Boomerangs of Empire: Latin America as Colonial Laboratory

Masked federal agents kidnap a father as he waits to pick up his child from school. An ice cream cart is abandoned on the sidewalk, its vendor disappeared. A young man is arrested at his job and secretly transported to a terrorism confinement prison in another country. These stories are not from Cold War Latin America, but shared by immigrants—undocumented, asylum seekers, green card holders—living in the United States since President Donald J. Trump assumed office in January 2025.

The kidnapped father was Juan José Martínez Cortes, taken while waiting in his car outside of Linda Vista Elementary School in San Diego. The paletero, Ambrocio Lozano, known to his beloved community as Enrique, became the subject of protests demanding his release. Andry Hernández Romero, a Venezuelan gay makeup artist, was arrested in South Carolina and sent to the infamous Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador, where he was held for 125 days until his release as part of a prisoner swap between the United States and Venezuelan governments.

Mirroring the many accounts of state violence throughout 20th-century Latin America, similar events are now surfacing in the United States. As we witness these horrors in person and online, Aimé Césaire’s words in Discourse on Colonialism(1950) reverberate: “[O]ne fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.” What Césaire once diagnosed as a colonial return now shapes the everyday, the imperial boomerang of our lived histories, our identities, of the stories and histories we wish to tell. It is this returning and disseminating violence, including its architectures, justifications, and resistances, that guides this issue’s analytical and historical content.

“Boomerangs of Empire and the Technofascist Turn” takes Césaire’s insight not as a metaphor but as a method. The imperial boomerang functions as a historical circuit in which tactics of imperial domination tested abroad return home, reshaping the very societies that invented them. By emphasizing process over parallel examples, we push contributors and readers to consider why these systems of state repression have become models for replication. Our concern is not simply that U.S. policies echo past empires, but that repression itself has become a transferable technology: an experiment refined in the colonial laboratories of the Americas and now redeployed within the borders of the United States.

We asked contributors to probe what makes this moment distinct. Their collective responses converged on two themes. First, the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) and Military Industrial Complex (MIC)—braided through racialized logistics, infrastructures, industries, and algorithmic computing—now operate as a single apparatus that manages dissent, migration, and everyday life. Second, popular resistance, the response to methods of repression, emerges to protect those being targeted and reaffirm social rights. The essays that follow trace this machinery across borders and centuries, from border militarization and migrant criminalization to algorithmic surveillance and ecological extraction.

Césaire foresaw “the American hour” as an age of “violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, conformism, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.” Our time demands that we meet it analytically and through activism. Naming this machine is a condition for interrupting it. In keeping with NACLA’s tradition, our editorial stance is double: to expose the architectures of technofascism and to foreground the counter‑methods that boomerang back as resistance.

Thingification

Césaire’s stark equation that “colonization = ‘thingification’” clarifies how colonization reduces life—person, culture, and ecology—into a nonentity to be sorted, priced, moved, and extracted. The colonial apparatus operates through administrative bureaucracies that strip singularity from the beings they process. What feels particular to this moment is not the process of thingification itself but its interoperability, where sonic thresholds, hydraulic schedules, and colonial urban geometries now plug into one another through infrastructures and logistics that bind extraction—human and nonhuman alike—to markets and security workflows.

In the Gulf of Mexico, Jerónimo Reyes-Retana shows how a small fishing border town is reframed by space-industry routines—launch corridors, shock-wave tolerances, and debris-recovery pathways—that rearticulate the lives of its fishermen and marine species in service of space colonialism. Further up the Río Grande, Federico Pérez Villoro tracks how dam-release timetables recalibrate the river’s dangers, reducing migrant lives to actuarial risk variables. And in Tovaangar/Los Angeles, Daniel P. Gámez reads the Castilian imposition of the urban grid as a mechanism that both exposes and contains dissidence, a mechanism still activated today through police kettling. As Mike Davis warned, the dystopian future is not ahead of us but built into the infrastructural present and its architectures, where life is parsed into parameters—decibels, flow rates, lines of sight—so it can be priced, routed, or neutralized.

