'Trump is tearing apart America': how the world
sees the US protests
The racial tensions in the US have emboldened both
President Trump’s allies and his enemies
Uki Goñi in
Buenos Aires, Lily Kuo in Beijing, Jason Burke in Johannesburg, Tom Phillips in
Rio de Janeiro, Sam Jones in Madrid, and Julian Borger in Washington
Sun 7 Jun
2020 20.28 BSTFirst published on Sun 7 Jun 2020 07.30 BST
Critics say President Trump is using the pandemic and
racial uprising across the US to rebrand himself as a saviour.
The images
of troops facing off against protesters on US city streets has brought back bad
memories for Ana María Careaga.
The
Argentinian psychoanalyst was 16 and pregnant when she was kidnapped in
mid-1977 by the military dictatorship. Careaga was tortured but survived. Her
mother, Esther de Careaga, a close friend of Jorge Bergoglio, the Jesuit who
would later become Pope Francis, was herself kidnapped and murdered by the
regime.
The
relentlessly rising death toll from police violence and the instinctive resort
to military force by a demagogic US president fills her with alarm.
“What’s
happening is very dangerous in a way similar to the dictatorships we had to
endure in South America,” Careaga, who is co-director of the Instituto Espacio
Memoria dedicated to the memory of victims, warned.
“Trump is
shielding himself behind religious symbols while trying to seduce people to
vote for him in the name of freedom, when it is precisely their freedom that
leaders like him plan to abolish.”
Miriam
Lewin is one of only around 150 survivors of the ESMA death camp, where some
5,000 people were murdered over the seven years of the dictatorship.
“I think
Americans are not aware, or don’t have the experience, to realise what it means
for the military to be out on the streets in charge of domestic security,”
Lewin said. “In Latin America, unfortunately, we do have a lot of experience
with how that can lead to an authoritarian regime irrespective of the fact that
Trump was democratically elected.”
The events
of the past week in America have had reverberations around the world. For
years, part of the daily work of the US state department was to issue
denunciations of police brutality, suppression of dissent, and instability in
far-flung corners of the globe.
In recent
days it has been the other way round. Friendly nations have expressed concern,
less friendly governments have revelled in Washington’s discomfort.
In South
Africa, where there have also been sporadic demonstrations, the ruling African
National Congress party called for calm in the US.
“We are
convinced that America – a beacon of freedom for many worldwide – has the
ability to directly focus on healing and peace and achieve an outcome that
prioritises respect for and promotion of fundamental freedoms for all Americans,”
Naledi Pandor, the country’s international relations minister, said.
The Nelson
Mandela Foundation was less restrained, arguing that systemic violence towards
black Americans could justify a violent response.
“When
communities are confronted by both resilient structural violence and attacks on
their bodies, violent responses will occur,” the foundation said in a
statement.
Among those
most delighted about the scenes being played out in US cities are governments
with the worst human rights records, which have been the most criticised over
the decades by the US.
China’s
communist leadership, which has incarcerated more than a million of the
country’s Muslims and brutally suppressed protests in Hong Kong, has portrayed
the protests and Trump’s response as symptoms of a deep malaise.
“Trump is
himself the problem. Beneath the surface, Trump is a white supremacist,” wrote
Sun Xingjie, deputy director of the Institute of International Relations at
Jilin University, in an editorial on Thursday.
Republican
senator Tom Cotton’s editorial in the New York Times calling on the president
to “send in the troops” was published on the 31st anniversary of the 1989
Tiananmen Square massacre when the Chinese military put down pro-democracy
protests led by students, killing thousands. It is a day that goes unmarked in
mainland China but the parallel is not lost.
“Trump is
tearing apart America. He doesn’t need to send the troops. This will hurt the
US’s international image,” said a journalist based in Beijing who asked not to
be named. “All of this is about the fight for justice, rights and equality.
Whether it is Hong Kong or the US, people need to differentiate between
violence and the fight for justice.”
“You can
see an absolute absence of moral legitimacy in the activities of all great
powers, from Putin in Crimea to Trump in Minnesota,” said Liu Yi, editor of
international affairs at Sanlian Life Weekly, a magazine.
“When Trump
was showing his hypocrisy and arrogance in the Minnesota issue, Chinese
nationalists got more legitimacy to say ‘never criticise us again about Hong
Kong’.”
While much
of the world looks on with varying degrees of anxiety, pity or scorn, it is
Latin America where the events to the north have the most immediate
repercussions.
Brazil’s
far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, and his followers have been egging on
Trump’s crackdown.
“The left
has hijacked the anti-racism banner in order to promote political instability
against Donald Trump just because he’s a conservative,” Bolsonaro’s son
Eduardo, an avid fan of both Trump and Brazil’s former military dictatorship,
tweeted this week.
Many
Brazilians fear Bolsonaro – who is facing mounting public anger over Brazil’s
political, economic and public health crises – could use Trump’s actions to
help justify a crackdown of his own.
“Trump’s
discourse over the protests in the US is a really significant stimulus for
Bolsonaro. In a way I think it strengthens him in the Brazilian conservative
arena,” said Luís Francisco Carvalho Filho, a lawyer and former head of
Brazil’s Special Commission on Political Deaths and Disappearances.
“For him
Trump is an inspiration,” he added.
The George
Floyd protests and their consequences has deepened a strain of pessimism among
South American progressives.
Writing in
the Spanish daily El País, Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, a political scientist
at Chile’s Diego Portales university and co-author of Populism, a Very Short
Introduction, saw ill omens in the news from US cities, where the nationwide
protests have overlapped with the crippling effects of the coronavirus
outbreak.
“Trump is
using the pandemic to position himself as a God-given saviour coming to avert
an imminent catastrophe,” Kaltwasser wrote.
“His
re-election, should it happen, will be considered – not least by him – as a
clear indication that the time is right to push on with his radical, populist
rightwing agenda. If that prediction is right, then Covid-19 will come to be
seen as not just the bringer of death and recession in the US, but also as the
forerunner that paved the way for the destruction of US democracy.”
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