We Are Not Your Backyard!

This is about agency, not switching masters. Here’s the upgraded version: 

Enough! Enough with this “America’s backyard” bullshit!

We are not your backyard. Not your patio, not your storage shed, not your geopolitical playground. Every time some stupid U.S. politician, analyst, or armchair expert says “Latin America is our backyard,” what they’re really saying is this is a place we feel entitled to control. 

And then they have the nerve to warn us: “Things could get worse.”

Worse than what, exactly? Worse than U.S.-backed coups and “friendly” dictators? Worse than decades of political interference dressed up as “stability”? Or our economies reshaped to serve foreign interests, not local people? Or drug wars fueled by U.S. consumption and paid for with our blood? Or being blamed for chaos that was engineered, encouraged, or ignored by… guess who? Yeap, you!

So no! Don’t threaten us with fear. We’ve already lived through the consequences of being under U.S. control.

Now here’s the current situation that is really making some of you uncomfortable and that is, China has showed up differently. They didn’t lecture us. They didn’t call us their backyard. They invested in infrastructure, in trade, in long-term projects. They came with a different frame of mind, a different perspective, and yes, they brought tangible progress where others brought conditions and threats.

Does that mean blind loyalty? No. Does that mean replacing one empire with another? Absolutely not.

But it does mean options. It means leverage. It means we get to choose. And that’s the part that really bothers you.

We believe our relationship with China can be fruitful. We also believe relationships with the U.S. could be fruitful, if based on respect instead of ownership.

This is not a zero-sum game unless you make it one. We decide who we do business with. We decide  who invests in our countries. We decide our future. Not Washington. Not Beijing. Us.

So drop the colonial language. Drop the entitlement. And understand this clearly: We are not your backyard. We never were.

Thanks for reading. Abrazos.

Diego Rojas