On an overcast August morning in 2023, I stared out the window of an Uber ferrying me home from Newark International Airport. It was a trip I’d made hundreds of times, and the scenes whizzing past me were familiar. Lost in my thoughts, I realized that the broader American landscape felt unrecognizable. Trump was facing several indictments and was spending hours in court, yet he still seemed to be the Republicans’ preferred candidate. The worst wildfires seen in a century were ravaging through the western part of Maui in Hawaii. Hundreds of newly arrived migrants were inhumanely sleeping on the sidewalks of New York City, after having been cruelly shipped from Texas border towns by Republican governor Greg Abbott. Meanwhile, the city was still healing from the fatal stabbing of O’Shae Sibley, a gay man brutally murdered at a Brooklyn gas station by a homophobe. Across the country, homelessness was on the rise, the fentanyl crisis was deepening, and doctors warned of an epidemic of loneliness. The Biden administration was touting the country’s economic progress coming off the pandemic, but there was an overwhelming sense of unease on the streets. It was as if the pandemic had taught us that life, as we knew it, could slip through our fingers at any point. It’s this general sense of unrest, mistrust, and disenchantment that can make many Latinos gravitate toward strongmen.
As the state of the nation was weighing on me, the Uber drove through a small Latino working-class New Jersey neighborhood. The driver stopped at a traffic light, and suddenly a small barber shop across the street caught my attention. Through its window I could see a huge poster of Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s president, plastered on a wall in the back. I took in the scene: The poster featured Bukele with his left hand tightly gripped, pointing at the sky with his index finger. Even if you didn’t know the man’s backstory, it was obvious he was a strongman confidently in command, demanding attention. The poster was at least five feet tall. Four young male clients sat in the shadow of the image while they got low-tapered haircuts. Every now and then their eyes would fluctuate between their phone screens and Bukele’s glaring image, which was also reflected in the salon’s mirrors.
“Who is that man?” the Uber driver asked with curiosity as he drove away.
“Many consider him Latin America’s millennial dictator,” I said. “His rise is already a threat to democracy. But people love him.” We kept driving toward Brooklyn.
Nayib Bukele is one of Latin America’s most popular leaders. As of the summer of 2023, his approval ratings in El Salvador were around 90 percent, higher than any other leader on the continent. Some consider him an authoritarian figure, while others—likely including the barber shop owners—think of him as a hero. Bukele, a former businessman, was elected in 2019 and made history for being the first president in El Salvador to emerge from neither of the nation’s two major parties. Running as the anti-establishment candidate, the thirty-nine-year-old rose to power amid a disillusioned populace frustrated by the country’s long history of corruption, violent crime, and instability. Bukele felt like a fresh start for El Salvador. He was politically unaffiliated. He had a youthful vibe, often appearing on broadcasts with his baseball cap backward, aviators, tight jeans, and leather jackets. He was a savvy social media communicator, relying on X, formerly known as Twitter, to make important policy announcements. (Sound familiar?) And he made bitcoin an official currency alongside the dollar, which was being used since 2001, opening the door to more tourism.
But underneath the hip aesthetic, Bukele mirrored a type of traditional populism that felt intimately familiar to Latin Americans. While casting himself as a sort of messiah of the people, Bukele leveraged his popularity to rule with an iron fist. Two years after his election, Bukele changed his X profile bio to say, “World’s Coolest Dictator” (he’s since changed it). That sarcastic bio description captured his character: Bukele was constantly trolling democracy.
Since taking office, Bukele worked to consolidate his power and exploit it as much as possible. He used his legislative supermajority to pack El Salvador’s highest court with his loyalists, employed intimidation tactics to pass favored bills, and defied the constitution by announcing his run for reelection in 2024 despite the constitution’s ban on consecutive terms. Eventually, by November 2023, El Salvador’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal had approved Bukele’s bid for reelection. Bukele also developed a hostile environment for the press, driving El Faro, an esteemed newspaper once based in the nation’s capital, to relocate their headquarters to Costa Rica due to the harassment and defamation they were receiving from the state. Bukele rarely held interviews with his own country’s news outlets, but he loved to sit down with Tucker Carlson when Carlson was at Fox News, fostering a Republican fan base that was mesmerized by Bukele’s tight grip on El Salvador. Yet perhaps Bukele’s most repressive and undemocratic policies are precisely why he is popular with his constituents and maintains stellar approval ratings. Through his hardline crackdown on gangs, Bukele managed to achieve security in El Salvador. But he did so at the expense of civil and human rights.
