The Negative U.S.-Latin America Security Alliance

By Augusto Varas 

Over the past 70 years, the U.S. has developed a complex, close relationship with Latin America's armed forces, building a political and military narrative in which Washington leads, and local military personnel cooperate. The Shield of the Americas and other initiatives represent the current form of this relationship and foreshadow dangerous developments. 

During his second term, President Donald Trump is implementing a series of measures to dominate South America, Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Among other things, he has launched the Shield of the Americas to combat organized crime and curb migration. He has ordered attacks on vessels in the Caribbean and off the Pacific coast manned by alleged traffickers. He kidnapped Venezuela's president and seized the country's oil reserves, while linking terrorism to crime—a move that would allow him to justify military interventions in the region. This offensive has numerous precedents, though they have varied with global and local security circumstances.  

Since World War II, U.S. military relations with the region have been organized through the institutionalization of the inter-American defense system, including the creation of the Inter-American Defense Board (1942), the School of the Americas (1946), the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR, 1947), the Mutual Security Act of (1951), the Military Assistance Program (MAP, 1951) for arms transfers, the Inter-American Defense College (1962), and the International Military Education and Training (IMET, 1976).
Its ideological foundation—the national security doctrine developed during the Cold War—held that Western democracies faced threats not only from the Soviet-led socialist bloc but also from an internal enemy: leftist parties and organizations. Operation Condor (1975–1980s) put this doctrine into practice. Estimates suggest that, between 1946 and 2026, 60,000 Latin American officers were trained under this doctrine.

This institutionalization coexisted with U.S. encouragement and support for coups and military regimes: Venezuela (1952), Colombia (1953), Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964), the Dominican Republic (1965), Chile (1973), Uruguay (1973), Argentina (1976), Grenada (1983), and Panama (capture of Manuel Noriega, 1989).

In 1963, command of military operations in the region was centralized under the U.S. Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM) in accordance with a state policy—the National Security Strategies (NSE)—which are updated with each administration.
With the end of the Cold War, the focus of discourse shifted from anti-communism to drug trafficking and organized crime, emphasizing a pattern of strengthening military and police capabilities: Plan Colombia (1999) and the Merida Initiative (Mexico and Central America, 2008). At the same time, the U.S. reactivated the Fourth Fleet in the South Atlantic in 2008. Argentina, Brazil, and the Mercosur Parliament criticized what they saw as a militarization of tensions between the U.S. and ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America). 
In the new century, these policy orientations expanded to include previously unaddressed issues. The NSE-2010 (Barack Obama) stated that the main threats to hemispheric stability are transnational in nature, such as drug trafficking, money laundering, illegal immigration, firearms trafficking, and terrorism. Subsequently, the NSE-2015 added that the financial and operational overlap between criminal and terrorist networks in the region; the rapprochement with China; the increased Russian presence; and challenges posed by regional organizations such as CELAC deliberately exclude the United States and seek to limit our role in the hemisphere in countering Islamic extremism, recruitment, and radicalization efforts that support terrorist activities.

The NSE-2022 (Joe Biden’s presidency) formulated an “integrated deterrence” strategy to confront the PRC, Russia, and other states (in 2025, it included Iran) below the traditional threshold of conflict and integrating the land, air, maritime, cyber, space, economic, technological, and information domains. Across the entire U.S. Government, it aimed to integrate diplomacy, intelligence, and economic tools into security assistance and force posture decisions. The integration with allies included interoperability and joint capabilities, cooperative planning, and coordinated diplomatic and economic approaches. Ultimately, strategies like the creation of the Conference of American Armies (CAA, 1960), following the Cuban Revolution, helped implement these objectives.

These eight decades of institutionalized military presence in the region ended when the legitimacy of those policies was declared obsolete. A few days after US military forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro (January 3, 2026), Stephen Miller (Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy in the White House) made it clear in unambiguous terms: “The future of the free world depends on America being able to assert ourselves and our interests without apology,” reiterating previous statements by President Trump. The U.S. ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, was even more explicit declaring that the U.S. can bring down “any country we want.” Thus, U.S. policy shattered all the multilateral frameworks and informal rules that had governed the use of its military force in the region. 

The new U.S. military policy toward Latin America pushed its own boundaries by giving political submission one-dimensional primacy in government-to-government relations—a formula summarized as the “Donroe Doctrine” (January 2026), which affirmed the United States’ comprehensive pre-eminence in Latin America over external competitors by combining diplomacy, trade, sanctions, and military pressure. 

