A
visual juxtaposition of Cold War military dictatorships and
contemporary right-wing governance in Latin America, inviting reflection
on how the aesthetics, institutions, and narratives of state power
evolve across generations, inspired by the visual language of the movie Rojo Amanecer. Note to Readers: Two shorter versions of this argument appeared previously as Substack Notes (here and here).
I have since developed them into this longer, more coherent text. It
does not attempt the kind of full conceptual or theoretical framework I
usually build, but it does expand substantially on every point the
original Notes raised. The patterns described here are not confined to
Latin America (even though there are certainly regionally specific
features present). They belong to a wider strategic logic, and I have
tried to make that logic visible.
I’ve been watching two extraordinary analyses from Mexican historians and Latin American specialists—Christian Nader on Retrovisor and the panel on Contralínea’s América Insumisa—and
I wanted to share some reflections on what they reveal about the
evolving nature of right-wing politics in the region, and how it
connects to the broader strategic logic of the US-led empire that I have
been mapping under the concept of the Bunker State, the Fragmentationist Grand Strategy and the Multi-Layered Cage.
The
recent electoral shifts in South America—the razor-thin victories of
the right in Peru, the rise of figures like Javier Milei in Argentina,
the persistent strength of Bolsonarismo in Brazil—are often read as
national phenomena. But we should understand these developments as a
mutation in the very form of fascism, shaped by the changing strategic
needs of the empire and the new terrain of cognitive warfare. (Not to say, there was no cognitive warfare before but nowadays, new technologies have given it a sharper edge.)
What I want to do here is connect three things: The electoral pattern and dynamics around the urban right, the rural left and razor-thin margins, the mutation of Latin American fascism from austere generals to histrionic populists, and the imperial strategy behind it, from coups to deaths squads to cognitive warfare and managed chaos.
First
of all, drawing on the framework of historian Christian Nader, we must
understand that historical Latin American fascism was a pact between
three specific sectors. This alliance was explicitly designed to crush
popular movements and preserve elite dominance—a dynamic that, to
varying degrees, still holds true today.
The first pillar was capital.
This encompassed the industrial bourgeoisie, big employers, and
business owners. Later, it expanded to include narco-traffickers—a
faction publicly demonized, yet structurally highly useful. Indeed,
narco-traffickers remain a crucial faction of capital in the context of
modern imperial hybrid warfare.
The second pillar was the clergy.
This primarily included the Catholic institution—a direct descendant of
colonial viceroyalties—which functioned as the oldest piece of the
machinery, selling salvation and naturalizing inequality. However, this
dynamic shifted drastically in the 1970s and 1980s with the rise of
Liberation Theology. This movement fused Catholic doctrine with Marxist
analysis and anti-imperialist goals. Taking Jesus’ famous declaration
that “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”
as a literal mandate, Liberation Theology served as an absolute
condemnation of exploitative economic systems, firmly rejecting the idea
that wealth is a sign of divine blessing. Because this posed a severe
threat to the ruling class, the US-led empire responded aggressively.
They strengthened ultra-conservative factions of the Catholic clergy
and, to an even more dramatic extent, fueled the expansion of (Zionist)
evangelical churches across the region.
The third pillar was the military.
Its internal structure reflected a stark class and racial divide: the
upper echelons—the generals and top brass—were largely inherited
positions, drawn directly from the criollo elites and ruling strata. In stark contrast, its foot soldiers were drawn largely from the poor and the lumpenproletariat—the
marginalized, disenfranchised underclass. For these lower ranks, the
system often offered a brutal choice: join the army or fall into
organized crime. Once inside, they were heavily indoctrinated to obey
the chain of command and defend the elite “order” of their commanders
above all else. Today, however, this dynamic has shifted, albeit
unevenly. In several countries, when progressive or leftist politicians
took office, they implemented policies to democratize the armed forces.
These reforms aimed to create a more humanist institution that genuinely
reflects the population, though the success of these efforts varies
wildly across the region.
This triad explains why the Cold War fascist aesthetic which we will now describe was so austere in Latin America.
The dictators of the Cold War era—Pinochet, Videla, Stroessner, Somoza,..etc.—were defined by what Nader calls “Spartan sobriety.”
They wore crisp military uniforms and dark glasses. They presented
themselves as stoic, disciplined, and severe. Their coups were announced
in formal, static environments, backed by the institutional weight of
the military as well as capital and the clergy.
