“Maldito sea el soldado que vuelva su arma contra su pueblo”

                                                              “Cursed be the soldier who turns his weapon against his people”

                                                                                                                                                         Simon Bolivar *

 

It’s time to take the gloves off: What’s happening in Minneapolis is inexcusable and indefensible. Two American citizens have been murdered by federal agents this month and another person shot.

That would be bad enough, but there are broader implications from what’s happening in Minneapolis and in other American cities.

• First, that the federal government, as now constituted, has lost all credibility with its citizens and probably with millions more people living all over the world. Governments have always bended the truth, but this federal government has fabricated lies and smears to justify its agents’ crimes. To avoid exposing its culpability further, the federal government is trying to prevent local police from examining the evidence in both killings.

• And second, that it is now reasonable to live in fear of our own government. It was always true that government has life and death authority over us, but most of us could assume that the mortal powers of government would be exercised with fairness, justice and restraint, and not randomly by roving bands of masked thugs operating with the assurance that they have absolute immunity to carry out their mission, whatever that might be.

There are even suggestions that the federal presence in Minneapolis is part of an extortion campaign to elicit voter rolls and other information from the state, purportedly for law enforcement purposes but more likely to purge voters from those rolls. Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote to Gov. Tim Walz suggesting that he,  “. . . allow the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice to access voter rolls to confirm that Minnesota’s voter registration practices comply with federal law as authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1960. Fulfilling this common sense request will better guarantee free and fair elections and boost confidence in the rule of law. I am confident that these simple steps will help bring back law and order to Minnesota and improve the lives of Americans.” Minnesota is not the only state from which the Justice Department is seeking access to voter rolls in advance of the 2026 midterm elections.

ICE has become Trump’s personal militia, deployed to Democratic cities as part of his campaign to harass and intimidate. So now we have American citizens and other human beings being killed by government agents; and the government lies about the circumstances of the killings and seeks to smear the victims, inventing back stories about them. No one—man, woman, child, black, white or brown—can assume they are safe.

These murders aren’t unprecedented. Earlier this year our government began blowing up boats in open waters because they were suspected of carrying drugs. No investigation, just their appearance on the high seas was proof enough. No interrogation, no arrests, no appearance before a judge, no trial. Just a sentence: death.

We have a president who is unmoored, echoing lies promoted by underlings and promoting lies of his own as he cut the bonds that tied us to western democracies for the past eight decades.

We are living in truly surreal times, rejecting our friends and seeming to embrace our adversaries, being fed false narratives about our history while the truth is repressed, told the world was laughing at us when we were envied and respected, assured that foreign businesses were paying the tariffs that in fact are being paid by Americans. We are experiencing an Orwellian reality where lies are truth, weakness is strength, respect is contempt, seeing is not believing.

We can find cold comfort in this: People are not remaining silent even if their representatives are. No regime is permanent. Murder has no statute of limitations. A day of reckoning will come.

“There are means that cannot be excused,” Albert Camus wrote. “And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don’t want just any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.”

* I’d like to thank Andrea Meyer Guzman for bringing the Simon Bolivar quote to my attention.