Not too long ago, El Salvador was often referred to as the murder capital of the world by mainstream media due, in large part, to brutal gang violence plaguing the country. For decades, groups like MS-13 and their rival Barrio 18 terrorized neighborhoods, killing countless citizens, and forcing thousands of people to flee the Central American country. On March 26, 2022, just a couple of years into Bukele’s presidency, over sixty people were killed in the country of 6.3 million, making it the deadliest day on record since the end of El Salvador’s civil war in 1992. The following day, Bukele declared a state of emergency and unleashed a set of policies that raised serious concerns in the international community. Bukele extended his special powers, deployed the military to the streets, arbitrarily rounded up and arrested thousands of men (having a tattoo or being related to a gang member was good enough reason for targeting), and detained them in inhumane conditions in overcrowded jails.
Shortly after Bukele began his massive crackdown, approximately 100,000 people were incarcerated—up to 2 percent of El Salvador’s entire population. By December 2022, Human Rights Watch found widespread human rights violations had taken place during Bukele’s mass arrests, including arbitrary detentions, torture of detainees, deaths in custody, and lack of due process. And, by 2023, Bukele was tweeting videos of thousands of barefoot, tattooed men in white boxers and shackles as they were being transferred to his newly constructed mega-prison. He was proudly and unapologetically showing off his captives to the world. The footage reminded me of the gruesome images of detainees being held in Abu Ghraib, images that would end up becoming proof of the U.S. government’s human rights abuses.
More than anything, Bukele and his show of force was reminiscent of a typical Latin American caudillo. For everything new Bukele represented, he was also the latest personification of the long lineage of autocratic leaders who have governed in the continent for centuries. The word “caudillo” means “Spanish or Latin-American military dictator” and specifically refers to the type of leaders that emerged from Latin America’s wars of independence against Spanish colonizers in the early nineteenth century. As colonial powers were challenged across the Americas, a number of social uprisings were led by strong, charismatic men who inspired masses of people to join revolutions and reclaim their independence from Spain.
Among the most prominent leaders was Simón Bolívar. Bolívar was known for liberating his birthplace of Venezuela, as well as Colombia, Panama, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Today, every Latin American history book praises Simón Bolívar as a “liberator” and “Great Man of America.” However, there are other scholars who take a more nuanced approach to understanding Bolívar’s leadership. Joshua Simon, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, has labeled Bolívar’s form of governance “Republican imperialism” and noted the ways in which he strategically insulated governments from the people’s reach. Simon writes, “It is clear that Bolívar’s constitutional thought provided a justification, however temporary, for the concentration of authority in the hand of a small, lettered, and largely Creole elite.”
Two things can be true at once. Simón Bolívar could have been both a liberator and an authoritarian caudillo. He could be a hero to some, an enemy to others. That seems to be a recurring story in Latin American history and politics: strongmen achieving “democracy” by way of authoritarianism. Or, rather, their own distorted version of democracy. Latin America, stained by its brutal history with colonization and instability, has proven fertile ground for caudillos on both sides of the political spectrum, caudillos who have exploited people’s yearning for stable democracies to their advantage. Throughout the twentieth century, Latin America saw another wave of autocratic figures. By the 1970s, seventeen out of twenty countries in Latin America were under some form of dictatorship. This included right-wing military rules in Chile under General Augusto Pinochet, in Brazil under Emílio Garrastazu Médici, and in Paraguay under General Alfredo Stroessner, as well as communist rule in Cuba under Fidel Castro and a leftist regime in Peru under Juan Velasco Alvarado.
Toward the end of the century, market reforms, electoral reforms, and transitions to civilian-elected governments propelled what became widely known as “the third wave of democratization” throughout Latin America. But by the early 2000s, autocratic tendencies reemerged in some countries. In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez’s socialist platform inspired populist movements in countries like Ecuador, Bolivia, and Honduras, while conservative leaders like Colombian president Álvaro Uribe were attempting to change the constitution to extend their power. By 2018, a World Economic Forum report found that Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Honduras were among the countries least governed by the rule of law. Meanwhile, Cuba’s communist stronghold has of course continued for more than sixty years.
Democracies in Latin America are haunted by the shadows of strongmen. While, to some, their voices may be inspiring and calming on the surface, they are also chipping away at the continent’s rocky democratic foundations. Nayib Bukele is simply the latest iteration of this dark legacy. Carolina Jiménez Sandoval, the president of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), an advocacy group that’s dedicated to advancing human rights in the Americas, told me that she views Bukele as “a caudillo on steroids.” Unlike the nineteenth- and twentieth-century caudillos, Jiménez Sandoval worries that new tools like social media and disinformation are helping Bukele leverage his power even further. “The word ‘caudillo’ falls short for him,” she told me. “In two years, Bukele has done what it took Hugo Chávez ten years to achieve.” The problem? Millions of people love Bukele. People want Bukele. They look up to him, not just in Latin America, but also in the United States.
Thousands of miles away from El Salvador, Ivan, a forty-three-year-old Mexican American store manager living in Southern California, was admiring Nayib Bukele from afar. Even though Ivan wasn’t Salvadoran, he had a Bukele-themed party in his home to celebrate his forty-third birthday. Ivan’s wife knew how much he loved Bukele, so she surprised him with a dozen vanilla cupcakes that had Bukele’s face plastered on them and one huge candle that read “Happy Birthday Bukelito.” As Ivan and I were speaking on the phone, he sent me pictures of the party. In several photos, you can see him smiling next to all his Bukele cupcakes.