Read together, the border pieces do more than illustrate thingification; they render its architectures visible. Reyes-Retana maps how aerospace regulation reconfigures a coastal commons into a mere service corridor; Pérez Villoro details how engineered water surges reprogram a river into a weapon; and Gámez reminds us how the colonial grid persists as a sorting machine for contemporary policing and repression. Together, these texts insist that architecture is not a backdrop but an instrument—spaceports, dams, and grids— that makes the routines of thingification interoperable.

The Law of Progressive Dehumanization

The rise of the U.S. empire turned the Americas into a continuous field of experimentation. From the Cold War’s “development” projects to the 21st century’s migration and surveillance regimes, the United States perfected a technocratic colonialism that organizes difference rather than erases it. In this landscape, deportation files, visa categories, and media representations perform the work once carried out by armies. Césaire’s warning that “there is a law of progressive dehumanization” names precisely this transformation: the conversion of life into data, labor into numbers, and citizenship into a conditional privilege measured by productivity and obedience. Dehumanization no longer requires ideology; it requires logistics.

In Jennifer Martínez-Medina’s “The Hidden Agrarian Transformation Behind Mass Deportation,” the Cold War’s counterinsurgency wars return as immigration policy. Martínez-Medina reveals how the racial hierarchies that once justified hemispheric “development” now govern U.S. agricultural fields, where the H-2A visa program updates mid-century tactics of control for a 21st century economy. The deported worker replaces the disappeared guerrillero, both rendered expendable in the name of national security and agricultural “efficiency.” In her reading, the farm becomes the new frontier of dehumanization—the plantation reborn through data and deportation.

Turning to Brazil, Omawu Diane Enobabor and Karina Quintanilha’s “Contesting Border Violence from São Paulo to New York” traces the afterlives of U.S. border enforcement in the detention camps and refugee airports of the Global South, where Black and African migrants navigate a transnational regime of racial profiling wrapped in humanitarian language. They show that the border, once a territorial line, has become a network—an algorithmic infrastructure stretching from Brooklyn’s migrant shelters to São Paulo’s immigration terminals—where mutual aid and community organizing fill the voids left by deliberate state neglect.

Marycarmen Lara-Villanueva turns Césaire’s phrase back onto its most contemporary surface: visibility itself. In “Anti-Racism as Spectacle: Visuality, Social Media, and the Afterlives of Mestizaje,” she argues that Mexico’s digital campaigns against racism reproduce the very “violence, corruption, and barbarism” Césaire identified, this time through the market of representation. What began as mestizaje—the 20th century Mexican state project to whiten and unify—returns in the 21st as a politics of inclusion that leaves racial capitalism intact. The colonial wound becomes a marketing category; dehumanization becomes an aesthetic.

Lastly, Chris Durán’s “Imprisoning Nations: Incarceration and Imperialism in Chile and the United States” traces how struggles against dehumanization—from the 1960s to today—provoke its renewal yet also generate the possibility of liberation. Focusing on the experience of political prisoners, Durán links the U.S. Black freedom movement and the Mapuche struggle for land against the Chilean state, showing how imprisonment becomes both a tool of repression and a crucible of resistance. In his reading, captivity does not extinguish resistance but refines it, transforming the site of containment into a school of revolution where the fight to reclaim life continues.

The Age of Tyrants

Césaire’s “circuit of mutual service and complicity” in the age of tyrants captures the long life of domination in the Americas, where empire’s administrators and neoliberal strongmen have continually borrowed from one another’s repertoires of control. From the 1930s onward, tyranny evolved through alliance: colonial paternalism merged with the spectacle of mass politics, and the vocabulary of development disguised dispossession as progress. Across the hemisphere, authoritarian projects drew legitimacy from the same sources as democracy—modernization, order, and the promise of national rebirth.Sam Markwell’s moving essay, “Submerged Pluralist Possibilities in the Pueblo Indian Homelands,”opens in this historical moment. Writing through the history of the Pueblo Indian homelands in the 1930s and 1940s, Markwell shows how Indigenous communities sought to build a genuinely plural society that took up the mantle against fascism while defending their sovereignty. Pueblo leaders and their allies envisioned a model of governance rooted in reciprocity and coexistence, a proto-plurinational order that countered both the racial hierarchies of settler democracy and the authoritarian unity of fascism abroad. Yet the U.S. state’s developmental agenda—its dams, bureaucracies, and modernization schemes—proceeded without them. Markwell’s conclusion lingers as both an indictment and a warning: the infrastructures that promised progress drowned the alternatives to tyranny that once flourished along the Rio Grande.

