The Goal is a Fascist Continent

Unpacking Trump’s End Game in Latin America with William Callison and Verónica Gago

Naomi Klein, William Callison, and Verónica Gago

Jul 30, 2026

Several readers of this newsletter have asked us to cover the attacks on democracy in Latin America. With that in mind, this week, I am thrilled to share Patterns’ first guest post, written by two scholars from whom I have learned a huge amount over the years, Verónica Gago and William Callison. Verónica is a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) in Argentina and has been a feminist organizer for years. William teaches political science at Hunter College at CUNY and is a member of the Zetkin Collective, a group of scholars and activists focusing on the political ecology of the far right. In this essay, they provide an invaluable roadmap for understanding the radical shifts underway in South America, and what it may portend for the world.

When we discuss rising fascism in the United States, many of the references tend to come from Europe. To understand the dangers of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s dehumanizing rhetoric and actions, scholars and commentators regularly look to parallels in the regimes of Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Francisco Franco.

Understanding this lineage is important, but there is a danger of glossing over inspirations closer to home. These include the homegrown fascism of the post-Reconstruction United States, particularly the eugenicist race laws that inspired the Nazis, and the myriad ways that South America has served as a laboratory for U.S. fascism. The Americas have their own specific fascist histories, places where new methods and ideas have been trialed and tested.

The influence of the Latin American right was clearest in the 1970s, when General Augusto Pinochet’s violent overthrow of the democratic socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1973 marked the bloody beginning of the neoliberal era (a chapter I covered extensively in The Shock Doctrine). With backing from the CIA, Pinochet turned his regime into a “workshop” (in Greg Grandin’s phrase) for the most extreme form of free-market economics the world had ever seen. Back in the U.S., the libertarian right celebrated Pinochet’s economic “miracle”–while conveniently glossing over the thousands of leftists Pinochet disappeared to clear its path.

On the U.S. right, Pinochet fandom is currently experiencing a resurgence. These days, however, it’s less his economic policies that are attracting admiration than the ruthlessness and brutality with which the dictator crushed the political left. Pinochet and the other generals who ruled neighboring states in the 1970s are now admired, not despite their imprisonment, murder, and disappearance of tens of thousands of trade unionists, student activists, and famed artists, but precisely because they did.

I knew we were headed into a dark place during the first Trump presidency, when far-right groups in the MAGA orbit started selling t-shirts with slogans like, “Free Helicopter Rides for Leftists,” and “Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong.” Today we have moved decisively beyond memes and t-shirts.

The war is an international one. Since returning to office, the Trump regime has been laser-focused on bringing the fascist right back to power across Latin America, interfering in election after election, from Argentina to Honduras, often with explicit monetary threats and bribes. The end goal is nothing less than a fascist Americas, stretching from Tierra Del Fuego up to Alaska (or, in Trumpian dreams, Greenland). The nerve center for this operation is the U.S. State Department–but its beating heart is in Miami. It is Florida, after all, where so many Latin American strongmen and war criminals have been welcomed into exile, and it is Miami where they have been able to launder their stolen fortunes, network amongst themselves, and plot their vindictive returns.

Marco Rubio, who is now at least as likely to succeed Donald Trump as JD Vance, is a pure creature of that Miami. The virulent anti-leftism that is its lifeblood courses through the veins of the U.S. Secretary of State. If you have any doubt, watch his chilling speech at the summit he hosted earlier this month on supposedly resurgent left-wing “political terrorism.” For anyone who knows the blood-soaked history of U.S.-backed Latin American dictatorships, this felt far too familiar: all over the continent, the battle against left-wing guerrillas was the cover story used to wage a war of annihilation against the left–armed and unarmed, religious and secular, elected and cultural. The claims of terrorism were the excuse the generals harnessed to crush an entire political tendency, pulling leftism up from its roots.

*******

The New Frontyard: Why Latin America Has Become the Playground For Imperial and Fascist Experiments

By William Callison and Verónica Gago

Latin America is riding a far-right wave, and the political map tells the story in vivid color. Around the turn of the century, the “pink tide” ushered in leftist governments and a “green tide” of feminist movements advanced abortion rights. Recently, however, the tides have shifted: twelve of the last fifteen presidential elections have been won by right-wing candidates. Clearly, the regional canvas is being repainted.

What might an increasingly far-right hemisphere look like? Modeled on Argentine President Javier Milei and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, and unfolding in the shadow of Donald Trump and Marco Rubio, it appears violent, chaotic, and yet also coordinated. As illustrated by Rubio’s recent initiatives around the so-called Resurgence of Political Terrorism and the Shield of the Americas, the far right increasingly operates as a sort of “internationalist” project.

With deepening financial, ideological, theological, and political ties, the international far right is better connected, more aggressive, and faster-paced than ever before. Their use of new technologies and fusion with Big Tech proliferates their ideas, while lining their pockets at the same time. Such are the forces recoloring the regional map.