“It’s pretty telling that a Mexican who immigrated to the U.S. has a birthday-themed Bukele cake,” he told me.
We both laughed.
“That was one of the best birthdays I’ve ever had.”
Where did this love come from? Ivan was born in Mexico City and immigrated to the U.S. with his parents in 1984. His father was a member of Mexico’s federal police, and as the violence, crime, and political corruption increased in the country, his father decided he had no option but to leave Mexico. This was around the time Mexico’s major drug cartels were forming and starting to gain significant power across the country. “My father’s stories of cartel violence were astonishing,” Ivan told me. Ivan and his parents started over in Southern California, and Ivan eventually had his own family and became the manager of an air-conditioning company. Yet, even after migrating from Mexico, he feels like he is still trying to dodge violence himself. For years, he has been very concerned about the presence of MS-13 gang members in Southern California. He recently took a night job at a nearby AutoZone parts store as an armed security officer. As he told me, there was high demand for that job due to the increase in theft and violence the store was experiencing. Even today, he feels potential danger and insecurity all around him.
From our conversation, I gathered that Ivan’s admiration of Bukele stemmed from the insatiable aspirations his father had for his family back in Mexico in the 1980s, striving for a semblance of stability that would have allowed them to live without fear in Mexico. Today, that same stability seemed to be slowly dissipating in the very place where Ivan’s family had found safety. “That’s one of the main reasons I support Bukele,” Ivan told me enthusiastically. “Now police officers and law enforcement in El Salvador no longer have to be scared, run for their lives, or leave their countries for the same reasons we did,” he said. “I wish our own president in Mexico could accomplish such a big task.” As we were talking, I could imagine Ivan patrolling the AutoZone shop at sunset—walking up and down the aisles, vigilantly looking outside the windows—and I understood that the threats he felt, whether real or imaginary, were the culmination of the ghosts of the past that had been trailing him ever since his family left Mexico.
In Nevada, Evelyn had similar thoughts roaming around in her mind. Through the years, her family had worked hard to find security, and she feared losing that sense of calm. Evelyn’s parents were forced to flee El Salvador in the 1980s during the U.S.-backed civil war, when the Reagan administration sent military aid and spent billions of dollars supporting the brutal military elite against the leftist revolutionaries. Disrupted by the violence, hundreds of thousands of people fled the war-torn country, with more than 400,000, including Evelyn’s family, entering the U.S. illegally to rebuild their lives.
While Evelyn was born in the U.S., she spent her entire life hearing stories about El Salvador and experiencing the country as a tourist. “There was a period of time when my uncles in El Salvador had to protect their home with guns because MS-13 kept trying to extort them for money,” she told me, also noting that she had a couple of cousins who had been murdered by the gangs (to this day, no one knows where their bodies are). For a long time, she felt unsafe walking around El Salvador each time she visited her family outside of the capital. Until Nayib Bukele came along. Bukele’s repressive gang crackdown, deemed unconstitutional by human rights activists, was received with immense approval in El Salvador. Back in the U.S., Evelyn finally sighed in relief and noticed an immediate change when she returned to visit. She now felt comfortable driving around El Salvador, even as a woman alone. It seemed like a big milestone.
When we spoke, Evelyn described El Salvador as if she were discovering the country for the very first time. She noted the way fresh air felt as it rushed through rolled-down car windows, how light her body felt as she pranced across streets, and how soothing it felt to see ordinary people smiling. “That’s why I’m pro-Bukele, because I’ve seen the difference since he’s been in charge,” she said. What Evelyn couldn’t see was the cost of this new sense of freedom for herself and others similarly positioned. She couldn’t see that democracy had been lost in the process. As she spoke to me during her lunch break in Las Vegas, I noticed how Evelyn’s tone was almost nostalgic, as if even now that she was back home after a recent trip, she was missing a piece of that stillness.
“Well, how do you feel now?” I asked, curious to get her take on the mood in the United States under President Joe Biden.
“The way that the country feels right now, the climate and everything is kind of scary. I felt safer when Trump was in charge.”
I paused, briefly. “You did?”
“Yes, and I never in my life thought I would say that,” she said. “But it’s true.”
