In Latin America, a region familiar with the attacks on democracy, the attack by pro-Trump extremists on the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Wednesday generated widespread alarm – and bleak reminders of political unrest in the region.
The phrase “GolpeDeEstadoEnEEUU,” (“coup d’état in the United States”), was a trend on Twitter as analysts and others compared the political chaos in Washington to the historical and contemporary upheaval in their homelands.
“The USA became part of Latin America”, Lester Ramírez, from Assn. for a More Just Society, a non-governmental social justice organization in Honduras, said in an interview.
Scenes from the violent crowd in Washington brought to mind a 2009 coup d’état on the Central American nation that forced President Manuel Zelaya into exile. The clashes he also recalled the protests that broke out after Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was re-elected in a 2017 vote marked by allegations of fraud – but considered legitimate by President Trump’s administration.
“Authoritarianism is the rule here,” said Ramírez, and now the United States was experimenting.
Future regional leaders, he said, can respond to US criticism of their democratic processes with disbelief: “You have no moral authority. Your country has serious problems. How are you going to say that what I’m doing is bad? “
For many in Latin America, there was considerable irony in the outbreak of political turmoil in a nation often accused of fomenting coups across the region.
The Venezuelan left-wing government, which the Trump administration has openly sought to remove from power, said in a statement that “with this unfortunate episode, the United States is experiencing what it has generated in other countries with its policies of aggression.”
Chilean academic Boris Yopo H. Tweeted: “Trump’s legacy: The United States, Banana Republic, 21st Century.”
President-elect Joe Biden acknowledged the damage to the United States’ global reputation. “The world is watching,” he said during a speech on the acquisition of the United States Capitol. “Think about what the rest of the world is looking at.”
Photos circulating on social media of bearded extremists breaking into the offices of US representatives sparked ironic tweets that “Conan the Barbarian” and his minions had taken over the sacred halls of Congress.
In Peru, Washington’s scenes evoked the 1992 pandemonium for many, when President Alberto Fujimori, a right-wing populist, dissolved the National Congress, justifying the coup as a movement against rebels and drug traffickers. Fujimori was later arrested for human rights violations.
“Today Trump looks a lot like Alberto Fujimori,” tweeted Peruvian journalist José Alejandro Godoy. “The extreme right is the biggest threat to democracy in the world. And watch out, he has his followers here. “
In El Salvador, the US confusion reminded some of last year’s scene in San Salvador, when President Nayib Bukele – a close US ally and Trump admirer – dispatched troops to Congress in what critics called an attempted takeover. legislative power.
“Trump and Bukele are very similar in the sense that they both came to power along democratic lines, but, once in office, they both started attacking democratic institutions,” said Celia Medrano, a political analyst in San Salvador, in an interview. “Both want to perpetuate themselves in power by force.”
In Chile, some observers saw parallels between what happened at the Capitol and the bombing of the presidential palace La Moneda in Santiago, the capital, on September 11, 1973, when General Augusto Pinochet led the coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende.
But Chilean President Sebastian Piñera, a center-right billionaire, said that Chile “has confidence in the strength of US democracy to guarantee the rule of law and rights”.
Critics from across the region attacked Trump supporters.
“What our pro-Trump compatriots are saying at the moment,” tweeted Carlos F. Galán, a former senator in Colombia, a close ally of the United States. “Everyone is quiet. … Extremes are the main threat against democracy.”
Some polls have shown a decline in U.S. popularity across much of Latin America since Trump took office. Still, Wednesday’s disorder in Washington surprised many observers accustomed to seeing the United States as a flagship of democracy and the peaceful transfer of power – even though Washington’s foreign policy often supported undemocratic regimes in Latin America.
Carlos Bravo Regidor, a political analyst and professor at CIDE, a public research center in Mexico City, said the violence in Washington exposed the United States as “just another country where there are political unrest”.
“They took off their masks,” he said.
Special correspondents Cecilia Sánchez and Liliana Nieto del Río in Mexico City, Alexander Renderos in San Salvador, Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires, Adriana León in Lima, Peru, Jorge Poblete in Santiago and Mery Mogollón in Caracas, Venezuela, contributed to this report.