Latin America and the Caribbean in the Face of US Desperation

By Stephen Sefton – Aug 24, 2025

The general consensus in Latin America and the Caribbean is that organized crime is the main threat to the region’s security. What is usually omitted is the central role of the US government in manipulating the regional structures of organized crime and money laundering. US government propaganda uses the alibi of fighting organized crime and drug trafficking to justify its extensive military presence in the region. Lately, it has served the Trump administration in order to threaten Mexico with possible military incursions and to mobilize warships with amphibious assault capabilities and contingents of marines to intimidate Venezuela

In fact, for decades it has been conclusively demonstrated that US financial institutions launder drug trafficking money on a large scale and that the US authorities encourage organized crime and drug trafficking by means of the CIA and its so-called drug enforcement agency, the DEA. More than 15 years ago, the Venezuelan authorities established that the DEA is merely one more regional drug trafficking cartel. It is notorious that the UN Office on Drugs and Crime reported in 2009 that it was money from organized crime and drug trafficking that kept the US banking system afloat during the financial collapse of 2008-2009.

Data of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), established by the G7 rich countries in 1989 to control international money laundering, indicate that between 2% and 5% of the world’s Gross Domestic Product comes from illicit activities. The US and British jurisdictions are among the five most involved in money laundering, along with Switzerland. The FBI itself estimates that more than US$300 billion in illicit funds are processed in the US jurisdiction every year. A similar amount of illicit funds is processed in the European financial system.

This year, on March 2nd, the US government Treasury Department suspended the application of the Corporate Transparency Law, legislation supposedly designed to control money laundering. In theory, the next valuation by the FATF, scheduled for February next year, will have to assign the “gray” category to the American financial system for not complying with international standards. However, essentially, FATF is another protagonist of the perennial farce in which institutions controlled by the collective West assess and evaluate their de facto owners while denouncing and condemning governments and nations which reject Western control.

This regulatory theater feeds the relentless psychological warfare that justifies the diplomatic, economic and terrorist aggression deployed by Western countries to destabilize entire regions of the world. In the aftermath of NATO’s categorical defeat in its war against Russia in Ukraine, some Western observers perceive the development of a new political-military international order based on the concept of respective spheres of influence. This outdated 19th century concept posits that the dominant regional power can legitimately assume the right to impose its will on weaker neighboring countries.

On the other hand, since the end of the Cold War at the end of the last century, the governments of Russia and China have developed as a guide for international relations the concept of indivisible security achieved through dialogue and respect for the interests of each country. In the European context this principle was formally established in the Istanbul Charter of 1999 and the Astana Declaration of 2010. In fact, the governments of NATO countries have completely ignored it. Until 2022, they continued their menacing expansion towards the borders of Russia and now it turns out that they are facing a decisive strategic defeat in Ukraine.

Based on the same principles of dialogue and respect for the interests of other countries, since 2022 China has promoted its Global Security Initiative, which takes to a broader level and scope the vision set out in 2014 by the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States which declared our region as a region of Peace. However, the US Southern Command plays a leading role in US foreign policy, permanently based on the Monroe Doctrine and gunboat diplomacy. This week, the head of the Southern Command, Admiral Alvin Holsey, continued the interventionist program of the previous chief, General Laura Richardson, with visits to the Dominican Republic, Panama, Argentina and Paraguay.

US meddling in the region has intensified markedly with the merging of the functions of Secretary of State and National Security Adviser in the administration of President Trump in the figure of Marco Rubio. In fact, Marco Rubio’s political career has been as a representative of the organized crime, drug trafficking and terrorism networks of the Cuban mafia in Miami. In January of this year, Rubio declared to a US Senate committee that China is “the most powerful and dangerous near-peer adversary this nation has ever faced.” No wonder the Chinese Foreign Ministry has criticized Marco Rubio’s ”Cold War mentality.”

In fact, the tariff war unleashed by President Trump has shown that the US economy is far behind China’s productive and commercial capacity. Similarly, US military power is also not on a par with the armed forces of the Russian Federation. The growing recognition of this reality and the increasing cooperation between countries of the majority world in defense of their interests has forced the US ruling class to focus its attention much more on Latin America and the Caribbean in order to ensure their access to the region’s natural resources. At first glance, the political landscape of the region seems quite favorable for American interests, because right-wing or center-right political forces predominate.

But it is necessary to point out several factors that counteract the criminal US impulse to expand and deepen its neocolonial control of the region. First, the internal political control of US allied governments is fragile due to the socio-economic precariousness of the majority of their populations and the strength of social movements resist those governments’ neoliberal. Secondly, in order to maintain commercial and financial stability, these reactionary governments need to work with and trade with the economy of the People’s Republic of China and with Asian economies in general. They know perfectly well that their relationship with the American economy is one of serving as territories to be plundered in exchange for nothing, apart from the usual contempt and arrogance.

China to Washington: ‘Latin America and Caribbean are Not Anyone’s Backyard’

Intertwined with these two considerations is the fundamental political-affective aspect that is inseparable from the issue of poverty reduction. Almost all the governments in the region suffer from low levels of economic growth and almost all, with different levels of seriousness and commitment, pretend to want to reduce poverty. But poverty reduction takes different forms depending on the economic vision of the respective governments. The governments of Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay or Peru prioritize the profits of their elites while letting a few drops of wealth trickle down to improve their countries’ majorities nominal incomes.

The governments of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico have shown a more serious commitment to poverty reduction through robust state interventions. In Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, their governments’ revolutionary poverty reduction has prioritized economic democratization allowing the human potential of their families, and their countries’ youth to flourish, via a focus on the development of the human person. It is precisely the fascist imperative to put down this revolutionary democratization that motivates the genocidal blockade against Cuba and the aggressive unilateral coercive measures by the US government and its European allies against Venezuela and Nicaragua.

Nor is it any coincidence that Brazil, Colombia and Mexico have incurred the displeasure of the US government because they advocate a vision of human development more aligned with the Chinese vision of the destiny of a shared future for humanity. The fourth China-CELAC Summit in May this year confirmed the determination of the People’s Republic of China to direct its economic development relations towards a future shared with all the countries of the region. In the end, the desperation of the US ruling elites is that they cannot stop the development of the region with the People’s Republic of China of trade and financial relations or of investment in infrastructure for connectivity.

Nor can they stifle the political-affective vision shared with China of making the potential of the region’s peoples flourish by creating greater spaces of all kinds for the development of the human person. For now, the local oligarchies of our region are torn between the need to develop good relations with China and their traditional submission to the US ruling elites. The terrorist activities of the US government around the world are a response to the desperation of the criminal ruling elites who own it. In the case of Latin America and the Caribbean, our Co-President Comandante Daniel expressed this reality at the XIII ALBA-TCP Extraordinary Summit when he observed:

“That’s what the Imperialists are terrified of, the Strength of the world’s Peoples when they decide to fight and when there are leaders like Chávez, in the case of Venezuela, who took the challenge head-on, the challenge to fight for Peace, to fight for the Well Being of the world’s Peoples. No war was planned by Chavez, nor by Nicolas. But there is the example the of those Revolutions, there is the example of the Cuban Revolution and there is the example of the Sandinista Revolution. So then they must be liquidated, so that the Imperialists can hijack the Sovereignty of the Peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean. But They Won’t Prevail! They Could Not Prevail, Nor Will They!”

(Tortilla con Sal)