This
overt military violence and aesthetic was also inextricably linked to
the context of the Cold War. During this era, the US-led empire faced an
existential threat: an organized, armed,
and ideologically coherent revolutionary left, backed by a rival
superpower. As we know, socialist movements of that time supported one
another ideologically, materially, and even militarily—both across Latin
America and transcontinentally. Therefore, the imperial response
“needed” to be kinetic: coups, death squads, forced disappearances, and Operation Condor.
The goal was to crush and destroy the left entirely (from peaceful
students to armed guerrillas) through the full force of state terror.
For historical context: Operation Condor was
a United States-backed campaign of political repression and state
terror implemented by South American military dictatorships during the
Cold War. Established in November 1975 formally initiated by Chilean
dictator Augusto Pinochet, the network formally united the intelligence
and military forces of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and
Brazil. Its singular objective was the eradication of socialist and
communist opposition. To achieve this, member nations created a
centralized intelligence database in Asunción and allowed agents to
operate freely across each other’s borders to kidnap, torture, and
execute political exiles. This campaign of terror was not confined to
the continent; high-profile assassinations were carried out as far away
as Washington, D.C., Rome, and Madrid.
The
human cost of this transnational extermination program was staggering.
Victims were held in secret detention centers and routinely subjected to
horrific abuses, with thousands permanently “disappeared” via methods
like “death flights.” Human rights organizations estimate the toll at
over 50,000 deaths, 30,000 forced disappearances, and 400,000 political
imprisonments. This machinery of death operated with the explicit
knowledge and critical support of the United States government. Under
the diplomatic oversight of figures like Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger, the US provided communications infrastructure, financial
backing, and intelligence support. The sheer scale of the conspiracy
remained veiled until 1992.
Economically, this bloc implemented neoliberalism under dictatorial protection. We cannot overstate the significance of the Chicago School of economics, led by Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger, in this endeavor. Through the U.S. State Department-funded “Chile Project” (1950s–1960s), Chilean economics students were brought
to the University of Chicago. These Latin American students—later
dubbed the “Chicago Boys”—returned home deeply indoctrinated in radical
free-market theories, waiting for an opportunity to implement them.
While mainstream South American politics at the time favored state-led
development through structuralism and dependency theory, the Chicago
Boys drafted El Ladrillo (”The Brick”), a 500-page economic manifesto advocating
for total privatization. Once in power, this neoliberal imposition
included mass privatization, severe wage repression, and aggressive
foreign‑capital integration.
To enforce and justify this economic model, the bloc rested on a rigid ideological foundation.
This included elitism and aporophobia—a deep contempt for the poor,
combined with the infantilization of the masses as “idiots” or
“children” who needed to be ruled. It was also driven by systemic
racism, where the white/criollo military brass viewed indigenous,
mestizo, and Black populations as “harmful elements” to be managed or
eliminated. Finally, until the mid‑1950s, this worldview included a deep
Judeophobia inherited from European fascism.
The
theater was minimal because the violence was maximal. The performance
was the violent repression itself. The austere, military aesthetic
communicated that the “chaos” of socialism is over. “Order” had been
restored.
After
the Soviet Union collapsed, the strategic calculus changed. The
revolutionary left, as an organized (and armed) force, was largely
defeated or transformed into electoral movements. The threat now was
democracy itself: the possibility that popular movements, now operating
through electoral channels, might win power and use it to challenge the
neoliberal order.
In
this scenario, the old methods—coups, death squads, open military
rule—had become materially costly. They destabilized investment climates
and, crucially, risked reigniting the very resistance they were meant
to extinguish. The memory of the 1960s and 1970s—of the Sandinistas, the
FMLN, the Tupamaros, of a continent in flames—is still very much alive
in Latin America.
So what replaces the coup? A more sophisticated, multi-layered strategy of demobilization.
The Bunker State carefully avoids creating martyrs or inadvertently
unifying the opposition. Rather than driving populations back toward
armed resistance, it seeks to manage dissent, fragment it, and safely
channel it into forms that pose no threat to the core hierarchies of the
world-system.
The empire therefore required a different toolkit built around the concept of the soft coup.
This multi-layered apparatus includes lawfare, constitutional
manipulation, and aggressive judicial offensives. It relies heavily on
election interference—ranging from the influence over electoral
software, data flows, and tally systems, to blatant US support for
preferred candidates, often paired with threats of economic ruin if a
country elects the “wrong” leader.
Beyond the ballot box, the empire deploys sanctions and sieges
to economically strangle governments deemed “anti-US” (such as
Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua), severely minimizing their capacity to
act. Simultaneously, it unleashes cognitive warfare through
relentless media campaigns, algorithmic propaganda on social platforms,
and strict narrative management. Finally, this strategy relies on a covert dimension:
the DEA-CIA connections that leverage cartels and gangs as
destabilizing forces. Once this managed chaos successfully places the
far-right in power, the loop is closed via so-called mano dura (iron fist) policies, installing mass incarceration as another important mechanism of domestic control.
