Reclaim or Rebuild?

Reclaim or Rebuild? Washington’s Uneven Push for Regional Realignment

By Víctor Ortiz

Researcher, Instituto de Estudios Nacionales, Universidad de Panamá

President Donald Trump greets Chinese President Xi Jinping before a bilateral meeting at the Gimhae International Airport terminal, Thursday, October 30, 2025 (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)

In his second term, US president Donald Trump placed the “reclaiming” of the Panama Canal among the central goals of his foreign policy. But this rhetoric cannot be read in isolation. It reflects a phenomenon that runs across all of Latin America, one in which the Canal occupies a central, though not exclusive, place. This raises two questions: Is Washington seeking to reclaim a hegemony it believes it has lost, or is it reacting to the perception that its hegemony has weakened? The distinction matters. In the first reading, this is simply a new edition of an old hemispheric discourse. In the second, a great power finds itself having to actively rebuild conditions it once took for granted, in the face of old and new threats: the fight against drug trafficking, illegal migration, and China’s growing influence in the region.

The concern did not begin with Trump. Under the Biden administration, then Southern Command chief Laura Richardson already had warned that US security depended on Latin America’s stability in the face of China’s growing presence, a power that had established itself as capable of contesting an area of control Washington had held almost unchallenged for two centuries — without regional economic dependence automatically translating into political subordination. One example: under President Juan Carlos Varela, Panama became the first country in the region to join the Belt and Road Initiative, in June 2017, and to break relations with Taiwan.

With Trump’s second administration, the shift was radical. Since December 2024 he has insisted that the United States give the Canal “to Panama, not to China,” and that the US was going to “take it back.” In February 2025, after meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, President José Raúl Mulino announced that Panama would not renew its memorandum of understanding with China on the Belt and Road Initiative, without going so far as to break bilateral relations. Beijing, through its foreign ministry, called the move regrettable and accused Washington of resorting to pressure.

On April 8, 2025, Panama’s Minister of Public Security, Frank Ábrego, signed a memorandum with US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth that restored a rotational US military presence at the former American bases of Fort Sherman, Rodman and Howard in the former Canal Zone, and guaranteed priority transit for US warships through the Canal. Mulino insisted the agreement did not compromise Panamanian sovereignty; critics, however, argued that Washington had obtained, through a technical memorandum, a fraction of what Trump had openly demanded. Panama retains legal sovereignty over the canal zone, but that sovereignty now coexists with specific operational concessions — US military access to infrastructure outside the Canal itself, framed under the umbrella of protecting it and regional security.

The dispute has also extended to the ports of Balboa and Cristóbal, operated since 1997 by Panama Ports Company (PPC), a subsidiary of the Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison group. In March 2025, CK Hutchison agreed to sell its global port business, including the Panamanian terminals, to a consortium led by the US company BlackRock. But in January 2026, Panama’s Supreme Court declared the 1997 contract-law unconstitutional, ruling that it granted disproportionate benefits to PPC; the decision was published in the Official Gazette on February 23, 2026. The outcome, however, was not a transfer of the ports to the Panamanian state: PPC was left without legal standing, and temporary administration passed to APM Terminals, a subsidiary of Denmark’s Maersk group, while the state prepares a new international tender.

Beijing’s response did not stop at the diplomatic protest of February 2025. After the Supreme Court ruling, China warned that Panama “will pay a high political and economic price” if it did not reverse the annulment of the concession. That warning translated into action: China detained 96 Panamanian-flagged vessels in March 2026 and 136 in April, 6.4 times the previous year’s average, in what the United States described as economic retaliation aimed at punishing Panama.

This episode reveals something about the nature of the “reclaiming” narrative. On March 4, 2025, before Congress, Trump presented the sale from Hutchison to BlackRock as if it constituted, in itself, the recovery of the Canal, and days later said on television that he preferred to see the asset in BlackRock’s hands rather than a Chinese company’s. Panama’s president responded that no such “recovery” had taken place: the ports do not control the Canal, since the two are run under entirely separate arrangements, with the Canal itself administered by the Panama Canal Authority (ACP). The sequence is telling: a private transaction, in which the Panamanian state was not a negotiating party, was narrated by the White House as a geostrategic victory over China. And when Panama did intervene directly on the ports front, it did not do so to hand the asset to Washington, but to annul the concession and open it to a new tender.

The Panamanian case is only one instance within this broader regional realignment. Since September 2025, Washington has sustained a military campaign in international waters against vessels accused of drug-trafficking activity in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, known as Operation Southern Spear, under which boats are destroyed even though doing so violates the flag state’s rights under international maritime law. In parallel, in March 2026 the “Shield of the Americas” was founded, a security and intelligence coalition that Panama joined at its inaugural summit in Doral, Florida, alongside Argentina, Ecuador, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic and Trinidad and Tobago; Peru and Colombia joined later that year.

This alignment reflects a prior structural subordination: these countries’ economies remain dependent on US trade and credit, their security forces — with the exceptions of Cuba and Nicaragua — are trained and equipped by the United States, and their political elites and economic power groups depend on staying on good terms with Washington.

Panama’s membership in the Shield adds to the 2025 memorandum and the port dispute — it does not replace them. While other governments in the hemisphere are linking themselves to Washington almost exclusively through that multilateral coalition, Panama is accumulating commitments at both levels simultaneously, the collective and the bilateral, making it the one point in the region where both layers of pressure converge on the same territory.

The evidence gathered suggests that the two readings posed at the outset are not mutually exclusive. Regional subordination is real and visible, as shown by the shift toward Washington-aligned governments across much of the hemisphere. Yet this subordination can no longer be taken for granted; it must be actively produced, through instruments ranging from security coalitions and lethal military campaigns, as in the Venezuelan case, to the simultaneous accumulation of bilateral and multilateral commitments, as in the Panamanian case.

