With Donald Trump’s inauguration as the next US president ushering in a new phase in corporate control of the economic and political system in the heart of the empire, it’s more important than ever to understand what’s going on, and how to fight back. Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy is an essential eye-opening book that can help us.
Silent Coup details the corporate takeover of the world, and how media bias means we rarely hear about either the architects of the current system or the people around the world who are resisting its destructive agenda. As co-author Matt Kennard previously told the Canary:
This system gets away with all the exploitation and rapacity because it operates in the shadows. We need people to understand the intricacies of the corporate system because when they do they understand that it is about stealing resources and ransacking the poor
In this article, we look at one particular example the book’s introduction gives as a case study of corporate power and popular resistance.
Corporate giant with Trump links sues country for $3 billion for giving land back to peasants
In their book, Kennard and co-author Claire Provost said the Zapatista movement that has been building popular power since the early 1990s proved the global elite’s power grab was not inevitable. In more recent years, meanwhile, the centre-left MORENA party has managed to overturn many decades of right-wing rule under Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). With modest reforms aiming not to unsettle the corporate world too much, his government managed to increase the minimum wage, push through labour reforms, and boost welfare payments. This resulted in a significant reduction of poverty, and ensured popularity levels that helped his successor Claudia Sheinbaum to win a landslide in 2024. She in turn has set out to continue with progressive reforms aiming to empower the poor majority of the country.
One risk as Trump takes power is that Mexico’s left-leaning government will become more and more of a target for corporate elites. Because in 2023, Kennard and Provost explained, elite backers of Trump set out to “sue Mexico for $3 billion in [a] land dispute with peasants”. The Mexican government had finally ordered corporate giant Amway (Access Business Group) to return land they had reportedly purchased illegally many years before, and elites weren’t happy about it. Provost and Kennard described Amway as “the world’s largest direct-selling company”, which “sells various health, beauty and home care products and had $8.9 billion in revenues in 2021”.
Trump has previously sought to demonise people migrating from Mexico to the US. And he provoked a backlash in Mexico recently by saying he’d seek to change “the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America”. As Al Jazeera’s Belén Fernández wrote, “unilateral cartographic adjustments have always been part and parcel of imperialism”. But Trump’s antagonism of Mexico could also be a sign that he’s paving the way for an increase in hostility towards the country as its people become more and more empowered.
US corporate-political elites trying to put Mexico in its place
Speaking about Amway, Kennard and Provost explained that:
At the top of that company are the uber-rich DeVos and Van Andel dynasties, which have been described by CBS News as ‘longtime financial stewards of the Republican National Committee’. The DeVoses became better known under the Trump administration because of their donations to his campaign and as Betsy DeVos, daughter-in-law of Amway co-founder Richard DeVos, was Trump’s education secretary (she is also the sister of Erik Prince, founder of the notorious private military contractor Blackwater). You can’t really get closer to the heart of American corporate and political conservative power, a position these people worked for decades to reach. Even compared to “other far-right mega-donors,” a 2018 Vanity Fair investigation said the DeVos “dynasty stands apart – for the duration, range and depth of its influence.”
They also clarified that:
The case Access Business Group LLC v United Mexican States was filed on 15 May 2023 at a branch of the World Bank that this book dives deep into. … Yet, this case was not covered by any major English-language media outlet in 2023. In Mexico too, coverage was very limited. It is thus a prime example of how the stories we tell in Silent Coup are still unfinished, and how they are too often unfolding above our heads and in the shadows.
Background of corporate capture in Mexico
NAFTA was an awful free-trade deal between the US, Canada and Mexico that “devastated Mexico’s rural sector and increased poverty”. And Mexico’s corporatist government at the time pushed it through by changing the country’s constitution “to enable members of ejidos – Mexican farms or ranches under the collective control of those who work them – to rent, mortgage or sell individual plots”. As Silent Coup highlighted:
The constitutional changes effectively ended decades of land redistribution, wrote James J. Kelly in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review in 1994, and ‘paved the way for mass transfer’ of land to multinational corporations.
It continued with the example in question, regarding Amway:
The San Isidro ejido community in Jalisco, in western Mexico, was one of the many affected by these changes – as well as incomplete land distribution that preceded them. In 1939, the community had been granted 536 hectares by the government but had never been able to access all of it. Then, about half of this territory came under the control of Amway, which the community said had ‘illegally’ purchased it. They’d formally denounced the company, including at the United Nations, for violating their rights to use the land to grow food but also to access water and move across the area. Finally, in 2022, the federal government intervened and said that Amway should return the ejido land it was using. A deadline was given for the handover but, when it came, only some of the land was actually returned. Company’s security guards were still harassing community members trying to grow food or walk through the area. Then, the company’s parent corporation, Access Business Group, threatened and then filed their suit at the World Bank.