As a recent US Army War College report states the siege and sanctions dynamic with candor:
“The
anti-US governments of Venezuela, Cuba, and, to a degree, Nicaragua are
under considerable US pressure, which minimizes their willingness and
ability to work actively against US interests.“
This is the logic of calibrated pressure: enough to disable, not enough to martyr. Enough to demobilize, not enough to radicalize.
This
is where the histrionic, dramatic, violent-in-rhetoric style of the new
Latin American right becomes legible. Nader contrasts the “Spartan sobriety” of the old dictators with the “high histrionics”
of figures like Milei, Bolsonaro, and their imitators. A stoic general
in an uniform cannot capture the populist imagination. But a
chainsaw-wielding showman can. Even though, admittedly, every country
still has there nuances in the presentation of their far-right political
figures. Still, the new aesthetic is a reflection of a transformation of fascism into a form adapted to the current strategic environment. Why?
It “wins” elections. The
new right secures power—or at least appears to—through the ballot box.
This provides a veneer of democratic legitimacy that makes it harder for
the opposition to mobilize. A traditional coup can be resisted with a
general strike, whereas an elected demagogue is a far more complicated
challenge. Admittedly, Bolivia, with its specific societal structure and
degree of political organization within, seems to resist this logic to a
certain extent, as evidenced by the ongoing, indefinite general strike
taking place as of July 2026.
It demobilizes through spectacle.
The constant theater keeps the public in a state of emotional arousal.
It saturates the information environment. It makes it difficult for a
coherent, class-based opposition to form, because everyone is too busy
reacting to the latest outrage.
It channels discontent into cultural war.
The new right redirects popular anger. It takes the legitimate
grievances of people immiserated by neoliberalism and gives them a
target that is not the ruling class: the “globalist elite,” the
“cultural Marxists,” the “gender ideology.” The theater provides an
emotional outlet without ever threatening the material structures of
power. Even such words as “liberty” are stripped of any meaning related
to human liberation from oppression, and reduced strictly to market freedom and the freedom of property‑holders to do as they wish.
It avoids the martyr effect.
The new histrionic right creates chaos. It is far harder to organize a
revolutionary movement against a shape-shifting performer who claims
victimhood even as he wields power. This does not mean violence is
absent. Police repression of protests, mano dura
policies, and the targeted assassination of grassroots leaders — Berta
Cáceres in Honduras, murdered in 2016 following the 2009 US-backed coup
against Manuel Zelaya — remain live instruments. But the violence is
more dispersed, its authorship deliberately obscured, and it is applied
selectively enough to avoid generating the iconic martyrs that united
opposition movements against Somoza, Pinochet, or the Argentine junta.
However, there are some more points about the features of this new Latin American far-right that I want to highlight:
Economically speaking, these new far-right faces talk about or are adjecent to so-called anarcho‑capitalism and radical libertarianism which one could read as
an escalation from the previous neoliberal status quo. In other wordds,
there is an explicit call to abolish the state altogether, replacing it
with direct rule by corporate boards who are supposed to run the
economy much better. It is about creating a “corporate society” in which
public institutions are reduced to shells around private power.
Thus, for example, the Argentinian President Javier Milei, said the following in 2024 while visiting Rome:
Philosophically,
I am an anarcho-capitalist, and therefore I feel a profound contempt
for the State. I believe that the State is the enemy, I believe that the
State is a criminal association — a criminal organization in which a
group of politicians come together and decide to use the monopoly to
steal the resources of the private sector.
Nonetheless,
there is a glaring contradiction and a profound hypocrisy in such
statements. These figrues depend entirely on the state, its tax system,
the police, military, bureaucracies, to protect property and enforce
contracts. If you removed the state structure for twenty minutes,
figures like Milei would collapse. They are dependent on what they claim
to want to destroy.
In that same vein, such frameworks include a stance of hyper-commodification which
includes the commodification of the human body. Because they equate
private property with personal property, modern fascists push
commodification to absurd extremes. Milei has advocated for selling
living human organs on the open market, under the premise that a
person’s body is their ultimate real estate asset, and talked about
selling children, and when pressed repeatedly, refused to categorically
oppose a market in children.
Another interesting feature of this new Latin American fascism is its change from Judeophobia (until the mid-1950s) to forming a Zionist alliance starting in the 1970s.
