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One of the US’ Biggest Vassal Governments in Latin America Just Banned the Country’s Main Opposition Party

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A taste of things to come under Trump’s “Shield of the Americas”? 

As the world’s attention is fixated, for obvious reasons, on developments in West Asia, big things are happening elsewhere. That includes in the US’ resource-rich “backyard”, which Washington once again wants to commandeer.

To that end, the Trump administration has cobbled together an alliance of right-wing Latin American presidents totally subservient to closely aligned with Trump. The guest list for Trump’s crassly titled “Shield of the Americas” summit, held last weekend in Doral, Florida, included the following heads of state and government:

  • Argentine President Javier Milei
  • Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz
  • Chilean President-elect José Antonio Kast
  • Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves
  • Dominican Republic President Luis Abinader
  • Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa
  • Guyanese President Mohamed Irfaan Ali
  • Honduran President Nasry Asfura
  • Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino
  • Paraguayan President Santiago Pena
  • Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele
  • Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar

Some of the attendees, of course, owe their position, at least in part, to Trump’s direct meddling in their national elections. They include Honduras’ Nasry Asfura, Bolivia’s Rodrigo Paz and José Antonio Kast, who on Wednesday became Chile’s first far-right president since Pinochet. As for Milei, he owes Trump for helping elect his party members to Argentina’s National Assembly in late 2025 by threatening to withdraw US economic support if any other party won.

The summit spawned the creation of the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition (ACCC) through a proclamation by the Trump White House. The proclamation included the following excerpt:

“My Administration has designated a number of cartels and transnational gangs as foreign terrorist organizations and has since dedicated unprecedented resources towards their destruction. These international entities control territories and commerce, extort political and judicial systems, wield arms and field military capabilities, and use assassinations and terrorism to achieve their ends.”

According to Trump, five additional countries signed the proclamation: Guatemala, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela (quite possibly under duress), and Suriname, making for a grand total of 17 — almost exactly half the total number of countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

To lead the ACCC, Trump appointed the disgraced Kristi Noem who spent most of his short stint as secretary of homeland security hunting down Latin Americans. Rather than facing the firing squad for her multiple scandals and controversies, ICE Barbie was given a nice little promotion. Now, rather than overseeing the security of the US homeland, she will be leading the US’ projection of force across its direct neighbourhood.

The main objective, she says in the clip below, is “to destroy the cartels” — a feat the US has supposedly been trying to pull off for decades, to no apparent avail.

This is the broad backdrop against which the government of Ecuador’s US-born, narco-connected president, Daniel Noboa, just made its most brazen move yet against the country’s democratic system. And it did so either with Washington’s tacit blessing or at its direct behest.

Killing the Opposition

Just a few days ago, an electoral judge in Ecuador, acting on the request of the government-aligned Prosecutor General, ordered a nine-month suspension of the Citizens’ Revolution (RC) party, Ecuador’s largest political movement that was founded years ago by supporters of former President Rafael Correa (2007-2017).

The temporary disqualification means that the centre-left party will not be able to register its candidates by the October deadline for the elections of local authorities, such as mayors and prefects, to be held in February 2027.

The move has triggered howls of protest from left-wing policy think tanks and a deafening wall of silence from Western governments and media, who are usually so quick to denounce anti-democratic moves by non-US aligned governments in the region. In a press release, the Washington-based Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) condemned Noboa’s latest putsch:

“The government of President Daniel Noboa, who is strongly backed by President Trump, is trying to accelerate the destruction of what is left of democracy in Ecuador,” said CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot.

In recent weeks, a series of judicial and administrative measures have been launched against the RC. Led by former president Rafael Correa, the RC is widely considered the principal opposition force in Ecuador, with the country’s largest member base and territorial presence.

“Democracy has been under attack since the presidency of Lenín Moreno (2017–2021), with not only the exclusion of political parties, but with persecution by lawfare, the imprisonment or forced exile of political opponents, and Noboa’s repeated assumption of ‘emergency’ powers and other abuses that have gutted civil liberties,” CEPR Director of International Policy Alex Main said.

