In Our Name

Before dawn on January 3rd, American aircraft crossed into Venezuelan airspace. By morning a man was in chains and a word was on every screen. Liberation. As if the word itself could make it so.

There is an ordinary way to tell this story. You count the aircraft. You name the ship. You quote the general and you quote the president and you note that no American died in the operation and you call it a success. This is how the story will be told for years if no one tells it differently. But there is another way. You can build a knowledge graph. You can encode what happened as structured data. You can ask the graph what kind of event this was, and the graph will answer in the only language it knows: pattern.

The Ontology

We built an OWL ontology to represent cases of leader removal. Classes for cases, actors, roles. Properties for the dimensions that matter: what the military did, what the insiders did, what happened to the leader, who took power after, whether intervention came from outside or within. Nine cases encoded as RDF triples. 256 statements of fact.

The graph encodes not just cases but actors and the roles they played. It encodes structural parallels between actors across cases. Cabello to Iliescu. Padrino to Stanculescu. The graph does not know these names mean anything. It only knows they occupy the same positions in the same kind of story.

What SPARQL Found

SPARQL is the query language for RDF. You ask questions of the graph and the graph returns what it knows. We asked four questions. The answers were not ambiguous.

Three names. Three men who stood beside their leaders and then stood in their place. The graph found them without knowing what betrayal means. It only knew they shared two roles that should not be shared.

What NetworkX Found

We converted the RDF graph to NetworkX and computed similarity edges between all cases. Then we asked the graph to find its own structure. Community detection. Clustering. The graph organized itself without being told what to look for.

The graph divided itself into two communities. Panama and Grenada in one. Chile and Romania and Guatemala and Venezuela in the other. The algorithm did not know that Panama is the story America tells itself about liberation. It only knew that Panama belongs to a different cluster.

The maximal clique is the tightest grouping the graph could find: three cases so similar they form a complete subgraph. Romania. Chile. Venezuela. The graph placed them together and did not explain why. It does not know why. It only knows the shape.

September 11th

There is a September 11th that Americans remember and a September 11th that Chileans remember and they are not the same day.

On that morning in 1973, jets appeared over Santiago. They had been sent by generals who had sworn oaths to a president named Allende. The palace burned. The president died inside it. By evening a man named Pinochet controlled the country and seventeen years of darkness began.

The Americans had not sent the jets. They had done something more elegant. They had made the coup possible and then watched it happen. Money to the plotters. Plans to the generals. An economy strangled until the middle class begged for order. And when order came with a gun in its hand, Washington recognized the new government before the fires were out.

In Panama the military fought. Young men on both sides died for the thing their governments had told them to die for. Noriega fled to holy ground and held out for ten days while American soldiers played music at the walls, and when it was over the man who had won the election before Noriega stole it became president of his country. That is one shape. Venezuela is not that shape.

The Uses of Liberation

Chile was not called a coup. It was called a restoration of order. Guatemala was not called a coup. It was called a defense against communism. The word changes. The shape remains.

There are things the Chile template predicts. That the new strong man will be a friend to Washington and a stranger to elections. That the opposition will be invited to ceremonies and excluded from power. That American companies will find the contracts they were looking for. That years from now, when the files are opened, we will read the cables and wonder how we did not see.

We do not claim certainty. The confidence intervals overlap. Chile and Romania and Guatemala cluster together at the top of the ranking and the distance between them is smaller than the uncertainty in the measurement. What we claim is narrower and harder to dismiss: that Panama does not fit. That the story we were told is not the story the structure tells. That somewhere between the word and the deed a gap opened and we were asked not to see it.

• • •

The next months will make their own record. Events will fall into place like stones into still water, and the pattern will become visible, or it will not. If Machado governs, if elections come, if the men who stood beside Maduro face the same justice he faces, then the template will have been wrong and we will say so.

But if the template holds. If it is Chile again. If it is Guatemala again. If it is the same story wearing new clothes and speaking new words and landing on new airstrips in the dark.

Then we will know what was done on January 3rd. Not what it was called. What it was. And we will know that it was done in our name, with our money, under our flag, by men who promised us liberation and delivered something older. Something we have delivered before. Something we will pretend, again, not to recognize.