source: The American Prospect
The leaks could have been one of the biggest international scandals of the century. But in a world where every information zone is flooded with a barrage of digital detritus and slop, it barely pierced the regular news cycle.
This past April, a consortium of anonymous journalists working in partnership with the Spanish newsroom Canal RED released an unheralded project called Hondurasgate: 37 phone conversations mined from WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram calls, taking place mainly in late 2025 and early 2026, wherein former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández plots to assassinate or jail his political opponents, expand economic zones free of government oversight, build a state-of-the-art U.S. military base, bribe elected officials, finance right-wing propaganda outlets with public funds, and, eventually, return himself to office.
Such actions, according to Hernández, were part of a larger blueprint organized by Donald Trump and his henchmen to not only regain American supremacy over the tiny Central American country but also remake the entire region.
The details are like something out of a John le Carré paperback. One audio clip reveals Hernández proclaiming that the broader purpose of Trump’s pardon of Hernández after he was convicted of conspiring to traffic 400 tons of cocaine, among other crimes, was to help organize cross-border opposition to Latin America’s left-wing governments.
“And I need that liquidity because we’re going to set up an office here. With support from some in the Republic, we can attack and eliminate the cancer of the left in Honduras and all of Latin America. I was telling [current Honduran] President Asfura that we managed to speak with [Argentine President] Javier Milei, and that he’s also going to contribute $350,000,” Hernández tells Honduran Vice President María Antonieta Mejía Sánchez. “Another great friend of ours from Mexico is also contributing, just for the Mexican angle. We’re practically ready and waiting for this to move forward with full force.”
Under the auspices of fighting international cartels and combating Chinese influence, Trump has sought to revive authoritarianism in the region.
In another file, Hernández explains to Asfura that none other than Benjamin Netanyahu largely orchestrated his pardon. “The Israeli prime minister is going to support us. We’re very grateful to him; they played a key role. In fact, they were decisive in my release and in the negotiations,” Hernandez can be heard saying.
But Hondurasgate, which its detractors have falsely claimed was concocted using AI, demonstrates that this is only the beginning of the global right’s machinations in the Western Hemisphere. At the beginning of 2026, Hondurasgate would have seemed likely to backfire on the Latin American right: The Trump administration was well into its Caribbean bombing campaign and had kicked off the new year by extrajudicially arresting Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Yet as international attention has shifted toward the war in Iran, a more grim reality is setting in. A relentless embargo of Cuba has the island on the brink of economic collapse, if not starvation. Reactionary governments have already surged in El Salvador, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Argentina, and have since been joined by their counterparts in Costa Rica, Honduras, and Chile. This June, both the Peruvian and Colombian right were able to retake power—the latter with a mercurial, Trump-backed outsider. With an upcoming election in Brazil, the Trump administration is eager to see the most potent South American state undergo a similar political transformation.
And to the satisfaction of Secretary of State Marco Rubio—who appears to be spearheading this reimagining—a mosaic of the most regressive leadership Latin America has seen in a generation has come into focus. They seem poised to undo decades of progressive policies, redistributive politics, the inauguration of social rights, and environmental regulation. The damage could take a decade or more to repair.
U.S. INTERFERENCE IN LATIN AMERICAN politics is hardly novel. Since the very founding of the United States, its governments have tended to assert that the entire Western Hemisphere is America’s neocolonial possession. If anything, the recent Pink Tide—the period of left-wing populism in Central and South America that came about at the beginning of the 21st century—is a historical anomaly. From the Monroe Doctrine of the 19th century; the counterinsurgency doctrines created after World War II; the brutal, CIA-trained death squads that terrorized opposition parties in the 1970s and ’80s during Operation Condor; and the hard austerity politics of the neoliberal era at the end of the millennium, right-wing, America-backed governance has been the overwhelming Latin American status quo since the excising of the Spanish Empire.
The Biden administration was something of an about-face, with CIA Director Bill Burns intervening in Brazil to prevent a right-wing coup rather than start one. But Trump’s National Security Council has gone back to imperialist basics, stating that “[a]fter years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region.”
This enforcement presumably includes destroying the Latin American left. Indeed, this new collection of recalcitrant administrations is rooted in retrograde, Cold War ideals. From Chile’s freshly inaugurated president and Pinochet admirer José Antonio Kast to the comically absurd Milei in Argentina, nostalgia and revisionism abound when it comes to the era of American-backed dictatorships and paramilitary violence. And such sentiments align nicely with Marco Rubio’s political raison d’être: liberating both continents, and particularly Cuba, from the supposed shadow of socialism, even though the dread threat of Soviet communism has been gone for almost 30 years.
