diplomatic obedience has only served to watch from the sidelines as coups in all their variants take place, afterward being reproduced locally.
In every coup, imperialism does not think locally. In the latest imperial doctrines, regions are the issue. Every particular destabilization has purposes of general irradiation. The righteous oligarchies of the declining empire neither know nor care to know the profound national and regional damage to which they are directing their follies.
But in times of civilizational decadence, sanity is the most absent thing because everything boils down to survival at any cost, and that is what the right-wing shows in politics; that is why they resort to the filthiest tricks because, in addition, they count on the complicity of all the powers, from the judiciary to the media, from the congress to the military, and so on.
In all the years of the “democratic spring,” the “progressive” governments have not generated a minimum policy of containment of the hegemonic power; some have even naively tried to “pact” with them, believing that a revolution can be attempted under oligarchic consent, without knowing that, in this way, they dig their own grave and, more seriously, they risk the popular project that brought them to power.
That project is the one that, as a horizon, opens up in the midst of the void that the left itself manifests in its historical deviation. It has a people that can no longer be summed up in the creeds of the 20th century.
The historical subject is no longer the proletariat because in the social classification that capitalism has produced, the real absent one, the one that has even resignified the language of the left itself, is the subject of change; this is the subject that our processes must empower because it no longer charges the systemic contradictions that modern society has designed for it to make the social, political and economic machinery functional. This absentee no longer seeks inclusion in the system but its radical transformation. That is why it postulates a “world where everyone fits.” Because only from extreme exclusion can a world valid for all be imagined.
This is the one despised by “stately” Lima, the one who cannot be considered an equal, the “cholo”, the “serrano,” the one represented by Castillo, and whom the false democratic tolerance of Lima’s stately society could not tolerate. That is why this elite embraces gringo democracy, because in it they empty and justify all their racist prejudices in the name of the most sacred thing in political language. That is why it is possible to be totally and absurdly democratic while being, in reality, a fascist.
This is not a current gamble but the historical decantation of a tradition that brings us back, once again, to the origin of the matter: the eternal return of conquest, now in the form of democracy. That is why Luis Abanto Morales is still alive in the popular soul: “Wasn’t it the whites who came from Spain/Who gave us death for gold and silver/Wasn’t there a certain Pizarro who killed Atahualpa/After many promises, beautiful and false?”.
Rafael Bautista S. author of: “The Angel of History. Genealogía, ejecución y derrota del golpe. 2018-2020”, “Yo soy si Tú eres” ediciones rafaelcorso@yahoo.com