If US hegemony were as solid today as it was in the era of the Monroe Doctrine or the Cold War, a single framework — one doctrine — would be enough to produce alignment across the region. What we observe instead is a deployment of distinct instruments, adapted to each country’s specific circumstances, at a political and legal cost that a comfortably exercised hegemony would not have to pay: allegations of possible war crimes in the naval campaign against drug trafficking, Panama’s judicial resistance that ended up annulling the concession despite US pressure, and China’s retaliation through the systematic detention of Panamanian vessels. That cost, repeated case by case, is the best evidence that Washington does not exercise the control it claims to have, but is rebuilding it — unevenly, country by country. Finally, it is worth asking whether this order will hold up regardless of who occupies the White House, as part of a consensus driven by the US national-security apparatus, one that Richardson had already flagged before Trump.

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by clalsstaff on September 22, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on September 22, 2026

https://aulablog.net/2026/09/22/reclaim-or-rebuild/

The Complex Mexico-U.S. Relationship

The Complex Mexico-U.S. Relationship: Claudia Sheinbaum’s Responses to Donald Trump’s Bullying

By Tomás Milton Muñoz Bravo

Professor of Political and Social Sciences and Researcher at the Center for International Relations of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Image of Claudia Sheinbaum. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Following the entry into force of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, relations between Mexico and the United States centered primarily on three major issues—trade, security, and migration—and institutional channels were established to address each issue separately. However, everything changed in January 2017 when Donald Trump took office; as an outsider, he damaged established relationships, complicated the bilateral agenda, and used coercion as a primary tactic in his dealings with former presidents Enrique Peña Nieto and Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Joe Biden’s presidency (January 2021–January 2025) largely marked a return to traditional bilateral relations with Mexico. With few exceptions—such as the July 2024 arrest of drug trafficker Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada in Sinaloa and his subsequent transfer to Texas, an operation involving U.S. agents and conducted without consultation with Mexican authorities—both governments regularly used institutional channels to address shared issues and challenges. Yet, Trump’s return to the presidency on January 20, 2025, once again upended the bilateral agenda. Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo—Mexico’s first female president, who had been in office for just over three months— had to contend with Trump’s return and his aggressive political style.

Beginning with the 2024 election campaign and continuing throughout his second term, Trump has once again set his sights on Mexico. As he did during his first administration, he conflates issues, distorts reality, uses threats to gain political leverage, and places additional demands on the Mexican president—most notably, that politicians accused of collusion with organized crime be handed over to the United States.

Through media, political, and economic pressure, “Trump 2.0” has ensured that the Sheinbaum administration continues to act as an extension of the U.S. border—preventing migrants from passing through Mexican territory and accepting migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees from other countries who have been expelled by the United States. He has also secured commitments to allocate additional security resources to combat criminal groups, shut down fentanyl-producing laboratories, increase drug seizures, and expel members of organized crime groups from Mexico without extradition proceedings to hand them over to U.S. authorities.

On trade, pressure from the United States has forced the Sheinbaum administration to limit its relations and exchanges with China and operate under constant uncertainty concerning the imposition of new tariffs and the hostile attitude of U.S. negotiators during the ongoing review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).

Against this backdrop, Trump has employed a “praise and punishment” strategy in his dealings with the Mexican leader. Within a single day, he might describe her as a “good person,” a “great woman,” and “beautiful,” with a “great voice,” only to question her capabilities minutes later and claim that she is “terrified” of drug cartels, thereby demanding that she accept the presence of U.S. armed forces on Mexican soil to combat criminal groups.

The bilateral relationship has historically been complex, but it has become even more fraught due to Trump’s attitudes, slights, and systematic bullying —from renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” and ignorantly and maliciously claiming that Mexico exports nothing but tamales and tomatoes to the U.S. to posting AI-generated memes that disparage Mexico and its migrants or depict the entire continent draped in the U.S. flag.  More than a year and a half after Trump’s return to office, it is possible to make an initial assessment of the hostile policies and actions that Washington has directed at the Sheinbaum administration in the areas of migration, politics, trade, and security.

On migration, Trump has achieved his goal: Mexico has become yet another containment barrier for migrants and asylum seekers. In addition to a reduction of more than 90 percent in unauthorized crossings through Mexican territory into the United States, the Sheinbaum administration has agreed—without asking for anything in return—that Mexico will once again serve as a de facto “safe third country,” where migrants become stranded, unable to enter the United States yet lacking the means to fully integrate into Mexican society. These migrants are joined by deportees—both Mexican nationals and nationals of other countries—who arrive in Mexico after being expelled from the United States.

Turning to Trump’s political attacks on Mexico, it is important to emphasize that they have indeed tarnished the image of the Mexican president’s political project. She has repeatedly refused to hand over members of the ruling MORENA party sought by the United States in connection with their alleged ties to organized crime groups. To date, the most prominent politicians whose arrest and extradition to the United States the State Department has requested are Rubén Rocha Moya—the governor of the northern state of Sinaloa (currently on leave)—and Enrique Inzunza Cázarez, a senator representing the same state.

In Mexico, ties between politicians and organized crime have plagued the country since the mid-20th century. However, these ties solidified during the administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador—founder of MORENA—creating a legacy that the current Mexican leader must confront. Yet, in an effort to avoid weakening her party or fracturing the alliance that backed her presidential bid, she has chosen to downplay these connections and refrain from taking decisive legal action.

Various polls continue to show MORENA as the party with the highest voter support ahead of the 2027 elections—which will include contests for 17 governorships and seats in the federal Chamber of Deputies. Nevertheless, the protection the Mexican executive branch has extended to MORENA politicians—as well as to at least two of former President López Obrador’s sons, who have been implicated in corruption schemes and alliances with criminal gangs through media reports and formal accusations—has become a weapon for the Trump administration,[1] which has toyed with the idea of ​​intervening on Mexican soil to combat drug trafficking groups, which the current U.S. administration has designated as terrorist organizations.

On trade, despite threats, insults, and pressure from Washington, Mexico has solidified its position as the United States’s top trading partner, with the trade balance increasingly favoring Mexico. In July 2026 alone, Mexico recorded a $26.31 billion trade surplus with the United States.

