The Capitol Hill riot was an attempt to bring home the kinds of coups that the imperialists regularly carry out in Latin America. The only difference was that this coup attempt didn’t work, which is only a momentary reprieve from the fascist crackdown that’s sure to come to this country. Because the riot set a precedent for the kinds of terror campaigns that the far right aims to carry out, and that the institutions of colonialism and capitalism are helping bring us closer towards.
The most important aspect of this precedent — and the one that’s most analogous to Latin America’s coups — is the fact that the riot was perpetrated by police and trained ex-military personnel. The storming of the building even included an instance of these radicalized Army members enacting the Ranger File, the standard military operating procedure where soldiers assemble into a marching line while holding the jacket collar of the one ahead. This shows how prevalent antisemitic conspiracy theories (like QAnon) and militia intentions are among those who’ve received military training. The forces of far-right paramilitarism are fused with the colonial law enforcement and military institutions, like is the case in death squad-ridden Latin American countries like Colombia.
And given the recent history of Washington’s counterrevolutionary terror throughout the hemisphere, this paramilitarism within U.S. borders is soon going to be utilized to replicate Colombia’s notoriously brutal repressive campaigns.
The Capitol Hill riot’s Ranger File was taken right from the playbook of violent reactionary power transfers like the one Bolivia underwent in 2019, where police marched in the streets to reinforce the military coup against Evo Morales. This coup had taken place after weeks of terrorism by U.S.-backed white supremacist rioters, who had been carrying out violent protests under the rationale that Morales had stolen the election. The claims about electoral fraud from the Organization of American States were later found to be deliberately misleading, but they were enough to force through a year-long overturning of democracy within the country where a coup regime unleashed torture and death squads.
These death squads were made possible by the coup regime granting immunity to Bolivia’s neo-Nazis, who were tasked with putting down the indigenous resistance. This parallels the permission to kidnap, extrajudicially execute, rape, and torture that Colombia’s paramilitary members have been given. Like the coupist violence in Bolivia, Colombia’s terror campaign is rationalized by fabricated claims of a conspiracy; the country’s recent anti-austerity protests, and their adjacent human rights organizations, are being implicated in an alleged foreign subversion plot by “Castro-Chavismo.” It’s the formula that reactionary power grabs always use: create a Big Lie, and keep repeating it while unleashing bloodshed.
We’re seeing the same thing in Peru, where the rightist candidate Fujimori has put forth cooked-up allegations of electoral fraud to stir up racist and anti-communist sentiment. And in Brazil, where Bolsonaro has been stoking fears of electoral fraud in anticipation of his likely loss in next year’s election. There’s an obvious running thread here, and it traces back to the conspiracy theories about a stolen election that Trump used to justify inciting the Capitol Hill riot. Conspiracy theories that Trump had been spreading years in advance of the 2020 election, and that were unsurprisingly utilized in Bolivia to portray the victory of Morales as fraudulent. Throughout the hemispheric right, an environment has emerged where reality can be turned on its head to justify acts of terrorism, whether that involves stochastic acts of random violence or well-coordinated military power grabs.
At some point, the brew of paramilitarism, reactionary conspiracy theories, and police state fortifications that’s being cooked up within U.S. borders is going to produce a massive campaign of violence. Members of right-wing militias like the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters will be deputized so that they can murder undesirables with impunity. These undesirables will range from communists, to journalists, to human rights activists, to simply members of the racial and LGBT groups that fascists hate.
It will mirror what happened following the Bolivia coup, where white supremacists were given total impunity to kill those within the indigenous resistance movement. As well as what’s been happening in Colombia, where half of the human rights activists killed last year were working to scrutinize the atrocities of the Colombian narco regime. Examples of this type of U.S.-backed paramilitary terror can be found in numerous other places — such as Ukraine, where a U.S.-installed fascist regime has been enabling neo-Nazi militias to target Jews, Romas, LGBT individuals, journalists, communists, and those among the one-third of the country’s population who are ethnically Russian.
If the primary targets of the empire’s terror in Latin America are indigenous people, and its primary targets in Ukraine are Russians, in the core of the empire the primary targets will be those the U.S. has colonized: Natives and Africans. The preparations for this extermination campaign are being made in Biden’s weaponization of police around the country, represented by this year’s acceleration of military aid to police departments, by the Israeli training of U.S. police throughout the last decade, and by the recent police brutality against indigenous Minnesota anti-pipeline protesters which demonstrator Tara Houska has described:
The level of brutality that was unleashed on us was very extreme. People were shot in their faces, in their bodies, in their upper torsos. I saw a young woman’s head get split open right in front of me. It was a really, really brutal scene. And the arrests in person were also quite brutal, throwing people face down in the dirt and being extremely violent in a situation in which we were outnumbered by police at least two to one, and many, many, many counties present protecting this one place, and which also happens to be a county where a murderer, an actual murderer, is still on the loose, has not been caught, but there were somehow over 50 police officers in that one place watching water protectors.
At the same time, an unnamed mercenary company has been sending contractors to assault peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters in Minneapolis, establishing a precedent of privatized paramilitary policing within U.S. borders. One that’s soon going to be used to expand the presence of mercenaries to a limitless amount of U.S. cities and towns. This, along with the looming deputization of the fascist vigilantes and the plans the U.S. military has for occupying the country’s urban areas, is going to add several more layers of reactionary muscle to the already highly militarized and Israelified police forces.
When Trump expressed desire to deploy 10,000 troops to Washington DC to attack the George Floyd protesters, and to use troops to protect his terroristic supporters on January 6th, he may have been only a few years ahead of his time. At some point, all the facets of America’s internal fascist militarization will unite to wage war against the masses. Latin America and Ukraine show the U.S. empire won’t hesitate to do this to its own people.
The problem with the empire’s plan to import the Bolivia military coup method is that this method has failed. Last year, the indigenous movement overwhelmed the military, police, and paramilitary forces of the coup regime, forcing through a new election where a new socialist president was elected and then inaugurated. If we unite into socialist militias, as the Bolivian proletariat did, we’ll be equipped to fight off the reactionaries and liberate this land from colonial occupation.
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