Noboa has expanded the use of extraordinary measures in response to the country’s escalating security crisis. Nevertheless, the homicide rate has continued to rise, from 5.8 per 100,000 at the end of Correa’s presidency in May 2017, to 50.6. Prolonged states of emergency, curfews, and increased military deployment have been implemented nationwide.

On the same day as the ban on the RC, the Ecuadorian and US militaries conducted joint airstrikes near the Colombian border targeting an alleged FARC dissident site. These “lethal kinetic operations,” as SOUTHCOM called them, represent the culmination of Noboa’s efforts since his 2023 election to deepen ties with Washington — including attempts to reestablish a US military base in the country.

As we reported last week, the US military has opened up a new front in the Western hemisphere by launching joint military operations against “narco terrorist” organisations in Ecuador. The move came just three months after the Ecuadorian people voted unanimously in a referendum against the deployment of US military bases.

The military operations were conducted in an area close to Ecuador’s border with Colombia that is known for Indigenous resistance to President Daniel Noboa’s government, reports Arturo Dominguez for The Antagonist:

The White House and Noboa’s government claim the attack was against Comandos de la Frontera, a dissident group of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). However, the U.S.-led attack targeted coastal and border areas like Guayas and El Oro, where the Ecuadorian military previously deployed heavily to Imbabura to break Indigenous-led blockades. The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) condemned the military operation as an “unprecedented military occupation” and a “siege” on the city of Otavalo. Two days later, many Indigenous activists had their bank accounts frozen.

As we noted last week, another reason why this latest deployment of US troops, with the ostensible purpose of bolstering the Noboa government’s fight against the drug cartels, is controversial is that the Noboa family’s banana export business has been repeatedly implicated in cocaine trafficking.

This is standard operating procedure in the US’ War against Drugs. Throughout its 80-year history, the CIA has, for its own ends, supported the operations of narcotics manufacturers and distributors across the world, from Taiwan’s anti-communist Kuomintang to the Corsican mafia, to Colombia’s Pablo Escobar and Mexico’s Guadalajara and Sinaloa cartels.

It is the reason why Trump recently pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been sentenced by a New York court to 45 years in prison for conspiring to smuggle more than 400 tonnes of cocaine into the US.

As for Noboa, he is accused not just of engaging in drug trafficking but also political assassination. On February 25, Darwin Chavarría (aka Pipo), the leader of Ecuador’s largest cartel, Los Lobos, alleged that Noboa had masterminded the assassination of former presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, in August 2023, which opened the way for the current Ecuadorian president to win that year’s elections.

The suspension of Ecuador’s largest political party is part of a gradual authoritarian drift that began under President Lenin Moreno, Rafael Correa’s hand-picked successor who ended up betraying his mentor by evicting Julian Assange from Ecuador’s London Embassy, allegedly in return for an IMF bailout, and allying with former political opponents to implement a neoliberal economic agenda. That drift was later accelerated by Guillermo Lasso and Noboa.

Since the right’s return to power after Correa’s departure in 2017, Ecuador has become one of Washington’s most loyal vassals in the sub-region. During that time, the Andean nation, wedged between the world’s two largest cocaine producers (Colombia and Peru), has also become the main regional hub for cocaine trafficking to the United States and Europe.

One of Noboa’s first acts in power was to declare a permanent state of “internal conflict” which has seen the homicide rate explode to an unprecedented high of 50.9 per 100,000 — the highest in the Americas. Like Milei, Noboa has taken a chainsaw to government ministries and departments — particularly those that were key to the supporting basic rights and environmental protections, explains an article by Frontline Defenders:

In July 2025, the government reduced the number of ministries from twenty to fourteen through Executive Decree No. 60. As a result, ministries that were key to guaranteeing rights, such as the Ministry of Women and Human Rights, were incorporated into the Ministry of Government and reduced to an undersecretariat. The decree also included the absorption of the Ministry of Environment, Water and Ecological Transition (MAATE) by the Ministry of Energy and Mines, forming the new Ministry of Environment and Energy.

