By Prince Kapone | Weaponized Information | April 2025
I. “The United States is the villain of our story.”
When Claudia Sheinbaum stood before a roaring crowd and spoke these words, she did not invent a narrative — she reminded the Mexican people of a history written in blood. From the illegal U.S. invasion of 1846 to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the United States annexed half of Mexico’s national territory — what is today California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of several other states.
The annexation was not the end. It was the beginning of a colonial relationship that persists to this day — enforced through gunboats, trade agreements, debt peonage, and militarized borders. Trump 2.0 is merely the latest face of a settler empire that never finished its conquest.
According to U.S. Census data, nearly 38 million Mexican-Americans live in the United States — millions of them descendants of people who never crossed a border, but had the border cross them. Manifest Destiny didn’t end at the Rio Grande. It mutated. It metastasized. And today, it builds walls and concentration camps.
II. “They stole half our territory and now they build walls to keep us out.”
Sheinbaum’s words hit like a hammer because they are backed by cold historical fact. The construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall is not about immigration. It is about enforcing the racialized economic hierarchies established through conquest.
The so-called “border crisis” is an imperial feedback loop. U.S. policies — NAFTA, CIA-backed drug wars, World Bank structural adjustment — impoverish Mexico and Central America. Migrants flee north seeking survival. The U.S. militarizes the border to criminalize the very victims of its policies.
In fiscal year 2024 alone, the U.S. Border Patrol conducted over 2.4 million apprehensions at the southern border — a record high. Meanwhile, remittances from Mexicans working in the U.S. sent back to Mexico reached $63 billion — a vital lifeline sustaining millions, and a reflection of structural theft on both sides of the border. [Pew Research 2024]
Walls are built not to keep Mexicans out — but to keep Mexican labor disciplined, precarious, and profitable.
III. “We will not be their slaves.”
This declaration slices through centuries of colonial subjugation. From the imposition of the maquiladora system along the border in the 1960s, to NAFTA’s full-scale neoliberalization in the 1990s, Mexico has been turned into a low-wage reserve for U.S. and transnational capital.
Today, over 5,000 maquiladoras operate along the border, employing more than 2.7 million workers — overwhelmingly women, paid poverty wages to assemble goods for Walmart shelves and Amazon warehouses. [U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics]
The USMCA trade deal signed in 2020 only deepened this dependency, locking Mexico into low-wage labor, agricultural dumping, and environmental degradation — all under U.S. legal frameworks.
Slavery today is not chained labor in fields. It is economic servitude enforced by free trade agreements and backed by armed borders.
IV. “They call us invaders, but it is they who invaded us.”
Trump’s 2025 campaign rhetoric is a recycling of Manifest Destiny in MAGA drag. He accuses migrants of “invading” the United States while ignoring that it was the U.S. that invaded Mexico, stole its land, massacred its people, and built an empire on the ashes.
Today, U.S. Border Patrol agents operate like colonial militias — with over 20,000 armed personnel patrolling the southern frontier, drones flying overhead, and military bases spread like tumors across the Southwest. [U.S. Customs and Border Protection]
ICE raids terrorize communities. Laws like SB4 in Texas criminalize migrants for existing. Vigilante militias hunt human beings like quarry. This is not immigration control. This is counterinsurgency against a colonized people within a settler state.
When Sheinbaum says “they invaded us,” she is not speaking metaphorically. She is speaking historically, legally, and materially.
V. “Our dignity is not negotiable.”
This is the most powerful line — and also the most dangerous if left in the hands of bourgeois nationalism. Dignity without material sovereignty is a hollow slogan. True dignity demands control over land, labor, and life itself.
While AMLO and Sheinbaum have challenged U.S. hegemony rhetorically, the Mexican state still remains deeply entangled with imperial finance, energy corporations, and trade dependency. Dignity that stops at the flag, but doesn’t touch the banks and the factories, will always be vulnerable to recolonization.
The revolutionary tradition of Emiliano Zapata — “Tierra y Libertad” — teaches that dignity must be fought for at the level of social relations, not just national borders. The Zapatista communities of Chiapas, the independent unions of the border, and the growing cross-border solidarity networks show the real path: organized, anti-imperialist, socialist struggle across artificial frontiers.
Dignity is not given. It is seized.
From Texas to Tenochtitlán — The Battle for the Continent
The rise of Mexican nationalism today reflects the deepening crisis of U.S. settler empire. Trump 2.0’s threats are not signs of strength — they are the convulsions of a declining beast, desperate to reimpose control through walls, militarism, and lies.
But if nationalism is to be a weapon of liberation, it must transcend bourgeois reformism. It must become revolutionary internationalism — an understanding that the Mexican, Central American, Indigenous, and Black struggles are one struggle against one common settler-imperialist system.
The gringo is the enemy — not just the ones in suits and uniforms, but the ones signing trade deals, enforcing debt, launching drones, and criminalizing the poor.
The future of the continent will not be decided in Washington. It will be decided in the streets of Tijuana, in the factories of Juárez, in the mountains of Guerrero, in the barrios of Los Angeles, and in every place where empire’s walls are met by the people’s fire.
We remember. We resist. We weaponize information.
This article draws from reporting by MSN, Reuters, La Jornada, Telesur, Pew Research, and independent revolutionary sources.
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