Finally, regarding U.S. pressure on security matters, Trump can claim victory, as the Mexican government has intensified its fight against major drug cartels—leading to increased seizures of drugs and weapons, more arrests of criminals, and the dismantling of fentanyl laboratories. Yet, insecurity remains rampant in Mexico; drug trafficking groups multiply like a many-headed hydra, continuing to terrorize the population, while the United States offers no reciprocity—even as it is the world’s leading consumer of narcotics. The equation remains unchanged: Mexico bears the brunt of the death and violence, while the United States provides the market for consumption and recreation in a losing war on drugs—a conflict addressed through a military and security approach rather than one grounded in public health and prevention.

[1] U.S. Vice President J. D. Vance has stated that his administration reserves the right to attack Mexican cartels within that Latin American country’s territory. The last time this occurred was on June 17, 2026.

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by clalsstaff on September 14, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on September 14, 2026

https://aulablog.net/2026/09/14/the-complex-mexico-u-s-relationship/

Peru’s 205th Independence Day: A Bleeding State, a Divided Society, and a Country Still Unpaved

By Diana Garay, Research Fellow at American University’s Center for Latin American and Latino Studies

Source: “Presidential inauguration of Keiko Fujimori”

On July 28, 2026, Keiko Fujimori was sworn in as the country’s ninth president in a decade. Inside Congress, the ceremony displayed the full apparatus of a functioning democracy: a presidential sash, with a king and half a dozen visiting heads of state in attendance. Outside, a different reality was on display. In front of the Palacio de Justicia, demonstrators performed a symbolic lavado de banderas (“washing of the flags”), scrubbing the national colors clean, rejecting the incoming government and demanding justice for victims of state violence. Inside, a nation performing normalcy. Outside, a nation still counting its dead. This contradiction captures Peru’s central political dilemma. The institutions responsible for governing the country are also institutions that many citizens associate with years of instability, corruption, and unaddressed grievances. The question facing Peru is therefore not simply whether democracy can continue to hold elections, but whether it can produce legitimate and effective governance.

A Crisis of Governability

Peru’s crisis is not a failure of democratic procedure but of what those procedures have been used to do. Since 2016, the country has cycled through presidents at a pace virtually unmatched among democracies. Fuerza Popular, the right-wing populist party of the new president, became the most visible actor in this period of institutional instability, particularly after securing congressional dominance after the 2016 elections. Under its leadership, Congress transformed oversight mechanisms into instruments of political pressure against the government of Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, whose resignation in 2018 came amid repeated attempts to remove him through the vacancy process, a mechanism that allows Congress to declare the presidency vacant under specific constitutional grounds, including “permanent moral incapacity.” The confrontation continued under Martín Vizcarra, whose presidency ended in 2020 when Congress declared the presidency vacant on grounds of “permanent moral incapacity.”

Yet the political crisis that followed revealed that Peru’s instability extended beyond any single party or president. Manuel Merino’s brief government collapsed after widespread protests against Vizcarra’s removal, during which two young demonstrators, Inti Sotelo and Bryan Pintado, were killed by police forces, further intensifying public outrage and demands for accountability. Francisco Sagasti’s transitional administration provided only a temporary pause in a deeper institutional conflict. Pedro Castillo’s presidency exposed the opposite side of the same dysfunction: a president elected without a stable governing coalition who ultimately attempted to dissolve Congress and rule by decree before being removed in December 2022. Dina Boluarte’s subsequent administration deepened the legitimacy crisis, particularly after the deaths of protesters during the 2022-2023 demonstrations. Together, these episodes demonstrate that Peru’s problem is not simply presidential turnover; it is a political system in which neither presidents nor Congress have consistently possessed the legitimacy, institutional capacity, and public trust required to govern.

Institutions Designed for Conflict

Peru’s institutional landscape, however, has now entered a new phase. Fujimori’s inauguration marked the return of a bicameral Congress, but the reform itself was not the result of a new public mandate. In the 2018 referendum, more than 90 percent of voters rejected the proposal to restore a bicameral legislature, while also approving restrictions on congressional reelection. Despite those outcomes, in 2024 Congress reserved both through constitutional reforms, approving the restoration of the Senate and Chamber of Deputies and congressional reelection. This has fueled skepticism toward bicameralism, not necessarily because of opposition to a two-chamber legislature, but because it reinforces the perception that political actors can reshape institutional rules despite previous expressions of popular will.

Under the new system, at least theoretically no political force possesses enough power to govern without negotiation. The president’s supporters do not automatically control the legislative agenda, while opposition parties lack the votes to independently impose their own program or fundamentally alter the balance of power. This distribution of power means that governing will require agreements across political lines.

The difficulty, however, is that Peru’s recent crisis has not emerged because political actors lacked opportunities to negotiate. It has emerged because political competition has increasingly rewarded confrontation. Since 2016, Congress and the executive have repeatedly used constitutional mechanisms as instruments of political struggle, transforming checks and balances into tools for weakening opponents. The result has been a political system in which institutional rules exist, but the incentives surrounding those rules have encouraged obstruction rather than cooperation.

Bicameralism may make abrupt institutional breakdowns more difficult, but it does not guarantee governability. Without a change in political behavior, the country risks replacing one form of instability with another: not the rapid removal of presidents, but prolonged paralysis in which competing factions possess enough power to block each other but insufficient willingness to govern together.

Peru’s challenge, therefore, is not simply a question of institutional design. It is whether a political class has repeatedly contributed to the erosion of public trust can operate within institutions that depend on trust to function. The new Congress may prevent some of the excesses of the previous decade, but it cannot resolve the deeper question at the heart of Peru’s crisis: How can any type of sustained governance take place, either from the right or the left, given the bad faith of political actors that appears to undermine democratic institutional mechanisms of checks and balances?

A Society Mistreated

Peru’s governability crisis cannot be separated from the society it seeks to govern. The country is often described as politically polarized, but polarization alone does not explain the depth of Peru’s instability. The deeper fracture is historical: millions of Peruvians do not share the same experience of the state. For some, the state represents economic opportunity, security, and national progress. For others, particularly communities that have experienced decades of exclusion, violence, and limited public investment, the state has often appeared distant, ineffective, and harmful.