I was taken aback when I heard Evelyn’s comments about Trump. They were unexpected. Evelyn was a queer, longtime Democratic voter whose parents had once been undocumented, and I naively assumed nothing could veer her toward Trump. Even Evelyn was surprised by her own comments. But she had made a seamless and seemingly unconscious connection between Nayib Bukele and Donald Trump. In my view, the tie between Bukele and Trump wasn’t necessarily based on ideology, politics, or policy preferences, but rather on the image both men evoked in Evelyn’s mind: that of a strongman and enforcer. Of someone “in charge.” Of a Latin American caudillo. As history has shown, these types of leaders tend to emerge in the midst of perceived chaos and instability. They can creep into and grab hold of people’s psyches when democracy feels slightly messy, uneasy, or on the verge of unpredictable change. And, for many Latinos who come to the U.S. fleeing different forms of political trauma, that pursuit for a stable democracy can paradoxically lead some to embrace undemocratic leaders, like Donald Trump. It can be an especially easy pivot when, despite all evidence of Trump’s flirtation with fascism, the idea of authoritarianism taking hold in the oldest democracy in the world seems unfathomable.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, NYU historian, fascism expert, and the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, was sounding the alarm a year before Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election. She started noticing Trump’s autocratic tendencies during that year’s Republican primaries, when Trump recited a loyalty pledge with his supporters (“I do solemnly swear that I, no matter how I feel, no matter what the conditions…will vote…for Donald J. Trump for President”). And by the time then front-runner Trump presumed his supporters would remain loyal even if he randomly shot someone (“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”), Ben-Ghiat knew the country wasn’t just facing a dangerous candidate but an ascending strongman. Despite being dismissed by the media several times, Ben-Ghiat reaffirmed what her research led her to believe, eventually becoming one of the first scholars to officially place President Trump among the ranks of fascist dictators, including Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Augusto Pinochet, and Vladimir Putin. “I wanted to warn Americans that this could happen here,” she told me.
As Ben-Ghiat cautioned, Trump was following the same strongman playbook employed by authoritarian leaders in different societies, complete with a cult of personality, intimidation tactics, propaganda, and corruption. During our conversation, I was particularly interested in the parallels she saw between Trump and Augusto Pinochet, the general and right-wing dictator who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990. Among other things, she pointed to the radical anti-Marxist crusades both figures espoused. “Anticommunism” justified Pinochet’s brutal violence as well as many of Trump’s big lies. More than anything, it conjured the illusion of a common enemy that helped validate both figures’ extremism.
However, a strongman’s power doesn’t just lie within himself, but also in his followers. The real story behind the rise of these figures is found amid their supporters and the deep-seated wants and needs they are trying to communicate through their willingness to let a strongman lead. The tolerance for authoritarian figures may be much greater than we want to recognize. For decades, scholars and historians have analyzed attitudes toward democracy and the root causes of public support for authoritarianism. An established canon of literature has consistently found that when instability, crises, and insecurities rock democracies, its citizens can become disillusioned and therefore more prone to autocratic tendencies.
Some scholars have even pointed to the effects of colonization and Catholicism in Latin America, characterized by its long history of violence and forced assimilation, as another underlying reason why some citizens may naturally submit to authority. All of this tracks with some of the most recent polling coming from Latin America. For example, approximately 40 percent of Latin Americans would tolerate a military coup under certain conditions, such as high corruption, according to a 2021 AmericasBarometer public opinion survey conducted by Vanderbilt University. A similar survey produced by Latinobarómetro, another annual public opinion survey that involves over nineteen thousand interviews across eighteen Latin American countries, found that less than 50 percent of Latin Americans agree with the notion that “democracy is preferable to other forms of government.” In El Salvador specifically, just 28 percent of the population fully supports the idea of democracy.
But perhaps the most compelling argument I’ve seen regarding the populace’s yearning for undemocratic leaders comes from Simón Bolívar himself, whom many believe to be the founder of Latin America’s democracies. In 1815, Bolívar, who has long been compared with George Washington, wrote:
The American States need the care of paternalistic governments which can cure the ulcers and wounds of despotism and war.
Bolívar was implying that strongmen were the solution for a people who had been controlled and damaged by other strongmen. One man could take out the other man, or replace other forms of governance. But what stuck with me most was his use of the word “wounds.” Those wounds, it seemed to me, were the real source of the strongman’s power. Those wounds alluded to the depth of the pain political trauma can inflict on humans—loss of land, unpredictable change, violence, death—driving many to embrace strongmen out of emotion and not logic. As Bolívar foresaw, those wounds could become the strongman’s justification for the abuse of power.
In the U.S., there are millions of Latinos walking around with open wounds, like Ivan, Evelyn, and their families. These are people who have escaped brutal violence and fled communism or other endless sociopolitical instabilities. Those Latinos don’t leave their trauma behind; they carry it with them and can thus become susceptible to the appeal of strongman rule in the U.S. For years, I’ve analyzed Latino voters as either Republicans or Democrats, when perhaps the more accurate way would have been to treat them as victims of trauma. That’s why I reached out to Dr. Jessica Cerdeña, a medical anthropologist and family physician who studies health justice, to help me understand the way immigrants’ political wounds manifest in American politics. The American Psychological Association (APA) defines trauma as an emotional response to a terrible event.