Israel is seen as the successful model of a supremacist, fascist
nation‑state (even though they drape it in the language of security
effectiveness, democracy, and anti-terrorism). Latin American far‑right
governments import Israeli counterinsurgency, repression, and espionage
techniques into their own security apparatuses. What’s more, even
figures like El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and Hondura’s Nasry Asfura who
are of Palestinian origin, engage in such policies without batting an
eyelash. Indeed, as of June 2026, legislators from 12 Latin American
countries signed
a resolution in Buenos Aires backing Milei's "Isaac Accords" —
explicitly modelled on the Abraham Accords and aimed at deepening
Israel-Latin America security, diplomatic, and intelligence ties.
This pivot follows Washington’s directives:
aligning with Israel is part of integrating Latin American regimes into
a US‑led hyper‑imperial structure. Fundamentally, the institutional
mechanism for this process is now formalized. In February 2026, Israeli FM Gideon Sa'ar met with Argentine and US officials in Washington for "the launch of a new Israel-US strategic dialogue on Latin American affairs", with Sa'ar declaring 2026 "a year of focus on Latin America". Further, the Shield of the Americas,
launched on March 7, 2026, at Trump's Doral resort in Miami, is
probably the single most concrete institutional expression of this
alignment with hyper-imperialism. Trump convened 13 heads of state — all
right-wing or far-right— and signed a joint security declaration
committing member states to "lethal military force to destroy sinister cartels and terrorist networks". The CSIS additionally frames the Shield as part of a broader strategy to counter China in the Western Hemisphere, including pressuring members to exclude Chinese infrastructure from their ports and replace Chinese telecoms networks.
On the topic of religion, one could say that “capital” has become the new faith, operating in conjunction with the expansion of new “churches.” In part, this was
a deliberate reaction to counter the increasing presence of Liberation
Theology—a resistant, anti-imperialist, and socialist movement that took
hold in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s. This
counter-offensive was so strategic that, of course, the CIA was
involved. Thus, if the traditional clergy fails to control the masses,
capital creates new churches: media
empires, television spectacles, social platforms, right‑wing
think‑tanks, and academic networks. This also extends to literal
religious alternatives, such as the evangelical church. Together, these
institutions preach the new gospel of inequality and market inevitability.
Indeed,
the face of religion has shifted dramatically in many Latin American
countries, moving from Catholicism to Evangelicalism. A January 2026 Pew
Research survey looked at the decline of Catholicism across Latin America. The Latinobarómetro data shows Catholic identification dropped from 70% in 2010 to 57% in 2020 across the region, with some countries experiencing a much steeper dynamic than others.
Another characteristic that goes hand-in-hand with these developments is an intensified social conservatism. While partially rooted
in the logic of who is able to produce profit, this conservatism serves
a deeply functional economic purpose. It directly accompanies the
privatization and dismantling of social services. After all, someone
still has to care for the children, the elderly, and a family’s overall
health. The fewer social services there are, the more this burden is
shifted onto the traditional family structure, dramatically increasing
unpaid and precarious domestic work at home.
Crucially, this new fascism feeds on left failure.
It emerges from the political vacuum left when social‑democratic or
pseudo‑left governments compromise, capitulate, or actively hand the
keys to the ultra‑right: Alberto Fernández paving the way for Milei in
Argentina, Gabriel Boric enabling Kast in Chile, Iván Cepeda yielding
ground to Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia.
The América Insumisa panel
offers a complementary insight. They note an apparent inversion of
Gramsci’s classic analysis of Italy. Roughly summarizing, in early
twentieth-century Italy, the industrial North was progressive and open
to change, while the rural South was conservative. In Latin America
today, the opposite holds (more or less): the rural periphery votes
left, while the “developed” urban centers and industrialized cities are
bastions of the far right.
Looking at electoral maps in Peru and Colombia for the 2026 elections, the paradox becomes obvious: In Peru, the Fujimori camp wins
the presidency with a margin of about 49,000 votes (50.13% vs 49.8%),
even though the left wins in far more regions that are rural and located
in the sierra. In Colombia, and similarly across the region, the far‑right consistently wins cities (except for Bogotá), while left candidates win decisively in rural areas and the periphery.
But,
why? Urban populations are saturated with corporate media, algorithmic
manipulation, and a constant bombardment of disinformation on platforms
like X and Facebook, as well as corporate radio stations and TV
channels. The far right invests boatloads of money to promote these
lies, saturating the “advanced” urban zones with neoliberal common
sense. By contrast, rural areas still maintain an existing community fabric. They rely on alternative, localized communication exchanges,
such as community radio stations and local assemblies. This surviving
social infrastructure acts as a shield against digital disinformation
and cognitive warfare.