This distinction was recently captured by Cardinal Carlos Castillo during the Mass and Te Deum commemorating Peru’s independence, when he emphasized that Peru is not only a divided country, but also one marked by citizens who have been mistreated and forgotten by its institutions. His message reflected a broader reality: Peru’s crisis is not simply that citizens disagree about political solutions; it is that many citizens question whether the political system has recognized their suffering at all. In such a context, governability becomes inseparable from legitimacy. A government can win an election and possess constitutional authority yet still struggle to govern if large segments of society believe that the state has repeatedly failed them.

The country’s electoral geography reflects these unresolved tensions. Fujimori’s strongest support came from Lima and much of the coastal regions, while the losing leftist candidate Roberto Sánchez received stronger backing from the Andean highlands and areas where poverty, inequality, and distrust toward central institutions remain especially pronounced. These differences are not merely electoral preferences. They reflect contrasting relationships with the state itself: between a coastal economy that has benefited more visibly from Peru’s market-oriented growth model and regions that continue to experience the consequences of unequal development.

However, Peru’s divisions are not only geographic. They are also historical. Keiko Fujimori’s return to the presidency reopened unresolved questions about the legacy of Fujimorismo and its role in the country’s current crisis of trust. Alberto Fujimori’s government remains one of Peru’s most contested periods: remembered by supporters for defeating the Shining Path insurgency, but remembered by critics for authoritarianism, corruption, the weakening of democratic institutions, and serious human rights violations.

For Keiko Fujimori, the challenge is therefore larger than inheriting a controversial family name. She inherits the unresolved wounds associated with that political project while also representing a movement that has played a central role in furthering Peru’s protracted institutional conflicts after 2016.

What Lies Ahead

Peru’s future will not be determined by whether Keiko Fujimori completes her presidential term. That would represent progress compared to the instability of the past decade, but it would not, by itself, resolve the country’s governability crisis. The more difficult question is whether Peru’s institutions can once again become arenas for democratic representation rather than instruments of political conflict.

For Keiko Fujimori, the challenge extends beyond managing Congress or implementing policy. She must govern a society where many citizens associate the political movement she leads with the institutional deterioration she now promises to reverse. That credibility gap cannot be closed through rhetoric alone. It will depend on concrete choices: strengthening judicial independence rather than weakening it, addressing the demands for accountability that continue to resonate after the 2022-2023 protests, and demonstrating that public institutions serve citizens rather than political interests.

The question is no longer whether Peru can hold elections or transfer power peacefully. It is whether those elected can rebuild the legitimacy that makes democratic government possible. Until that question is answered, Peru’s greatest challenge is not simply to preserve democracy, but to make it believable again.

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by clalsstaff on August 11, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on August 11, 2026

https://aulablog.net/2026/08/11/perus-205th-independence-day-a-bleeding-state-a-divided-society-and-a-country-still-unpaved/

Lethality and Illegality in the U.S. Boat Strikes Campaign: Why Characterization Matters for Regional Accountability Efforts

Marie Miller, Program Associate, Reiss Center on Law and Security, NYU School of Law

Source: Wikimedia Commons

On September 2, 2025, President Donald Trump announced that he had ordered a kinetic strike against a boat off the coast of Venezuela. U.S. military forces, he said, had identified those onboard as “narcoterrorists” of Tren de Aragua (TdA), a decentralized criminal organization with Venezuelan origins and a transnational reach. Thirteen days later, another strike, and a glimpse into the administration’s purported rationale: to disrupt narcotics networks affecting Americans—notwithstanding that Venezuela plays essentially no role in fentanyl production and smuggling. And then came another. Now, nearly a year later, more than 200 have been killed in 66 strikes by the U.S. Without evidence, without interdiction and trial, nor the administration’s stated legal authority made public, there’s still no telling when Operation Southern Spear, as the U.S. calls the campaign, will truly end.

With each strike, the administration has failed to make public any evidence that these boats are transporting drugs, much less that the passengers on board are affiliated with cartels or are participants in an “armed attack.” Most of the victims have not been identified, yet reports suggest victims include farmworkers and fishermen, compelled to participate in the trafficking network as independent laborers without ownership over the illicit product. With regard to cases where boats have been unusually crowded, one military official suggested that human trafficking victims could have been amongst those killed.

The Trump administration has claimed that the laws of war permit the killing of passengers smuggling narcotics in support of cartels designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs). In 2025, TdA was designated as such by Trump’s State Department, under a statutory authority delegated by Congress. Typically, the military can stop instances of trafficking with far less lethal force. If a vessel is suspected of ferrying drugs, it can be intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard and its passengers arrested. Instead, it appears that boats merely suspected of drug trafficking have been blown to bits from above, taking the lives of those on board and occasionally leaving survivors who, eventually, are also presumed dead or missing at sea. Even if evidence had been provided that these individuals were indeed associated with TdA—and it has not—the administration’s justification for these strikes relies on a flawed legal basis.

An FTO designation made by the U.S. government can include financial, criminal, and immigration consequences for its material supporters. Importantly, despite having led to military operations in the past, the designation by itself does not create a state of war or armed conflict, nor does it authorize “wartime” authorities like targeting or detention. Nonetheless, in a classified memo notifying Congress of the administration’s legal basis for the operation, the “President determined that the United States is in a non-international armed conflict with these designated terrorist organizations.” The president can surely repel threats of terrorism when a sudden attack is imminent. Yet there is no evidence that this high threshold was met at the onset of Operation Southern Spear. The initial strikes were framed as “self-defense” against a critical threat to American life and security. A state’s self-defense is justified under the U.N. Charter’s Article 51 only in the case of preventing an armed attack or subduing an ongoing one.

In an undisclosed notice to Congress, the Trump administration apparently shifted its basis, indicating that the strikes go beyond discrete acts of self-defense, labeling the targeted cartels as “nonstate armed groups” whose actions amount to “an armed attack” against the U.S. Many legal experts, on the other hand, contend that drug trafficking and its effects cannot constitute an “armed attack” triggering the right of self-defense. In its description of non-international armed conflict, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia refers to it as “protracted armed violence between governmental authorities and organized armed groups or between such groups within a State.” While the Trump administration has indicated that TdA is engaged in “irregular warfare” in the U.S., it has yet to define what this entails. Whether this amounts to “protracted armed violence” is uncertain and unsupported by available evidence.

