This is where Latino Facebook users come to vent about Donald Trump

There’s a thriving group on Facebook with 12,000 members who say Donald Trump is the son of the devil. Another group, with 5,500 followers, has a banner photo depicting a cartoon devil blowing fire at Trump’s head. Then there’s the group called “If Donald Trump wins he’s going to fuck you and if not, same.”

The pages are gaining more followers every day, thanks to memes posted by members that either compare Trump to the devil or depict him on the verge of some terrible death.

The images on these anti-Trump pages are consistently crude and violent—this is where Latino Facebook users come to vent. The pages are all in Spanish, and they began last year as a backlash to Trump’s insults against Mexicans and immigrants. Now they’re being used not only to let out a little aggression, but to turn that aggression into political power.

“I hope the information on the page compels the Latino community to vote against Trump,” said Victor Ibarra, who founded “Mexicans and Latinos against the son of the devil Donald Trump,” the group with 12,000 followers, in an interview with Fusion.

“I made this page to help and give information that will be important to you and your vote in 2016,” reads the description of another, “No a Trump” (“No to Trump”), one of the largest Latino anti-Trump groups on Facebook.

The so-called “Trump effect,” in which anti-Trump sentiment pushes Latinos to get out and vote, has already been documented in the primaries. But Facebook groups like these offer Latinos—including those who aren’t eligible to vote—a platform to share unedited opinions.

One cartoon of a frantic Trump being held at gunpoint by the Mexican drug kingpin known as El Chapo was shared 462 times on Ibarra’s “son of the devil” group. Another shows Trump hanging off the side of a skyscraper with the caption, “Be honest, what would you do?” Others compare him to grotesque creatures or horror movie villains.

Ibarra, who was born in Mexico and currently resides in Houston, decided he was going to launch an anti-Trump page last summer after the candidate referred to Mexican immigrants as rapist and drug dealers.

“The people who support Trump are people that have never suffered, people who have never lived the life that undocumented people live,” said Ibarra. “Immigrants suffer when they know they can’t get their documents, when young undocumented people have to pay more to go to college, and when children don’t have a parent at home because of immigration or financial reasons,”  Ibarra said.

“Voting is powerful, but we have to mobilize people to get them to vote,” said Ibarra, who founded an immigrant rights group in Houston.

Notably, the most popular post on the page Ibarra started is a picture of a woman holding a sign challenging the use of the word “alien.”

“We call them ‘aliens’ [but] they are people,” reads the sign in the image posted by a member whose profile states he lives in Alaska. The image was shared 9,288 times.


For the most part, the rage on these anti-Trump pages is focused solely on Trump. But sometimes, Latino supporters of Trump have been openly shamed. A member of one anti-Trump group with 5,000 followers posted a picture of two Latinos at a Trump rally with a caption that said the only people Mexicans should fear more than Trump are Mexican Trump supporters.

In October, when a Colombian woman took the stage at a Trump rally to say “we love you all the way to the White House,” that same group responded with a meme that reads “don’t let drugs destroy your future,” questioning the woman’s sanity by triggering stereotypes of the South American country.

Ibarra said he chose “son of the devil” as the group’s name because he knew to get people’s attention he would have to do something out of the ordinary. He said the group name is “direct and real.” He said he’s only heard a few complaints about the group name, from religious leaders who told him he should forgive Trump and refrain from saying he is the son of Lucifer.

“But Donald Trump is no God’s angel. He’s an antichrist,” Ibarra told Fusion.

He has a lot of hope for his Facebook page.

“This page is going to lift people and raise voices to vote against Trump,” he said.

 
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