This decision eliminates the autonomous oversight of the mining sector by the environmental sector, as the powers of the MAATE became subordinate to extractive policy, seriously weakening the protection of ecosystems and the communities that inhabit them, and increasing the risk of socio-environmental conflicts. This… is particularly concerning for the human rights defence landscape in Ecuador, where most cases of defenders at risk occur in contexts of socio-environmental conflicts, with repeated cases of criminalisation of social leaders who seek to guarantee their right to participation and prior consultation in decision-making processes on extractive projects to be implemented on their territories and communities.

Right now, the US is determined to extract as much mineral wealth as possible from the subsoil of countries like Ecuador, which will inevitably leave a vast trail of environmental damage and human rights abuses in its wake. Like Noboa, Milei has loosened mining regulations, including, most controversially, in protected areas close to glaciers.

In the last few days, Noboa has opened the doors even wider to US influence and outright control. In a televised interview, he said he would happily let US troops enter Ecuador to hunt down members of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards being trained in Ecuador while providing no evidence that these groups are even present on Ecuadorian soil.

As we warned in early September, Washington is looking to merge two “failed” wars in Latin America: the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, with the ultimate goal of securing exclusive domain over Latin America’s vast trove of strategic resources for it to exploit in its confrontation with its main strategic rivals, particularly China:

Like the Global War on Terror, the whole edifice of the US’ war on the drugs cartels, is built on a foundation of lies. Just as Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, Venezuela is a relatively minor corridor for drug trafficking organisations. Just as the US supported Islamist terrorist groups whenever it served its interests (Syria, Libya, Chechnya…), the US has a long history of supporting drug trafficking organisations (Fast and Furious, IranContra, the Medellin cartel, Corsican mafia, Kuomintang…).

As NC reader Tom Dority succinctly put it, “this is not a ‘fight against’ (“narco-terrorists”) but is a fight for control of the ownership of the drug trades” — a fight that US government agencies, particularly the CIA, have been waging for decades.

That fight is now escalating rapidly. On Wednesday, the US announced the opening of its first Federal Bureau of Investigations office in Ecuador to combat the trafficking ​of drugs and weapons, along with ⁠money laundering and the financing of ​terrorism — in partnership with President Noboa, whose family business has been shown to have ties to drug trafficking.

From Reuters:

Ecuador’s Interior Minister John Reimber told reporters that collaboration with the FBI office would ​start immediately, after prior joint efforts ​with the U.S.

“What has changed is that we have ‌FBI ⁠agents permanently in Ecuador working with a national police unit that has been set up so that they can ​work together,” ​he said.

The agreement provides for the permanent presence of US agents and the creation of a specialized police unit to dismantle networks dedicated to drug trafficking. Below is a short clip of the signing ceremony. This is what it looks like when a treasonous government signs away what little remains of its nation’s sovereignty to the northern hegemon.

That, of course, will mean war — in a region that not so long ago was declared a zone of peace. That was at the second summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States held in 2014 in Havana, Cuba, a country the US is now starving of energy and which Trump is threatening to take over, in a “friendly or unfriendly” manner.

The island nation hasn’t received a single shipment of oil in three months. As the former US Ambassador to Cuba Jeffrey DeLaurentis (2015-17) said in a surprisingly frank interview with Christiane Amanpour, the goal is to “use humanitarian suffering as a political tool for change”:

While China offers the region trade and investment that is generally mutually beneficial, the US will be offering to install military bases or use their existing bases to host US military assets. Those assets can be used not only to help control local populations as the inevitable protests begin but also to increase the pressure, or even launch attacks, on less aligned countries in the region.

“Although Trump has now recruited, and in some cases helped bring to power, some 13 governments in the region, 60 percent of the population of Latin America — a solid majority — still lives in countries governed by people who seek to preserve and expand democracy and raise the living standards of the majority and the poor,” the CEPR’s Mark Weisbrot said. “These are Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, who combined also have 64 percent of the region’s GDP.

