For over fifty years, radical and independent filmmakers across Latin America have been making films targeting the history of Latin America’s domination by imperialist powers and above all, in the twentieth century, the USA, whose methods have been economic exploitation, mass cultural colonisation and direct or indirect military intervention. In Mexico, where the threat represented by Donald Trump is particularly keenly felt, a group of filmmakers has come together under the banner Stop ¡Basta! to campaign for Latinos north of the border to use their vote to defend their own interests, which means their past, their traditions, their history, their people. Their instrument of choice is their own films, in the form of scenes selected to ‘suggest the nightmare that our world can become if ruled by the worst traditions in the history of the United States’.  Like this, from Paul Leduc:

You can find the full selection on this website, grouped in various sections, including ‘El mundo bajo Trump’, ‘The World Under Trump’, which imagines the future if ‘that dump of stupidity, racism and misogyny, lies and violence, ignorance and demagogy, triviality and arrogance’ wins the White House.

But they speak ‘not just as Mexicans entitled to indignation by his stupid insults, but as ordinary citizens of the world preoccupied about the survival of human life on the planet’, at a moment in which climate change, economic crisis, terrorism, corruption of governments, parties and business men around the world, violence in almost every corner of the planet,’ promote confusion and fear campaigns – the example they give is the Referendum in the UK which voted for Brexit, to ‘the immediate regret of more than 4 million voters – three times the difference that won’.

Will November 8th bring a similar result? Even if Trump doesn’t win, the fascistoid forces he represents will not disappear. And neither will resistance.

Coming soon! A new video from Paul Leduc.