Racism is commonly presented as a residue of the past: a moral pathology or cultural prejudice whose return to the public sphere is understood as an ideological drift confined to the margins of politics. It is treated as an excess that civilizational progress was supposed to overcome, now allegedly encouraged by the “barbaric discourses” of the far right. Yet the facts compel us to formulate another hypothesis: that racism is neither an error nor a deviation of the system, nor the return of a shadow from the past, but rather one of its central operating principles—one that functions not only at the cultural or symbolic level, but as a geopolitical rationality that orders the world, hierarchizes it, and in doing so decides which lives deserve protection and which may be sacrificed in the name of the “civilized.”
This suspicion does not arise out of nowhere. It imposes itself through events: the systematic persecution of Latin American immigrants in the United States; the growing pressure exerted against countries such as Venezuela; the complicity of local elites who openly despise their own popular majorities; the double standard embedded in European human rights discourse; and, as a backdrop, the structural defenselessness of the Palestinian people in the face of a violence that no longer requires justification to be exercised obscenely.
U.S. migration policy is usually explained in domestic terms: border control, security, employment. But this reading is insufficient. The figure of the criminalized Latin American immigrant cannot be separated from the way the United States conceives its historical relationship with Latin America. The migrant is the exterior that irrupts within the territory; the unruly Latin American state is the external threat whose claimed autonomy exposes the arbitrariness of the imposed order. Both embody the same anomaly. It is no coincidence that the countries of origin of migrants hunted down by ICE coincide with those subjected to sanctions, diplomatic harassment, or campaigns of delegitimization when they attempt to deviate from the script (1). In both cases, punishment responds less to specific actions than to structural positions within the world order.
The migration border and the geopolitical border are not distinct devices. They are two scales of the same mechanism of classification and exclusion.
When Venezuela is discussed from centers of power, the language used is revealing: chaos, populism, corruption, backwardness, criminality, drug trafficking. These are not merely political criticisms. Beneath them lies a civilizational matrix that situates these countries in a state of historical immaturity, as if their primary fault were their inability to govern themselves or their captivity to the baseness of mafia organizations. What is decisive today, however, is not the existence of this gaze, but the loss of restraint with which it is publicly deployed. Economic suffocation, financial punishment, or military threat are presented as reasonable, even pedagogical measures. The suffering they produce appears as an unavoidable collateral damage.
The recent statement by Donald Trump, reported by El País, brutally condenses this shift. When announcing ground attacks within the framework of the so-called “war on drug trafficking,” the U.S. president stated that these actions are not directed against a country, but against “horrible people.” This phrase is not a rhetorical outburst. It is a political program. By defining the enemy in aesthetic and moral terms, the conflict is displaced outside the field of international law. There are no sovereign states or political adversaries. There are degraded subjects, disposable lives, bodies that can be eliminated without this constituting either an attack on a sovereign country or a violation of human rights.
This displacement is not merely discursive. It has immediate material effects. Once the enemy is defined as a “horrible person,” the use of force is no longer governed by verifiable legal criteria and instead follows a logic of preventive elimination (2). The recent attack on a boat accused of drug trafficking—and particularly the killing of survivors after the first strike—shows with stark clarity how far this rationality can go. The objective was not to neutralize an imminent threat, but to suppress lives that no longer posed any danger (3). The message is clear: once certain bodies have been inscribed in the moral category of the abject, the distinction between combat and execution, between military operation and summary punishment, becomes irrelevant. This is neither an operational excess nor a tactical error, but the coherent application of a political framework that has already decided that some lives deserve neither capture, nor trial, nor mourning.
This turn makes it possible to justify military attacks on sovereign territory without declaring war, without assuming legal consequences, and without clear limits. Above all, however, it reveals a racialized logic. Those “horrible people” are never abstract. They have an origin, a geography, a color. They are bodies from the Global South. The same discourse that criminalizes the Latin American immigrant at the southern border now criminalizes, in military terms, entire populations in their countries of origin. The South appears as a producer of death; the North, as the legitimate administrator of a purifying violence.
This rationality does not operate solely at the level of states or abstract discourse. It is embodied in figures, in bodies that condense symbolic hierarchies. The contrast between Nicolás Maduro and María Corina Machado is illustrative. The difference between them is not only political. It is bodily, aesthetic, civilizational. Machado unambiguously embodies Latin American whiteness: formal neatness, European manners, mastery of liberal language, class belonging. Her discourse may be openly exclusionary or authoritarian, but it is wrapped in a civilized form that renders it acceptable to the international gaze (4).
Maduro, by contrast, is presented as the improper body: mestizo, coarse, excessive. He is not read as a political adversary, but as an anomaly. His delegitimation does not require complex arguments. It operates at an affective, visual, immediate level. Violence, when articulated from whiteness, becomes responsibility; when embodied in mestizo bodies, it becomes intolerable. Here racism does not need to be named: the camera, the framing, and the narrative tone do the work.
The reaction of a large part of the European press to these processes confirms this pattern. The judicial or political cornering of left-wing Latin American leaders is celebrated as a defense of the rule of law, with little attention to power asymmetries or social costs. European universalism functions with a tacit clause: human rights are universal, but their concrete application depends on the subject concerned. When violence is exercised against non-European peoples, it is recoded as order, stability, or realism (5).
This double standard is not an occasional deviation. It is a moral structure. And it finds its point of truth in Palestine. The Palestinian situation is not a tragic exception, but the rule that reveals how the system functions. Faced with accumulated evidence of genocide, the international response is inaction or explicit support for the aggressor. This is only possible because those lives have already been devalued. The same logic that tolerates death in Gaza tolerates death in the Mediterranean or mass deportation at the U.S. border. The settings change; the rationality does not.
