The Changing Face of Fascism in Latin America: From the General’s Silence to the Showman’s Scream

By Nel Bonilla – Jul 04, 2026

How the US-led empire traded military coups and death squads for cognitive warfare, soft coups, and managed chaos.

I’ve been watching two extraordinary analyses from Mexican historians and Latin American specialists—Christian Nader on Retrovisor and the panel on Contralínea’s América Insumisa—and I wanted to share some reflections on what they reveal about the evolving nature of right-wing politics in the region, and how it connects to the broader strategic logic of the US-led empire that I have been mapping under the concept of the Bunker State, the Fragmentationist Grand Strategy and the Multi-Layered Cage.

The recent electoral shifts in South America—the razor-thin victories of the right in Peru, the rise of figures like Javier Milei in Argentina, the persistent strength of Bolsonarismo in Brazil—are often read as national phenomena. But we should understand these developments as a mutation in the very form of fascism, shaped by the changing strategic needs of the empire and the new terrain of cognitive warfare. (Not to say, there was no cognitive warfare before but nowadays, new technologies have given it a sharper edge.)

What I want to do here is connect three things: The electoral pattern and dynamics around the urban right, the rural left and razor-thin margins, the mutation of Latin American fascism from austere generals to histrionic populists, and the imperial strategy behind it, from coups to deaths squads to cognitive warfare and managed chaos.

The power triad of Latin American fascism
First of all, drawing on the framework of historian Christian Nader, we must understand that historical Latin American fascism was a pact between three specific sectors. This alliance was explicitly designed to crush popular movements and preserve elite dominance—a dynamic that, to varying degrees, still holds true today.

The first pillar was capital. This encompassed the industrial bourgeoisie, big employers, and business owners. Later, it expanded to include narco-traffickers—a faction publicly demonized, yet structurally highly useful. Indeed, narco-traffickers remain a crucial faction of capital in the context of modern imperial hybrid warfare.

The second pillar was the clergy. This primarily included the Catholic institution—a direct descendant of colonial viceroyalties—which functioned as the oldest piece of the machinery, selling salvation and naturalizing inequality. However, this dynamic shifted drastically in the 1970s and 1980s with the rise of Liberation Theology. This movement fused Catholic doctrine with Marxist analysis and anti-imperialist goals. Taking Jesus’ famous declaration that “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” as a literal mandate, Liberation Theology served as an absolute condemnation of exploitative economic systems, firmly rejecting the idea that wealth is a sign of divine blessing. Because this posed a severe threat to the ruling class, the US-led empire responded aggressively. They strengthened ultra-conservative factions of the Catholic clergy and, to an even more dramatic extent, fueled the expansion of (Zionist) evangelical churches across the region.

The third pillar was the military. Its internal structure reflected a stark class and racial divide: the upper echelons—the generals and top brass—were largely inherited positions, drawn directly from the criollo elites and ruling strata. In stark contrast, its foot soldiers were drawn largely from the poor and the lumpenproletariat—the marginalized, disenfranchised underclass. For these lower ranks, the system often offered a brutal choice: join the army or fall into organized crime. Once inside, they were heavily indoctrinated to obey the chain of command and defend the elite “order” of their commanders above all else. Today, however, this dynamic has shifted, albeit unevenly. In several countries, when progressive or leftist politicians took office, they implemented policies to democratize the armed forces. These reforms aimed to create a more humanist institution that genuinely reflects the population, though the success of these efforts varies wildly across the region.

This triad explains why the Cold War fascist aesthetic which we will now describe was so austere in Latin America.

The Cold War Dictator: Austerity as the Aesthetic of Pure Coercion
The dictators of the Cold War era—Pinochet, Videla, Stroessner, Somoza,..etc.—were defined by what Nader calls “Spartan sobriety.” They wore crisp military uniforms and dark glasses. They presented themselves as stoic, disciplined, and severe. Their coups were announced in formal, static environments, backed by the institutional weight of the military as well as capital and the clergy.