This far-right or “right-wing international”–as Milei himself has called it–is emerging in the cracks of a geopolitical earthquake. We no longer inhabit a bipolar world, as during the Cold War, or a unipolar one, with the U.S. trumpeting itself as world hegemon. We are now witnessing real multipolarity, with China, Russia, the EU, Iran, and others checking U.S. power.

For many, the intensification of regional powers evokes the Monroe Doctrine, the nineteenth-century policy that designated Latin America as the “backyard” of the United States. Hoping to wield greater influence over the Western hemisphere, the Trump administration has leaned into this history, comedically rebranding it the “Donroe Doctrine” and reasserting the idea of the “backyard.” Yet this old metaphor fails to capture just how central Latin America is becoming for the shifting geopolitical order and for the far right itself. Today Latin America is better understood as the “frontyard”: an emergent playground of imperial and fascist experimentation.

Mobilizing in the frontyard, far-right governments are uniting around shared causes and constructing new enemies. Intensified extractivism, financialization, and militarization are their transnational causes. Their “internal enemies,” too, are of an increasingly transnational variety: roaming migrants, Indigenous peoples, feminist and queer subversives, environmentalists, and now, “narco-terrorists”.

This new and latest term, synthesizing the “war on drugs” with the post-9/11 scareword, works simultaneously as an appeal to security and a call for elimination. And as “terrorism” semantically expands to every conceivable adversary, it is becoming clear that internationalism–solidarity in struggles across different territories–is the ultimate target of today’s far-right international. In short, the global right is networked as never before, but any cross-border solidarity on the left is increasingly cast as criminal.

The “Anti-Terrorism” of the Americas

On July 16, Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller’s long-planned conference on “The Resurgence of Political Terrorism” was convened in Washington, D.C. Delegates from over 60 countries were in attendance to hear the Trump administration preach about the gravest threat to “civilization” and to coordinate police and military in response. In the aftermath of the administration’s cuts of federal programs that monitor far-right violence, the conference was premised on the highly dubious claim that the vast majority of historical and contemporary violence emanates from “the far left.”

“This is an international conference because we are facing an international, a transnational threat,” Rubio declared in his plenary address. “These are not distinct and isolated cells. They are interconnected networks. They do not recognize our borders. They do not believe, in fact, in the nation state itself.”

Like much of Rubio’s speech, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau’s remarks focused on the 1970s, with particular emphasis on the South American organizations Tupamaros and Montoneros, which he designated as terrorist groups. For the reference to Argentina, this is a clear inversion of historical narrative: it disregards the state terrorism perpetrated by the military dictatorship. Instead, it adopts the very language of the genocidaires in its characterization of these political organizations. When Landau celebrates the “defeat” of the left resistance–” it can be defeated because it has been defeated, and we can defeat it again”–he is speaking of a defeat that included the torture and disappearance of thousands of people, acts that have been tried and convicted in Argentina as crimes against humanity.

After the opening plenary, Argentine Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno delivered the luncheon keynote. He assured the audience that Milei’s government will continue to coordinate with the United States to eliminate everything and anything it considers “left-wing terrorism.” “What we are facing,” Quirno warned, “is an enemy that knows no borders and keeps moving, looking for loopholes.”

The US-led initiative against “political terrorism” has been compared to Operation Condor by experts like Argentine federal judge Adrián Grünberg, the president of a tribunal that put these events on trial for crimes against humanity. The first meeting of the CIA-backed Operation, held in 1975 in Pinochet’s Chile, gathered the dictatorships of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil. According to the tribunal, this is where they formalized an agreement “for the purpose of organizing a system of repression, persecution, and annihilation of left-wing political opponents throughout the region.”

Argentine congressman Horacio Pietragalla Corti, who was taken by the military at five months old after his parents were murdered in 1976, and returned to his family in 2003, has formally petitioned for access to public information on the scope of Argentine participation in the U.S. initiative. Yet even before the full truth has come out about this bloody past, the continent now finds itself in the grips of a new, even more ambitious coordinated campaign.

The “Shield” of the Americas

Following the indiscriminate killing of hundreds of “narco-terrorists” at sea and the invasion of Venezuela, the Trump administration launched its key hemispheric initiatives, the Shield of the Americas and the Americas Counter-Cartel Coalition (A3C). With the stated purpose of targeting crime, drug trafficking, migration, and Chinese influence in the hemisphere, these projects represent the most wide-ranging effort to coordinate over a dozen right-wing governments in Latin America and the Caribbean.

At a March roundtable with Milei, Bukele, Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa, and Chilean President Jose Antonio Kast, among others, Rubio introduced Kristi Noem as Special Envoy to the Shield of the Americas. The former Homeland Security secretary, who just recently had overseen ICE’s “mass deportation” campaign in U.S. cities, declared a shared mission “to go after these narco-terrorists that are destroying our people.”

In detailing the A3C, Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller echoed the sentiment. This program designates “several cartels and transnational gangs as foreign terrorist organizations” and pledges to “operationalize hard power to defeat these threats to our security and civilization.” This runs parallel to Miller’s domestic work targeting “Antifa” as a terrorist organization, which has already yielded results: extraordinary terrorism-related sentences–at least 50 years in prison each–given to fifteen anti-ICE protesters following their “noise demonstration” outside a Texas detention center to show solidarity with those inside. In the case of A3C, Miller explained that “there is not a criminal justice solution to the cartel problem.” Cartels, he added, are “the ISIS and Al Qaeda of the Western hemisphere, and should be treated just as brutally.”

