This weekend, Donald Trump convened right-wing leaders from Latin America and the Caribbean to his Miami golf resort for the “Shield of the Americas” summit. Amid renewed US military aggression in the region, the gathering showcased an emboldened reactionary bloc eager to demonstrate its subservience to US dictates.
The summit drew twelve heads of state to the Trump National Doral Golf Club, with Argentina’s Javier Milei, Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, and Chile’s president-elect, José Antonio Kast, joining the conservative presidents of Bolivia, Paraguay, Panama, Honduras, Costa Rica, Guyana, the Dominican Republic, and the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago. The Miami country club setting was not only typically gauche but, as the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) notes, a means of channeling funds into Trump’s private enterprise.
Seventeen Latin American countries have signed on to Trump’s new “Americas Counter Cartel Coalition,” which promises to mobilize military action against criminal groups “to defeat these threats to our security and civilization.” That many of its members are themselves implicated in organized crime operations is hardly an obstacle. After all, this is the administration that pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran president who was serving a forty-year US prison term on a drug-trafficking conviction, then kidnapped the sitting president of Venezuela on the same alleged grounds.
Willingness to shore up convenient drug traffickers has long been bipartisan policy in the region. The cocaine trade was notoriously central to the CIA’s covert Contra supply network throughout the 1980s in Central America, and the United States provided millions in counternarcotics support to the Mexican government of Felipe Calderón (2006–12), who prosecuted a war on drugs in favor of the Sinaloa Cartel. Like the Cold War and the” war on terror,” the “war on drugs” provides…
Auteur: Hilary Goodfriend