This overt military violence and aesthetic was also inextricably linked to the context of the Cold War. During this era, the US-led empire faced an existential threat: an organized, armed, and ideologically coherent revolutionary left, backed by a rival superpower. As we know, socialist movements of that time supported one another ideologically, materially, and even militarily—both across Latin America and transcontinentally. Therefore, the imperial response “needed” to be kinetic: coups, death squads, forced disappearances, and Operation Condor. The goal was to crush and destroy the left entirely (from peaceful students to armed guerrillas) through the full force of state terror.

Economically, this bloc implemented neoliberalism under dictatorial protection. We cannot overstate the significance of the Chicago School of economics, led by Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger, in this endeavor. Through the U.S. State Department-funded “Chile Project” (1950s–1960s), Chilean economics students were brought to the University of Chicago. These Latin American students—later dubbed the “Chicago Boys”—returned home deeply indoctrinated in radical free-market theories, waiting for an opportunity to implement them. While mainstream South American politics at the time favored state-led development through structuralism and dependency theory, the Chicago Boys drafted El Ladrillo (”The Brick”), a 500-page economic manifesto advocating for total privatization. Once in power, this neoliberal imposition included mass privatization, severe wage repression, and aggressive foreign‑capital integration.

To enforce and justify this economic model, the bloc rested on a rigid ideological foundation. This included elitism and aporophobia—a deep contempt for the poor, combined with the infantilization of the masses as “idiots” or “children” who needed to be ruled. It was also driven by systemic racism, where the white/criollo military brass viewed indigenous, mestizo, and Black populations as “harmful elements” to be managed or eliminated. Finally, until the mid‑1950s, this worldview included a deep Judeophobia inherited from European fascism.

The theater was minimal because the violence was maximal. The performance was the violent repression itself. The austere, military aesthetic communicated that the “chaos” of socialism is over. “Order” had been restored.

The Post-Cold War Shift: From Suppression to Managed Demobilization
After the Soviet Union collapsed, the strategic calculus changed. The revolutionary left, as an organized (and armed) force, was largely defeated or transformed into electoral movements. The threat now was democracy itself: the possibility that popular movements, now operating through electoral channels, might win power and use it to challenge the neoliberal order.

In this scenario, the old methods—coups, death squads, open military rule—had become materially costly. They destabilized investment climates and, crucially, risked reigniting the very resistance they were meant to extinguish. The memory of the 1960s and 1970s—of the Sandinistas, the FMLN, the Tupamaros, of a continent in flames—is still very much alive in Latin America.

So what replaces the coup? A more sophisticated, multi-layered strategy of demobilization. The Bunker State carefully avoids creating martyrs or inadvertently unifying the opposition. Rather than driving populations back toward armed resistance, it seeks to manage dissent, fragment it, and safely channel it into forms that pose no threat to the core hierarchies of the world-system.

The empire therefore required a different toolkit built around the concept of thesoft coup. This multi-layered apparatus includes lawfare, constitutional manipulation, and aggressive judicial offensives. It relies heavily on election interference—ranging from the influence over electoral software, data flows, and tally systems, to blatant US support for preferred candidates, often paired with threats of economic ruin if a country elects the “wrong” leader.

Beyond the ballot box, the empire deploys sanctions and sieges to economically strangle governments deemed “anti-US” (such as Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua), severely minimizing their capacity to act. Simultaneously, it unleashes cognitive warfarethrough relentless media campaigns, algorithmic propaganda on social platforms, and strict narrative management. Finally, this strategy relies on a covert dimension: the DEA-CIA connections that leverage cartels and gangs as destabilizing forces. Once this managed chaos successfully places the far-right in power, the loop is closed via so-called mano dura (iron fist) policies, installing mass incarceration as another important mechanism of domestic control.

As a recent US Army War College report states the siege and sanctions dynamic with candor:

“The anti-US governments of Venezuela, Cuba, and, to a degree, Nicaragua are under considerable US pressure, which minimizes their willingness and ability to work actively against US interests.“

This is the logic of calibrated pressure: enough to disable, not enough to martyr. Enough to demobilize, not enough to radicalize.