These observations tell us where cognitive warfare is most effective: in the urban, digitally integrated centers
that the empire and local elites need to control. The most “developed”
zones are the most vulnerable to fascist capture. And the periphery,
precisely because it has been excluded from the digital infrastructure
of empire, retains a capacity for independent thought and collective
action. Interestingly, it was Peruvian Marxist Mariátegui a contemporary
of Gramsci, who theorized
that in Latin America the indigenous peasant is not a backward element
to be modernized away but the central revolutionary subject of Latin
American socialism. He argued that Peru's indigenous communities
retained a communal organization that
constituted a living socialist tradition predating capitalism, and such
living traditions exist all over Latin America still. Ultimately, both
Gramsci and Mariátegui theorized the peripheral, marginalized population
as possessing revolutionary potential precisely because it has been
excluded from the hegemonic capitalist order and all that it implies.
If
we zoom in from the electoral map to the operating table of empire, we
can see how this new fascism doesn’t just arise spontaneously. This turn
is operationally cultivated through a very specific soft coup playbook
within the context of a fragmentationist strategy. Dr. Aníbal García’s
recent analysis on Contralínea lays this out with painful clarity.
“The United States studies us constantly. We barely study them.”
This asymmetry of knowledge is a fatal vulnerability. Recently, the Mexican investigative journalism channel Contralínea aired
an indispensable analysis by Dr. Aníbal García on the mechanisms of the
“soft coup.” His analysis is historically grounded, operationally
precise, and urgently relevant. What follows is my attempt to add a
complementary analytical layer.
Dr. García grounds his analysis in the 1954 CIA-backed coup against Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz. During Operation PBSUCCESS, the CIA drafted what is colloquially known as the “Coup Plotter’s Manual“
(declassified in 1997). It included a literal “Study of Assassination,”
targeting lists for the elimination of officials, and a blueprint for
psychological warfare via “black propaganda.”
Today’s
coup-mongering is similar, yet not so heavily and overtly focused on
the kinetic aspect in most cases in Latin America. It is the kidnapping
of leadership, the de facto capture of the media, and the weaponization
of lawfare; judicial spectacles masquerading as justice for geopolitical
ends. According to the Contralínea analysis, the
soft coup unfolds in four distinct phases, which are rooted in that very
same 1954 manual. We are watching them play out in Mexico right now:
The
central command moves into the territory. In other words, this is about
the placement of personnel that will prepare the soft coup. In Mexico,
CIA agents have already been detected operating in Chihuahua this year
(two CIA officers and two Mexican police were killed in a vehicle accident
and this is how Mexican state security forces were able to detect their
presence), invited in by a compliant opposition governor, Maru Campos.
Previously, the current US Ambassador, Ronald D. Johnson, a former Green Beret, is an expert
in special operations and psychological warfare. Indeed, ambassador
Ronald D. Johnson’s was involved in Central America during the 1980s for
his military and intelligence background. He served as a Green Beret
and intelligence officer, leading combat and counterinsurgency
operations in El Salvador as part of the authorized U.S. military
advisory group during the Salvadoran Civil War. Furthermore, beginning
in 1984, he also led a Special Forces battalion in Panama. His early
operational background in the region later led to his appointment as the U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador (2019–2021).
For historical context:
Panama served as the staging hub for Green Beret Mobile Training Teams
(MTTs) deployed to counter communist insurgencies in the region. In
early 1984, teams from the 3rd Battalion were sent on temporary duty to El Salvador
to conduct Small Unit Tactical Training (SUTT) for the Salvadoran
military. Special Operations Teams (SOTs) and Regional Survey Teams
(RST) within the battalion conducted continuous, low-visibility regional
surveys and training across multiple Latin American countries. They
monitored political instability and regional threats (from their point
of view), building the localized expertise that the U.S. military relied
upon heavily throughout the Cold War. How exactly Johnson was involved
in these operations is not known. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. Army Special
Forces in Panama—specifically the 7th Special Forces Group (and its
predecessor, the 8th Special Forces Group)—had a close, intertwined relationship with the infamous Escuela de las Américas (School of the Americas, or SOA) which trained counter-insurgents and military in the region, and the Death Squads. Foreign
soldiers who flew into Panama to attend specialized tactical courses
(like airborne or jungle warfare schools) often did so under the formal
sponsorship of the School of the Americas, while the Green Berets served as the direct instructors.
Green Berets from the 7th Special Forces Group were also the "boots on
the ground" advisors deployed on temporary duty inside El Salvador to
manage, refine, and fight alongside these same units from SOA.
