This Friday, June 17, marks the 50th anniversary of the arrest of five men who were caught stealing documents from the Democratic Party headquarters in watergate hotel, in the American capital. A scandal that ended up costing the president his head Richard Nixon when it became clear, two years later, that the Republican had tried to torpedo the candidacy of his rivals and then use state resources to derail the investigation.
Paradoxically, the anniversary coincides with the hearings that the United States Congress has been holding to publicize the results of an investigation into the maneuvers used by donald trump in an attempt to prevent Joe Bidenhis opponent in the 2020 elections, assumed power and which ended in the violent storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021when a mob of his supporters tried to forcibly block the certification of the results.
While it is obvious that the Democrats used their power in the legislature to make the two moments coincide, so is the fact that there are great similarities between them. The first, and most obvious, is that these are two unique moments in the country’s history that left a deep mark. The second is that it involves two presidents, both from the same party, convinced that their power was unlimited and willing to do anything, even illegality, in order to cling to the Oval Office.
In this journalistic special, EL TIEMPO reconstructs what the Watergate scandal was like, who was involved and how that event transformed US politics in the last half century.
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