Here’s some expert trolling on the real purposes behind the Shield from the Chinese embassy in Washington:

The intensification of the drug war will mean more blood and gore, as we’ve already seen in Ecuador (and Colombia and Mexico before it). Meanwhile, the drugs will continue to flow northwards while the US-made weapons will flow in ever larger streams southward, to arm both sides of this totally needless conflict.

As George Carlin once said, the US “can’t build a decent car. Can’t build a TV or a VCR worth a fuck. Got no steel industry left, can’t educate our young people, can’t get health care to our old people. But we can bomb the shit out of your country, all right!”

Washington has already shown a keen interest in developing a joint military base in Ushuaia, the capital of Argentina’s Tierra de Fuego province, the southern most point of the Americas. It has also signed an agreement with Paraguay’s government to allow greater presence of US troops and civilian personnel within the countries’ borders.

The same will presumably be happening in all the other countries that have joined the “Shield”, including possibly even Costa Rica, which prides itself on having no armed forces. An advisor to the president-elect, Laura Fernandez, has proposed the establishment of U.S. military bases in Limón, Puntarenas and Guanacaste, the country’s three coastal provinces, to help combat the drug cartels.

Fernandez has so far rejected the idea, in public at least, arguing that such a policy would have to overcome a series of constitutional obstacles as well as a long, drawn out legislative process. But she will presumably come under sustained US pressure to change her stance (if indeed it is genuine).

The processes playing out bear chilling echoes of the dirty wars and coordinated repression of the 1970s and ’80s in which hundreds of thousands perished. As Dominguez notes, the recent military intervention in Ecuador could serve as a taste of things to come under Trump’s “Shield of the Americas”:

The populations of these countries will be unaware of who is doing what as bombs drop in various areas. With former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at the helm, providing fusion between the Department of State and the Department of Defense, and her history of cruelty and inhumanity while shirking the law, U.S. actions in Latin America are unlikely to consider human life in any of its actions.

A brief look at the map of participating countries highlights where the U.S. will likely position military assets, putting many of the countries Trump has previously targeted in the U.S.’s crosshairs.

The Noboa government’s nine-month suspension of Ecuador’s largest political movement, which may well be extended, is also a stark warning to countries in the region. As history has consistently shown, especially in Latin America, wherever the US military expands its presence abroad, the local governments it partners with tend to begin applying more and more repressive and authoritarian measures.

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8 comments

  1. ocypode

    As always, Porfirio Diaz’s famous quote rings true not just for Mexico but for the entirety of Latin America: “poor [Latin America], so far from God, so close to the United States!” Here’s to hoping the Iran debacle will be a blow strong enough to cripple US imperialism not just in West Asia, but in the whole world. Maybe if enough coffins are mailed back home, the US rulers will lose their appetite for meddling everywhere? (I’m not holding my breath, though). How long until they go for broke and start a war in Taiwan as well?

    Sadly, local governments and elites in Latin America are still too bedazzled by the “american dream” (of living in Miami) to see that following the US means simply following it to the grave.

  2. S. Weil

    Although the link is correct the wrong CEPR is referenced in the text – the Weisbrot/Baker CEPR is based in Washington DC not in London – that CEPR is quite different.

  3. The Rev Kev

    This appears to be part of a growing trend to curb stomp democracy and tell people to eat it. We saw that with Romania when they cancelled their election on spurious rumours and arrested & charged the leading candidate. So why should it be any different in South America? The Trump regime may have grandiose plans for this Shield of the Americas organization but putting Kristi Noem in charge only guarantees that in the long run that it will die of neglect. ICE Barbie made a lot of bad comments about South Americans when she had her job and now she is expected to work alongside them? Hopefully none of them will bring any of their dogs to their meetings or there could be trouble.

  4. Lee Christmas

    I may be victim in trying to seek a pattern in an otherwise chaotic sequence of events, but I have been searching for some method in this administration’s madness.

    I am trying to reconcile Trump’s moves in South America last year including your referenced election meddling, the “Donroe Doctrine,” this announcement of the Shield of the Americas, all with the Ramadan War.

