Opinion • Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar • January 26, 2024 • Leer en castellano

Last year ended with televised genocide in Gaza and this year began with the same. Since the Israeli invasion began in October, over 25,000 people have been killed and more than 62,000 injured, the vast majority of them civilians, many of them children.

The blatant and explicit mass detention and torture of Palestinians is yet another indication that Israeli forces, with American arms and support, intend to empty the territory. 

Gaza has been under siege since 2007 and, according to the United Nations, conditions are worse than ever. Approximately 85 percent of Gaza's population has been displaced and "every single person in Gaza is hungry." 

Israel's escalating war in Gaza is the most extreme instance of an expanding global war that sets out to clear territories in order to appropriate them and establish draconian relations of command and obedience. 

The militarist right in power

In late 2023, Argentine president Javier Milei unveiled his repressive, ultra-neoliberal government plan. Diverse sectors of Argentine society made it clear that they oppose his reactionary cuts in large protests on January 24. 

And Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa decreed a "state of internal armed conflict" on January 9. This declaration of war encourages the detention of and violence against racialized and poor youth, who are now accused of being terrorists. 

Both rightwing presidents started their terms in office after the bombings in Palestine began and both have stated their unconditional support for Israel’s genocidal war. Noboa has said he backs Israel and will not condemn its actions in Gaza, while Milei's team has announced that he will soon travel to Tel Aviv.

This is a war against the reproduction of social life as a whole, which is to say, against popular and communitarian possibilities for the organization of daily life in a minimally stable manner. And it is expanding across our region with shocking speed. It uses overt violence to liquidate organizational forms and horizons of struggle that have been built over the years in the midst of intense conflicts.

War, government and control 

Last week, I spoke with Verónica Gago, Lucía Cavallero and Silvia Federici about Gaza and current events in Argentina. 

Federici suggested that ruling elites linked to the U.S. military-industrial complex and the owners of the largest corporations seek a "total recolonization" of territory. I would add that the process of colonization—or recolonization—requires the imposition of new modes of governance and new relationships of command and obedience between the rulers and the ruled. 

This requires erasing earlier political arrangements, drastically altering imbalances, and imposing a radical disregard for previous political and public interventions and governance capacities.

Four decades ago, the implementation of neoliberal programs on Latin America and beyond was a harsh offensive against common goods, public resources and wealth that disregarded labor rights and undermined the possibility of material security through employment. Liberal democratic-formal procedures were imposed as a mechanism to organize the transfer of government. 

An immense range of social struggles have unfolded against the colonizing thrust of neoliberal capitalism and its extractivist, dispossessing logics that attack the fragile equilibrium upon which the reproduction of collective life depends. 

These mobilizations have introduced challenging horizons of political transformation into activism and debate, often based on re-launching communal and popular organizations’ capacity to intervene in public affairs, as well as feminist collectives and networks. In some countries, these movements have managed to install progressive governments that, with the passage of time, have demonstrated their inadequacy and short-sightedness. 

Now, in the midst of overlapping and multiple crises—economic, financial, climatic, ecological, sanitary, and productive—ruling elites have accelerated their political offensive against the population as a whole.

In Argentina, for the time being, this takes an economic form, intertwined with an increase in repression. In Ecuador, it has assumed the form of the militarization of social life and the suspension of basic civil rights. 

All of this occurs in the midst of an insidious campaign of confusion, typical of all wars. The words “economic crisis” and “insecurity” are repeated endlessly to bewilder the population. Argentina and Ecuador held elections in the second half of 2023 and the right, linked to the interests of finance capital, won in both countries. 

In Argentina, the shady and ridiculous Milei won in November elections against a worn-out and confused representative of the right wing of the Peronist party. In Ecuador, the young heir to a banana fortune, Noboa, was elected in the second round of voting. He seems to want to become a hybrid of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and Mexico’s criminal President Felipe Calderón.

Milei's warmongering 

Since December, Milei's government has been hammering on the need to reign in Argentina’s economic crisis.

