In mid-September the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petrorepeated again that there is a plot against him. He called it a “coup of the ties” and invited his bases to a National People’s Assembly to defend democracy. Although he stated that the alleged coup would begin on Monday, September 16, nothing happened. That same month the president of Honduras, Xiomara Castrosaid during a speech in front of his supporters that he will not allow a coup d’état in his country.
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Both heads of state are going through problems: in the case of Petro, the National Electoral Council must decide whether to file charges for possible illegal financing of his presidential campaign. In Castro’s case, Insight Crime published a video in which his brother-in-law appears meeting with powerful drug traffickers who offer him $650,000 for the campaign of the president’s party (Libre).
These are not the only speeches about dark powers that conspire against incumbent leaders. They also circulate in countries such as Nicaragua, Venezuela, El Salvador and even Costa Rica and Mexico, with varying levels of intensity. Are there really coups d’état or plans in the making against these leaders, as has happened before in Latin American history, or are they simply playing the victimization card?
In the case of Petro, in an interview in 2023, retired Colonel John Marulanda spoke of the need to “defenestrate” the Colombian President and gave as an example what happened in Peru with Pedro Castillo. Petro took advantage of this statement – coming from a former military officer unknown outside the military sphere, who retracted it shortly after – to demonstrate that there were plans to overthrow him.
The President also recently maintained that the DEA (the US drug control agency) informed him of a plan to assassinate him with explosives. Later, a controversial evangelical pastor and close friend of the President, Alfredo Saade, insisted on this theory during an interview with a journalist from the public channel RTVC, adding that there was an alleged poisoning plan.
In the case of Honduras, the background of the departure from power in 2009 of Manuel Zelaya, precisely the husband of the current president, Xiomara Castro, (and her current advisor) makes the narrative of the coup d’état more credible among his followers. against them.
For Honduran sociologist and economist Leticia Salomón, “the possibility of a new coup d’état is real due to the cultural backwardness of political leaders, the desperation of business groups displaced from power, the discomfort of some religious pastors and media owners. equally displaced, and the high level of confrontation and social polarization.”
After the scandal over the ‘narcovideo’, very few here believe that there is a coup d’état being organized against the Government.
But journalists and members of civil society question this theory and associate it rather with the president’s need to respond to the accusations against her brother-in-law, Carlos Zelaya, for the video in which he appears with drug traffickers who would have offered him money for a political campaign. “After the ‘narcovideo’ scandal, very few here believe that there is a coup d’état being organized against the Government,” says Raquel Lazo, journalist and news editor at a Honduran channel.
For Cuban political scientist and historian Armando Chaguaceda, both in the case of Xiomara Castro and Gustavo Petro, these theories are more due to the search for lost popular support. “They emerge after deep political crises, criticism from sectors of the middle classes and even former voters. And in this panorama, both Petro and Castro have a confrontation not only against the traditional elites of the political system (as they want us to believe), but also against civil society organizations, journalists and dissident movements.”
According to Chaguaceda, academic and political sectors related to the São Paulo Forum and the Puebla Group have promoted these narratives of the “soft coup” and the “lawfare” (legal war).
“The democratic system allowed both Gustavo Petro and Xiomara Castro to come to power, but when they come to power they accuse that there is wear and tear and they resort to these narratives of coups or lawfare, they call for using the streets, they pressure other powers of the State and generate a polarization. We already saw this in the early stages of Bolivarianism.”emphasizes Chaguaceda.
The expert refers to the cases of Venezuela and Nicaragua, where the argument of conspiracy against the Government from foreign forces or internal elites has been used to promote increasingly restrictive laws against the opposition.
On some occasions these conspiracies have been real. For example, there is the case of former Venezuelan military officer Ronald Ojeda, who tried to return from Chile to Venezuela to organize an insurrection against the Maduro regime, but he failed, had to flee and was later murdered in Santiago.
Some governments have taken advantage of cases like these to persecute political opponents and members of civil society. A report from the UN mission in Venezuela, released by El País, maintains that the regime intensified its “actions aimed at demobilizing the organized political opposition; to inhibit the dissemination of independent information and opinions critical of the Government and to prevent peaceful citizen protest. “The brutality of the repression continues to generate a climate of widespread fear in the population.”
The Venezuelan Prosecutor’s Office has detained more than two thousand people for ‘terrorism’, without further evidence. Among them, the activist Rocío San Miguel, whom prosecutor Tarek William Saab accused of participating in a conspiracy against the life of Nicolás Maduro.
Zair Mundaray, former prosecutor of the Venezuelan Public Ministry, currently outside his country, maintains that the regime frequently repeats that it is in a fight against international fascism that wants to overthrow it, and that the opposition is a coup-monger. “This is very Cuban: one of the ways to discredit, to persecute, is to classify anyone who thinks differently as a fascist. But there is nothing more fascist than the Chavista revolution, which marks houses, persecutes people, creates norms that persecute dissidence, that prevent the free expression of ideas, that control even works of art.says.
They carried out stigmatization campaigns against social organizations and the media to justify all this talk of conspiracy and supposed destabilization against the Government.
Mundaray maintains that precisely one of the tools to persecute opponents is the so-called Anti-Fascist Law, because “given its ambiguity, anything can be classified as fascist, any expression contrary to the regime, any protest formula, or any organizational mechanism in favor of the regime.” claim of a right.”
The Nicaraguan regime has long used these same arguments to exile and remove the nationality of opponents, in addition to outlawing non-governmental organizations. As the Nicaraguan sociologist Elvira Cuadra says, this has been going on since 2008.
“They carried out stigmatization campaigns against social organizations, the media, to justify all this talk of conspiracy and supposed destabilization against the Government. What they were saying at that time is that there were a number of organizations from the United States that financed people and groups within Nicaragua for that. And this deepens in the social protests of 2018. From there, anyone who does not have their opinion is considered a traitor to the country.”
For Cuadra, it is worrying to see that this type of speech, in which the opponent is branded as a traitor, coup plotter or conspirator, is gaining strength throughout Central America, beyond ideologies. “We have heard similar speeches in Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Panama,” he explains.
In fact, in El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele accused Parliament in 2021 of attempting a coup d’état. “They do not have the power to stop us, although they try to do so through the media, through their front NGOs, through their friends in the international community, they are even calling for a coup d’état,” Bukele said that year. .
Ilka Treminio, coordinator of the Central American Chair at the University of Costa Rica, agrees that in that region the conspiracist discourse has gained strength and seems to conclude the topic with a forceful phrase: “The most authoritarian presidents admire each other, they wink at each other in their speeches, they copy certain words or concepts. It can be seen as a snowball effect. “They are a reflection of the situation of the time and of a process in which democracy is in crisis.”
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