The US’ attack on Venezuela came weeks after Donald Trump accepted the newly and ludicrously instituted FIFA Peace Prize – and months before the football World Cup kicks off in the US. In advance of the last World Cup, in 2022, FIFA suspended Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. But Sean Jacobs, a professor of international affairs at The New School, the founder of Africa is a Country, and editor of the Substack called Eleven Named People, anticipates no similar suspension of the US this year.

Sean Jacobs

Every time the US flouts international law, an impassioned soul on X or Facebook calls for the country to be stripped of hosting the 2026 World Cup. The assumption behind this plea is twofold: first, that FIFA, the body that controls world football and organises the World Cup, has a conscience; and second, that Donald Trump is some kind of exception.

Neither is true.

The World Cup’s relationship to international law and human rights has always been, at best, dubious. The first edition was played in 1930, and four years later, scandal erupted when Benito Mussolini used the World Cup in Italy as a propaganda vehicle for Fascism, interfering in game scheduling and selecting referees for Italy’s games to deliver a home victory.

Because the competition was essentially a European and South American affair, African nations boycotted the 1966 World Cup to press for direct qualification. As a result, Morocco became the first African team to qualify in 1970. At the time, the FIFA President was the right-wing Englishman Stanley Rous. Earlier, in 1938, Rous, then the English FA secretary, had facilitated the English team’s Nazi salute at the World Cup in Germany, in front of high-ranking Nazi officials. Once he became FIFA President in 1961, Rous spent much of his tenure preventing apartheid South Africa’s expulsion from international football. It was only when South American and Asian member countries coordinated the campaign to vote out Rous that South Africa was expelled.

Probably the lowest point for FIFA and the World Cup came in 1978, when Argentina’s military junta used the tournament to project an image of normalcy while it disappeared, tortured, and murdered dissidents. Survivors from internment centres mere blocks away from the main stadium later recalled hearing the roar of the crowd while they were being tortured.

The current incumbent, Gianni Infantino, became FIFA President in 2018, and he presided over Russia’s hosting the World Cup later that year, amid widespread criticism over domestic repression of political opponents and gay people, and foreign aggression, including invading and occupying their neighbours’ territories. FIFA eventually suspended Russia over the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, excluding them from the 2022 World Cup, but it would later balk at using the same logic when member states pressed for Israel’s expulsion over Gaza and the occupation.

In most of these cases, FIFA shrugged, issued platitudes, and carried on. So when Americans were shocked to see Infantino cozy up to Trump and award him a “peace prize,” much of the football world was not surprised. This is how FIFA has always operated. The World Cup has never been a moral institution. It has always been willing to launder the reputations and agendas of the powerful and make sure they all get very rich in the process.

There is an argument that the World Cup does not really belong to FIFA, or to presidents and dictators. While FIFA has given regimes bragging rights, it has always maintained a fine balance between that and how fans value the ritual and the communal spectacle. In 2018, even Putin couldn’t stop Pussy Riot from disrupting the final in Moscow by running onto the field in police uniforms, leading to a pause in the match to demand an end to political repression, illegal arrests, and political diversity.

But this time, it feels more like Italy 1934 and Argentina 1978. The host is doing too much to unsettle the balance. The next World Cup represents an unprecedented low point because of the direct risk posed by the host to many participating countries and their teams and fans, who face being barred or arrested; because of Trump’s threats to move games from cities governed by the Democratic Party; and because of Infantino’s sucking up to him. FIFA will hope the kick-off changes everything, but this is the US under Trump, where everything from travel bans and ICE arrests to the thunder and lightning of a climate-crisis escalation of deadly storms and unbearable heat disrupting games presents a whole new world.

Jonathan Shainin revisits an underground film with an alternative explanation for the US’ history of interference in Latin America.

Jonathan Shainin

Many words have been wasted this week debating whether Donald Trump’s carefree Caracas kidnap represents a final break with America’s long and responsible stewardship of the global liberal order – or whether it signals a return to America’s long record of responsibility for coups, assassinations, and death squads in what the Donroe Doctrine officially calls “OUR Hemisphere”.

What was unquestionably novel, however, was Trump’s forthright insistence on his low motives for military intervention – a refreshing alternative to the elaborate and preposterous case for war crimes traditionally served to the American public. (As one novelist quipped: “We used to manufacture consent in this country.”) But what The Economist is now calling Trump’s “radical honesty” doesn’t make his explanations less convoluted. Like Freud’s guilt-stricken kettle borrower, he keeps giving too many reasons: all that oil, of course, but also drugs, terrorism, Tren de Aragua, migrants, and what the New York Times described as “Maduro’s regular public dancing and other displays of nonchalance.”

This pileup of cackhanded explanations for America’s hemispheric hijinks put me in mind of one of the great American underground films, Craig Baldwin’s 1992 “pseudo-pseudo documentary” Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America. In 99 numbered chapters unfolding over 45 minutes, Baldwin uses an astonishing library of found footage to reveal “the shocking truth” about the Cold War in Latin America.

In Baldwin’s diabolically serious narration, decades of bloody American military interventions are explained by the secret presence of sinister space aliens who took refuge in a system of caves under the South Pole after the destruction of their planet, Quetzalcoatl, 1000 years ago. Using a lurid collage of thousands of clips repurposed from educational films, newsreels, science fiction and monster movies, Tribulation 99 reconstructs every major episode in America’s losing battle against the space invaders.

For centuries, the aliens have been “worming northwards towards the United States’s soft underbelly” in their underground caverns – but when “the Qs” begin to insinuate themselves into the leadership of strategically important Latin American countries, President Harry Truman sets up the CIA “as a self-defence measure.”

In Tribulation 99, Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala, is revealed to be a “well-placed humanoid double” who attempted to seize the landholdings of the United Fruit Company – forcing the CIA to overthrow him in 1954. (Sadly, even after Arbenz is vanquished back to his subterranean lair, replaced by “a decades-long succession of strong, defence-conscious military rulers, over 100,000 Guatemalan lives are lost” to alien abductions, “mysteriously disappeared” into thin air.)

We learn that “the absolutely uncanny immortality of Fidel Castro”, explaining his ability to survive dozens of absurd CIA assassination attempts, is because the Cuban leader is another “alien automaton”, who foils the Bay of Pigs attack and then sends the android Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate John F Kennedy. When the Quetzalcoatl leader Salvador Allende begins plotting to “alter the earth’s polar axis”, to turn the western hemisphere upside down, “Chilean naval officers rise in righteous rebellion against the plan to stand America on its head” with the help of the CIA and the billionaire Howard Hughes.

But the alien menace continues to spread, and Baldwin deliriously reinvents every skirmish – Grenada, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama. Tribulation 99 is somehow simultaneously a satire of American interventionist propaganda, a remedial radical history of covert anti-Communist operations, and a sincere tribute to an authentically American genre, the apocalyptic paranoid conspiracy theory. Until your local cinema screens the 16mm original, you can watch it here.