In the absence of such an organized group engaged in protracted armed violence with the U.S., the law of armed conflict does not apply. Thus, the passengers on the boats—alleged associates of TdA, though not identified as such in the formal report from President Trump informing Congress of the initial strike—would not be combatants, nor civilians within an armed conflict. (If there was an armed conflict, the boaters’ civilian status would render them prohibited targets). Subsequently, the strikes would not be classified as war crimes. Outside of armed conflict, premeditated killing of suspected criminals is called murder. And under U.S. domestic law, it is prohibited. Article 6(1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the U.S. is a party, further prohibits arbitrary deprivation of life. Those responsible for authorizing the strikes may also be guilty of murder under Article 118 of the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice.

According to former U.S. State Department attorney Charlie Trumbull, with each of the 66 strikes constituting discrete acts of murder across a ten month window, the attacks can arguably be described as “widespread.” Crimes against humanity (CAH), one of three atrocity crimes alongside genocide and war crimes, are understood as part of a “widespread or systemic attack directed against a civilian population” in “furtherance of a State or organizational policy to commit such an attack.” A named policy—Operation Southern Spear—implemented by U.S. Southern Command in an organized manner, therefore, may meet the “state or organizational policy” requirement for CAH.

Operation Southern Spear appears to be one of many prongs of the Trump administration’s aggressive aims to reassert the U.S. preeminence in the western hemisphere, as part of the National Security Strategy’s “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.” In spite of condemnation from civil society, a largely tepid response from Caribbean states met the U.S. militarization of the Caribbean and the capture of Maduro in January. While Cuba’s representative to the U.N. decried the “military aggression” of the United States against Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago—whose military has partnered with the U.S. for joint exercises in Caribbean waters—verbally committed to the “cooperative efforts led by the United States to disrupt and dismantle networks that enable transnational crime,” remaining “steadfast” in support of U.S. “initiatives that strengthen regional security.” When Colombian President Gustavo Petro called one of the strikes “murder,” President Trump sanctioned members of his family, threatening to reduce aid and raise tariffs on the country. Since ending intelligence sharing with the U.S. (to, in his words, refrain from “collaborating with a crime against humanity”) Petro has reportedly toned down his criticism of U.S. Southern Command. Colombian authorities, moreover, have been slow to identify bodies that have washed ashore.

In the wake of Operation Absolute Resolve, which removed Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro from power, and the reported preparation of indictments against Cuba’s “political and military leadership,” Caribbean and Latin American states may be hesitant to further push back on the campaign, lest they risk falling into disfavor with a highly unpredictable Trump administration. In March, Ecuador began joint military exercises with U.S. Southern Command, with the intention of combatting drug trafficking. These led to various land and sea strikes, property destructions, and detentions. Since Operation Southern Spear appears to rely on a presumption that the U.S. is in an armed conflict with TdA, would the U.S. further target perceived associates—potentially including civilians—on land in Latin America? It is not outside the bounds of possibility.

If the relevant crime is indeed murder under U.S. law, the U.S. would hold prosecutorial jurisdiction. An ACLU case brought on behalf of the boat strikes victims’ families for wrongful death and extrajudicial killing is currently pending in Massachusetts, for instance. But if the killings are recognized as a crime against humanity, states outside of the U.S. may have universal jurisdiction status, in which international or foreign courts could step in when the U.S. fails to hold perpetrators accountable. This is why the distinction between war crimes and crimes against humanity matters. Despite President Trump’s ability to pardon those who have executed his orders in his chain of command, a determination that Operation Southern Spear is a crime against humanity would open new routes of accountability on the international level.

The International Criminal Court (ICC), for instance, can assert jurisdiction over crimes committed within the territory and maritime space of states that have ratified the Rome Statute. A point of comparative interest lies with the case of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, who is now jailed after the ICC confirmed charges of crimes against humanity against him. In light of the murders of persons involved in drug-related criminal activity under the supervision of Philippines law enforcement, the ICC found reasonable grounds for the elements of crimes against humanity to be met. States can also prosecute crimes committed against their citizens abroad, such as the victims of the boat strikes, if they embrace passive personality jurisdiction and are able to either acquire prosecutorial custody or allow in absentia prosecution.

The geopolitical risks of accountability-seeking by victims’ states—Colombia or Trinidad, for instance—are evident. But the Trump administration won’t last forever. Right now, if they are able to muster the political will, Caribbean and Latin American states can quietly gather evidence of the strikes and secure witnesses. Once President Trump is out of office, indictments of perpetrators responsible for driving Operation Southern Spear on the state’s behalf can still come about.

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by clalsstaff on August 11, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Caribbean, Uncategorized, United States
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Posted by clalsstaff on August 11, 2026

https://aulablog.net/2026/08/11/lethality-and-illegality-in-the-u-s-boat-strikes-campaign-why-characterization-matters-for-regional-accountability-efforts/

Guatemala’s President Arévalo: When Honesty is Not Enough

By Ricardo Barrientos*

Source: Guatemala’s Ministerio de Desarrollo Social (MIDES)

Around the world, increasing numbers of voters are electing rulers with authoritarian, anti-democratic, or even, openly dictatorial profiles. Disenchantment with democracy is on the rise, while respect for basic freedoms, inclusion, equality, and progressive thinking – or, just thinking – is on the decline. When Bernardo Arévalo took office in January of 2024, after a legal battle to defend the previous year’s electoral results, Guatemala appeared a notable exception in the global slide towards authoritarianism. Recognized as a politician highly committed to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law, Arévalo emerged as a beacon for democracy and freedom in Central America and beyond.

