from The Grayzone
Biden and Trump compete for South Florida swing voters with anti-communist
conspiracies and interventionist chest-beating
SEBASTIAN LOMAGLIO·NOVEMBER 2, 2020
CUBA
US DOMESTIC POLITICS
VENEZUELA
Aggressive efforts by both parties to court South Florida’s Latin American
diaspora have shaped Miami’s political landscape into a paranoid,
anti-communist madhouse as Election Day nears.
Just a week before the November 3 election, a New York Times report on plans
by a future Joseph Biden administration to restart negotiations with
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro roiled the Democratic presidential
hopeful’s campaign. The October 27 article provoked a wave of attacks from
Cuban-American Republicans like Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart and Senator Marco
Rubio, who pointed to it as proof that Biden would embrace the cause of
socialism in Latin America.
Days later, Biden’s camp forcefully denied the story, insisting to the media
that he was the first Democratic candidate to recognize the unelected coup
administration of Juan Guaidó.
The competition between President Donald Trump and Biden to take the most
hardline position on Latin America has seen both candidates’ campaigns
blanket South Florida’s airwaves and roadways with ads painting one another
as crypto-communist caudillos.
Their battle for a few Latino-concentrated districts in the state only
intensified as the election drew to a close, highlighting the centrality of
the Florida swing vote to both parties’ strategies.
It has been the case for decades that the Latinos that live in Florida, and
especially in South Florida, represent a significantly different demographic
than those that reside in other US states. This is increasingly true today
as hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans flock to the state and form a
political bloc that supplements the strength of the right-wing
Cuban-American lobby that initially cohered in the 1960s.
And while is usually difficult to pin a specific political tendency on an
entire national group, South Florida Latinos are an almost unequivocal
exception. Despite all their differences, many share a reflexive resentment
of any semblance of left-wing politics due to the recent political history
of South America.
As has been the case with Cuban-Americans, the key factor that drives
politics in the area among the other nationalities is the ferocious drive to
install right-wing, US-friendly, anti-socialist regimes across the region,
and to avoid, among those who can vote in the US, any semblance of
progressivism on the domestic front.
This is corroborated by the fact that 50% of Florida Latinos support Donald
Trump over Joe Biden, and that among newly registered Cuban-American voters,
67% have registered as Republicans.
While most polls and data focus on the Cuban-American demographic, it is
also important to keep in mind that the large Latino population of South
Florida also includes other nationalities whose constituents, having arrived
in the last 20 years, are still in the process of becoming US citizens and
therefore cannot yet vote. This detail does not make them less politically
active or relevant, however; rather, it makes this demographic a crucial
electoral asset in the years to come.
For example, with more than 235,000 Venezuelans and 400,000 Colombians,
Florida’s Latino communities are projected to become even more influential,
certainly more than it already is, in future elections. It is not for
nothing then that the Biden campaign has outspent the Trump campaign on TV
ads in the state, with the Democrats pouring in $42 million – $12 million
more than the Republicans have shelled out.
Florida’s demographic trends illustrate why both parties are ramping up the
already entrenched far-right rhetoric that the Latino communities of South
Florida have zealously embraced. Their goal is to gain electoral support not
only in the upcoming presidential election, but to secure the allegiance of
the Latino community for the future.
The Spanish-language media landscape of Greater Miami has provided a perfect
theater for the overheated anti-communist narratives that shape the area’s
diaspora politics, which have informed the outreach efforts of the Trump and
Biden campaigns.
Miami media’s paranoid style
As self-described democratic socialist Senator Bernie Sanders surged in the
Democratic primaries in early 2020, he became the subject of a fanatically
anti-communist and borderline anti-Semitic diatribe by Daniel Lara Farías, a
right-wing Venezuelan host on the Florida-based network Factores de Poder.
“Bernie Sanders is Jewish but not any kind of Jew,” Farías ranted. He
explained that, though Sanders lost family in the Holocaust and studied on a
Kibbutz, he was not a practicing Jew, and was married to a Catholic.
According to Farías, these factors made him as racially inauthentic as
Obama, who was “probably not” an actual African-American because of his
mixed race heritage.
The YouTube edition of the video was organized into chapters based on
negative aspects of Sanders’ biography. They began with “BernieJudio,” or
Bernie the Jew, followed by “Jóvenessocialistas,” or young socialists, and
“Antisegregaciónracial,” referring to Sanders’ civil rights-era activism
against racial segregation.
Another staggering example of the right-wing fever consuming South Florida’s
Latino community took place when the famed Venezuelan comedian Erika de la
Vega made her support for Biden and disdain for Trump public.
De La Vega was immediately bombarded with social media attacks to the point
that she had to release a public statement bashing Venezuela’s leftist
Chavista movement, justifying her political positions, and repeatedly
clarifying that “I WILL NOT BE A COMMUNIST. NOT IN THIS NOR IN FUTURE
LIVES.” Such is the toxicity that the Miami-based Venezuelan opposition
manages to reserve for one of their own.
Hector Schamis, a professor at Georgetown University and star columnist at
various publications including Spain’s El País, claimed in a column about
the “hypocrisy of the Democratic Party” that liberals are unable to contend
with their leftist ideology when it comes to truly opposing the regimes of
Latin America.