    If things go according to “plan,” and US-Israel objectives to collapse the state of Iran are achieved, turning it into Libya or Syria, with subsequent ethnic balkanization, Israel (of course with explicit US-backing) would take over the role of the US in West Asia to achieve it’s larger goal of Greater Israel.

    On the other hand, US would focus it’s attention on Central and South America ostensibly to ‘combat narcotics trade’ but indeed to instead control it. With the US choosing to abandon and not rebuild some of their destroyed bases in West Asia, they can keep the war-machine MIC humming by building bases/reviving old ones south of the border.

    I did come across this:
    https://taskandpurpose.com/news/us-bases-latin-america-revived

    I remember Greg Grandin saying that one of the side effects of Obama’s stewardship of America becoming a net oil exporter was the weakening of some Latin American countries’ oil diplomacy, and good ties that came with that.

    If so, it could be that the death of the Washington Consensus has been greatly exaggerated and much like “Clean Break” or PNAC, US foreign policy is remarkably consistent and plays out in the long term, however short-sighted it seems in the moment.

    The added benefit of “Donroe” is also to challenge any current and future infrastructure projects that China may have down there. China builds infrastructure, US builds military installations. This also keeps Central and South America in the IMF/World Bank subjugation, rather than the slightly less onerous Chinese loans for infrastructure.

    And last, if things do not go according to “plan” and West Asia experiences the kind of Nuclear Armageddon that was talked about here a few days ago (I know Kirk’s piece presented analysis that this was unlikely, Kendzior’s piece presents it as plausible), rich Israelis can abandon Israel proper to the poor orthodox farmers in their shtetels, and decamp to South America, where Argentina and Chile would be happy to take them in. Of course, the Board of Peace would still fly drones overhead to keep an eye on any uppity people who stick around.

    In addition to Milei’s clear hard-on for Israel, I remember also Argentinian Rafael Grossi (head of the IAEA) being accused by Iran of sharing details of their nuclear sites with Israel, which they used to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists as well as aid in their bombing of those targets.

    I realize this is an overly broad overview, but as I said in the beginning I’ve been trying to makes some sense out of what seems like the most grotesquely stupid thing the US-Israel has done, in a long line of grotesquely stupid things.

    1. Nick Corbishley Post author

      In addition to Milei’s clear hard-on for Israel, I remember also Argentinian Rafael Grossi (head of the IAEA) being accused by Iran of sharing details of their nuclear sites with Israel, which they used to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists as well as aid in their bombing of those targets.

      Add to this the fact that Israeli citizens now have access to certain state benefits in Argentina, even as many Argentineans are losing access to theirs, which we covered here. Meanwhile, Israel’s state-owned water company, Mekorot, is quietly expanding its control over Argentina’s water infrastructure while Israeli companies are increasingly involved in operations in the so-called Lithium Triangle. All three of the countries that make up the triangle (Bolivia, Argentina and Chile) now form part of Trump’s Americas Counter Cartel Coalition (ACCC).

      One of the most stunning (and revealing) statements made by a Milei official was the following sentence addressed by Milei’s former chief of staff, Demian Reidel, to a gathering of foreign investors, particularly from tech companies, interested in investing in Patagonia:

      We have vast areas of land with access to energy, water and cold climates. The only problem are the Argentineans.

      1. Lee Christmas

        Hmm. And I remember during the Patagonia fires last year, a video circulated in the online rumor mills of an Israeli being there before the fires started.

        Don’t mind me, I’m just looking for some tinfoil :-/

  5. Eclair

    Wow, that was enlightening, Nick. While we are all focused on Iran/Israel/Middle East, this realignment is quietly being arranged in South America. Thank you. I think.

    Maybe it is time to stop referring to “the Trump administration,” or even “the Trump Regime,” because this will not stop when/if Trump disappears. Or is disappeared. I submit for consideration: ‘the Evil US Empire.’

    Relax and enjoy it, as the old misogynistic jokes back in the ’70’s used to quip.

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