Arévalo’s campaign was simple: be honest and fight corruption. This proved to be a highly effective electoral offer, as voters were tired after several administrations plagued with corruption scandals, and the ominous capture of important public institutions, most notably the General Attorney’s Office. After more than half of his four-year presidential term, Arévalo has carried through on that promise. He and most of this cabinet are perceived as honest, and corruption is not understood to be a problem within the Executive branch. Arévalo is also highly praised internationally, in contrast to his predecessors and some of his current regional neighbors. His administration has proved highly sagacious in managing international and diplomatic relations, achieving the best possible results with such challenging topics as dealing with the Trump administration in the US.

    Arévalo’s time in office would appear to be an outstanding success, deserving of applause by the Guatemalan people. Well, not quite.

    A survey conducted in May of 2026 shows that citizen support for Arévalo has plummeted. Only around 37 percent of Guatemalans approve of his government, putting him among the six worst rated presidents in Latin America. His popularity is well below several of the least democratic presidents, like Nayib Bukele of El Salvador or Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, who enjoy high levels of citizen support. The reason is simple: since the beginning of his tenure, the Arévalo administration has suffered severe difficulties managing the budget, most notably, public investment in infrastructure.

    With four ministerial changes in just two years and the lowest rate of budgetary execution among all ministries, the Ministry of Communications, Infrastructure, and Housing is surely a particular nightmare for the president. It continues to suffer from deeply rooted structures of corruption, contractors linked to organized crime and campaign financing for rival parties, compounded by a lack of technical experts within Arévalo’s own party, Movimiento Semilla, capable of assuming high-profile ministerial positions. This chaotic situation is reflected in roads that are in very bad condition and no construction of new ones. Understandably, Guatemalans become angry when poorly maintained roads aren’t improved, and not even a kilometer of new road has been built.

    Arévalo’s administration has also proven extremely weak when dealing with Congress. Since 2024, the only way the Executive branch has managed to get the legislation it needed approved is by increasing the money for what congressional members and mayors most want: fully flexible budget allocations to local governments, especially through so-called “extraordinary” transfers to local development councils. In 2024 this tactic seemed to work, as the Arevalo administration finally got its budget expansion approved, followed by extensions and modifications of the 2025 and 2026 budgets. But this “solution” for Congress to pass legislation worked only for those bills that Congress members, mayors, and the Executive all wanted. It did not work for other measures to protect children and youth, or to regulate the use of water, among many others.

    Of course, the tactic of “buying” the will of Congress is never sustainable over the long term. Arévalo’s team discovered that the appetite of congressional members and mayors for extraordinary transfers to local development councils proved insatiable: in 2026 extraordinary transfers rose to around US $1,420 million, or more than 18 times what they were in 2022. However, the actual execution of this huge increase through transfers is very low. In 2025, execution was only 59 percent of what was allocated. And as of July 2026, it stands at 16 percent, while the rest of the budget’s execution averages around 42 percent. Among the reasons is technical incompetence. But the most worrisome is that Congress has been passing exceptions to the Organic Budget Law, allowing non-executed allocations to be carried over to the next year. This effectively allows mayors and congressmembers to accumulate and finally execute them all in 2027, when general elections will be held. It will also likely be too tempting for mayors and congressional representatives not to divert these funds to their own re-election campaigns.

    Thus, due to the Arévalo administration’s weakness when dealing with Congress and its inability to deliver public investment works through Central Government ministries, it has not only transferred huge amounts of money, but a large share of political power to mayors and Congress. And, if the general perception is that Arévalo and his ministers are honest, that perception is surely not the same with regard to mayors and members of Congress: they belong to the “old politics”; many have been accused of corruption and of having links to organized crime, which is why such colloquial terms as “narco-mayor” or “narco-deputy” continue to be widely used.

    President Arévalo is highly praised for his honesty and recognized internationally as a true democrat. But most Guatemalans reject him for not being an effective ruler in delivering the needed public investment in goods and services. The worst possible outcome of this mess is that Guatemalans approve of honesty and democracy, while also believing that they are not enough to achieve the necessary results. As is happening around the world, many Guatemalans have become convinced that not only are democracy and honesty not enough, but that they prefer less democratic and less honest rulers in exchange for more effectiveness in delivering real products and results. This is perhaps the most probable outcome in Guatemala for the upcoming 2027 election: if mayors and members of Congress manage to execute the accumulated budget through their local development councils, this will show that, they, local narco-politicians and practitioners of the “old politics,” are in fact more reliable for delivering the public goods and services, such as roads, that people desperately need. In the wake of a new electoral cycle, Guatemalans could be applying to President Arévalo the old saying, “Street lamp, darkness at home.”

    * Ricardo Barrientos is the executive director of the Central American Institute for Fiscal Studies (ICEFI).

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    by clalsstaff on July 7, 2026  •  Permalink
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    https://aulablog.net/2026/07/07/guatemalas-president-arevalo-when-honesty-is-not-enough/

    The U.S. Supreme Court Immigration Rulings: Citizenship, Asylum, Metering, and TPS

    By Ernesto Castañeda

    American University

    By Ernesto Castañeda

    In recent weeks, the conservative majority in the U.S. Supreme Court has issued several rulings affecting the U.S. immigration system. One of these rulings states that people cannot seek asylum in the United States until they are physically inside U.S. territory. This has significant implications for people arriving—especially at the U.S.-Mexico border—who were requesting entry at the border wall or at ports of entry, turning themselves over to immigration agents to ask for admission with the stated goal of seeking asylum. Now, according to the Supreme Court, the U.S. government will view them as being in Mexico, and since they will largely be denied entry, they cannot apply for asylum while still outside U.S. territory. That is, the Court treated people waiting on the Mexican side of the border as not yet having entered the United States for asylum purposes. This is curious because in some cases the side of the border wall facing Mexico is already U.S. territory because clearly the U.S. cannot build on Mexican territory. Meaning that in many places, by reaching the wall, one is technically already on U.S. soil. Future suits may test this. However, given these new legal precedents, it appears the U.S. government would deny entry for the purpose of seeking asylum inside the country. This will affect many people, particularly those from Latin America and regions experiencing armed conflict or political turmoil. 