To illustrate this point, Schamis complained that “this ambivalence is seen
in this supposed progressivism, also illustrated by an unfortunate New York
Times article in which a new theory about the violence that occurred in
Cúcuta is presented. It says that the humanitarian aid fire was not caused
by the regime but by a molotov, thrown by a protester, and whose previously
lit rag came off the bottle and fell on the truck.”
As The Grayzone first reported and the New York Times later confirmed, video
evidence from multiple angles demonstrated without a scintilla of doubt that
a convoy of humanitarian aid was torched by Venezuelan opposition hooligans
on February 23, 2019, then baselessly blamed on Venezuelan government
forces, which were stationed far from the incident. Schamis was later fired
by El Paí s for a questionably sourced column he published on one of the
favorite bogeymen of the Latin American right: Cuba’s brigades of medical
professionals.
In Diario Las Américas — a Spanish-language publication founded in South
Florida by the right-wing Aguirre Baca brothers in 1953 — the pundit Ixtu
Díaz wrote this year that the Biden campaign “has failed miserably” in
projecting political moderation because of “its insane nomination of Kamala
Harris” as Biden’s running mate, hence making the “arrival of socialism to
the White House a real threat.”
In the same publication, the far-right Cuban commentator Yali Nuñez
declared in an op-ed entitled “In November, Latinos Should Say NO to the
Radical Left,” that a Biden administration would “forge closer diplomatic
ties with the Communist regime in Cuba, hence ignoring the current crisis in
Venezuela and the abuses of human rights in Nicaragua.”
On the other hand, Nuñez was careful to clarify, “President Trump has
defended human rights and democratic values in the Western hemisphere, he
understands the pain of those who have been negatively impacted by socialist
regimes.”
A similarly absurd point was made about the centrist Democratic ticket by
another rightist commentator popular in Miami media, Andrés Villota. “After
the maelstrom of irrational violence that fundamentalist groups like ANTIFA
and BLM,” Villota wrote, “supported by Biden since their conception, the
Democratic party has the double and difficult task of convincing the
electorate that they are not from the same lineage as Stalin, Mao, Fidel
Castro, or Nicolás Maduro, while also avoiding losing the votes of the
radical Marxists led by Bernie Sanders and the vice-presidential candidate
Kamala Harris.”
These unhinged points were echoed by the Center for a Free Cuba, a
regime-change lobbying outfit funded by the US government’s National
Endowment for Democracy (NED). Frank Calzón, the center’s executive
director, published an article arguing implausibly that Biden’s Cuban policy
would be dictated by socialists from the Bernie Sanders camp.
“It is not difficult to predict the difference between the recommendations
of Marco Rubio and Mario Díaz-Balart and those that would present to a
possible President Joe Biden characters such as Bernie Sanders and
Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez,” Calzón claimed.
Meanwhile, in PanAm Post, an online publication popular among the Latin
American right-wing, Emmanuel Rondon marshaled far-right Anglo outlets
including Breitbart, the New York Post, and BlazeTV as sources for an op-ed
painting Joe and his failson Hunter Biden as likely assets of the Chinese
Communist Party and China’s People’s Liberation Army.
The obsession with China is the engine of many of the popular paranoias that
fuel the Latin American right. For Guillermo Rodriguez, a right-wing
libertarian Venezuelan economist who has defended the 1973 coup that brought
General Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile, and dismissed the notion of CIA
plotting as “socialist propaganda,” the Chinese government is guilty of “a
gigantic ‘agitprop’ effort from the Chinese Socialist totalitarianism to
hide their criminal responsibility for the pandemic. Disinformation effort
which is widely supported – openly or secretly– by almost the totality of
Socialism in the broad sense of the West.”
While it might seem irrational to outsiders, particularly Bernie Sanders
backers disgruntled with the rightward direction of the Democratic Party,
any ploy that evokes a communist, socialist, Bolivarian, Castroist, or
Chinese conspiracy within the most mundane Democratic proposal is likely to
fall on fertile soil in South Florida.
Thus it is not unusual to find an op-ed in a popular Spanish-language outlet
in Florida that deploys quotes by Joseph Stalin and references to Soviet
tyranny to decry voting-by-mail as a Democratic partisan strategy aimed at
promoting “massive fraud.”
I invite the reader to read the aforementioned articles in their entirety.
Use Google translate if you are not fluent in Spanish, and you will be able
to fully grasp the delusional, paranoid mind state that dominates the
opinion pages of South Florida’s Latino media.
These pieces offer just a slight window into the prevailing mindset that
sees beret-wearing communist guerrillas taking cover behind every
milquetoast Democratic politician passing out leaflets to suburban
mall-goers.
The Democrats deal immigration ace card alongside anti-communist hysteria
Since the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, Cuban-Americans have pledged unwavering
support to the GOP, and the new waves of South American immigrants seem to
be on the same track.
It is for this reason that the leading and most popular source of news for
the Venezuelan diaspora in the United States, EVTV Miami, enjoys a close
partnership with the US government-run news agency Voice of America, which
has been reshaped into a partisan propaganda arm of the Trump
administration.
