Nations as well as individuals, without exception, have our internal demons, we develop, throughout life, limbs behind the spinal column commonly called “tails”, some longer than others, susceptible to being stepped on, and we emanate evil smells. Nobody is perfect.
Today the objective of this column is not individuals, but nations, specifically the one that looks for the speck in another’s eye and has never seen the beam in its own: the United States of America.
Before continuing, I would like to point out emphatically that this column is not intended to defend the governments of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, dictatorial countries where, it is an irrefutable fact, that human rights are not respected.
But it is also undeniable that the three nations mentioned are in the American continent. Therefore, if the president of the United States, Joe Biden, intends to hold a Summit of the Americas in his territory, specifically in Los Angeles, California, he should invite all the countries of the continent regardless of their long lines and bad smells undemocratic. To Uncle Sam, the one who feels entitled to be the world’s policeman; the one that decides which countries are democratic and which are not; He hypocritically forgets that the US government has supported the worst anti-democratic and bloody Latin American dictatorships such as those of Trujillo, the Somozas, Castillo Armas, Pérez Jiménez, Batista, Getulio Vargas, Pinochet, Videla and others. It is worth recalling here what Corder Hull, Secretary of State for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, said about Somoza Sr.: “Somoza is a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch.”
To choose its presidents and vice presidents, the United States is governed by an obsolete democracy of the 19th century whose result does not depend directly on the citizen vote —popular vote—, the deserving of these two important positions are determined by an electoral college, formed by the so-called electors, whose number is equal to the number of congressmen per state. In total there are 538 voters. An example of the imperfection of this democratic modality was palpable in the year 2000 when Al Gore of the Democratic Party and George W. Bush of the Republican Party confronted each other. Gore obtained more than 500,000 popular votes than Bush, however, the latter, after some maneuvers not very clear in Florida, a state governed by his brother Jeb, he won by 271 electoral votes to 257 for Gore.
But the United States every day has less moral authority to impose its self-righteous will. Only last Saturday there were more than 400 protests in the main cities of that country where tens of thousands of supporters of abortion rights demonstrated against the possibility that the Supreme Court annul the ruling that almost 50 years ago (1973) legalized it throughout the country.
That same day, an 18-year-old white man armed with a semi-automatic rifle and a video camera used to broadcast the massacre live on the Internet, killing 10 people and wounding three in Buffalo, New York. Ten of the victims were African American. The FBI office considered the action a racial hate crime. In the 19 weeks leading up to 2022, there have been, for different reasons, 199 mass shootings in the US.
In another order of nefarious customs, according to the Centers for Disease Control, about 108,000 Americans died in 2021 from drug overdoses.
The foregoing establishes a question: Why a country that has supported ominous dictatorships; with an archaic democracy; where it is intended to reverse human rights conquered 50 years ago; in which there are massacres of racial hatred; who is the largest drug consumer in the world, wants to impose his broken life system as a paradigm?
If the Summit is of the Americas, all the great countries of the continent must be invited to Los Angeles. (With visit to Disneyland included).
Writer and television screenwriter
The Privilege of Opinion
Mexican television writer. He is known for having written the scripts for programs such as Ensalada de Locos, La carabina de Ambrosio, La Güereja and something else, El privilege de manda, among others.