Urgent Enthnography and the Unraveling of Empire

Abstract (English)

From his first day in office, president Trump made his power felt in Latin America through a series of executive decisions. These include sending thousands of undocumented immigrants to Guantánamo, flying military aircraft in (or dangerously close to) Mexican airspace, as well as threatening to impose tariffs on longtime trade partners and to declare drug cartels as terrorist organizations. This dizzying whirlwind of events seem both urgent and difficult to interpret, as they appear to signal a departure from the (neo)liberal order that the US has so firmly established. In this paper, I suggest that it is precisely by attending to this order that we may best interpret its undoing. This requires not only examining these decisions in light of the imperial power that has long organized the US's relations with the hemisphere. It also demands critical attention to the ideological work that has sustained such power. While these executive decisions are certainly marked by an exacerbated aggression (and sometimes blatant violence) towards Latin American countries and persons, they are not discontinuous with the immediate past. By tracing these continuities, particularly in the US's forms of military power in the region, this paper explores how the current shift is, in large part, an ideological unraveling. Rather than camouflaging this power in liberal discourse, its logic (such as the equation of migrants, criminals, and enemies) is no longer merely implied, but rather made explicit. In so doing, the paper illuminates how, by doing away with the efforts to project a liberal order, the current administration throws into sharp relief the forms of violence that sustain its imperial power.