The New Right Aesthetic: Theater as Cognitive Warfare
This is where the histrionic, dramatic, violent-in-rhetoric style of the new Latin American right becomes legible. Nader contrasts the “Spartan sobriety” of the old dictators with the “high histrionics” of figures like Milei, Bolsonaro, and their imitators. A stoic general in an uniform cannot capture the populist imagination. But a chainsaw-wielding showman can. Even though, admittedly, every country still has there nuances in the presentation of their far-right political figures. Still, the new aesthetic is a reflection of a transformation of fascism into a form adapted to the current strategic environment. Why?

It “wins” elections. The new right secures power—or at least appears to—through the ballot box. This provides a veneer of democratic legitimacy that makes it harder for the opposition to mobilize. A traditional coup can be resisted with a general strike, whereas an elected demagogue is a far more complicated challenge. Admittedly, Bolivia, with its specific societal structure and degree of political organization within, seems to resist this logic to a certain extent, as evidenced by the ongoing, indefinite general strike taking place as of July 2026.

It demobilizes through spectacle. The constant theater keeps the public in a state of emotional arousal. It saturates the information environment. It makes it difficult for a coherent, class-based opposition to form, because everyone is too busy reacting to the latest outrage.

It channels discontent into cultural war. The new right redirects popular anger. It takes the legitimate grievances of people immiserated by neoliberalism and gives them a target that is not the ruling class: the “globalist elite,” the “cultural Marxists,” the “gender ideology.” The theater provides an emotional outlet without ever threatening the material structures of power. Even such words as “liberty” are stripped of any meaning related to human liberation from oppression, and reduced strictly to market freedom and the freedom of property‑holders to do as they wish.

It avoids the martyr effect. The new histrionic right creates chaos. It is far harder to organize a revolutionary movement against a shape-shifting performer who claims victimhood even as he wields power. This does not mean violence is absent. Police repression of protests, mano dura policies, and the targeted assassination of grassroots leaders — Berta Cáceres in Honduras, murdered in 2016 following the 2009 US-backed coup against Manuel Zelaya — remain live instruments. But the violence is more dispersed, its authorship deliberately obscured, and it is applied selectively enough to avoid generating the iconic martyrs that united opposition movements against Somoza, Pinochet, or the Argentine junta.

However, there are some more points about the features of this new Latin American far-right that I want to highlight:

Economically speaking, these new far-right faces talk about or are adjecent to so-called anarcho‑capitalism and radical libertarianism which one could read as an escalation from the previous neoliberal status quo. In other wordds, there is an explicit call to abolish the state altogether, replacing it with direct rule by corporate boards who are supposed to run the economy much better. It is about creating a “corporate society” in which public institutions are reduced to shells around private power.

Thus, for example, the Argentinian President Javier Milei, said the following in 2024 while visiting Rome:

Philosophically, I am an anarcho-capitalist, and therefore I feel a profound contempt for the State. I believe that the State is the enemy, I believe that the State is a criminal association — a criminal organization in which a group of politicians come together and decide to use the monopoly to steal the resources of the private sector.

Nonetheless, there is a glaring contradiction and a profound hypocrisy in such statements. These figrues depend entirely on the state, its tax system, the police, military, bureaucracies, to protect property and enforce contracts. If you removed the state structure for twenty minutes, figures like Milei would collapse. They are dependent on what they claim to want to destroy.

In that same vein, such frameworks include a stance of hyper-commodification which includes the commodification of the human body. Because they equate private property with personal property, modern fascists push commodification to absurd extremes. Milei has advocated for selling living human organs on the open market, under the premise that a person’s body is their ultimate real estate asset, and talked about selling children, and when pressed repeatedly, refused to categorically oppose a market in children.

Another interesting feature of this new Latin American fascism is its change from Judeophobia (until the mid-1950s) to forming a Zionist alliance starting in the 1970s. Israel is seen as the successful model of a supremacist, fascist nation‑state (even though they drape it in the language of security effectiveness, democracy, and anti-terrorism). Latin American far‑right governments import Israeli counterinsurgency, repression, and espionage techniques into their own security apparatuses. What’s more, even figures like El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and Hondura’s Nasry Asfura who are of Palestinian origin, engage in such policies without batting an eyelash. Indeed, as of June 2026, legislators from 12 Latin American countries signed a resolution in Buenos Aires backing Milei’s “Isaac Accords” — explicitly modelled on the Abraham Accords and aimed at deepening Israel-Latin America security, diplomatic, and intelligence ties.