Dr. Cerdeña carries this definition into her work by viewing political trauma as a disruptive incident that can change the way humans perceive their environment and their attitude toward the future. As she explained, this type of trauma can be caused by many things, including natural disasters, gang violence, corruption, repressive regimes. When the negative experiences accumulate to the point that a person decides to leave their home country, it’s clear that the buildup of trauma propelled them to try to escape those conditions. “When it [negative moment] arrives on your doorstep,” Dr. Cerdeña told me, “that’s when it becomes deeply personal.” More than 75 percent of migrants from Latin America to the U.S. report histories of trauma, which can be passed down through generations, according to research Cerdeña compiled in her report, Intergenerational Trauma in Latinxs: A Scoping Review. From a clinical framework, she explained that the symptoms of political trauma can manifest in hyper-vigilance of one’s surroundings, intrusive memories, and nightmares. It’s a form of PTSD.
“At what point does this type of trauma heal? Can it be healed at any point?” I asked.
“Trauma is disruption,” she responded. “It’s something that entirely disrupts what you thought about the world around you. And being able to heal that takes a lot.
“For many people, the main strategy is avoidance,” she continued. “You try and avoid anything that triggers you and [avoid] the people that remind you of that trauma.”
“So, you essentially run away from what you think you know?” I asked.
“Yes. You run away from it and don’t get to a point of healing,” she said.
For many Latinos, the purpose of being in the U.S. is to heal. To run away and escape from those wounds of the past. Yet, the United States has a long history of exploiting the political trauma many Latinos carry—particularly those who are fleeing communism and violence—to score political points. Countless American administrations have leveraged that pain, exacerbated it, and carefully weaponized it to their advantage. I thought about everyone who has been featured in this book so far: So many of them don’t appear to have healed from their wounds. The harmful expressions of their politics, I see now, are also manifestations of the deep traumas they hold. Eulalia Jimenez, leader of Moms for Liberty, Enrique Tarrio, the now imprisoned member of the Proud Boys, and Anthony Aguero, the border vigilante, all came to mind at that moment, as they were some of the more controversial figures I spent time with. Looking back, perhaps the more memorable moments from those interviews are what the cameras could not capture. It’s easy to use interviews as a means to give people like Eulalia, Enrique, and Anthony a platform, so their own words can reveal how dangerous they are. It’s harder to paint a full picture of them as human beings tormented by pain. I say this not to justify their actions. On the contrary, I say this because I believe that extremists can take on more vicious and unpredictable turns when fueled by personal trauma, especially when it’s weaponized by politicians.
I decided to return to my conversation with Eulalia Jimenez, the chair of the Miami-Dade Moms for Liberty. As a reminder, Moms for Liberty, which has been labeled an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is one of the national organizations that has emerged during the culture wars and became pivotal in shaping the GOP’s 2024 agenda. As mentioned in chapter 5, their mission revolved around combating “grooming” and “woke indoctrination” in schools. I went back to some of the transcripts with Eulalia and attempted to read through the lines: To what extent was trauma the source of her extremism? How did Eulalia go from being a Democrat to a MAGA culture warrior with close ties to the Miami Proud Boys and QAnon? As I attempted to see Eulalia through a different lens, I recognized that her extremism—driven by a deep fear of communism—is a crisis of the United States’ own making.
Eulalia’s fight was about so much more than protecting her six kids; it was actually about her father. When I first met Eulalia at her home in 2022, you could feel her late father’s presence. She reminisced about him as she made me a cortadito in her kitchen, delicately stirring the foam. “This is how my father always did it,” she said as she handed me the cup of coffee while her kids were in the living room getting home-schooled. Her father had been a political prisoner in Fidel Castro’s Cuba and fled the island after he served his time in jail. As an exile in South Florida, he raised Eulalia to believe that a possible communist takeover was not out of the realm of possibility in the U.S.
For decades, Eulalia dismissed her father and even grew resentful of his paranoia over communism. As she told me, she used to call him “crazy,” and push him to “go to therapy.” Eulalia actually felt grateful for her life and was pretty apolitical. She had a home, she was a mother, and she had the means to travel. She was living that American Dream every exile parent wants for their kids. But that dream was always tainted by her father’s skepticism. “My dad used to say to me: ‘One day, your roots will cry, and you will not be able to deny it,’ ” she told me in her kitchen. In other words, he always believed that her ancestry, specifically the horrors he himself had survived in Cuba, would someday force Eulalia to see her present reality through a different lens.
In 2020, Eulalia’s roots finally cried. She described how that year, marked by COVID-19 government restrictions, led to her own “political awakening.” After my conversation with Dr. Cerdeña, I would put it differently: It was the year that Eulalia’s trauma awakened. The year her father’s trauma suddenly became her own. As Eulalia talked, her tone was conspiratorial, but it merely echoed her father’s distrust. The state and federal governments’ health and safety measures, paired with the shortages in consumer goods, high inflation rates, and the record gas prices that marked that period, triggered a flashpoint for Eulalia. The country was in the midst of fighting a deadly pandemic and was experiencing the effects of a global recession, but Eulalia’s eyes were distorted by the signs her father had warned her about her entire life. She saw a crumbling country and was consumed by the fear of a communist-style intervention.
