Monroe Fandom

A new U.S. State Department video on the Monroe Doctrine is critical “to understand how the Trump administration views the history of US foreign policy in the hemisphere,” advises James Bosworth in the Latin America Risk Report. “In short, it’s every left-wing complaint about US influence across the centuries reframed as a right-wing triumph. The Trump administration is justifying overt US intervention in regional affairs as part of US “primacy” in the hemisphere … I imagine even some of Trump’s closest right-wing allies in Latin America feel a bit queasy about this video when they watch it.”

“Not even the region’s most Trump-friendly leaders would agree that ‘the United States is practically sovereign on this continent,’” writes Benjamin Gedan, who argues that this muscular vision of U.S. foreign policy “is a time-tested recipe for incubating the next Fidel Castro or Hugo Chávez.”

The video is just the latest in Trump’s significant efforts to exert influence in Latin America — from endorsing candidates, to punitive tariffs, to actual military action. “I think for Trump, it’s satisfying to feel and think that he has a kind of a power to shape politics in an entire part of the world,” Will Freeman told USA Today. “As with many things, it’s sort of something he thinks that the United States paid lip service to before, but probably didn’t respect in reality.”

More U.S. - Latin America

• “The Pentagon’s review of its 2025 attacks found that no civilians were killed in the Trump administration’s campaign of boat strikes,” reports The Intercept, “despite the fact that the U.S. killed more than 120 civilians last year in attacks that experts call extrajudicial killings or outright murder. The Trump administration has asserted repeatedly and without evidence that the boat strike victims, who now number more than 220, were “narcoterrorists.””

Ecuador

• Ecuadorean fishermen in the Pacific have been attacked by unidentified “gringos” using drones — some have been killed. The operations are separate from the ongoing U.S. military attacks on vessels in the Caribbean and the Pacific. “It is certainly possible that the U.S. or some other military has conducted clandestine attacks on boats in the region. But the many lingering questions surrounding the fishing boat attacks have led some experts to wonder whether a private military contractor has been hired by the U.S. government or one of its Latin American allies — possibly El Salvador, where the plane has operated,” reports the New York Times. (The New Yorker reported on the case in June.)

• Thirteen survivors of those attacks interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that after the attacks, they were detained on board a ship by people they identified as armed US nationals wearing military-style uniforms.

Regional

• Governments around the region have sought to emulate El Salvador’s charismatic Nayib Bukele’s heavy-handed security policies, reports InSight Crime. “More than 15 megaprisons have been proposed throughout the region in the three years since El Salvador opened the doors to its famous Terrorism Confinement Center (Centro de Confinamiento de Terrorismo – CECOT). Between April 2020 and April 2023, at least 30 states of emergency were declared in the region. In Argentina, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Colombia, Honduras, and Peru, rhetoric echoing—and sometimes directly referring to—Bukele’s mano dura (iron fist) hardline measures has dominated recent political campaigns. But despite emulating El Salvador’s approach, no other country has managed to replicate its results.”

Regional Relations

• U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will travel to Panama today where he will meet with the country’s President José Raúl Mulino and hold a meeting with Colombian senior officials as the U.S. deepens its defense cooperation with the country, reports The Hill.

• Venezuela and Israel have agreed to restore consular relations, in a major shift, as Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodriguez has pursued a major realignment since the U.S. intervention in January, reports Al Jazeera. Although the agreement falls short of full diplomatic restoration, it is the first formal coordination channel between the two countries since Hugo Chávez severed relations in 2009 in response to Israel’s policies in Gaza, reports the Caracas Chronicles.

• Under Colombia’s new right-wing president, Abelardo de la Espriella, the country has recognized Morocco’s sovereignty over occupied Western Sahara. Colombia has frozen diplomatic relations with the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic and ended prior support for the independence group, the Polisario Front, reports Democracy Now.

Colombia

• As rescuers continue to search for survivors in the rubble caused by a major earthquake in Colombia on Monday, the disaster is an early test for President Abelardo de la Espriella. He said yesterday he would suspend utility bills for affected families for three months and grant rental subsidies for those who lost their homes, reports the Washington Post.

• De la Espriella asked for international aid for supplies, but not rescue teams — a move that has been questioned by experts, reports La Silla Vacía.

• Two of the National Liberation Army (ELN) were killed in air strikes ordered by Colombia’s new government, a military source told AFP yesterday. The bombings were the first such operation by the incoming government, reports La Silla Vacía.

Brazil

• Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s advantage over Senator Flavio Bolsonaro in ‌a potential runoff ahead of October’s general election narrowed — the incumbent would obtain 48.0% of the vote against his right wing challenger’s 39.1% , according to the latest CNT/MDA poll. (Reuters)

• Brazil’s Supreme Court is set to weigh a series of cases in the coming days that could reshape protections for the Amazon rainforest and the Indigenous communities that depend on it, reports the Associated Press. The cases span from Indigenous land rights, recent rollbacks on environmental safeguards and infrastructure projects — but most stem from measures approved by conservative lawmakers and later vetoed by Lula’s administration for violating constitutional rights.

• Flávio Bolsonaro’s presidential campaign is preparing a new fiscal framework to replace Brazil’s current budget rules, imposing tighter spending caps as debt rises that could ‌reduce real spending growth to zero, reports Reuters.

Regional

• Rainforest communities face a silent crisis as mercury from gold mining contaminates their food and water — Guardian photo essay.

Cuba

• “Under Washington’s crippling oil embargo against Cuba, an exception that allows U.S. firms to export fuel to private Cuban businesses has kickstarted a chaotic black market and pried the lid off an energy sector tightly controlled by the state” for decades, report Reuters.

Mexico

• An aggressive U.S. crackdown on money transfers near the US-Mexico border was aimed at cartels, but instead business owners and legal experts say the policy has devastated small businesses across the region, and the largely immigrant communities who rely on them to pay rent and bills and send money to family, reports the Guardian.

Migration

• The U.S. Trump administration has awarded a $158 million contract to represent unaccompanied migrant children to a nonprofit group founded by a former immigration agent — part of a pivot away from working with advocacy groups that previously represented the minors, reports the Washington Post.

Critter Corner

• Actor and environmental activist Leonardo DiCaprio has come out in defense of the Pehuenche frog (Alsodes pehuenche), an amphibian listed as critically endangered, whose habitat in Chile’s Maule region could disappear if plans for an electricity interconnection proceed, reports El País.