Cristina Awadalla’s “Authoritarian Aesthetics: Ortega, Bukele, and the Bodies that Sustain Power” brings Césaire’s circuit into the present. Across Central America, she traces how Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele inherit and reinvent the visual and affective technologies of Cold War rule. Ortega’s revolutionary nostalgia and Bukele’s social-media populism converge in a politics of spectacle where incarceration, obedience, and digital charisma become indistinguishable. The old tyrant’s charisma and the new influencer’s algorithm meet in mutual service: each governs by staging the body as proof of order and legitimacy. Awadalla exposes this alliance, both regional and global, as an aesthetic of domination that travels easily across regimes.

In this same register, Simón Rodríguez shows how the Dominican Republic’s regime, once cast as a regional pariah, has become a proving ground whose techniques of retroactive denationalization, racialized raids, and mass deportation quotas are now openly courted by the U.S. far right. The traffic is bidirectional: Trumpism’s legal fictions and carceral spectacle find in Santo Domingo not merely a model but a partner that furnishes ready-made instruments and a veneer of legitimacy. Césaire’s “circuit of mutual service and complicity” is thus made contemporary: old and new tyrannies exchange methods, narratives, and even markets, until apartheid governance becomes common sense across the hemisphere. By closing the loop between Caribbean laboratories and North Atlantic power, Rodríguez reveals that the age of tyrants is less a genealogy of leaders than a shared infrastructure of rule—one that can only be interrupted by circuits of solidarity as agile as those of domination.

Mechanization

In his final reflections, Césaire evokes the “prodigious mechanization, the mechanization of man; the gigantic rape of everything intimate, undamaged, undefiled that, despoiled as we are, our human spirit has still managed to preserve” in modern life. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, the Mexican anthropologist Rossana Reguillo names this the necromáquina, “a death device that advances by swallowing territories, bodies and futures.” The danger, as Césaire warned, is immense. In the same passages he cautions that “American domination [is] the only domination from which one never recovers… unscarred.”

In this light, Trumpism appears less as an aberration than as an intensification of “conformism, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.” It recodes punitive governance and infrastructural chauvinism as common sense, aestheticizes humiliation as order, and licenses off—to federal agents or private tech—a managerial contempt for the inconvenient particularities of life. The boomerang is visible not only in policy but in style: the swaggering promise of this new American hour is to accelerate extraction, to police and militarize all space—physical, digital, discursive, and extraterrestrial—and to collapse all possibilities of political imagination into a repertoire of violent heuristics where cruelty is misrecognized as efficiency. Mechanization thrives on this confusion, turning collective resentments and cultural grudges into manipulable user interfaces at the disposal of colonial power.

Lost in this confusion is original thinking. The current rush toward large language models (LLMs)—misnamed “artificial intelligence”—invites the mass renunciation of judgment in favor of predictive mimicry, outsourcing observation, embodied knowledge, and even ethical reasoning to systems trained on past colonial normalities. Troublingly, we editors received multiple proposals—and even drafts—that leaned heavily on AI-generated content. The irony was not lost on us that the very technologies of imperial governance this issue critiques are being uncritically employed in the production of writing itself.

This raises uncomfortable questions about Audre Lorde’s famous assertion that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Can these algorithms and LLMs, trained on imperial archives and corporate datasets, confront the imperial boomerang? Césaire’s many warnings resonate that we are at risk of transforming radical thought into mere throughput—another task to be checked off, another data point to be processed, predicted, neutralized.  As our contributing poet, césar montero, writes from Los Angeles, California, reflecting on the imperial return:

Oh Great Smoking Mirror
Tezcatlipoca
Give me guidance
Allow me to see
Through the smoke and mirrors
The other side of your obsidian dreams

This article is syndicated in partnership with the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA). This piece appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of NACLA’s quarterly print magazine, the NACLA Report.

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