“He really believed that Venezuela and Argentina and Brazil and Colombia should be great countries, and that they should be staunchly anti-Communist,” a source once close to Rubio told The New Yorker. “They should be the engines of a reinvigorated South America.”
In practical terms, this first means prying open Latin America’s economy. The contemporary conservatives in the region, along with their U.S. backers, seem especially keen on reversing the social democratic reforms that came to dominate Latin American politics during the Pink Tide. As the Hondurasgate recordings indicate, this means dismantling many of the nationalization and regulation efforts that left-wing administrations pursued. These efforts were not particularly revolutionary or even radical—Norway did much the same thing when it discovered oil in the 1960s—but international business and reactionary activists alike castigated them as a slow-motion Marxist apocalypse.
We are already seeing the consequences of a reimagined South America in Venezuela, wherein American oil companies are scrambling to get in on the action, and the economic siege of Cuba has compelled it to adopt free-market reforms. In the Hondurasgate files, Hernández emphasizes that the incoming regime must embolden Employment and Economic Development Zones (ZEDEs)—essentially libertarian city-states where foreign capital could operate unabated.
It is these material interests that color the Trump administration’s vision for Latin America: a crude mixture of banana republic economics, goon-squad psychology, and imperial revanchism operated through comprador local politicians like Hernández. Under the auspices of fighting international cartels and combating Chinese influence, the president has sought to revive the old-school mano dura (“iron fist”) authoritarianism in the region by dressing it up as a matter of national security and global commerce.
This approach to foreign policy has been manifested specifically with the creation of the Shield of the Americas (AC3), a burgeoning axis of Latin American countries that, like Trump’s Board of Peace, is designed to undermine and ultimately supplant pre-existing international bodies like the Organization of American States (OAS). AC3 is, in the words of Rubio, meant to “advance strategies that stop foreign interference in our hemisphere, criminal and narco-terrorist gangs and cartels, and illegal and mass immigration.” Comprising 12 states ruled by right-wing governments, the AC3 naturally does not include Latin American countries with left-wing heads of state like Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico, and Brazil—yet.
In effect, AC3 will embolden this far-right coalition to ignore previous cooperations that centered, however ineffectually, on human rights—especially as it relates to state violence and repression. Conversely, AC3 seeks to remix predecessors such as Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative, security partnerships in which the U.S. spent billions to militarize the police forces of Colombia and Mexico, respectively. The problem is that U.S. investment into a similar program would run up against Trump’s “America First” agenda. Until American dollars start backing up AC3, social austerity and foreign investment for multinationals will have to serve as a proxy source for funding.
Regardless, AC3’s broader ideological function seems to be pantomiming these hyper-violent models to every partner: Both Plan Colombia and Mérida resulted in thousands of civilian deaths and human rights abuses, while drug cartels continued operating, and in many cases became more violent. Additionally, these remnants of both the global war on drugs and the global war on terror proved useful not only in emboldening right-wing paramilitary forces but also in allowing larger domestic firms and foreign capital to penetrate Latin American markets.
In practice, AC3 will mean that the Department of State will not be the primary mediator of foreign policy in Latin America, but rather the Defense Department. For example, instead of interfacing with Ecuador through the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently met with Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa. Ecuadorian voters ultimately rejected Noboa’s venture to build a new U.S. military base in the country. This dynamic portends deeper military incursions into Latin America: U.S. and Ecuadorian military forces recently conducted operations against cartels designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
AC3 will mean that the Department of State will not be the primary mediator of foreign policy in Latin America, but rather the Defense Department.
“That’s why we’re seeing an uptick in very great human rights violations in the entire region, because the trend is always that you have militarization, and once you have militarization, this inevitably will lead to other human rights violations,” Daniel Noroña, Amnesty International’s Americas advocacy director, said. “So once you have a militarization process and you have arbitrary detentions, extrajudicial executions, forced disappearances, and so on.”
Left unsaid in the AC3 alliance is how such agreements, which are framed around countering so-called “narco-terrorism,” can be weaponized against political opponents. In the modern Latin American context, this manifests in the criminalization, abduction, and debanking of groups that are hostile to Trump-friendly regimes—such as human rights defenders, indigenous leaders, and trade union organizers.