Additionally, following his time in the U.S. Army Special Forces, Ambassador Ronald D. Johnson transitioned
to a two-decade career as an operative for the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA). During this "second career," he frequently popped up in
global conflict zones and high-risk hotspots, which included operational
deployments in Yugoslavia during the Balkan conflicts. Now, what is a
person with such a background doing in Mexico? What was CIA personnel
doing in Northern Mexico?
The
next step’s goal is to demonstrate government incapacity and discredit
the target domestically and abroad. We see this in the coordinated
international smear campaigns labeling Mexico a “narco-government” which
should make others see Mexico as ungovernable. And we see this in the
strategic revocation of US visas for border-state governors to probe for
“weak links” in the chain of command (possibly to detect who could be
“captured”). Indeed, the Trump administration formally designated Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations in February 2025, which was the institutional trigger that enabled DEA intelligence to feed directly into visa revocation decisions — transforming a law enforcement tool into a political pressure instrument. Now, with the recent NYT article
on supposed informants within the governing MORENA party for the US
government, one can see even another layer at play in the creation of
preliminary conditions. On top of this, US prosecutors have already
formally charged sitting Sinaloa Governor Rocha Moya with conspiring
with cartels — the first formal indictment of a sitting Mexican
governor. This is a continuous and escalating process aimed at creating
mistrust within the political ruling strata.
This phase involves weaponizing legitimate social demands to
fracture both the government and society. Elements of both the US and
Mexican business sectors are currently inciting the abandonment of
peaceful protests in favor of violence. Ricardo Salinas Pliego, one of
Mexico's wealthiest businessmen and owner of TV Azteca stated in a recent interview, during the teachers' protests preceding the World Cup, that a peaceful protest "is useless."
The government also formally accused former president Vicente Fox (a
conservative business-aligned figure) and Salinas Pliego of publicly
endorsing the November 2025 protests that turned violent. Sheinbaum's
government presented evidence to the Mexican Attorney General of a
"coordinated digital operation" costing nearly $5 million, linked to
opposition accounts and amplified by influencers — which El País specifically connected to the Atlas Network
(the Koch-funded international libertarian think-tank network).
COPARMEX (the Employers' Confederation) was also active in framing the
protests as a government failure. Simultaneously, immense economic
pressure is applied via tariffs, debt, and attacks on the stock market and the peso.
Lastly, an intense rumor campaign is launched, designed to generate a psychological “fear of war” and
provoke a total internal rupture. Examples of what steps are being
already taken in that regard by the US-led empire: In every phone call
between Trump and President Sheinbaum, Trump has repeatedly raised the possibility of deploying US troops into Mexico. Trump told Fox News that the US would begin "hitting land"
after targeting cartel vessels at sea. There are, of course, more of
such threats and hints coming from the Trump administration. Yet, I
would argue the next escalation in the
psychological campaign will be to generate fear not merely of cartel
violence or US strikes against supposedly “cartel targets” but of
Mexico's territorial coherence as a nation-state
— essentially a "Yugoslavia scenario" in which the country is portrayed
as ungovernable enough to justify external intervention or partition
into zones of influence, or likewise or in conjunction, an attempt at
supporting secessionist movements.
Here, the Trump administration’s mapping of cartel territorial control as rival sovereignty is a signal in that regard. The “narco-state” label already applied to specific border governors also implies a narrative of alternative sovereignties. Indeed, FTO designation transforms cartels from criminal actors into geopolitical actors, enabling the US to legally treat counter-cartel operations as irregular warfare. The RSDI analysis confirms that these legal terrorism tools “reshape the entire US-Mexico security architecture”
in ways that give Washington leverage to direct, manage, or selectively
neutralize cartel forces. The historical precedent from Lawfare Media’s
analysis of CIA operations in Mexico shows the US has been running “six or seven US-vetted, funded, and supported special units”
within Mexican security forces since at least 1997. In what exact way
each of these elements interacts or is operating today, I do not know,
but a direction is taking shape in one way or another.
One signal in the secessionist direction
takes us to a concept that has deep roots that are now being explicitly
revived. The Republic of the Río Grande (1840) was a US-backed
secessionist project covering the northern Mexican states of Nuevo León,
Coahuila, and Tamaulipas. A JSTOR-archived historical record confirms
US military commanders were explicitly instructed by Washington to give
“all proper assistance” to any northern Mexican separatist movement.
This precedent is not dead. The Texas Nationalist Movement (TNM), which campaigns for Texas secession from the US, announced in April 2024 its “full support for the Northern Mexico secession movement”, explicitly citing
border crime as justification. This cross-pollination between US
state-level secessionist politics and Mexican northern separatism could
be read as one step in the contemporary activation of the 1840 template.
