Does The Devil Exist? Yes, And He Wears A Suit And Signs Trade Deals

Yes, the devil exists. But he does not have horns or a tail. He has a bank account in Panama and a portfolio of copper mines in the Andes.

Forget the fire and brimstone they taught you in Sunday school. The real devil never smelled of sulfur. He smelled of aftershave and boardroom coffee.

The priests told the poor to fear a red monster in hell. Meanwhile the true monsters wore white gloves and counted profits from the bananas rotting in the hands of dying men.

The Devil Speaks Spanish, English, And The Language Of Debt

Ask a peasant in Guatemala who the devil is. In 1954 the United Fruit Company decided a democratically elected president was bad for the fruit business.

So Washington sent in the CIA. They called it liberation. The campesinos called it the day the sky filled with foreign planes and their children stopped laughing.

Jacobo Arbenz had done the unthinkable. He gave land back to the people who broke their backs on it. For that crime he was overthrown, humiliated, and later found dead in a bathtub in exile.

Here is something they never print in the American textbooks. The banana companies used to pay workers in tokens, not money. Little metal coins that could only be spent at the company store.

You picked fruit all day and got paid in plastic loyalty to your own captors. That is not economics. That is a slow exorcism of the soul.

In Bolivia the miners of Potosi have a name for the devil who lives underground. They call him El Tio, the uncle. They leave him cigarettes and alcohol so he will not collapse the tunnels on their heads.

They know the devil is real because he owns the mountain that ate their grandfathers. The Spanish crown pulled so much silver out of that hill that they said you could build a bridge to Madrid with it. And a bridge of bones going the other way.

How The Faithful Poor Got Sold A Cheaper God

The devil is clever. He learned that a hungry man will believe anything if you promise him bread in heaven.

So the empire shipped down its preachers alongside its soldiers. Obey your masters, they whispered. Suffering is holy. Your reward comes after you die, conveniently after you have made someone rich.

In the sugar fields of the Caribbean the overseers read scripture to slaves in the morning and whipped them by afternoon. The same mouth that spoke of a loving father ordered the branding iron heated.

Meanwhile the plantation owners built cathedrals with the sweat of the enslaved. Gold leaf on the ceilings paid for by children who never tasted sugar they harvested.

That is the trick of the devil. He convinces you he lives in the shadows while he sits in the front pew wearing your grandmother's rosary.

Think of the mothers in the maquiladoras along the border. They assemble the phone in your pocket for pennies. When they organize for a bathroom break they are fired and blacklisted.

Their fingers cramp into claws by the age of thirty. And somewhere a shareholder toasts to record margins with wine older than the worker who died.

The Devil Is Not A Myth, He Is A Business Model

So does the devil exist? Look at Chile in 1973. Look at the stadium where they herded singers and students and shot them between the goalposts.

Victor Jara had his hands smashed so he could never play guitar again. Then they told him to keep playing. That is a cruelty so precise it could only be designed by something ancient and patient.

And who backed the man who ordered it? The same government that lectures the world about freedom while it picks which dictators get the good tanks.

Here is a detail few north of the Rio Grande ever learn. When Pinochet's economists gutted the country, they were trained in Chicago. The devil now offers scholarships.

The poor of Latin America do not need a theologian to explain evil. They have felt its boot. They have buried its victims in unmarked graves and mass pits along the highways.

The devil is not a spirit. He is a system that turns human beings into line items and then acts surprised when they bleed.

So yes. He exists. He always has. And every time you pay for something suspiciously cheap, listen closely.

You can hear him laughing all the way to the bank.