This pivot follows Washington’s directives: aligning with Israel is part of integrating Latin American regimes into a US‑led hyper‑imperial structure. Fundamentally, the institutional mechanism for this process is now formalized. In February 2026, Israeli FM Gideon Sa’ar met with Argentine and US officials in Washington for “the launch of a new Israel-US strategic dialogue on Latin American affairs”, with Sa’ar declaring 2026 “a year of focus on Latin America”. Further, the Shield of the Americas, launched on March 7, 2026, at Trump’s Doral resort in Miami, is probably the single most concrete institutional expression of this alignment with hyper-imperialism. Trump convened 13 heads of state — all right-wing or far-right— and signed a joint security declaration committing member states to “lethal military force to destroy sinister cartels and terrorist networks”. The CSIS additionally frames the Shield as part of a broader strategy to counter China in the Western Hemisphere, including pressuring members to exclude Chinese infrastructure from their ports and replace Chinese telecoms networks.

On the topic of religion, one could say that “capital” has become the new faith, operating in conjunction with the expansion of new “churches.” In part, this was a deliberate reaction to counter the increasing presence of Liberation Theology—a resistant, anti-imperialist, and socialist movement that took hold in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s. This counter-offensive was so strategic that, of course, the CIA was involved. Thus, if the traditional clergy fails to control the masses, capital creates new churches: media empires, television spectacles, social platforms, right‑wing think‑tanks, and academic networks. This also extends to literal religious alternatives, such as the evangelical church. Together, these institutions preach the new gospel of inequality and market inevitability.

Indeed, the face of religion has shifted dramatically in many Latin American countries, moving from Catholicism to Evangelicalism. A January 2026 Pew Research survey looked at the decline of Catholicism across Latin America. The Latinobarómetro data shows Catholic identification dropped from 70% in 2010 to 57% in 2020 across the region, with some countries experiencing a much steeper dynamic than others.

Another characteristic that goes hand-in-hand with these developments is an intensified social conservatism. While partially rooted in the logic of who is able to produce profit, this conservatism serves a deeply functional economic purpose. It directly accompanies the privatization and dismantling of social services. After all, someone still has to care for the children, the elderly, and a family’s overall health. The fewer social services there are, the more this burden is shifted onto the traditional family structure, dramatically increasing unpaid and precarious domestic work at home.

Crucially, this new fascism feeds on left failure. It emerges from the political vacuum left when social‑democratic or pseudo‑left governments compromise, capitulate, or actively hand the keys to the ultra‑right: Alberto Fernández paving the way for Milei in Argentina, Gabriel Boric enabling Kast in Chile, Iván Cepeda yielding ground to Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia.

The Gramscian Inversion: Why the Cities Vote Right
The América Insumisa panel offers a complementary insight. They note an apparent inversion of Gramsci’s classic analysis of Italy. Roughly summarizing, in early twentieth-century Italy, the industrial North was progressive and open to change, while the rural South was conservative. In Latin America today, the opposite holds (more or less): the rural periphery votes left, while the “developed” urban centers and industrialized cities are bastions of the far right.

Looking at electoral maps in Peru and Colombia for the 2026 elections, the paradox becomes obvious: In Peru, the Fujimori camp wins the presidency with a margin of about 49,000 votes (50.13% vs 49.8%), even though the left wins in far more regions that are rural and located in the sierra. In Colombia, and similarly across the region, the far‑right consistently wins cities (except for Bogotá), while left candidates win decisively in rural areas and the periphery.

But, why? Urban populations are saturated with corporate media, algorithmic manipulation, and a constant bombardment of disinformation on platforms like X and Facebook, as well as corporate radio stations and TV channels. The far right invests boatloads of money to promote these lies, saturating the “advanced” urban zones with neoliberal common sense. By contrast, rural areas still maintain an existing community fabric. They rely on alternative, localized communication exchanges, such as community radio stations and local assemblies. This surviving social infrastructure acts as a shield against digital disinformation and cognitive warfare.