Lastly, journalist Zavala argues the “cartel myth” is a deliberately constructed
ideological narrative jointly produced by the US and Mexican
governments to disguise their own involvement in and management of drug
trafficking. The LA Times summarizes it: Zavala argues “cartels could not flourish without the support of corrupt public officials”
and that presenting them as autonomous criminal sovereigns obscures
this. Additonally, he argues that cartel violence ultimately aims to
displace inhabitants from areas rich in energy resources (such as
Northern Mexico) for the benefit of private interests. In a January 2026
Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime report, Northern Mexico is being described as “battlegrounds" where "criminals
compete for revenue streams from illegal logging and mining, while the
state is wilfully negligent in the face of criminal innovation and
corporate rent-seeking". That report specifically covers Chihuahua and Sonora, the same region implicated in CIA incursion and secession risk.
Fundamentally, the “narco-state” framing is a politically constructed discourse
that serves the imperial project by: (1) delegitimizing the Mexican
state as ungovernable, (2) justifying external intervention, and (3)
concealing the actual US institutional involvement in shaping the drug
trade and resource extraction as tools of pressure, compliance or
destabilization.
The
soft coup blueprint Dr. García describes is, in my terms, one modality
of the fragmentationist grand strategy. It is the preferred modality for
Latin America and the Caribbean, where the empire operates with a proximity, a density of institutional penetration, and a centuries-deep history of intervention that makes direct cognitive and psychological warfare highly
effective. The tools are lawfare, media manipulation, economic
strangulation, the weaponization of social divisions, and the
cultivation of a comprador business class. I would even add the
co-optation of the religious dimension. When it works, a right-wing
government is installed, and there is no need for a Memorandum of
Understanding, a Minsk agreement, or a Board of Peace. The old order is
simply “restored.”
However, there is a second modality—one
could argue it has been applied to Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, and the
broader energy war to different extents and with varying “results.” This
second modality activates when the soft coup fails, when the target
state is too large, too socially and politically resilient, or too
geopolitically critical to be toppled by media campaigns, economic
pressure, proxy destabilization, and lawfare alone. At this point, the
US-led empire shifts into a different gear: a grinding siege of
sanctions, the threat and subsequent application of (limited) kinetic
action, and eventually, the offer of an “integrationist” pact. The
sovereign shell is kept intact. A faction of the elite is offered a path
to liquidity, legitimacy, and reintegration into the global financial
and market architecture. In exchange, structural concessions are
extracted—the opening of a strait, the freezing of a nuclear program,
the redirection of critical mineral or other resource contracts, or the
signing of “agricultural deals.” On top of this, any emerging crisis—such
as an earthquake or drought, made infinitely more lethal by the
sanctions, sieges, and blockades already in place—will be weaponized to
impose these very tools of submission and pressure. The MoU with Iran
and the Venezuela model of kidnapping serve as such fallback options
when the soft coup fails.
Of
course, as Dr. García lays out, Latin American governments have
historically been overthrown by naked violence. Today’s strategy relies
on a flexible mix of tools because a
highly visible, traditional coup risks activating the populations in
targeted countries. As has happened so often in Latin America, overt
imperialist actions tends to backfire, inadvertently paving the way for a
genuinely anti-imperialist or left-wing government to eventually take
power.
Dr.
García’s timeline is flawless, but I would an additional structural
layer. The empire’s goal is not merely to create chaos; it is to force
the integration of the target nation into Western financial, market, and
infrastructural systems. This is the multi-layered cage. This would
make it much more difficult for any successor government to set
themselves free from the cage the country has been put in. Just imagine:
an agricultural “deal,” US-GMO gets imported, the food sovereignty
project destroyed, agricultural labor and industry destroyed, and the
country now is dependent on the US for its food…., this is not so easy
to escape from. At least not in the short-term.
While the Contralínea
report correctly identifies the financial pressure—stock market
manipulation, inflation induction—it can be deepened by incorporating
the broader “Fragmentationist” logic. Often, the imperialist strategy
relies on grinding a country down through sanctions, economic
strangulation, and the latent threat of kinetic action until it finds a
compliant faction within the progressive ruling party itself. The goal
is to hollow out the sovereign leadership from the inside, forcing
concessions that are later disguised as pragmatic choices. And they may
very well be exactly that.
As Dr. García sharply noted regarding these elite enablers:
“The
businessmen—this rentier bourgeoisie that is foreign-oriented and more
Yankee than Mexican—are divided. Some show confidence in the Mexican
government, while others simply bet on interventionism.”
