In 1950, Martinican author Aimé Césaire used the term “imperial boomerang” to describe a historical circuit in which the tactics of imperial domination tested abroad return home, reshaping the very societies that invented them. Guest edited by Romina Green Rioja and Sergio Beltrán-García, our winter issue takes Césaire’s insight not as metaphor but as method, tracing how this returning and disseminating violence is shaping the Americas today. Our concern is not simply that U.S. policies echo past empires, but that repression itself has become a transferable technology: an experiment refined in the colonial laboratories of the Americas and now redeployed within the borders of the United States.
The essays that follow trace this machinery across borders and centuries, from border militarization and migrant criminalization to algorithmic surveillance and ecological extraction. In keeping with NACLA’s tradition, this issue aims to expose the architectures of technofascism and to foreground the counter‑methods that boomerang back as resistance.
Read the full editors’ introduction and explore more from the issue. This entire issue is available open access in full for a limited time. If you prefer print, order an individual copy here.
Contents
Winter 2025 VOL. 57, NO. 4
Editors’ Note
Romina Green Rioja and Sergio Beltrán-García
379 Boomerangs of Empire: Latin America as Colonial Laboratory
Around the Region
Daniel Alvarenga
384 The Case of Kilmar Abrego García
Madeleine Penman
389 The Relentless March of Authoritarianism in Peru
Report
Sam Markwell
396 Submerged Pluralist Possibilities in the Pueblo Indian Homelands
Simón Rodríguez
405 The Dominican Regime: From Regional Pariah to Vanguard of the Reactionary Wave
Cristina Awadalla
413 Authoritarian Aesthetics: Ortega, Bukele, and the Bodies that Sustain Power
Jerónimo Reyes-Retana
421 For Coexistence in Resonance: In-between the Playa Bagdad/SpaceX Conundrum
Federico Pérez Villoro
428 Tactical Waters and Unnatural Disasters: The Engineering of Risk along the Rio Grande
Daniel P. Gámez
435 The Urban Imperial Boomerang in Anáhuac and Tovaangar
Jennifer Martinez-Medina
441 The Hidden Agrarian Transformation Behind Mass Deportation
Omawu Diane Enobabor and Karina Quintanilha
449 Contesting Border Violence from São Paulo to New York
Marycarmen Lara-Villanueva
458 Anti-Racism as Spectacle: Visuality, Social Media, and the Afterlives of Mestizaje
Christian Durán
465 Imprisoning Nations: Incarceration and Imperialism in Chile and the United States
Arts & Reviews
césar montero
475 Amanecer
Alan McPherson
476 Review of Greg Grandin’s, America, América: A New History of the New World
Sara Kozameh
478 Review of The Eternaut, A Netflix Series