These observations tell us where cognitive warfare is most effective: in the urban, digitally integrated centers that the empire and local elites need to control. The most “developed” zones are the most vulnerable to fascist capture. And the periphery, precisely because it has been excluded from the digital infrastructure of empire, retains a capacity for independent thought and collective action. Interestingly, it was Peruvian Marxist Mariátegui a contemporary of Gramsci, who theorized that in Latin America the indigenous peasant is not a backward element to be modernized away but the central revolutionary subject of Latin American socialism. He argued that Peru’s indigenous communities retained a communal organization that constituted a living socialist tradition predating capitalism, and such living traditions exist all over Latin America still. Ultimately, both Gramsci and Mariátegui theorized the peripheral, marginalized population as possessing revolutionary potential precisely because it has been excluded from the hegemonic capitalist order and all that it implies.

If we zoom in from the electoral map to the operating table of empire, we can see how this new fascism doesn’t just arise spontaneously. This turn is operationally cultivated through a very specific soft coup playbook within the context of a fragmentationist strategy. Dr. Aníbal García’s recent analysis on Contralínea lays this out with painful clarity.

The Soft Coup Manual and the Fragmentationist Strategy in Latin America

“The United States studies us constantly. We barely study them.”

This asymmetry of knowledge is a fatal vulnerability. Recently, the Mexican investigative journalism channel Contralínea aired an indispensable analysis by Dr. Aníbal García on the mechanisms of the “soft coup.” His analysis is historically grounded, operationally precise, and urgently relevant. What follows is my attempt to add a complementary analytical layer.

The Playbook: From Operation PBSUCCESS to Today
Dr. García grounds his analysis in the 1954 CIA-backed coup against Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz. During Operation PBSUCCESS, the CIA drafted what is colloquially known as the “Coup Plotter’s Manual“ (declassified in 1997). It included a literal “Study of Assassination,” targeting lists for the elimination of officials, and a blueprint for psychological warfare via “black propaganda.”

Today’s coup-mongering is similar, yet not so heavily and overtly focused on the kinetic aspect in most cases in Latin America. It is the kidnapping of leadership, the de facto capture of the media, and the weaponization of lawfare; judicial spectacles masquerading as justice for geopolitical ends. According to the Contralínea analysis, the soft coup unfolds in four distinct phases, which are rooted in that very same 1954 manual. We are watching them play out in Mexico right now:

Placement and Evaluation
The central command moves into the territory. In other words, this is about the placement of personnel that will prepare the soft coup. In Mexico, CIA agents have already been detected operating in Chihuahua this year (two CIA officers and two Mexican police were killed in a vehicle accident and this is how Mexican state security forces were able to detect their presence), invited in by a compliant opposition governor, Maru Campos. Previously, the current US Ambassador, Ronald D. Johnson, a former Green Beret, is an expert in special operations and psychological warfare. Indeed, ambassador Ronald D. Johnson’s was involved in Central America during the 1980s for his military and intelligence background. He served as a Green Beret and intelligence officer, leading combat and counterinsurgency operations in El Salvador as part of the authorized U.S. military advisory group during the Salvadoran Civil War. Furthermore, beginning in 1984, he also led a Special Forces battalion in Panama. His early operational background in the region later led to his appointment as the U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador (2019–2021).

Additionally, following his time in the U.S. Army Special Forces, Ambassador Ronald D. Johnson transitioned to a two-decade career as an operative for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). During this “second career,” he frequently popped up in global conflict zones and high-risk hotspots, which included operational deployments in Yugoslavia during the Balkan conflicts. Now, what is a person with such a background doing in Mexico? What was CIA personnel doing in Northern Mexico?

Zionist Expansionism in Latin America and the Caribbean

Preliminary Conditions (Internal Tensions and Discrediting)
The next step’s goal is to demonstrate government incapacity and discredit the target domestically and abroad. We see this in the coordinated international smear campaigns labeling Mexico a “narco-government” which should make others see Mexico as ungovernable. And we see this in the strategic revocation of US visas for border-state governors to probe for “weak links” in the chain of command (possibly to detect who could be “captured”). Indeed, the Trump administration formally designated Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations in February 2025, which was the institutional trigger that enabled DEA intelligence to feed directly into visa revocation decisions — transforming a law enforcement tool into a political pressure instrument. Now, with the recent NYT article on supposed informants within the governing MORENA party for the US government, one can see even another layer at play in the creation of preliminary conditions. On top of this, US prosecutors have already formally charged sitting Sinaloa Governor Rocha Moya with conspiring with cartels — the first formal indictment of a sitting Mexican governor. This is a continuous and escalating process aimed at creating mistrust within the political ruling strata.

