Trump Should Hire an Argentine General for His Proposed President-by-Decree
From my comfortable and safe vantage point in Vancouver, BC this Argentine-born Canadian finds the situation in our neighbor in the South very troubling. In Mexico they have a saying: “So near the United States and so far from God.”
As an Argentine who served as a conscript in the Marina de Guerra in the mid 60s I know what it is like to live in a country where the next rank up of a five-star general is President of the Republic usually via a coup d’état. In fact I participated in one (I obeyed orders or I would have been shot!) where our freely and honestly elected president (a gentle country doctor) Arturo Illía whose term that began on October 12, 1963 and ended abruptly (but gently as he went home in a taxi) on June 28, 1966. I was with a contingent of the army, air force and the nave that surrounded the Casa Rosada and gave him on hour to leave.
In another previous cop attempt I remember being in the grandstands of the River Plate football stadium watching a game. We heard some rumbling and we saw a long string of tanks going into the city. We all ignored the event and went back to watching the game.
Thus with the latest pronouncements by Donald Trump on perhaps not accepting the results of the November 8 elections and of his backers taking the streets to stop a possible inaugural of Hillary Clinton I find myself in a world of magic realism North of the equator. And when Trump says he would like to have his presidency decreed I hyperventilate.
But my fave cartoonist Ted Rall foresaw this years ago during George W. Bush’s presidency. He featured Bush as El Busho (as a wolf, perhaps?) who with his epaulets (huevos fritos or fried eggs in my native Argentina) looked like the very image of any South American military dictator that ever was.
Rall’s cartoons may offend some but I believe that this is a good thing. It is unfortunate that our own Vancouver Sun and other Canadian newspapers have never discovered him.
Originally published at blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com.
