By Dr. Juan Barreto
It is not about surrender or tutelage. What happens when a species changes so it does not disappear? It evolves and may even hybridize, like mules, which are neither horses nor donkeys. Macaws do the same. A new variety—or even a new breed—may emerge.
Species commonly interbreed across genera; ask any idle biologist on the nearest street corner. When one species remains isolated within a territory, and another, more dominant species enters its ecological niche, the two eventually interbreed, and the newcomer genetically colonizes the local species. When climate or ecological conditions shift, native species become more vulnerable to hybridization. The same happens when a species grows beyond what its own ecosystem can sustain. It weakens and becomes exposed to that process. That is how Darwinian evolution works. It is not capitulation; it is adaptation through successive mutations.
Now let us see how that unfolded. They seized the symbols, history, and concepts. They emptied them of meaning and reshaped them into a narrative that now lies in ruins, leaving the entire country without a story—or an identity—from which to build a shared political will. They dismantled the collective identity into fragments while turning the country into private patrimony. They confiscated and centralized the institutions, dismantled or subordinated civil society, political parties, and labor unions, silenced society, outlawed independent thought, and planted collective suspicion.
Once popular sovereignty disappears, national sovereignty loses its foundation as well, much like a banknote that loses its value when one side becomes damaged. The ruling elite becomes nothing more than an armed group that controls a population and a territory through force.
They weakened the collective imagination and blurred the contours of national identity. Then, like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, they gradually opened Pandora’s Box and unleashed forces they can no longer control. They created both the material and subjective conditions for intervention to occur without resistance. A general crisis of the State caused by the loss of hegemony explains part of what happened, although other factors also played a role. Perhaps no one planned that outcome, but usurpation and the denial of legitimacy at the origin of power ultimately produced it.
Today, people retreat into the bubble of personal comfort and individual survival. Private life becomes the only meaningful alternative, and everything else fades into background noise. Collective purpose has turned into an empty, demagogic slogan, while indifference has become the public’s political response.
The dominant forces in the confrontation both suffered defeat. They wore each other down until neither prevailed. As in Darwin’s theory, they now compete for the survival of the fittest. The strongest, the most capable, and the most integrated prevail through natural selection and competition. Such are the rules of the wild. It is The Selfish Gene making its way.
Today, those same actors compete for the occupier’s recognition in the hope of becoming the force that legitimizes the intervention and serves it. This is pure biology. It does not confuse pragmatism with servility. It is “renaturalization.” It is “real subsumption.” It is a process of dissolution and integration into the other’s substance, not the mere addition of separate parts. It is not alienation; it is integration. Natural history offers countless examples.
This is not surrender without resistance. It is not cowardice or resignation. It is not an ethical dilemma or a debate over right and wrong. It is simply what occurs.
Understanding belongs to a framework that is less dialectical and more Spinozian. It belongs to the realm of conatus: “the thing that affirms itself in the other to continue existing.” It is not Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It is The Thing, by Carpentier.
This is not a parasitic relationship among opportunists. It is hybridization, mixture, and mestizaje. In that sense, it opens a new register for the production of meaning. It is not adaptation; it is entanglement and superposition, because when the nature of a thing changes, its meaning changes as well.
“It is not the same thing to have a linen rod as to wear a frock coat,” Marx would say. It is another plane, another level, another register—another layer. It is use value transcending itself into exchange value.
The qualitative dimension no longer belongs to the realm of numbers but to that of magnitudes; it belongs to the realm of representation. Opacity is a zone beyond representation—not a limbo, but another state of occurrence in which the object refuses both a name and a place within language.
The unfolding of occurrence follows the path of “negation, preservation, and transcendence, without synthesis—or, at most, synthesis within the corporeality of the other.” It is more Lacanian than Shakespearean. There is no Hamlet. There is Sisyphus.
The task is not to oppose before anything else. The first task is to understand. As In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities makes clear, Baudrillard had already said it.