Construction of the Coup (Maximum Antagonism)
This phase involvesweaponizing legitimate social demands to fracture both the government and society. Elements of both the US and Mexican business sectors are currently inciting the abandonment of peaceful protests in favor of violence. Ricardo Salinas Pliego, one of Mexico’s wealthiest businessmen and owner of TV Azteca stated in a recent interview, during the teachers’ protests preceding the World Cup, that a peaceful protest “is useless.” The government also formally accused former president Vicente Fox (a conservative business-aligned figure) and Salinas Pliego of publicly endorsing the November 2025 protests that turned violent. Sheinbaum’s government presented evidence to the Mexican Attorney General of a “coordinated digital operation” costing nearly $5 million, linked to opposition accounts and amplified by influencers — which El País specifically connected to the Atlas Network (the Koch-funded international libertarian think-tank network). COPARMEX (the Employers’ Confederation) was also active in framing the protests as a government failure. Simultaneously, immense economic pressure is applied via tariffs, debt, and attacks on the stock market and the peso.

The Critical Period (Maximum Pressure and Dissent)
Lastly, an intense rumor campaign is launched, designed to generate a psychological “fear of war” and provoke a total internal rupture. Examples of what steps are being already taken in that regard by the US-led empire: In every phone call between Trump and President Sheinbaum, Trump has repeatedly raised the possibility of deploying US troops into Mexico. Trump told Fox News that the US would begin “hitting land” after targeting cartel vessels at sea. There are, of course, more of such threats and hints coming from the Trump administration. Yet, I would argue the next escalation in the psychological campaign will be to generate fear not merely of cartel violence or US strikes against supposedly “cartel targets” but of Mexico’s territorial coherence as a nation-state — essentially a “Yugoslavia scenario” in which the country is portrayed as ungovernable enough to justify external intervention or partition into zones of influence, or likewise or in conjunction, an attempt at supporting secessionist movements.

Here, the Trump administration’s mapping of cartel territorial control as rival sovereignty is a signal in that regard. The “narco-state” label already applied to specific border governors also implies a narrative of alternative sovereignties. Indeed, FTO designation transforms cartels from criminal actors into geopolitical actors, enabling the US to legally treat counter-cartel operations as irregular warfare. The RSDI analysis confirms that these legal terrorism tools “reshape the entire US-Mexico security architecture” in ways that give Washington leverage to direct, manage, or selectively neutralize cartel forces. The historical precedent from Lawfare Media’s analysis of CIA operations in Mexico shows the US has been running “six or seven US-vetted, funded, and supported special units” within Mexican security forces since at least 1997. In what exact way each of these elements interacts or is operating today, I do not know, but a direction is taking shape in one way or another.

One signal in the secessionist direction takes us to a concept that has deep roots that are now being explicitly revived. The Republic of the Río Grande (1840) was a US-backed secessionist project covering the northern Mexican states of Nuevo León, Coahuila, and Tamaulipas. A JSTOR-archived historical record confirms US military commanders were explicitly instructed by Washington to give “all proper assistance” to any northern Mexican separatist movement. This precedent is not dead. The Texas Nationalist Movement (TNM), which campaigns for Texas secession from the US, announced in April 2024 its “full support for the Northern Mexico secession movement”, explicitly citing border crime as justification. This cross-pollination between US state-level secessionist politics and Mexican northern separatism could be read as one step in the contemporary activation of the 1840 template.