By 2021, Eulalia was opening the Moms for Liberty Miami-Dade chapter, one of many that sprang up during that time. But looking back at the transcripts from my interview with her, I previously dismissed what are perhaps some of the most important words regarding Eulalia’s intentions behind Moms for Liberty. Words that, at the time, seemed random and harmless compared to her overtly racist and homophobic comments. Looking back, the words Eulalia used when I asked about her purpose with Moms for Liberty captured the heart of her extremism:
“It is what I live and breathe every day,” Eulalia said. “Partly because of my passion…for the children. Also, to honor my father.”
Eulalia got emotional. Her eyes became watery when she invoked her father. She continued. “To honor my father, who I ignored for so long,” she said, with noticeable guilt. “So many Cuban families…carry this trauma of communism. Carry the paranoia that this country may one day become a socialist and a communist country,” Eulalia said.
“I know your father believed that. But do you believe that?” I followed up.
“I do. I actually believe it’s here. I believe it’s literally in our backyards.”
At the end, Eulalia’s late father was one of the core reasons behind the birth of Moms for Liberty Miami-Dade. Now Eulalia couldn’t unsee her father’s repeated warnings. Her voice got deeper, darker, and more detached from reality as she painted a picture of an America that was being “infiltrated by communism.” She equated progressive ideologies with the “Marxist agenda.” Equated COVID-19 mask mandates, Obamacare, or Biden’s policy proposals on Medicare and the Green New Deal (and pretty much everything) to communist state-control interventions. Equated classroom conversations about gender, sexuality, and slavery to “Marxist indoctrination.” As Eulalia paced through her kitchen, I noticed in particular one of the many tattoos that covered her arms. The latest one she’d had etched into her skin depicted a lioness protecting her cubs, an homage to Moms for Liberty. To me, it also symbolized Eulalia’s newfound loyalty to her father and to those who vowed to protect the country against a “communist takeover.”
In Eulalia’s eyes, Ron DeSantis was that strongman who could root out communism. Through the years, DeSantis had become one of the people Eulalia looked up to most, and she was one of the governor’s biggest allies. She had even participated in the governor’s public unveiling of the Stop WOKE Act, a bill meant to keep critical race theory from being taught in schools. (In actuality, it never had been.) But now, with a better understanding of Latin American caudillos, I understood the governor’s appeal even more. DeSantis didn’t just cast himself as a culture warrior. He’d also fashioned himself as a strongman standing up to communism and socialism. DeSantis aggressively pushed for book bans in classrooms, singled out authors, scolded academics for teaching truths, and retaliated against corporations for opposing what came to be known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill—all under the guise of “fighting communism.” DeSantis simultaneously enacted a “Victims of Communism Day” requiring public schools to teach students about the evils of communist dictators.
And while people like Eulalia praised these repressive measures, historians cautioned that DeSantis was displaying signs of authoritarianism. NYU historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat described DeSantis as a “Florida fascist”; Yale University historian Timothy Snyder said DeSantis was employing “communist-style authoritarian practices”; and Brian Klaas, a global politics professor at University College London, declared that the governor was “engaged in legislative authoritarianism.” Even the Miami Herald published an editorial titled “Altered State: Florida’s DeSantis Is Teaching a Master Class in Authoritarianism 101.” But Eulalia saw what she wanted to see.
It’s easy to become frustrated with people like Eulalia, who support leaders and policies that go against the very democratic values she claims to protect. Her actions are contradictory. However, can we really blame Eulalia? American history tells us that its governments haven’t just rewarded anticommunist behavior but also normalized violence against communists and “the left.” In fact, the U.S. has historically treated anticommunism as the paramount political goal, leveraging that trauma suffered at the hands of communist regimes to win support for controversial interventions in Latin America that have supported right-wing strongman rule. Ignited by the Cold War and the fear of communism spreading through the West, the U.S. government was covertly and overtly involved in a series of military operations against left-leaning governments in Latin America from the 1950s through the 1980s. Anticommunism hasn’t just been an ideological platitude; it’s always been the ultimate representation of American patriotism. It’s an identity.
