𝗠𝗲𝗿𝗳𝘆 𝗠𝗮𝗰

Questions, Perceptions, Agency, and Structure An ongoing debate in the alternative media space revolves around a quiet epistemological tension: does mapping the sheer reach of US-led imperial strategy—its financial hooks, media ownership networks, NGO pipelines, and algorithmic architectures—inadvertently breed defeatism among those trying to resist it? The concern is understandable and certainly not without a kernel of truth. Indeed, when every protest movement or electoral shift is dissected to reveal the fingerprints of Western private equity, state-backed foundations, or sanctions pressure, it can easily feel as though human agency is being erased. To anybody looking for a horizon of hope, being told that a popular movement is (potentially) structurally compromised can sound like a call to stay home because the game is rigged in advance anyway. However, this friction often comes down to confusion between two very different genres of political writing and research, and, consequently, two ways of processing political reality. (Of course, there are certainly more than two options, but I’m simplifying here.) Holding Dialectical Truths All at Once To make sense of our current (or any) conjuncture, we have to be able to hold multiple, seemingly contradictory truths at the same time without collapsing into binary thinking. Whenever an opposition movement erupts against a government—whether we are looking at Eastern Europe, Latin America, or parts of Asia—two realities almost always coexist on the ground: The Material Base of Grievance: Millions of ordinary people experience legitimate anger over corruption, decaying public infrastructure, ecological extraction, and the comprador balancing acts of their domestic elites. Their frustrations are certainly not invented in a think tank in Washington or Brussels. The Mechanisms of Capture: At the same time, the transatlantic ruling strata maintain a permanent, highly sophisticated infrastructure—intelligence-linked media conglomerates, NGO networks, think-tank policy pipelines, and targeted financial sanctions, just to name a few—designed specifically to harvest legitimate public anger and steer its institutional outcome once power successfully changes hands. Pointing out the existence of the second point does not negate the first, nor does it insult the people resisting in the streets. I’d argue that one of the decisive political questions is not whether the CIA invented a population’s grievances out of thin air. The question is whether a movement possesses the organizational independence, ideological clarity, and material autonomy to prevent itself from being used and digested by a foreign or domestic comprador power bloc. The Rallying Cry vs. The Strategic Blueprint Why, then, does research into imperial mechanisms strike some observers as demoralizing, while others find it clarifying and urgent? It helps to view this not as a moral failing on either side (or even intelligence operations?), but as the difference between two distinct functions in political communication: emotional catharsis and strategic cartography. Every movement needs the genre of the rallying cry. People need to feel solidarity, moral indignation, and the emotional catharsis of seeing power challenged in the streets. However, when politics is experienced primarily through screens in an atomized society, there is a natural gravitational pull toward consuming conflict as a morality play of heroes against villains. When something interrupts this narrative—for instance, by pointing out which think tanks or transatlantic organizations are already influencing the transition agenda—it deflates any hope. If our mode of engagement is cheering from afar, losing an idealized narrative can feel like paralysis. For those looking at politics through the lens of strategy and organization, however, identifying and understanding the mechanisms of imperial capture has the opposite effect. An attempted X-ray of the apparatus then provides an operational blueprint of what seems to be going on, what could happen, what must be avoided, what needs to be strengthened, and what must be thought anew. For example: Outsourcing a movement’s communication infrastructure to foreign-funded corporate media; relying on "leaderless," horizontally vague mobilizations whose political programs are so broad ("rule of law," "modernization") that external institutions like the EU or IMF can effortlessly step in and fill the policy vacuum the day after an election (and maybe even before that) might be something to avoid. Independent media and domestic financial circuits that cannot be strangled by a single sanctions letter; clear working-class material demands that cannot be easily co-opted by neoliberal technocrats; and finding autonomous, low-surveillance spaces where participants are politically educated before a crisis hits, could be something to strengthen. The Value of Observation (if you are an outside observer, that is) Because the relation of social forces inside any country is fluid, adopting a posture of patient, empirical observation—judging movements and class factions by their concrete material actions over months and years is strategic common sense. Nothing produces more lasting demoralization than cheering uncritically for an "anti-establishment" wave, only to watch a new government hand the country over to transnational capital or military alignment six months later because nobody wanted to examine the structural strings attached beforehand. Naming the dangers early is one step in how movements might inoculate themselves against such betrayal. Brazil as One Case We do not have to speak in abstractions to see how analyzing imperial infrastructure leads to practical action rather than defeatism (not to mention the public and media-mediated research on color revolutions