The United States, Latin America's indispensable partner, is back and drawing the line.
By: Carlos Sánchez Berzaín - 15/12/2025
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The interdependence between the United States and Latin America is essential and inevitable, and those who encourage confrontation with anti-imperialist rhetoric do so to protect the crimes of regional dictatorships and extra-hemispheric penetration. This century is marked by the United States' withdrawal from Latin America and the ceding of ground to criminals who supplant politics, but the "National Security Strategy" and concrete actions show that the United States is back as a partner that draws the line.
The historical relationship between Latin America and the United States has been, to say the least, variable and turbulent. Following the end of the Cold War, the First Summit of the Americas in 1994 ushered in a policy of complementarity and integration based on shared interests, principles, and values such as freedom, democracy, free markets, the fight against drug trafficking, sustainable development, free trade, and more.
The First Summit of the Americas, as a result of the "state foreign policy" formulated by President George Bush (Republican) and implemented by President Bill Clinton (Democrat), led to the "Inter-American Democratic Charter," to extraordinary successes in the fight against drug trafficking in Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru (the main producers of coca and cocaine), to free trade agreements, and to the belief that the 21st century would be one of full democracy with the end of the only dictatorship, which was that of Cuba.
On September 11, 2001, the same day the Inter-American Democratic Charter was signed in Lima, Peru, the terrorist attacks against the United States took place. It was not these terrorist acts themselves that damaged the process of integration and democratic strengthening in the Americas; rather, it was the reaction to these terrorist acts that marked the sudden and progressive abandonment of Latin America by the United States, which focused its efforts on the wars against “Islamic terrorism.” From the withdrawal of strategic agreements with Latin American countries, we moved to a lack of understanding of the projects of Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, and Lula da Silva.
The history of the first 25 years of this century in the Americas is the chronicle of the seizure of political power by the oldest criminal organization in the region, the Cuban dictatorship, which, rescued by Hugo Chávez in 1999, took control of the populist Bolivarian project to turn it into the expansion of its criminal/dictatorial model in Venezuela with Maduro, Nicaragua with Ortega/Murillo, Bolivia with Morales/Arce and Ecuador with Correa, also managing to install quasi-dictatorial governments in Mexico with López Obrador/Sheinbaum, Brazil with Lula, Colombia with Petro, Chile with Boric, Honduras with Castro.
The most successful moment for Latin American organized crime was undoubtedly the Summit of the Americas in Panama in 2015 when dictator Raúl Castro was recognized as a regional leader by President Barack Obama, and subsequently achieved the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the US.
While transnational organized crime assumed international legal standing, creating and seeking to control international organizations with the dictatorships of Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador, it opened the region to China, Russia, Iran, and international terrorism. It attacked the United States and the democracies of the Americas with “hybrid warfare” tactics, including forced migration, drug trafficking, terrorism, human trafficking, infiltration through common crime, internal manipulation, fake news, campaign financing, and more, employing “plausible denial.”
The anti-imperialist narrative and anachronistic Cold War arguments served as a cover to simulate an ideological confrontation between left and right, when in reality it is an attack by organized crime against democracy, with devastating effects in the United States, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Panama, Brazil, Mexico, El Salvador, Ecuador, and other countries ravaged by forced migration, the rise of transnational crime, drug trafficking, insecurity, and the erosion of their democratic systems. This scenario of terror will end because the United States, in safeguarding its “national security,” has identified the aggression perpetrated by the 21st-century socialist dictatorships that operate as criminal groups. The “Cartel of the Suns” in Venezuela is the most notorious identified to date.
The actions of the last few months that modified its foreign policy and that change the regional geopolitics are explained in the "United States National Security Strategy", which with the "Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine" marks the return of the world's leading power to Latin America, establishing the objective of the extinction of crime in political power, drawing the line in the sand.
*Lawyer and Political Scientist. Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy
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