Men of Eulalia’s father’s generation were conditioned to violently vilify communism and called on to join the U.S.’s steadfast commitment to defeat communism at all costs. Among those men was Felix Rodriguez, a Cuban exile from South Florida who was recruited by the CIA to help the American government carry out this mission. Rodriguez has always been considered a star among many Latinos and U.S. officials. Why? Because he was willing to die in the name of anticommunism. After Fidel Castro’s revolution swept through Cuba, Felix and a number of ordinary Cuban exiles were enlisted by the CIA to participate in Brigade 2506, an operation aimed at invading Cuba and toppling the new dictator. The operation developed into John F. Kennedy’s failed Bay of Pigs invasion, but it nonetheless sent an important message to the Cuban exile community: Their collective desire to kill Castro, the personification of the revolution that had driven them from their homes, would be supported by the U.S. government. As Rodriguez told me, for years and under the CIA’s watch, he helped plot Castro’s assassination from bases in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, often parachuting into locations close to Cuba to get radio pickup signs from the island.
By 1967, Rodriguez was part of an operation in Bolivia to capture and kill Che Guevara, Fidel Castro’s right-hand man. Rodriguez spoke with great pride about the day Guevara was killed, October 9, 1967. It’s clear it was one of the most important days of his life. Rodriguez remembered every single detail from that afternoon: what Che was wearing, what Che had inside his pants pockets, and Che’s humor. Apparently, El Che had a strong sense of humor, even minutes before his death. “He died at 1:15 p.m.,” Felix said. “His mouth was wide open.” Felix told me that he ordered his team to cut one of Che’s fingers in order to confirm it was him and match his identity.
The Cuban Revolution inspired other left-wing guerrilla movements in countries like Venezuela, Guatemala, Colombia, and Nicaragua. During the late 1960s, Rodriguez was deployed to various countries, including Peru, where he was tasked with training Peru’s national police force against the emerging Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), the homegrown far-left Maoist guerrilla organization that would, years later, evolve into a dangerous terrorist group aiming to replace Peru’s government with Marxism. Around that time, the U.S. government also developed an interest in Chile, where Salvador Allende, a Marxist activist and member of Chile’s Socialist Party, was a rising star and running for president in 1964. That election marked the first time in Latin America’s history that either a Christian Democratic party or a Marxist party was legally on the ballot, and Washington was terrified that if the Marxist candidate won, other countries would follow Chile’s example.
This prompted the U.S. government to spend millions of dollars (including mobilizing Chile’s conservative women and Catholic voting blocs) to help elect Eduardo Frei, Allende’s conservative opponent. They believed that linking Allende to communism—leaning in on the politics of fear—would prove successful given the terror that neighboring countries’ revolutions struck in the hearts of the populace. U.S.-backed Eduardo Frei won the 1964 presidential election, but Marxist Salvador Allende ran again in 1970 and won. This, in turn, led the U.S. to one of its darkest moments in its foreign policy.
With Allende’s rise, Richard Nixon’s administration feared that communism would soon take over Chile, but a couple years into his government, Allende’s popularity was challenged by forces inside the country. Allende enacted major health care, agricultural, and economic reforms that helped the nation’s redistribution of income and strengthened Chile’s lower and middle classes. Yet, by 1973, popular discontent over Chile’s spiraling economy led to massive strikes and demonstrations against Allende’s government, eventually crippling the country. On September 11, 1973, the Chilean military, led by defense minister and army commander in chief Augusto Pinochet, staged a successful coup d’état to overthrow democratically elected Allende.
Two days later, General Pinochet was established as president of Chile, and he immediately dismantled Congress and outlawed left-leaning political parties. While there is still no clear evidence about the CIA’s direct involvement in Pinochet’s coup, we do know the U.S. government was fully supportive of Pinochet, a right-wing military leader who ushered in seventeen years of authoritarian rule and brutal human rights abuses. By the time Ronald Reagan walked into the White House in January 1981, anticommunism and the type of strongman rule Pinochet embodied was officially cemented as the United States’ raison d’être in the context of Latin American politics. The new president had expressed his own commitment to crushing left social movements during his campaign for the presidency. As Felix Rodriguez told me, “Reagan was simply a blessing for us.”
The U.S. government was extremely concerned by the landscape they faced in 1981: Castro was still firmly in power, the Shining Path was gaining strength in Peru, Nicaragua was moving in Cuba’s direction, and leftist revolutionary guerrillas were organizing in El Salvador and in Guatemala. It was in this context that the Reagan Doctrine, the administration’s anticommunist crusade in Latin America, emerged. In taking on what he called “the Evil Empire,” Reagan positioned the U.S. in a longstanding battle against the Soviet Union and any country that aligned itself with the USSR’s political and economic system and against the U.S. and capitalism. Reagan was notoriously involved in Nicaragua, a country where a socialist movement (the Cuban-backed Sandinistas) had seized power through a revolution in 1979. Among other things, Reagan funneled millions of dollars, arms, and training to the contras (an armed force of Nicaraguan exiles that fought against the Sandinistas), and, despite Congress’s increasing restrictions on CIA-backed interventions, the administration turned to illegal U.S. arms sales to Iran as another means to fund the contras. This became the infamous Iran-contra affair.