His proposal, according to Cavallero of the Ni Una Menos Collective, is an attack on three fronts: against women and gender and sexual dissidents who sustain life in conditions of immense difficulty; against workers who have lost jobs and rights and, in general, against those who are outside the circuits of profit tied to financial, extractivist and/or agro-export businesses. 

The first is a harsh package of economic policies often referred to as structural adjustment. It consists of currency devaluation, an increase in the prices of fuel, food and services and an interest rate hike, among other measures.

The second operates through a de facto constitutional reform by decree that ignores previous political agreements and seeks to modify modes of accumulation by deregulating the actions of corporations in all spheres of life. 

The last is tied up with another set of reforms sent to Congress called the "Bill of Foundations and Starting Points for Argentine Freedom" that complements and deepens reforms contained in the decree and proposes delegating legislative powers to the executive. It also includes reforms that make protesting a crime by introducing a "Repressive Protocol" that attempts to legalize generalized repression, particularly through the figure of the protest "instigator." 

Under the proposed changes, anyone who opposes the government or promotes protests that spill over into street confrontations is subject to detention and heavy fines, whether or not they participated in the events in question. 

During our conversation, Gago, also from Ni Una Menos, alluded to a psychological terror campaign that harkens back to the dictatorship. In addition to criminalizing protest through the figure of the “instigator,” it threatens those who participate in mobilizations with the loss of subsidies through loudspeaker announcements at bus and metro stations. These threats instill a great deal of fear in Argentine society. In fact, in the province of Jujuy (where a repressive constitutional reform has already taken place), two people have already been arrested for tweeting against the former governor.

The aim is to spread terror and cultivate obedience by making the population fear that protest may lead to reprisals.

Internal armed conflict by decree

In Ecuador, militarization is taking place by decree. Throughout 2023, this lush and beautiful country convulsed in a crisis of its liberal political institutions that culminated in what is known as "mutual death."

The executive branch suspended Congress, while the latter did not recognize the former president, Guillermo Lasso, due to his participation in money laundering.

As a result, elections were held and won by Noboa, the son of an agro-export magnate from Guayaquil, as murders and violent conflicts raged in prisons. There is an opaque and virulent rearrangement taking place within the criminal economy, which is intertwined in many ways with the "legal" economy.

Finally, in January, the country was militarized by decree. According to the official narrative, following the escape of two incarcerated drug trafficking bosses and a prison riot that led to the taking of nearly 200 guards hostage, Noboa junior was obliged to declare a "state of internal armed conflict." This suspended constitutional guarantees and ensured that intimidation, detention and violence would become an increasing part of public life.

Militarized crises

In Argentina, the government argues that the economic crisis must be contained with dramatic aggressions against the reproduction of life, without the least reference to the causes of the situation. In Ecuador, it is drug trafficking—now considered terrorism—that must be neutralized. 

This is another instance of the familiar and failed strategy of militarizing public life, which the so-called War on Drugs made infamous, as if the experiences of Colombia and Mexico did clearly indicate that this path should not be followed.

Milei's government seeks to guarantee transnational corporations access to lithium deposits in the north of the country and the maritime resources along its extensive shores and to restore full access to land and water so that they can pass seamlessly into the hands of foreign corporations and millionaires.

In Ecuador, there is an unresolved dispute over land, water, minerals, the agro-export model, the wealth of the sea and the taxes that citizens pay. The conflict over the illicit economy, including but not limited to drug trafficking, and its intersection with licit modes of accumulation is also unsettled for now. 

War is spreading through Latin America and earlier organizational forms are being put to the test. We must collectively strengthen our capacity for self-defense, collective support and resistance so as to ensure that we don’t amplify the spiral of state violence. 

This is how 2024 is beginning in Latin America. All of this is taking place simultaneous to the genocide in Gaza, as reactionary politicians from the region applaud Israel when its armed forces bomb, torture and massacre Palestians.