And in the absence of media coverage of this highly controversial case, it was activists that did “the hard work to document what’s at stake”:
In 2023, a delegation from the small international non-profit GRAIN visited the San Isidro ejido community at the centre of the dispute.
GRAIN met with Raúl De la Cruz Reyes, the chair of San Isidro’s Ejidal Commissariat. And he told them:
This land has been stolen, first by the landlords of the hacienda, and then came the worst, when the government handed over the land to a transnational company instead of us peasants, and this company destroyed everything, the fauna, everything. We see that they take the product but the people remain poor because the wealth is taken abroad. What is left here are people who are worn out from work and a few elites who are filling their pockets with money.
Many other examples of the struggle to defeat “entrenched global corporate power”
Mexico’s case is far from the only one. Another similar dispute saw a company file a case against Honduras, which has much less money and power than Mexico. The Central American country, Provost and Kennard explained:
is facing an even bigger $6 billion claim from a US company that builds dystopian special economic zones and ‘private cities’. Its controversial project on the island of Roatán was blocked by the government amidst growing popular opposition that corporate carve-outs were not the right direction for the country.
In Ecuador, meanwhile, former president Rafael Correa oversaw an analysis of “treaties and the supranational corporate justice system they enshrine”, concluding they were “deadly for democracy”. He consequently “ordered the termination of these deals”. But when power changed hands, the new government “reversed this position and signed new international investment treaties to replace those cancelled”. The Silent Coup authors insisted that:
Such examples show how entrenched global corporate power now is, and how hard it can be to secure changes that are long-lasting, even when a popular government comes to power and really tries to grab back control from corporations.
Back in Mexico, meanwhile, the authors said:
NAFTA no longer exists, but the world it helped to remake in favour of transnational corporate power is still with us. That landmark treaty was officially terminated in 2020 and replaced with a new deal (called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA) which does not give foreign investors the same access to international tribunals. But NAFTA’s provisions remained in force for three years under a ‘sunset period’ during which numerous investors – including Amway – filed challenges. Mexico is still vulnerable to investor suits in some cases under the new deal, as well as under others such as the mega Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) between 11 countries including Canada.
People can fight back against Trump and his oligarchy
Hopefully, Kennard and Provost stressed that:
NAFTA was terminated off the back of increasingly popular opposition to such deals that also led to the demise of the proposed Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) mega-deal, between the US and Europe, which would have further enshrined the supranational corporate justice system we investigate in this book. In 2024, other cracks in this system widened as the UK confirmed it was joining a growing number of countries in officially withdrawing from the Energy Charter Treaty which enables cases through this system on behalf of multinational energy investors including fossil fuels giants that object to environmental and climate action.
They added that:
Around the world, there are local initiatives focused on concretely ensuring peoples’ access to water, energy, housing and food, and that these are not captured by corporations – including by reversing the privatisation of basic services. At the international level there have also been major moves to challenge and end corporate impunity. In 2018, the first full draft of a new binding international treaty to regulate the activities of transnational corporations was released by a UN working group, off the back of a long process led by Ecuador and South Africa, supported by human rights and social justice activists and opposed by corporate lobby groups.
Regarding climate change, there’s “a ticking clock”. Many activists rightly understand that continuing corporate control of the world would doom the planet to experiencing the most severe consequences of global warming. That’s why there are “initiatives around the world to declare ‘Fossil free zones’ where no fossil fuels are produced or consumed, and to push local representatives to support a global fossil fuels non-proliferation treaty”. These efforts simultaneously seek to “block or dismantle structures benefiting corporations at the expense of people and the environment, while also building new structures and rewriting the rules for a better future”.
It’s a massive uphill battle, but Provost and Kennard quote the Zapatistas in pointing out the “very long history of peoples’ struggles against oppression” that we can build on. Indeed:
There are examples around the world of local communities winning, against the odds, battles against transnational corporate power. Things would have been much worse without their resistance
If we keep fighting, we can win. And for the sake of humanity, we must.
Kennard previously told the Canary that:
All the revelations and analysis in the book is impossible to get into the mass media because it is largely owned by the forces we are exposing. We need to build a new media independent of corporate and state control that provides a truthful account of who and what runs our society untainted by the powerful forces which do not want the truth to come out.
I am hopeful that we are making advances in this regard with outlets like the Canary, Declassified UK and many others. It’s a long-term project but is the most important part of any move towards to creating a world and global economy that is run in the interests of people not concentrated wealth and power.
Silent Coup asks us to inform ourselves about what’s going on as the first step to fighting back. It gives us hope that, if we spread the word and fight back, we can win. And if we want humanity to stand a chance of survival – for the sake of our children, grandchildren, and beyond – we absolutely must do that.
For more, we highly recommend getting hold of the book here.
Featured image via the Canary