and imperial interference done throughout Latin America to strengthen, not weaken, resistance). The recent presidential runoff in Brazil on October 25 offers a textbook case of converting past tactical defeats into a new operational plan. Across Latin America over the last several years, the Left, or at least Progressive forces, suffered heavy blows inside the digital public square. It became undeniable that the social media space is commanded by US-owned tech monopolies whose algorithmic architectures structurally reward right-wing outrage, atomization, and disinformation. After the first round of the Brazilian election on October 4, when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva trailed Flávio Bolsonaro by more than two million votes, a defeatist reading of that structural reality would have concluded that the US-owned algorithmic cage is simply unbeatable. Instead, the campaign’s communication strategists treated their past defeats on US platforms as diagnostic data. Recognizing that traditional, top-down institutional messaging was being buried by Meta and X, Congressman André Janones and the reorganized second-round team mapped how the far right gamed platform visibility and reverse-engineered the process. Through a centralized WhatsApp coordination channel dubbed "Lula’s Army" (Exército do Lula), the campaign issued coordinated, daily digital "missions." Millions of supporters acted in unison to trigger search autocompletes, flood comment sections, and force the algorithms to surface concrete working-class policy proposals, such as ending the grueling 6x1 workweek in favor of a 5x2 schedule and introducing zero-fare public transit (tarifa zero). The Indispensable Anchor: Physical Space Let's not forget, however, the Brazilian turnaround also proved the limits of the digital sphere. As post-election analyses have pointed out, "gaming the algorithm" was surely not the only action taken here. What the digital counter-offensive actually did was provide rhythm, talking points, and morale to an already-existing physical base—millions of trade unionists, neighborhood activists, and grassroots movements like the Landless Workers' Movement (MST). People took the arguments offline into material space: into workplaces, family kitchens, church groups, and working-class neighborhoods, driving a three-million-voter surge in turnout that flipped the election by 4.4 million votes on October 25. Digital tools were essential for rapid mobilization and breaking an algorithmic blockade, but they only worked because they were anchored in durable, face-to-face organization in physical space. Some Questions We Need to Ask Ourselves Looking at the strength of the transnational cage—whether it is the silent administrative state of exception hardening across Europe, the financial and media leverage deployed in Eastern Europe, or the algorithmic monopolies of Silicon Valley—is only demoralizing if we expect history to be the subject, instead of understanding ourselves as the subjects driving history, slowly and often, painfully. Once we treat critical research as a diagnostic tool rather than a prophecy of doom, a much more constructive set of questions opens up in front of us: When we look at a rising protest movement, where are its independent material or media structures, and where is it vulnerable to elite or foreign capture? How do we use digital platforms to break information blockades in the short term without trapping ourselves in the algorithmic panopticon—and how do we funnel that energy into organizing in low-surveillance physical spaces of regular convergence? How do we fuse immediate, practical mutual aid in our neighborhoods with continuous political education, so that when systemic crises hit, people respond as an organized subject with a shared horizon rather than as atomized spectators? Understanding the blueprint of the cage is not supposed to be the end of the story. How else will we know where the bars are weakest? In other words: Optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect.

How do governments survive next to the imperial core? In this segment of my conversation with Jeff Rich on The Burning Archive, we look at what Lula’s re-election in Brazil means for the wider Latin American political landscape, and why analysts in Mexico were saying, "If Lula loses, we will be alone." Across South and Central America, a wave of right-wing and ultra-right presidents, many holding dual US citizenship, has accelerated the region’s integration into the US-led security-military establishment. While Lula still faces obstruction from a right-wing Senate and ongoing US pressure, holding the Brazilian presidency slows down the full integration of the hemisphere and keeps Mexico (its people and government) from standing isolated against economic and financial coercion. We also unpack how Mexico weathers constant hybrid destabilization from its northern neighbor: from opposition state governors attempting to invite the CIA, DEA, or US military across the border, to sudden visa cancellations for Morena officials, media warfare, and a former Green Beret veteran of El Salvador and Yugoslavia stationed at the US embassy. What has kept those tactics from breaking Mexico’s political project? Not just institutional maneuvering at the top, but an organized social base built through mass political education: free ongoing courses in political theory, history, and governance, massive public book fairs as well as other educational mass events, and town-to-town, street-to-street dialogue on new legislations, a process that speaks with people rather than at them. When a population is politically conscious and organized from below, standard imperial destabilization playbooks cannot easily break that wall. Watch the full segment with Jeff Rich here: youtu.be/2fJfG2MQQ_w