Lastly, journalist Zavala argues the “cartel myth” is a deliberately constructed ideological narrative jointly produced by the US and Mexican governments to disguise their own involvement in and management of drug trafficking. The LA Times summarizes it: Zavala argues “cartels could not flourish without the support of corrupt public officials” and that presenting them as autonomous criminal sovereigns obscures this. Additonally, he argues that cartel violence ultimately aims to displace inhabitants from areas rich in energy resources (such as Northern Mexico) for the benefit of private interests. In a January 2026 Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime report, Northern Mexico is being described as “battlegrounds” where “criminals compete for revenue streams from illegal logging and mining, while the state is wilfully negligent in the face of criminal innovation and corporate rent-seeking”. That report specifically covers Chihuahua and Sonora, the same region implicated in CIA incursion and secession risk.

Fundamentally, the “narco-state” framing is a politically constructed discourse that serves the imperial project by: (1) delegitimizing the Mexican state as ungovernable, (2) justifying external intervention, and (3) concealing the actual US institutional involvement in shaping the drug trade and resource extraction as tools of pressure, compliance or destabilization.

The Two Modalities of the Fragmentationist Grand Strategy
The soft coup blueprint Dr. García describes is, in my terms, one modality of the fragmentationist grand strategy. It is the preferred modality for Latin America and the Caribbean, where the empire operates with a proximity, a density of institutional penetration, and a centuries-deep history of intervention that makes direct cognitive and psychological warfare highly effective. The tools are lawfare, media manipulation, economic strangulation, the weaponization of social divisions, and the cultivation of a comprador business class. I would even add the co-optation of the religious dimension. When it works, a right-wing government is installed, and there is no need for a Memorandum of Understanding, a Minsk agreement, or a Board of Peace. The old order is simply “restored.”

However, there is a second modality—one could argue it has been applied to Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, and the broader energy war to different extents and with varying “results.” This second modality activates when the soft coup fails, when the target state is too large, too socially and politically resilient, or too geopolitically critical to be toppled by media campaigns, economic pressure, proxy destabilization, and lawfare alone. At this point, the US-led empire shifts into a different gear: a grinding siege of sanctions, the threat and subsequent application of (limited) kinetic action, and eventually, the offer of an “integrationist” pact. The sovereign shell is kept intact. A faction of the elite is offered a path to liquidity, legitimacy, and reintegration into the global financial and market architecture. In exchange, structural concessions are extracted—the opening of a strait, the freezing of a nuclear program, the redirection of critical mineral or other resource contracts, or the signing of “agricultural deals.” On top of this, any emerging crisis—such as an earthquake or drought, made infinitely more lethal by the sanctions, sieges, and blockades already in place—will be weaponized to impose these very tools of submission and pressure. The MoU with Iran and the Venezuela model of kidnapping serve as such fallback options when the soft coup fails.

Of course, as Dr. García lays out, Latin American governments have historically been overthrown by naked violence. Today’s strategy relies on a flexible mix of tools because a highly visible, traditional coup risks activating the populations in targeted countries. As has happened so often in Latin America, overt imperialist actions tends to backfire, inadvertently paving the way for a genuinely anti-imperialist or left-wing government to eventually take power.

The Multi-Layered Cage
Dr. García’s timeline is flawless, but I would an additional structural layer. The empire’s goal is not merely to create chaos; it is to force the integration of the target nation into Western financial, market, and infrastructural systems. This is the multi-layered cage. This would make it much more difficult for any successor government to set themselves free from the cage the country has been put in. Just imagine: an agricultural “deal,” US-GMO gets imported, the food sovereignty project destroyed, agricultural labor and industry destroyed, and the country now is dependent on the US for its food…., this is not so easy to escape from. At least not in the short-term.

While the Contralínea report correctly identifies the financial pressure—stock market manipulation, inflation induction—it can be deepened by incorporating the broader “Fragmentationist” logic. Often, the imperialist strategy relies on grinding a country down through sanctions, economic strangulation, and the latent threat of kinetic action until it finds a compliant faction within the progressive ruling party itself. The goal is to hollow out the sovereign leadership from the inside, forcing concessions that are later disguised as pragmatic choices. And they may very well be exactly that.

As Dr. García sharply noted regarding these elite enablers:

“The businessmen—this rentier bourgeoisie that is foreign-oriented and more Yankee than Mexican—are divided. Some show confidence in the Mexican government, while others simply bet on interventionism.”

