By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez
We began the new year 2026 with the deployment of US military might very close to us in the Caribbean Sea. This was the setup for the extraction in Caracas of the illegitimate president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, kidnapped in the name of foreign justice to be taken to a court in New York where they are accused of criminal conspiracy related to drug trafficking.
This new expression of warfare in today's tripolar world, created after the pandemic by the United States, China, and Russia, was already foreseeable. Russia's invasion of Ukraine, China's threat to Taiwan, and the genocide of the Palestinian people by the state of Israel with the tactical support of the United States are all part of this new geopolitical strategy.
But we ignored these signs in the Western Hemisphere. We thought that Latin America and the Caribbean would be safe from Uncle Sam's neocolonialism because they had overcome his political and military interventionism during the era of the military dictatorships of the last century. We believed in party-based democracies, which took the reins of left-wing and right-wing governments throughout the region. Under the illusion of these party-based systems, we were unable to see how networks of corruption were being woven between political parties, business groups, governments in power, increasingly sophisticated criminal organizations, and transnational corporations, forming the very fabric of the extractive society of which we are part as unrestrained consumers of superfluous goods, indifferent to "the political" as everyone's task.
Today it is necessary to recognize that we are also part of the problem of this neocolonial war with various fronts that has already reached our territories and entered our homes.
On social media, hateful phrases are increasingly circulating, used to criticize anyone who comments on the corruption occurring in Mexico under the Fourth Transformation, or in Venezuela denouncing Chavismo, or in the United States pointing out the ICE executions in Minneapolis and Chicago as a mercenary power serving the ideology of [the regime/the regime]. Make America Great Again (Maga). It seems that it's all the same to insult someone with a single phrase on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, and then justify a deranged mercenary shooting a woman point-blank in the head for driving a car that failed to stop despite police threats on a street in her neighborhood, which was being raided by immigration police. Even in our closest digital conversations, this practice of resolving differences with a single phrase and a click, blocking those who disagree with us as if it were a virtual gunshot, is growing.
Differences worth confronting in a face-to-face dialogue, which we avoid as much as possible because it makes us uncomfortable. Why does this proximity frighten us so much? It seems as if the world of war has been encapsulated within the screens of our cell phones, tablets, or computers, only to then spill out onto the streets with the same necrophilic clinical precision, using pepper spray or an AK-47 rifle. The time of war has already entered those "black mirrors" that devour us mercilessly, shifting from praise to insult with the same speed with which our thumb swipes wildly across the screen. scrolling or swiping on the cell phone screen.
Time of territorial and digital warfare.
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“Everything has its time,” says the book of Ecclesiastes. This beautiful biblical wisdom text is a contemplative meditation on war and peace, addressed to a people seeking their place in the Hellenistic world of their time. “A time to throw stones into the river, and a time to gather them up.” Thus the Qohelet, or Hebrew sage, expresses the inexorable law of life, lived in the ebb and flow of love and hate, a law celebrated by poets of so many cultures. “A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,” he continues, in a more personal tone, speaking of love and heartbreak. And to complete this realism, bordering on self-denial in the face of the inevitable, he concludes with a laconic ending: “A time for war and a time for peace.”.
Will we have to resign ourselves to the imperial military violence that stunned us a few days ago, and at the same time be trapped in the solitude of social media, which exalts and lynches with a click those who dare to dissent in a chat with friends, family, or a digital community? Times of war.
The realism of face-to-face confrontation is perhaps the opportunity to “stop the virtual and territorial war” by recovering the intimate space from the encounter of vulnerable body with vulnerable body, as masterfully presented Emmanuel Levinas. This vital opening immediately places us in a different perspective: the range of the voice with its intonations and accents, movements and pauses, emphasis and irony, glances and silences. It opens another door for us. Perhaps the refuge of peace lies precisely there. In that realm of pause, silence, shadow, the waiting period. A time of peace.
Could that be the narrow gate through which the messiah passes?
These past few weeks I've been discovering new facets of the urban indigenous culture of the Chiapas Highlands, very different from what I knew in past decades. I've had to learn to pause, for example, to interpret a look when a woman addresses me in Tsotsil, a Mayan language I don't understand, during a prayer and reconciliation meeting. But she and I managed to connect by looking into each other's eyes: hers bathed in tears that flowed accompanied by the whisper of her voice, imploring a heavenly blessing to ease her pain. Mine, responding to her gaze with tears that mirrored hers. Even though we don't "understand" each other in terms of phonemes and the signifiers of language, a communication of sense Through gestures and symbols, when we both bow our heads and my hands brush against her hair to communicate human and divine energy, and her hands embrace mine in gratitude and bless me. In that silence that gives way to the wordless embrace, a spark of eternity arises, enveloping us both.
Is that the peace he speaks of? Qohelet in the times of the dominant Hellenism of his era?
Times of peace in the face-to-face experience.
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The first week of the year leaves me with a very clear challenge: to learn to break free from the times of war in a world driven mad by threatening empires, as a gift of times of peace lived in face-to-face encounters. proximity, so dear to Jesus of Nazareth, recovered by Gustavo Gutiérrez e Ivan Illich in our time.
In this way we can move from resignation to the overwhelming military power of our times, reinforced by self-denial in the face of the digital lynchings we experience in a frenzied way, towards the peace of face-to-face encounters, in the discreet but real meeting with the face, body, and soul of the other, however different they may be, when we experience them as a gift.
There is always the possibility of a haven of peace that arises like a spark when we allow our vulnerable condition to touch and be touched by the other person, with their own ways of life.
And indeed, our violent world is in need of that peace more than ever.
Jobel, January 10, 2026
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