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Editor's Note:
Roberto Izurieta is Director of Latin American Projects at George Washington University.
He has worked in political campaigns in several Latin American countries and Spain, and was an advisor to Presidents Alejandro Toledo of Peru, Vicente Fox of Mexico, and Álvaro Colom of Guatemala.
Izurieta is also a contributor to CNN en Español.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author.
See more opinions at cnne.com/opinion
(CNN Spanish) -
There are many mistakes that are made in life.
Some are careless, some venial, others do not have major consequences, others are serious and others hurt us a lot and for a long time.
But of all the mistakes, the worst are the deadly ones.
And of the mortals, the worst are not those that cost us our own lives but those that cost the lives of others.
In politics, the most common mistakes are those of corruption and that is why we classify them as criminal acts.
They cost countries and their citizens a lot, and they even make us angry.
Many are always surprised when I say that there are errors even more serious than corruption in politics: yes, there are many management errors that can cost much more than acts of corruption.
The acts of corruption are left to the justice system (and I prefer to leave them only to them), the management errors ... those are the responsibility of all of us.
President Donald Trump has made serious mistakes.
As a Latino, it hurt me and it will be difficult for me to forgive how he referred to our Mexican brothers from the beginning of his electoral campaign: “When Mexico sends us people, it doesn't send us the best.
They send us people with a lot of problems, who bring us drugs, crime, rapists ... ».
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If I had said it once…;
Like many mistakes, they can be forgiven because it could have been a slip, a venial error, an apology is apologized and the page is turned.
But those phrases continued to be repeated in one form or another throughout his campaign and during his rule ... over and over again.
The absurd idea of building a wall from coast to coast along the entire border, and saying that Mexico would pay for it, was the icing on the cake of these systematic insults, because with that Donald Trump revealed himself to me as a classic political demagogue, of those we know very well in our countries.
Donald Trump used undocumented immigrants in a systematic way to create fear, because - unfortunately - fear is the strongest emotion that motivates the vote.
And not so that they vote for one, because of one's merits, but because of the fear of this supposed enemy - created or recreated - that could invade us.
The serious thing is that the only real invasion that occurred in the United States was that of covid-19.
Said by Donald Trump himself - and recorded with his authorization - he said that at the beginning of February he already knew that this was a serious threat, but days later he had the gall to tell the public otherwise.
The argument that many use to try to explain such a deception or crime (let the justice see it at the time), is that they did not want to lose re-election or that they did not want to affect the stock market, to which they pay more attention than to the numbers of people infected daily by the virus.
Those motivations, which I think may be real, I leave them for political analysis.
But I want to take just one that Trump himself describes in the same recordings with journalist Bob Woodward: "I didn't want to cause panic ... we couldn't seem weak."
We all agree on the need not to cause panic.
Trump himself compares his action with that of Winston Churchill.
Of course, Churchill never wanted to panic, but he never underestimated the real threat posed by Adolf Hitler.
Churchill summoned all the civilized forces of the world, unified them, motivated them to work together;
they prepared, they fought, our heroes were born and we won the Second World War.
On the contrary, Trump underestimated the threat of this pandemic and lied to American citizens, while saying that the virus was only in China or that it would pass with the summer.
That is the big difference;
difference that should have seen and that could have saved lives.
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Denying a threat does not eliminate it.
On the contrary, it makes us lose time and lives.
I have said it publicly countless times and have no problem putting it in writing: I will never blame Donald Trump for the virus (and neither will I blame any other nation or leader).
I hold Trump accountable for failing to act in time and the time to act decisively was, from what appears in this statement, the end of January.
I blame Trump for not having unified the country in this fight as Uruguay did, for example, which has proven to be one of the nations that has faced this threat most effectively.
Donald Trump says in that same interview that we could not project ourselves as weak.
Besides a vanity problem, Trump always likes to project himself as the strongest and most aggressive.
As his wife said at the time, "As you know ... when you attack him, he will return the attack 10 times stronger."
Donald Trump's answer that we couldn't seem weak now explains, and for me graphs, why he rejected the use of masks.
Donald Trump knows the basics of communication to recognize that when you say one thing and do another, the most important thing is what you do.
Trump did not wear the masks (except when he went to a hospital and an auto plant).
If we had worn masks since February, including March, if the United States had prepared for a massive test since January that would allow us to monitor the path and strength of the virus, if we had established a national preparation plan for public health supplies, if we had putting politics and campaigning aside ... we would have saved many lives, avoided a lot of pain and such a brutal economic crisis.
That responsibility I assign to Donald Trump: with my vote I will hold him accountable.