Although Felix Rodriguez wasn’t involved in Nicaragua, he was in El Salvador during the country’s bloody twelve-year civil war between the military junta and the Marxist-Leninist guerrilla group known as Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (the war lasted from 1979 to 1992). I wanted to know what Rodriguez had seen on the ground there as the Reagan administration backed the strongmen of the Salvadoran military’s elite. By then, Rodriguez had retired from the CIA. He went to El Salvador as a volunteer to help the military junta’s air force. He had nothing to prove.
“Why would you risk your life again and go back to a war zone on a voluntary basis?” I asked him.
“You have no idea what it’s like to lose your country,” he responded.
Today, at eighty-two years old, Felix’s trauma is as alive as ever. I spent over two hours on the phone with him, listening intently to his stories about his missions across the world. Felix is perhaps one of the last from a generation of Cuban exiles who will die without the chance of returning to their island. And though I knew that Felix would go down in history as an American hero, part of me also saw him as an ideological fanatic, enabled by the government of the country to which he’d immigrated. Throughout his adult life, he had witnessed the U.S. government sanction interventions across the Americas and make anticommunism a symbol of patriotism. Decades after Felix’s first mission, modern American politics has simply replaced these violent interventions with violent words that continue to red-bait and exploit the wounds carried by people like Eulalia Jimenez from Moms for Liberty.
In the last couple of years, we’ve seen this very clearly in the way Republicans have continuously attempted to baselessly cast Democrats as the party of “crime and lawlessness” and as “Marxists” and “communists.” It’s all strategic. During the 2016 presidential elections Trump publicly called then Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders a “socialist-slash-communist.” (Sanders is a self-described Democratic socialist who has always praised aspects of socialism but has never endorsed communism, a form of governance characterized by one-party rule.) Four years later, this type of rhetoric simply escalated and spread. By September 2020, Trump was holding a Hispanic Heritage event at the White House where he told a roomful of Latinos: “We did not fight tyranny abroad only to let Marxists destroy our beloved country.” From Trump’s speeches to Republican campaign ads to conservative pundit talking points, the media landscape leading up to the 2020 presidential election was filled with disinformation that painted Joe Biden as a communist.
A postmortem 2020 election report produced by Equis Labs revealed how effective these types of attacks were. The report found that approximately four in ten Latino voters were concerned about the Democratic Party embracing socialism and leftist policies. Most importantly, Latino voters were more worried about Democrats moving to the left than about Republicans espousing fascism and nondemocratic policies. This helps explain why Donald Trump doubled down on his anticommunist crusade during the 2024 campaign. In August 2023, in the midst of the Republican Party’s primaries, Trump was leading the pack of Republican candidates for president even after he was arraigned on federal charges for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. His decision then to cast himself as a hero, freedom fighter, and political prisoner persecuted by “Marxists and communists” was also strategic. A couple of months later, he pledged to a crowd in New Hampshire that he would “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs.” His words were meant to push voters like Eulalia, Felix, Ivan, and Evelyn—whose families’ histories were marked by chaos and violence—to vote out of fear and trauma.
Exploiting people’s pain is, after all, an incredibly cruel and effective strategy. In 1984, during a White House address, Ronald Reagan famously said, “Latinos are Republican. They just don’t know it yet.” That phrase alluded to the fact that Reagan fundamentally believed that Latinos were conservative people in their hearts, moved by traditional values, faith, patriotism, and, of course, anticommunism. But looking back, I now see a different meaning behind Reagan’s words. As Reagan gave those remarks, the U.S. was backing Pinochet in Chile, involved in El Salvador’s civil war, and on the verge of funding the contras in Nicaragua. I wonder if Reagan foresaw, back then, that generations of Latinos could be conditioned to rely on strongmen as their rulers. Is that what he was implying? For decades, many Latinos have been led to believe that the fundamental solution to their problems and defeat of their enemies was the strongman. Throughout American history, different administrations used the guise of fighting communism and instability to justify foreign policy interventions, legitimize violence, and, ultimately, support dictators. Generations of Latin Americans were forced into thinking that the strongman was the cure to all political woes and wounds, as Simón Bolívar predicted. This may have had some immediate short-term effects, but in the long run, America’s foreign policy created fertile grounds for the steady rise of authoritarianism, not just in Latin America, but in our own backyard.
It all comes full circle.
When democracy starts to feel slightly messy on an overcast morning, wounds can dehisce and traumas can reawaken. This is what makes Ivan guard his AutoZone store in Southern California with such vigilance. It’s what makes Evelyn’s mind race in Las Vegas. It’s what prompts the owners of a New Jersey barber shop to hang a massive poster of Nayib Bukele on their wall. All of them live different lives but remain haunted by the same nightmare: the U.S. becoming a failed Latin American state. In their nightmares, the only way out of it is through strongman rule. In their nightmares, the promises of autocracy at times outweigh those of democracy. It turns out, that’s not just Latin America’s doing; it was the United States’ unintended nightmare, too.