The world is told to us as the board of a game in which great powers – great “players,” indeed – confront each other to achieve the coveted supremacy. It is not entirely false, but it is a narrative aimed at making all other subjects actually feel like “subjects,” in the sense of passive, forced into obedience. To bow to the law of force.
However, great powers must never face each other directly: always in “third” spaces. Like between the USA and USSR during the Cold War. But also in the Renaissance, when the French and Spanish fought in Italy – and we, a pragmatic colony, coined a saying that still fits today: “France or Spain, as long as we eat.” Even Athens and Sparta, quite close, went to fight in Sicily or the Dardanelles.
Latin America is an excellent conflict space. Certain distance from power centers, many riches and resources, significant population, endemic weakness and political division. The effect was seen during the Cold War. But even before, the expansion of the borders and sphere of influence of the United States (the continent’s only superpower, so much so that it geopolitically synecdochically named itself “America”) took place on that territory, against European powers. Today, after a moment of relative calm, Latin America has returned to that function.
The board is multidimensional: many historical aspects and others new, intertwined. There is the confrontation between the United States and China, over goods and resources. But there is also the opposition between Washington’s political and financial hegemony, and the desire of the region’s states to transform themselves into “middle powers,” capable of autonomously choosing if and which system, which camp, in global alignments. Finally, the ideological-philosophical conflict between the United States, leader of the Western tendency toward an individualism now reduced to a hybrid of narcissism, irresponsibility, and nihilism, and a universalist vision for which the Catholic Church is becoming a standard-bearer.
The battle rages. The operation against Maduro – guilty of giving “America’s” resources to China. The one planned against Castro, to reestablish who is “subject.” The commercial blackmail of Brazil and Mexico. The challenge over Panama. The elections in Brazil, Chile, now Colombia, almost a script by now – right there to follow the runoff between the Trump-supporting billionaire lawyer and the Third Worldist Gramsci scholar. Argentina’s concession as an AI playground made by Milei to Thiel’s Palantir. The contest for oil and lithium. The fight for souls, between neo-evangelicals and Catholics.
And last but not least, the “general ethics,” very little ecclesiastical, very humanistic, that is emerging against the philosophy of power emanated by the USA. Ethics with a “Latin” root: the last two popes, who developed it, were both spiritually formed among the marginalized of the continent: Jorge Mario Bergoglio among the shantytown dwellers of Buenos Aires, Robert Francis Prevost among the poor peasants of northern Peru.
Prevost spoke in the Spanish Parliament. Spain: with the most anti-Trump European government. With the right (Vox) more Trumpist than all. With a progressive front linked to Latin America and a conservative one to Miami and Washington. With a past of colonial exploitation – precisely of America. A past also Catholic, but now hedonistic and agnostic. In Spain now what the pope says really interests few. Oh no, correct that: it interested few. Leo said in Madrid: leave Hernán Cortés alone, the conqueror who erased the Aztec kingdom and started colonization (which the Spanish right is trying to mythologize). And recover Francisco de Vitoria, the Dominican among the founders of international law – for example, he introduced the concept of proportionality in conflicts. Or that of the illegitimacy of colonial conquest, “not even for religious reasons,” he specified. For example. Just as the pope was speaking, dozens more people died due to Israel’s unilateral decision to further restrict the Yellow Line behind which it has confined the Gazans.
The papacy has taken the lead of a political project. In a broad sense: moral. Just as we consider many of the leaders of our planet immoral, and the actions they carry out. The Roman Catholic Church has seen a void. It has seen the possibility of regaining significance. We are no longer in the times of the fight against atheistic communism or the defense of tradition from modernity. The current Catholic leadership grew up among the world’s last, not the first. But it knows them.
The top of the human class, first in wealth and power: who have decided to extract from others, from the last, from everyone, the attributions necessary to guarantee themselves untouchability, immortality. To divinize themselves with the help of machines, of which they want to remain masters.
It is against them that Leo directs his ethical program.
