The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Inter-American Foundation (IAF) are corpses. They have been devoured and buried alive while they were still throbbing. They are the first missing persons of a very quickly orchestrated system of mass destruction. Nobody knows where they are or what has happened. They have disappeared, along with their professional commitments and exchanges, their humanitarian agreements, and their shared social values. With them, the ecosystem that had woven together parts of the lives of communities, collectives, and organizations in the Global South for years has also vanished. Thousands of historical human relationships were devoured by a few brutal and ravenous beasts. Hundreds of thousands of collective responses to the fragility of the dominant system are being decimated in an attempt to erase the history of collective and communal resilience. To the cannibals, every struggle of every community is a threat to their sanitized vision of the future.
USAID and IAF are the past. That is what they have decided. The men who kill. The men who destroy. These cannibalistic men who impoverish and desperately seek to weaken the lives of all to strengthen their own. These men, unleashed beasts of insatiable appetite.
They seek humiliation and social subjugation. They shoot and wound, then press their doughy fingers into the bleeding wounds. They expose their victims on social networks, now transformed into their Roman circus. They revel in the global chorus of dying breaths. The world’s silence is numbing. With no one to set limits, they recharge and push forward even faster.
They point at us with their index finger and raised arm. They are waiting for the day when they can mark our homes. They want the pinnacle, a place with no room for others. They promised USA citizens the return to a successful past that never really existed. They want to be the law, the rule and the life.
These cannibalistic men seek the endless accumulation that requires social and political submission for an endlessly extractive relationship. They know that they must build a new social system and not just an economic structure. They also know that they can only exist and sustain themselves over time by devouring, exploiting and dispossessing nature and life, identities and cultures. They know that they must empty the non-economic conditions of existence of their substance: social reproduction (care), democracy, public powers and services, ecosystems, freedom, justice, peace, dignity and rights.
To save human life, we must stop being paralyzed. We must mobilize all our possible assets and succeed in dismantling the system proposed by these cannibalistic men. We are in the majority, and we must be able to co-create alternatives that emphasize the issues that cannibalism relegates to the background: respect for human beings, democracy and nature.
While cannibalism gives rise to various forms of resistance (environmental justice movements, decolonial movements, indigenous peoples’ struggles, degrowth and women’s movements), too often these movements tend to avoid the need to confront power and the system. Perhaps it is necessary to develop the convergence of struggles and mobilizations around a counter-hegemonic and anti-systemic project in each region, in each city, in each territory. Knowing that there is not only one way to make territory an “actively defended place”, but multiple forms of territorialization. Perhaps we need to be able to name this convergence of struggles, because naming it may be the key to giving strength and critical mass to the global and socio-environmental struggles that are taking place on the margins of societies.
By the way – the United States of America was never great.
Florencia Roitstein is the Executive Director of ELLAS—Mujeres y Filantropía (Women and Philanthropy) in Argentina