We
cannot afford the luxury of geopolitical romanticism or essentialism.
We must study the architecture of our own subjugation if we want to
survive it. Dr. García highlights a painful irony regarding the
University of Florida, a known hub for the Latin American and
international right-wing:
“The
University of Florida was actually the first university in the United
States to open a Center for Latin American Studies. Over there in the
United States, they do study Latin America. Ask yourselves, for example,
how many research centers on the United States or North America exist
here?“
If
we want to dismantle the cage, we must first map its bars. Recognizing
the mechanics of the soft coup is a vital step in that larger project.
In
other words, what García describes at the level of operations is one
modality of the same Bunker State logic I’ve been mapping: a move from
direct terror to calibrated fragmentation, from visible coups to soft
coups and cages.
The
empire wants weak, fragmented, perpetually crisis-ridden states that
are incapable of pursuing autonomous development. The theatrical fascism
of the new right serves this purpose well for the time being. It keeps
the region in permanent political turmoil, prevents the consolidation of
any genuinely anti-imperialist project, and does so without triggering
the kind of mass armed resistance that the old dictators provoked.
The
Cold War was a period of open class war, and the right’s methods
reflected that: direct, military, existential. Today, in the
interregnum, the war continues by other means. The theater is not a
distraction from politics. It is the politics—a politics designed to keep you watching, reacting, and exhaustedly passive.
And yet, as a recent War College report itself acknowledges,
this configuration is fragile. It depends on the absence of a unified,
organized, defiant left, both within Latin America and across the Global
Majority. The lack of regional unity, the absence of collective defense
mechanisms, and the fragmentation of the multipolar space all create an
opening that the empire exploits. But that opening is not permanent. “If
cooperative governments do not increase citizen security and
prosperity, or if changes in internal US politics—or the international
situation—cause currently silent governments to decrease their fear of US retribution,” the entire strategic configuration could shift.
In
other words, the US-led empire itself knows that the current situation
is not a march and victory of the far-right. Instead, the current system
is an unstable homeostasis. The new fascist style is part of how the empire tries to
keep that homoestasis intact. We have to understand how the myriad of
tools of greyzone warfare and the soft coup, including electoral
software, telecommunication platforms, media, sanctions, and data flows
plug into a multilayered cage managed by the imperial core; how new fascist leaders are products designed for that cage; and how the memory of the old resistance shapes what kinds of repression the empire now avoids.
The
silence of the general has been replaced by the scream of the showman.
But the silence of the masses is what makes both possible. And breaking
that silence—through organization, through alternative media, through
the slow rebuilding of the community fabric—remains a genuine path
forward.
The choice of style is a signal about how power plans to rule, and how
it plans to prevent the return of the organized, transnational
resistance that once made Latin America the beating heart of global
anti‑imperialism.
These are the Notes that partly touch upon the topics discussed here:
The Changing Face of Fascism in Latin America: From the General's Silence to the Showman's Scream
The Soft Coup Manual and the Fragmentationist Strategy in Latin America
And these are the YouTube podcast episodes that inspired the Notes and, hence, the essay:
Cesar Pineda on the electoral stalemate in Latin America
Contralinea’s
America Insumisa panel on the far-right in Latin America (with Latin
Americanists Marcela Román, Pablo Rojas and Aníbal García)
Chamuco Media’s Retrovisor episode on Fascism in Latin America (with Historian Christian Nader)
The Four Phases of the Soft Coup on Contralinea (with Dr. Aníbal García)
As
we conclude this analysis, we must ask how this shift from the austere
terror of the Cold War to the theatrical, managed chaos of the new right
plays out in reality.
Do
you see the mechanics of this cognitive warfare and structural
fragmentation operating in your own political region? Are the signs of
the “soft coup” toolkit—whether through lawfare, algorithmic propaganda,
the weaponization of economic crises, or the push for a
hyper-commodified “corporate society”—visible in your local landscape?
Have
you observed a similar “Gramscian inversion” where digitally saturated
urban centers are increasingly captured by far-right narratives, while
the rural periphery maintains progressive resistance? Have you observed a
different political pattern altogether?
Or,
conversely, do you see the resilience we discussed? How are the
communities around you rebuilding the social cohesion, alternative
media, and localized community fabric needed to break out of this
multi-layered cage?
Share your observations in the comments below.
Leave a comment
o
map the mutation of fascism in Latin America, and to see a deliberate
strategy of imperial management where others see only random, theatrical
populism, one must operate from a space entirely outside its logic.
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