Thus, the Shield of the Americas (March 2026) —a statement signed by 17 Latin American countries— establishes the exchange of intelligence, the coordination of joint military operations, immigration control, and the containment of threats to “regional security” such as drug trafficking, irregular migration, and the expansion of transnational criminal organizations, thereby expanding the law enforcement role of the armed forces.  

According to this statement, “an Organ of Consultation under Articles 6 and 13 of the Inter-American Treaty on Reciprocal Assistance” (TIAR) would be established to promote and facilitate collective action against narco-terrorist organizations under the Rio Treaty. Article 6 states that any other fact or situation that may endanger the peace of the Americas shall result in the agreement on measures “which should be taken for the common defense and for the maintenance of the peace and security of the Continent”. The latter leaves open the possibility of joint military action against any country that, in the judgment of the majority of the members of that Body, is failing to contain such threats.

Although UN Resolution 2344 (1967) called for eliminating foreign military bases in the region, the United States has maintained and projected its military power through its own bases and a permanent military presence at other facilities that remain under US national control (quasi-bases). Last January, it approved US$1.5 billion to modernize and build new infrastructure at the Callao Naval Base, located 80 kilometers from the Chinese- funded Chancay megaport. 

Similarly, construction at the Ushuaia Integrated Naval Base (resumed in September 2026)—intended to support Argentina’s presence in the South Atlantic and Antarctica, which the U.S. defines as a strictly Argentine initiative—had already been visited by the commanders of USSOUTHCOM, Laura Richardson (2024) and Alvin Holsey (2025)—given the U.S. interest in preventing China from installing or financing dual-use facilities such as its Deep Space Station at Neuquén. Considering Donald Trump’s proposal to act as a “mediator” in the conflict between Argentina and the United Kingdom over the Malvinas (Falkland) Islands, in order to avoid “a potential disaster,” General Carlos Alberto Presti, Argentina’s Minister of Defense, noted that the “strategic alliance with the United States” would allow Argentina to “equip and position ourselves at the hemispheric level.”
Another component of this policy was recently formalized by Elbridge Colby, Under Secretary of War for Policy, who stated: “We want strong, reliable, and effective partners, not feeble and dependent ones,” and demanded that Latin American countries increase their military spending. At the same time, the State Department reported that funds from the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program, originally approved for Slovakia, North Macedonia, Tunisia, and Iraq, would be reallocated to Panama, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia, within the framework of the Shield of the Americas. Both policies will increase military demand for arms purchases in the region. 

This set of policies creates a perverse incentive for Latin American governments and armed forces to compete to establish a unique military relationship with the U.S.; failure to do so would result in punishment for undesirable governments, as outlined in the November 2025 National Security Strategy. A country’s military deterrence against another country—an ally of the U.S.—would be nullified, and its sovereignty would be jeopardized.

The most recent development was Trump’s September meeting with several Latin American leaders in New York to reaffirm both their commitment and U.S. leadership in the Shield of the Americas.  
These new U.S. policies destabilize current political-military relations in the region, making them dependent on the type of government elected and preventing the establishment of an effective regional zone of peace. For now, Latin American unity for peace depends fundamentally on regional coordination and mobilization of civil society organizations to defend national and regional sovereignty.
 

About the author

Augusto Varas Fernández, Ph.D. in Sociology (Washington University, St. Louis). He has served as director of the International and Military Relations Area at FLACSO-Chile; as a professor at the Institute of International Studies at the Universidad de Chile; at the Instituto Universitario Ortega y Gasset in Madrid; at Duke University, the University of California (San Diego), the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), and the University of Wisconsin (Madison). Fellow, Public Policy Scholar, and Vice-Co-Chair of the Advisory Council for the Latin American Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; member of the Executive Council and the Nomination Committee of LASA; Senior Research Fellow at FRIDE in Spain; and seminar coordinator at the Norwegian Peacebuilding Center (NOREF). Author of numerous books and articles on international relations, security, the armed forces, democracy, and international politics, he has served on the editorial boards of academic journals in Latin America, the United States, and Europe. He served as the Ford Foundation’s Representative for the Andean Region and the Southern Cone; and as an advisor to the General Secretariat of the Presidency (during the Patricio Aylwin Chilean administration) and to the Undersecretary of Defense (during the Michelle Bachelet administration). He currently serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Fundación EQUITAS (Chile).

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