    Another ruling related to what is known as “metering”—essentially a slow, controlled trickle of people allowed into U.S. territory when there is congestion of asylum seekers at the border, or when large numbers of people wish to enter the United States. It is not the first time this border-processing policy, which limits how many asylum seekers are admitted or processed at a time, has been brought up. During the pandemic—and even earlier, under programs like “Remain in Mexico”—the U.S. government stated it would only accept, say, five hundred, two hundred, or two thousand people per day across the entire border. Consequently, even though many people sought asylum, they were not immediately admitted. The U.S. government claimed this was necessary to maintain order and manage logistics—handling the entry process in a way they could manage without people sleeping on the streets or needing more hostels for migrants or overcrowded immigration detention centers. Metering was an “emergency” policy that began under Obama, continued under Trump, was paused during most of Biden’s term, though it was brought back towards the end, and continued under the Trump administration. The Supreme Court has allowed the policy to proceed into the future by lifting the lower-court block.

    The third topic is Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which allows legal residence in the United States to whole groups of people from particular countries due to events like earthquakes, hurricanes, civil conflict, or other crises—as seen in Honduras, Haiti, El Salvador, and other countries—where nationals could stay in the U.S. without fear of deportation. However, the Supreme Court has now ruled that, in the case of Haitians and Syrians, this status of temporary protection can be completely revoked despite motives and the decision-making process. But the Supreme Court conservative majority went further, arguing that TPS designation is a matter that falls under executive authority, specifically the president’s power to decide whom, how, when, and for how long TPS is granted. Therefore, the decision strengthens the executive’s ability to terminate TPS designations and may affect other TPS holders. So, although the ruling did not directly address cases involving, for example, Salvadorans, it grants the president greater power to revoke TPS at will without explanation, preventing even lower courts from blocking such decisions—something they had done in recent years. 

    Altogether, these decisions have many implications that make it harder for people to enter the U.S. legally or to seek asylum, and make it difficult for those already inside the country to apply for asylum, given the lengthy, difficult process, made even worse by recent procedures implemented by the second Trump administration. Now, regarding people holding TPS, deportations will begin—starting with Haitians and Syrians—but the issue likely will not stop there. People with TPS have been in the U.S. for decades, working, paying taxes, contributing to the economy and the arts. They have children born in the U.S. who are U.S. citizens under the current practice of granting birthright citizenship; soon, the Court will rule on the future of birthright citizenship, which is so common in many countries in the Americas, which started as European colonies with an important proportion of the population born from parents and ancestors born elsewhere.  

    Ernesto Castañeda is a political, social, and cultural analyst. Edited by Esmeralda Alverde Duarte, Research Intern at the Immigration Lab

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    by clalsstaff on July 1, 2026  •  Permalink
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    https://aulablog.net/2026/07/01/the-u-s-supreme-court-immigration-rulings-citizenship-asylum-metering-and-tps/

    Changing Birthright Citizenship Would Weaken American Democracy

    By Ernesto Castañeda

    American University

    The U.S. Supreme Court will soon announce its ruling on Birthright Citizenship. If it sides with the Trump administration, it will revoke the practice of automatically obtaining citizenship by birth in U.S. territories. The outcome of this case has the potential not only to change how immigration law functions but also how citizenship is defined for everyone in the United States. Doing away with it would permanently damage the Supreme Court’s reputation.

    Birthright Citizenship is part of the 14th Amendment and has been a right guaranteed to anyone born within the country since 1868. The amendment was originally implemented to guarantee citizenship to formerly enslaved people and means that anyone born on American soil is an American citizen, regardless of their parents’ citizenship at birth. Slaves were not considered citizens nor had the same political rights, and their status was inherited through maternal lines and thus also affected the children slave-owners had with enslaved mothers.

    Revoking Birthright Citizenship would immediately bring into question the citizenship of hundreds of thousands of children born each year, both to citizens and to undocumented or temporary residents with permission to work and study in the United States, and not officially representing a foreign country.  It would reinstate the inheritance of status that existed during slavery, where a mother’s status, in this case, documentation, would be passed down to her children, possibly for generations. It would create a group of people in the U.S. with no rights, greatly deepening inequality and democratic erosion.

    Previous court decisions have upheld Birthright Citizenship regardless of the parents’ immigration status. There is a strong precedent for birthright citizenship. Even during previous periods of immigration restriction in the US, like during the years following the Chinese Exclusion Act, the U.S.-born children of undocumented Chinese parents were American citizens. Changes to birthright citizenship would directly impact newborns from undocumented parents as well as the children of foreign workers with permission to reside in the country. Systems like this have existed before in countries like Germany, but were abandoned due to their impracticality and the enduring inequalities they created.

    A small group is fighting to end birthright citizenship. Most Americans do not have a problem with birthright citizenship; 64% of Americans support it. The widespread impact of ending birthright citizenship would be felt not just by everyday people but also by foreign-born CEOs, scientists, healthcare professionals, and, yes, agricultural and service workers. It would impact U.S. innovation for decades to come. It would deter people from immigrating and bringing new ideas and approaches to common problems. The U.S. would no longer be the main global hub of intellectual exchange and creativity that it has been for decades.

    Ernesto Castañeda is a political, social, and cultural analyst.

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    https://aulablog.net/2026/07/01/changing-birthright-citizenship-would-weaken-american-democracy/

    Lifestyle Migration from the United States and Canada to Ecuador

    By Ernesto Castañeda

    American University

    Matthew Hayes looks in depth at a population that moves from one country to another without asking for permission. They expect to keep their cultures and worldviews intact and to be respected. They live together in the same part of town. They talk to each other in their native language and are slow to learn the local language. Some start new businesses. They increase economic activity and revitalize urban areas, sometimes pushing long-time residents out.

    A street in Cuenca, Ecuador

    We are talking about the many North Americans that have moved to an area of Cuenca, Ecuador, as described by Hayes in his original book: Gringolandia: Lifestyle Migration under Late Capitalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). The author interviewed 108 American and Canadian retirees in Cuenca and a rural area also favored by them, along with Ecuadorians, while conducting ethnographic fieldwork during visits across seven years – all before the COVID-19 pandemic and the acceleration of this phenomenon. This book vividly describes an interesting case study and helps improve our overall understanding of human migration and how race affects immigrant reception.