These are also the grounds on which the U.S. has justified its multilevel attacks on Venezuela and Cuba. Shortly after its “anti-terrorism” conference, the U.S. State Department released a 100-page report titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.” The neo-McCarthyite reading of Cuban influence seeks to connect international histories of the left from the Black Power and guerilla movements in the 1970s to movements around Black Lives Matter, Antifa and the Democratic Socialists of America today. It concludes that the U.S. now faces three different categories of terroristic threats: “narco-terrorists and international gangs,” “historical Islamist terrorists,” and “violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists.”

The existentialized war framing of the Shield of the Americas combines Miller’s focus on domestic repression with Rubio’s gambit for hemispheric militarization. Its framework gives new impetus to coordinate against the far right’s long-standing enemies. And now, every enemy the far right wishes to dispense with–Indigenous, transfeminist, environmentalist, and labor movements–is being smeared with the spectral crime of “terrorism.”

The “Frontyard” of the Americas

Resonances can be found between the 1970s and today. But it is important to highlight the novelties that characterize the current geopolitical situation. If the U.S. once spoke of the “backyard” to promote itself as a democracy over and above its Latin American neighbors, the “frontyard” better describes an emergent order in which the U.S. and its far-right allies pursue shared projects, make collective statements, and drop the lip service to democracy. Unlike the Cold War order in which Latin American countries needed to be “cleaned up” to join the liberal democracies of the North– through a coup d’etat, if need be–it is now a place where authoritarian exit strategies from liberal democracy are being tested out.

Looking at the concrete processes remaking the regional landscape, the frontyard refers to techno-financial (especially crypto and AI), extractivist (critical minerals and fossil fuels to power them) and militaristic expansionism. Where Pinochet’s Chile was neoliberalism’s workshop in the 1970s, today it is Milei’s Argentina being offered up as a laboratory for capitalism’s next phase.

All of these forces have come together in Peter Thiel’s personal installment in Argentina, where Palantir’s predictive AI technology is being fused with state architecture. His image of the country as a “bunker” or “Plan B” for nuclear catastrophe or other apocalypses reveals the “End Times Fascism” dimensions of this project, as Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor call it.

Thiel’s is but one of countless examples of new investments in security, with many used to protect mining, logging and fossil fuel projects from social discontent. At the same time, the impoverishment of the population is being rerouted through financial devices. Crypto and “fintech” represent the new infrastructure for exploiting poverty caused by austerity policies, but also shaping perceptions of finance as a site of freedom and proof of individual merit.

With the attacks on Venezuela and Cuba, the electoral interference in Colombia and Peru, and the early signs of manipulation in the October presidential election in Brazil, 2026 marks a turning point. For a region fast becoming a frontyard of fascist experimentation, Milei offers a model. Beyond deepening ties with Trump and greenlighting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, he is now advancing labor, environmental and land reforms which kickstart a new phase of natural and digital extractivism, siphoning new forms of value from the public to private capital. “Argentina invites AI to free itself,” Milei declared in the Financial Times, arguing that AI companies should be given legal personhood and left unregulated. In his vision, Buenos Aires would be to the AI era what Amsterdam was to the age of sail.

In admiration of the Argentine laboratory, Flávio Bolsonaro invited Milei onstage to dance at his July 24th campaign launch in Brazil. This week the new President of Peru, Keiko Fujimori, embraced him in Lima during the transfer of command, just as Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz did at his inauguration last year. After celebrating Fujimori’s opportunity to resurrect her father’s dictatorship, Milei will visit two other aspirational dictators, Daniel Noboa in Ecuador and Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia. Noboa is rapidly advancing authoritarian measures on multiple fronts, and de la Espriella, who takes power on August 7, campaigned on the message that he will be the Milei-style leader the country needs to “disembowel” the left.

Within the Shield of the Americas, the far-right international, is attacking all forms of global solidarity it deems “terrorism.” The paradox is that its campaigns of persecution and criminalization are premised on a recognition that internationalist and anti-fascist alliances remain worldmaking forces themselves, capable of checking the fascist drive for unlimited power. It’s an important reminder of the latent power of true internationalism.

+++++++++++

Zionism & Americanism are the front lines of Western civilisation and freedom in our world today: Pete Hegseth US Secretary of Defense

Homeland Empire

Tar Wars

‘An International Thug’

Trump’s new world order is being born – and Venezuela is just the start

Venezuela: Private Wounds, Loud Audiences

Biden Is the Latest President to Tout the Vietnam War as Proud History

Norman Solomon: How the Warfare State Paved the Way for a Trumpist Autocracy

The US left Vietnam 50 years ago today. The media hasn’t learned its lesson

Vietnam’s Village of Moroccan Defectors

Henry Kissinger was the definition of elite impunity