Beware the Outsider – Donald Trump in a Latin American mold

*Mainstream U.S. voters have no experience with outsider dictator thugs, none whatsoever.  It’s easy for them to be seduced by the strongman with no ties to the prevailing political structure who promises to change things by the force of will. In Latin America Donald Trump would be nothing more than a well-known political trope. At last check, Trump had a 77 percent unfavorable rating among U.S. Latinos. Wonder why? This article is worth the time to read. VL

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By Javier Corrales, Foreign Policy (8 minute read)

Donald Trump is running for president of the United States as the ultimate outsider. His campaign message is simple: only leaders who have no ties to Washington politics can change the status quo. Freedom from political debts means freedom to get things done.

Trump’s lead in the primaries shows that many U.S. voters appear to be seduced by this idea. It’s understandable that electing an outsider might be an attractive prospect for people disillusioned by the workings of their political system.

For me, as a long-time observer of Latin American politics, what’s most unnerving about Trump’s rise is just how familiar it feels.

For me, as a long-time observer of Latin American politics, what’s most unnerving about Trump’s rise is just how familiar it feels. Latin America has a mostly unhappy history of dealing with outsiders-turned-presidents. Far more often than not, they have ended up either hurting democracy or ruining the government’s ability to act.

Click HERE to read the full story.

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[Photo by Darron Birgenheier/Flickr]

Suggested reading

“On good days I feel I am a bridge. On bad days I just feel alone,” Sergio Troncoso writes in this riveting collection of sixteen personal essays in which he seeks to connect the humanity of his Mexican family to people he meets on the East Coast, including his wife’s Jewish kin. Raised in a home steps from the Mexican border in El Paso, Texas, Troncoso crossed what seemed an even more imposing border when he left home to attend Harvard College.

Initially, “outsider status” was thrust upon him; later, he adopted it willingly, writing about the Southwest and Chicanos in an effort to communicate who he was and where he came from to those unfamiliar with his childhood world. He wrote to maintain his ties to his parents and his abuelita, and to fight against the elitism he experienced at an Ivy League school. “I was torn,” he writes, “between the people I loved at home and the ideas I devoured away from home.”

Troncoso writes to preserve his connections to the past, but he puts pen to paper just as much for the future. In his three-part essay entitled “Letter to My Young Sons,” he documents the terror of his wife’s breast cancer diagnosis and the ups and downs of her surgery and treatment. Other essays convey the joys and frustrations of fatherhood, his uneasy relationship with his elderly father and the impact his wife’s Jewish heritage and religion have on his Mexican-American identity.

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