This is also the reason why Senator Rubio has been on the front lines of the
Trump’s administration efforts to effect regime change in Venezuela. The GOP
knows it not only cannot afford to lose the Cuban-American vote, but that it
also must court the loyalty the more than 1 million South American
immigrants in Florida who have yet to be firmly consolidated as a
pro-Republican bloc.
If the GOP can supplement the built-in support of Cubans with that of
Colombians, Venezuelans, and other likeminded constituencies from the
region, it is confident it can transform Florida from a swing state into a
solidly red state like Texas.
The aggressive dissemination of conspiratorial Republican political
discourse into Floridian Spanish-language media has already succeeded in
making some of the most deranged right-wing narratives mainstream. As a
result, the future of Miami politics is being determined by an
evidence-averse, paranoiac, far-right ideology. It’s a perfect fit for a
city that made its fortune in the 1980s from the cocaine trade, gearing the
country up on a drug known to provoke irrational fears of invisible enemies.
But if the trajectory of South Florida seems to be so clear, why is the
Biden campaign outspending the Trump campaign on Latino outreach efforts in
the area? One reason is that, on issues like Venezuela, the Democrats are no
less eager to advance a regime-change agenda, albeit through more seemingly
sophisticated means like lawfare disguised as “anti-corruption” efforts.
The Democrats also have an ace up their sleeve. For all the inflammatory
rhetoric of the GOP and their far-right allies, there is one key issue on
which the Republicans have failed to deliver to Miami Latinos: immigration
reform.
It is not uncommon for the many YouTube news channels that cater to the
Latino community in greater Miami to feature ads from immigration lawyers
and similar services that help those who are in the United States, but who
have either no legal status or are at risk of losing it.
The Democratic-led House passed a Temporary Protection Bill specifically
targeted to Venezuelan immigrants; however, the GOP-controlled Senate
ultimately failed to approve it. The bill would have protected from
deportation around 200,000 Venezuelans.
TPS can be enacted either by the legislative branch or by executive order,
something that the YouTube ads never fail to mention. And here is where the
Democrats stand a chance of winning over the community not only in 2020, but
most importantly in the years and decades to come.
At the same time, the specter of socialism haunts not only the Republican
right, but also the liberal Democrats seeking to expand their footprint in
South Florida politics.
Attacking Trump for failing to invade Venezuela
On September 26, 2020, around one hundred Nicaraguans gathered in Miami to
show their support for the Biden/Harris ticket and flaunt their disdain for
the Sandinista government that rules in Managua. Among the most prominent
attendees was Ana Navarro, a Nicaraguan Contra cheerleader and former
lobbyist for several corruption-stained, right-wing governments in Central
America.
Now a key Biden campaign surrogate, Navarro reminded rally-goers that the
former vice president was far from a communist, and that the Democrats also
supported crushing economic sanctions against the members of the “Troika of
Tyranny” like Nicaragua.
Desperate to counter-act Republican propaganda about Biden’s secret
socialist alliances, a Biden proxy group called Venezolanos con Biden 2020
has published a “Guide to Combat Disinformation” [PDF] that emphasizes the
candidate’s hostility to leftist Latin American governments, the support he
has received from Republican politicians, and his own centrist political
views.
The guide asserts that Maduro has financed Trump’s political operation, and
even counters the claim that “Trump will invade Venezuela,” suggesting that
a military invasion would be a desirable outcome that Biden would consider.
From the Venezolanos con Biden 2020 “Guide to Combatting Disinformation”
To emphasize Trump’s supposed mollycoddling of Maduro, the guide quotes
Elliot Abrams – the State Department point man on Venezuelan regime change
and former Iran-Contra felon – describing a US military invasion as “magical
realism.”
Making a neoconservative fanatic like Abrams appear as the sensible person
in the room is a trick that perhaps only the insane cesspool of Miami
politics can accomplish. While it is true that the Republicans have a clear
advantage with these kinds of ploys, the Democrats have proven that they are
not afraid to indulge the interventionist hallucinations of the Venezuelan
diaspora.
Fully conscious of the Biden campaign’s efforts to win over the most
reactionary elements of Florida’s Latino immigrant community, the Trump
campaign held a last-minute, late-night mega-rally at the Miami-Opa Locka
Executive Airport on November 1.
There, thousands of right-wing Latino immigrants heard from figures like
Roberto Marrero, the former chief of staff to failed Venezuelan coup leader
Juan Guaidó, who was arrested for an alleged assassination plot and later
exiled to the US; and Rick Scott, the ultra-wealthy Republican senator and
Big Oil darling, who warned in barely comprehensible Spanish about a
socialist takeover by Biden.
When former President Barack Obama appeared at a Biden rally in Orlando,
Florida just days before, he put his own brand of Cold War scaremongering on
display, asserting without evidence that “Putin of Russia, Xi of China, and
Kim Jong Un of North Korea want [Trump] to win.”
In South Florida, November 3 is not only Election Day; it also marks the
beginning of a new phase in the war on the Latin American left.
