The 2016 presidential elections allowed U.S. Latinos to reach several important conclusions:

One, this community is orphaned of a political leadership of its own at the national level.

Two, neither of the 2 parties is seriously interested in cultivating this new and growing segment of voters and make it part of their ranks and hierarchy.

Three, it will take a serious organizing effort by Latinos themselves to bring out that vote and finally flex its political muscle to impact a nationwide election.

A paradox of the current electoral politics in the U.S., to say the least. 

16 years after the close call between Bush and Gore, the recent Hillary-Trump results also left a similar sense of a stalemate in a presidential race — so close in the final result that it leaves a sense of illegitimacy for the winner and a hard-to-concealed indignation for the loser.

Latinos were again a passive agent in this election, although they were implicitly at the center of it: 

Without the fantasy of a 2,000-mile wall on the border with Mexico, or the fiction created around “Millions  of undocumented immigrants” ravaging the country, the Trump phenomenon wouldn’t have been possible to construct in the popular imagination.

Thanks to Latinos, Donald Trump created the narrative that allowed him to build a coalition of mostly rural, conservative, resentful voters who bought his fiction of “making America great again” by deporting residents of the country in a multi-million scale, and building an impossible Wall he already was downgrading to “a fence” in his interview with “60 Minutes” on Sunday.

But the histrionic talents of Mr Trump, added to the incompetence of the Democratic Party campaign that was supposed to give us the first woman president, made this victory possible, even when the Republican party was completely fractured, but comfortably riding with the voice of a single man on the shoulders of a defenseless community.

The silence of the so called leaders of the Latino community is deafening at this hour after the election.

Former U.S. Senator Ken Salazar, appointed by Hillary Clinton to be the chair of her transition team, is yet to say a word about the devastating election result.

Maybe it is about time to break the silence, Ken.. After all, there is not much else to lose.