As Cicero wrote in The Tusculan Disputations (three centuries before Julius Caesar, the dictator who ruled Rome), the tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius, tired of the flattery and envy of his courtier Damocles, invited him to sit on his throne. Damocles enjoyed the banquet for no more than a few minutes. When he looked up, he saw a sword hanging above his head, suspended by a horsehair. It was a warning: Those in power live under a constant threat. If they are aware of it, they will be alert to the consequences of their decisions.

At that time, the common people were more feared than the city’s wealthy. At that time, it was the wealthiest who had to foot the bill for most of the wars they dared to wage. But Julius Caesar was assassinated a year later, not by his own people, but by a group of senators representing the Roman oligarchy. It was an act of mutual betrayal, since these senators had been his main allies in government. Exactly 30 years later, Plutarch reported on the assassination of Quintus Sertorius in Hispania at the hands of mercenary officers, who did not receive the expected compensation—a classic reminder that “Rome does not pay traitors.”

Two thousand years later, we have achieved the opposite marvel: It is not the rich who pay for the wars they invent, but they are who profits from them. It is the people who provide all the money and all the blood that fuel a system administered by the sect of neo-feudal lords—a system infinitely more corrupt, more degenerate, and more brutal than the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire combined.

A business owner’s “sacred right” to fire someone who, in his judgment, is not meeting expectations does not apply to those at the top.

Systematically, and especially in so-called liberal democracies, the traitors are the Julius Caesars and their oligarchs; they are the Quintus Sertoriuses and his officers. They are the puppets that the puppeteer will make kill one another, to the people’s amusement. They are the Yamandú Orsis and the Delsy Rodríguezes on the left. They are the Javier Mileis, the José Antonio Kasts, the Alberto Fujimoris, the Jair Bolsonaros, and the Abelardo de la Espriellas on the right.

We have built republics where the sword of Damocles hangs over the citizen’s head—not over that of the ruler. Puppet presidents, after having betrayed their people and themselves, sleep soundly. They know—or believe—that for four or eight years, no matter what happens, no one can touch them. As history shows, this is an illusion; but history also shows that justice delayed is justice denied, because we humans cannot wait 100 years. We don’t even have a reserve supply of young people to make up for lost time.

Every four or five years, citizens of countries that perceive themselves as full-fledged democracies—such as Uruguay—sign a blank contract. They elect a president, and if they later discover that the promises were mere window dressing, all that remains for them is therapy, resignation, and republican patience until the circus returns to town.

Uruguay takes pride—with some justification—in its civic tradition, which includes plebiscites and referendums, such as the one in 1989 that confirmed impunity for human rights violators and, in the 1990s, halted privatizations despite the almost unanimous support of politicians in favor of the Washington Consensus. But neither Uruguay, nor Argentina, nor Brazil, nor Chile, nor Paraguay, nor Peru has a mechanism for citizens to recall their presidents. Impeachment proceedings are unreliable, because they are mediated by a representative body invented to ensure “responsible stability” for the major shareholders in each country.

In........

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