This geopolitics of racism is not limited to Latin America. The Muslim world is recurrently presented as a dangerous alterity, incapable of moral modernity. Russia is symbolically racialized as barbaric, oriental, authoritarian. Asia oscillates between technocratic admiration and civilizational fear. This is not a classic biological racism, but a civilizational racism that hierarchizes cultures and legitimizes differentiated forms of violence.
This global framework also allows us to understand internal Latin American politics. In many countries, political disputes are traversed by a persistent racial fracture, systematically denied. The confrontation between Indigenous peoples, the “Black” people—as the term is still used in Argentina—and elites who define themselves as heirs of Europe is not a remnant of the colonial past, but a living structure. Argentina is, in this sense, an emblematic case. The myth of a white, European, modern nation has served to render Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and mestizo populations invisible, and to legitimize a politics that conceives the people as a problem and Europe as the horizon of normality. When politics becomes radicalized, this racial contempt emerges without mediation.
At this point, the initial question can be answered without hesitation. We are not facing a collection of crises or isolated excesses. We are facing a geopolitics of racism: a world order that classifies and hierarchizes peoples while administering the violence exercised upon them. As long as we fail to name this rationality for what it is, we will continue to discuss migration, regional conflicts, or humanitarian crises as if they were independent problems. They are not. They are different expressions of the same logic: a world that has decided that some peoples are disposable.
NOTES
(1) El País. (13 de diciembre de 2025). Las redadas del ICE disparan el absentismo escolar y traumatizan a los niños: “Les han obligado a dejar atrás su infancia”. El País.
https://elpais.com/us/migracion/2025-12-13/las-redadas-del-ice-disparan-el-absentismo-escolar-y-traumatizan-a-los-ninos-les-han-obligado-a-dejar-atras-su-infancia.html
The article documents how ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids under the Trump administration have led to a significant increase in school absenteeism and psychological trauma among children in migrant communities. Living under constant fear of family separation due to warrantless detentions, many children experience anxiety and long-term emotional distress. The report highlights intensified operations in U.S. urban areas, including arrests near schools, illustrating the profound social and human impact of immigration enforcement policies on Latin American families.
(2) Vidal Liy, M. (2025, December 13). Trump sostiene que los ataques terrestres se dirigirán contra “personas horribles”, no contra un país. El País.
https://elpais.com/america/2025-12-13/trump-sostiene-que-los-ataques-terrestres-se-dirigiran-contra-personas-horribles-no-contra-un-pais.html
The article reports statements by Donald Trump in which he explicitly redefines military attacks linked to the so-called “war on drug trafficking” as actions directed against “horrible people” rather than sovereign states. This moral redefinition of the enemy outside the framework of statehood allows the justification of extraterritorial use of force without acknowledging armed conflict or violations of international law, exemplifying the political logic analyzed in this text.
(3) Miller, G., & Hudson, J. (2025, December 11). How a U.S. admiral decided to kill two boat strike survivors. The Washington Post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/12/11/frank-bradley-boat-strike-survivors/
This investigative report reconstructs the decision-making process that led to a second U.S. military strike against two survivors of a boat suspected of drug trafficking, following an initial attack that had already disabled the vessel. Drawing on military sources and internal records, the article shows that the order was taken based on tactical and operational considerations rather than legal criteria, despite the fact that the individuals no longer posed an immediate threat. It documents legal and ethical concerns within the U.S. military and political apparatus, as well as growing congressional pressure to release the full video footage, highlighting a shift toward a logic of preventive elimination.
(4) Lecumberri, B. (2025, December 13). Venezuela, entre el cansancio, la pureza moral y la esperanza. El País.
https://elpais.com/america/2025-12-13/venezuela-entre-el-cansancio-la-pureza-moral-y-la-esperanza.html
The article portrays María Corina Machado as an opposition leader who has successfully reworked her public image, moving beyond the label of “bourgeois” once attributed to her by Hugo Chávez to become a figure capable of “distributing hope” in a country marked by social exhaustion. The coverage emphasizes her personal composure, her decision to remain in Venezuela while other leaders went into exile, and her symbolic legitimation through the Nobel Peace Prize. This moralized and aesthetically polished portrayal contrasts implicitly with the degraded representation of chavismo, offering insight into the criteria of political and civilizational legitimacy employed by the European press.
(5) El País. (2002, April 13). Golpe a un caudillo. El País.
https://elpais.com/diario/2002/04/13/opinion/1018648802_850215.html. El País. (2013, January 24). El País retira una foto falsa de Hugo Chávez en un hospital. El País.
https://elpais.com/internacional/2013/01/24/actualidad/1359002703_817602.html
During the April 2002 coup d’état in Venezuela, El País published the editorial “Golpe a un caudillo”, in which the interruption of constitutional order was interpreted as a near-natural consequence of the political deterioration of Hugo Chávez’s government, framing his removal as a necessary correction to a leadership characterized as caudillista. Years later, in January 2013, the same newspaper disseminated a false photograph allegedly showing Chávez hospitalized and intubated, which was later withdrawn after its falsity was confirmed and prompted a public apology. Together, these episodes illustrate a continuity in media treatment: the symbolic availability of Chávez’s body and sovereignty—first during the coup, later during illness and death—under a standard of exposure and inclemency rarely applied to European leaders.