From Detroit to Minneapolis, via Trump's bunker

The United States is an enormously complex country. Its complexity is very difficult for Europeans to understand, even though we believe the opposite, and it is so despite the fact that its conception, foundation and development was carried out by European immigrants who arrived for centuries from the other side of the ocean. This is the fundamental reason why no one on this side understands today that, at a time of health and economic devastation, when the incidence of a dangerous virus has left more than a hundred thousand dead there, it is the least of their problems. Since George Floyd's neck was strangled by the knee of Officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, a wave of unrest has rocked the country, mixing the understandable and necessary protest of Black people against police abuse with the emergence of radical groups trying to capitalize on the violence and take to the streets.  

The most powerful country in the world is in serious trouble because of a triple threat. The pandemic that continues unchecked in many states; the brutal economic crisis that leads 40 million people to apply for unemployment benefits; and now the social violence caused by the curfew in the 100 largest cities, admired around the world for their civility, their organization as a community and their respect for freedom and rights.  

There is "systemic" racism in the U.S., and it is present in major centres of police in some cities. Minneapolis is no exception. From time to time the boiling pot explodes, and then it is impossible to stop the eruption, even with the National Guard or the army unless it shoots to kill tens of thousands of protesters. This supremacist behaviour is not widespread, but it is felt even by our compatriots, Spaniards who live in the most powerful country in the world and feel a visceral rejection in many of their neighbours by being identified as "Latinos", a typology that many American social classes repudiate despite the immense contribution they make daily with their work and integration.  

What happened in Minneapolis, once again, takes us back to the cinema and to history. Director Kathryn Bigelow released her film Detroit in the summer of 2017, based on the very serious events that took place in the industrial city of Michigan. A police raid fifty years earlier on the Algiers Motel had been the origin of the racial revolt, as the black population understood the agents' actions as a violent abuse of power. The riots lasted several days and ended with nearly 50 African Americans killed by beatings and bullets from police forces. The detonation of Detroit-1967 was nowhere near as bad as the one that has led to Minneapolis-2020: the cops believed that someone had tried to shoot them from a window, and the search took place, riddled with torture and mistreatment as Bigelow details in his film. The cops firmly believed that the motel was a nest of troublesome outcasts and that any way to keep them at bay would be justified. As with Chauvin and his knee. The severity of the homicide in Minnesota's most populous city, the Coen and Sinclair Lewis Minnesota, is not comparable to the small incident that sparked the 1967 riot, and the police officer's knee has been a catalyst for the drop in unemployment and marginalization caused by the pandemic.  

President Donald Trump's response has been to label something as ethereal as Anti-Fa and the extreme left in the country as a terrorist organization. As Alana Moceri explained in Atalayar's programme on Capital Radio, Antifa is not an organized group but a network of activists who are very careful to leave a trace of their calls or their members, and who under the mantle of their anti-fascist radicalism (many think that the worst fascism is that of the anti-fascists) contribute to create that atmosphere of chaos in which later the criminals take advantage to perpetrate looting and aggressions against innocent citizens. By symbolically fleeing to the bunker on Friday night, Trump has cast doubt on the power of his administration, and everything will depend on how he can control the situation on the streets in the coming nights.