Further entrenching the militarization of Latin America is the spread of the so-called “Bukele model.” Since 2019, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele’s innovative take on the strongman routine has become the envy of the Latin American right. Following a breakdown in backroom diplomacy between the administration and the country’s most dominant cartels in 2022, the constitution was suspended, and Bukele empowered his security forces to arrest close to 2 percent of the country’s population. The ensuing steep decline in the country’s homicide rate, which has supposedly fallen by almost 99 percent, gave Bukele unprecedented popularity, allowed him to marginalize or imprison his left-wing opposition completely, and allowed U.S. investment to flow into the country. That then permitted him to pursue an illegal second term unabated.
Trump, Bukele’s reactionary peers, and even the then left-wing president of Honduras, Xiomara Castro, took notice—though the states of exception more recently imposed in Honduras and Ecuador have seen more mixed results. More recently, Bolivian president Rodrigo Paz declared a state of emergency after indigenous protesters engaged in strikes and blockades of major cities.
But it is Ecuador’s Noboa who is most keen on mirroring Bukele. However, a similarly brutal response to Ecuador’s skyrocketing cartel violence has not worked. The homicide rate remains sky-high, and Noboa’s popularity, which was once at Bukele-like levels, has collapsed. In turn, he’s declared martial law for months at a time to maintain control. Forced disappearances, prison massacres, and the assassination of indigenous leaders have followed. This, of course, hasn’t stopped Noboa, who, like Juan Orlando Hernández, has blatant ties to drug traffickers, from becoming a vital ally of the Trump administration.
“I think those kinds of botched operations, incompetence, lack of results on the ground, broken promises, all those kinds of things are starting to take a toll,” Guillaume Long, the former minister of foreign affairs of Ecuador under former President Rafael Correa, told me. “In fact, in many regards, he’s been saved by Trump.”
If other Latin American leaders can’t replicate Bukele’s apparent results on crime, they can at least copy the crown jewel of Bukele’s crackdown: the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT). This maximum-security prison—perhaps better called a torture dungeon—gained international attention for the draconian treatment of prisoners and its utility as a propaganda tool, leading the Trump administration to throw a collection of deportees into CECOT’s abyss to have some abuse to broadcast on television.
Now, the ground has been laid in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Honduras, and Peru for the construction of their own CECOT-style facilities, with Bukele also serving as a key adviser for Bolivia’s “prison reform.” Bukele was even the headline speaker for the ribbon-cutting of Costa Rica’s CECOT. “Everything we did in CECOT will be replicated in the Costa Rican version,” Bukele said at the grand opening.
Regardless of whether or not Bukele’s model can be perfectly retrofitted to other Latin American governments, the systemization of Bukele’s signature policy across the Americas augurs an unkind future: one wherein securitization becomes the primary weapon for displacing social resistance to austerity—and, most urgently, curtailing what’s left of the Pink Tide’s once-dominant politics.
FOR ALL THE BAD NEWS, this reactionary alignment should be seen as an opportunity as well. The success that the Latin American left had in alleviating poverty is undeniable; the matter of domestic security remained elusive. Progressive parties have been unable to reassure constituents that they’d be able to tackle the consistently pressing issue of criminal violence. Yes, homicide did decline across the region over the past decade, but voters demonstrably still felt victimized by the power of cartels.
“The left never was able to figure out that puzzle; they were never really able to address questions of criminality, of rehabilitation, of reassertion, of gang demobilization, you know, questions of the residue of arms that just exist in Central America and elsewhere,” Jorge Cuéllar, an assistant professor of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean studies at Dartmouth, said.
“It invested in things like social rights and women’s health, in schools and cultural centers and all of that, but sort of the immediate issues of criminality, extortion, homicide, etc., it had nothing but tried-and-true militarism and policing.”
Even the Pink Tide’s most public face, Brazilian President Lula da Silva, resorted to his own lackluster brand of mano dura politics. And when later Pink Tide leaders like Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador tried to reconcile the matter by allowing military and policing institutions to continue wielding influence, this ultimately undermined his Morena party’s social democratic aspirations. While this hasn’t deterred the Mexican electorate from embracing Obrador’s successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, it hasn’t paid off in other races. Much like when Kamala Harris tried to convince moderates that she was a hard-nosed proponent of tough-on-migration policies, most Latin American voters simply have not been able to buy into the left’s lackluster criminal justice bona fides.
Now, as the Pink Tide seemingly recedes into an ocean of obscurity, movement leaders on the Latin American left will have to reckon with the right’s insurgent, internationally minded movement with a counterattack. Otherwise, the cruel legacies of the Monroe Doctrine and the Cold War will not be bygone history, but reference points for a new chapter of reactionary domination.