We Must Study the Empire
We cannot afford the luxury of geopolitical romanticism or essentialism. We must study the architecture of our own subjugation if we want to survive it. Dr. García highlights a painful irony regarding the University of Florida, a known hub for the Latin American and international right-wing:

“The University of Florida was actually the first university in the United States to open a Center for Latin American Studies. Over there in the United States, they do study Latin America. Ask yourselves, for example, how many research centers on the United States or North America exist here?“

If we want to dismantle the cage, we must first map its bars. Recognizing the mechanics of the soft coup is a vital step in that larger project.

In other words, what García describes at the level of operations is one modality of the same Bunker State logic I’ve been mapping: a move from direct terror to calibrated fragmentation, from visible coups to soft coups and cages.

Concluding Note: The Strategic Logic of Managed Chaos
The empire wants weak, fragmented, perpetually crisis-ridden states that are incapable of pursuing autonomous development. The theatrical fascism of the new right serves this purpose well for the time being. It keeps the region in permanent political turmoil, prevents the consolidation of any genuinely anti-imperialist project, and does so without triggering the kind of mass armed resistance that the old dictators provoked.

The Cold War was a period of open class war, and the right’s methods reflected that: direct, military, existential. Today, in the interregnum, the war continues by other means. The theater is not a distraction from politics. It is the politics—a politics designed to keep you watching, reacting, and exhaustedly passive.

And yet, as a recent War College report itself acknowledges, this configuration is fragile. It depends on the absence of a unified, organized, defiant left, both within Latin America and across the Global Majority. The lack of regional unity, the absence of collective defense mechanisms, and the fragmentation of the multipolar space all create an opening that the empire exploits. But that opening is not permanent. “If cooperative governments do not increase citizen security and prosperity, or if changes in internal US politics—or the international situation—cause currently silent governments to decrease their fear of US retribution,” the entire strategic configuration could shift.

In other words, the US-led empire itself knows that the current situation is not a march and victory of the far-right. Instead, the current system is an unstable homeostasis. The new fascist style is part of how the empire tries to keep that homoestasis intact. We have to understand how the myriad of tools of greyzone warfare and the soft coup, including electoral software, telecommunication platforms, media, sanctions, and data flows plug into a multilayered cage managed by the imperial core; how new fascist leaders are products designed for that cage; and how the memory of the old resistance shapes what kinds of repression the empire now avoids.

The silence of the general has been replaced by the scream of the showman. But the silence of the masses is what makes both possible. And breaking that silence—through organization, through alternative media, through the slow rebuilding of the community fabric—remains a genuine path forward.

The choice of style is a signal about how power plans to rule, and how it plans to prevent the return of the organized, transnational resistance that once made Latin America the beating heart of global anti‑imperialism.

Addendum
These are the Notes that partly touch upon the topics discussed here:

The Changing Face of Fascism in Latin America: From the General’s Silence to the Showman’s Scream

The Soft Coup Manual and the Fragmentationist Strategy in Latin America

And these are the YouTube podcast episodes that inspired the Notes and, hence, the essay:

Cesar Pineda on the electoral stalemate in Latin America

Contralinea’s America Insumisa panel on the far-right in Latin America (with Latin Americanists Marcela Román, Pablo Rojas and Aníbal García)

Chamuco Media’s Retrovisor episode on Fascism in Latin America (with Historian Christian Nader)

The Four Phases of the Soft Coup on Contralinea (with Dr. Aníbal García)

Do you see the mechanics of this cognitive warfare and structural fragmentation operating in your own political region? Are the signs of the “soft coup” toolkit—whether through lawfare, algorithmic propaganda, the weaponization of economic crises, or the push for a hyper-commodified “corporate society”—visible in your local landscape?

Have you observed a similar “Gramscian inversion” where digitally saturated urban centers are increasingly captured by far-right narratives, while the rural periphery maintains progressive resistance? Have you observed a different political pattern altogether?

Or, conversely, do you see the resilience we discussed? How are the communities around you rebuilding the social cohesion, alternative media, and localized community fabric needed to break out of this multi-layered cage?

Share your observations in the comments below.

 

(Substack)