    These North American communities are not unique to Ecuador. For example, well over one million Americans live in Mexico today. Some estimate that, currently, more people move from the United States to Mexico than the other way around; this includes white retirees receiving social security benefits to finance their stay and many tourists overstaying their visas. Therefore, the discussions in this book are relevant for other expatriate communities. Many interviewees in Ecuador frame their migration as an adventure, a way to stay active and gain new experiences,  or a bold instance of individual freedom and self-expression.

    Many of the participants in Hayes’s study call themselves gringos or expats; others call themselves ‘‘economic refugees’’ because they needed to move abroad to find a place with a lower cost of living. Yet others see themselves as ‘‘medical refugees’’ because they would be unable to afford healthcare in the United States, but can access health services and other subsidies and social programs in Ecuador (p. 109). Therefore, inequality, economic and geopolitical reasons motivate the decision to migrate, justifications that are similar to those offered by many people moving from the global South to the global North.

    Nevertheless, these retirees not only benefit from a retirement income that goes further in their new location, but also from their whiteness. This arrangement is what allows them to frame precarity-led displacement as an adventure and a personal decision. Hayes finds that ‘‘North Americans think of their relocations mostly in terms of their own lives, even as they continue to be rooted in unequal global social relations’’ (p. 7). Problems created by neoliberal policies are met with individual neoliberal solutions that transfer the burden of some of those individuals aging into poverty in North America to the global South.

    Another big difference between Latin American immigrants in the United States and U.S. emigrants in Ecuador is that the latter group can easily obtain immigration papers. One can get an Ecuadorian residency visa by demonstrating at least 800 dollars of continuous income, which can include Social Security payments. Indeed, most of Hayes’s respondents reported monthly incomes between $800 and $1,500. Foreigners can also get an investor visa if they deposit $25,000 in an Ecuadorian bank. Many others choose to overstay their tourist visa, and they rarely face consequences for this. Local officials are welcoming, offering integration courses and help with relocation.

    By receiving income from the global North and moving to a place with a lower cost of living in the global South, these retirees profit from ‘‘geoarbitrage.’’ Migration allows them not only to make ends meet but to be financially better off. Retirees have been doing this within the United States for decades, but as retirement incomes and inequality in the U.S. increase, even retirement communities in Florida or Arizona can be unaffordable to many. Thus, some people move to places in the global South. Colonial cities in Latin America such as San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, Cusco, Peru, or Cuenca, Ecuador, offer the appeal of Mediterranean European-like cities but are much more affordable.

    The book includes a fascinating discussion about who benefited from UNESCO’s designation of Cuenca as a World Heritage City. Hayes discusses the intermediaries that have popped up to lure North Americans into Cuenca and other areas, as they profit from it. They lure customers with neoliberal phrases such as ‘‘Half the Cost, Double the Freedom’’ or ‘‘Living a Six-Figure Life . . . on Much Less.’’ Interestingly, the relocation of North Americans leads to price increases in Cuenca and helps to propel the gentrification of certain downtown neighborhoods and areas in the idyllic countryside, resulting in the relocation of poorer Ecuadorians, often of indigenous origin. Hayes cites work calling these processes ‘‘transnational gentrification.’’

    By moving to South America, working class retirees, burnt out professionals tired of their work schedules, recent widows, and new single mothers a few paychecks away from homelessness in the U.S., are suddenly closer to the top of the social hierarchy in Ecuador and are able to afford many comforts that they could not in the global North. They cannot pass as local white elites, though; they are identified everywhere and mostly benignly as gringos. Hayes shows how self-conscious long-time gringos are about how locals perceive their group, as their numbers increase, and why they themselves openly critique ‘‘obnoxious gringo’’ behavior (p. 93).

    North Americans benefit from white privilege in Ecuador, but ‘‘the visibility of their somatic whiteness contrasts with its invisibility in North America’’ (p. 95). Furthermore, some interviewees felt that increased numbers of North Americans might change ‘‘gringoness from something unique and interesting into something humdrum and even somewhat of a hassle’’ (p. 105). One interviewee complained about being increasingly seen as a part of a group. This sense of the loss of individuality racialized their whiteness and deeply bothered those who were used to being in the majority and in the dominant racial group in North America. They became concerned about the behavior of other gringos in Cuenca because they felt it could affect them. Many respondents saw their new home in Cuenca as like America in the 1950s, partly implying nostalgia for a white-dominant America with a stronger social safety net and economic security.

    One takeaway is that migration creates change in the short term, but overall and in the middle and long-term, it is good for migrants and locals (See Castañeda 2026); another is that short- and long-distance relocations cannot be understood outside the context of population growth, capitalism, global inequality, and power dynamics. Thus, the book is not only about expats but also about political economy and whiteness. It is a captivating read and a solid contribution to the growing body of academic work on migration, global inequality, and race.

    References

    Castañeda, Ernesto. 2026. “Immigration and Urban Vitality: How Newcomers Make

    Cities Strong.” Washington, DC: Center for Latin American and Latino Studies and the

    Immigration Lab, American University.

    Hayes, Matthew. 2018. Gringolandia: Lifestyle Migration under Late Capitalism.

    Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Ernesto Castañeda is Professor and Director of the Immigration Lab and the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University

    Edited by Vincent Iannuzzi-Sucich

    *This post continues an ongoing series, as part of CLALS’s Ecuador Initiative, examining the country’s economic, governance, security, and societal challenges, made possible with generous support from Dr. Maria Donoso Clark, CAS/PhD ’91.

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    by clalsstaff on June 3, 2026  •  Permalink
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    https://aulablog.net/2026/06/03/lifestyle-migration-from-the-united-states-and-canada-to-ecuador/

    Why El Salvador is Turning to Soft Power

    Sonja Wolf, Research Professor at the Panamerican University in Mexico City*

    El Salvador’s elected autocrat claims to have ended gang violence. Soft power is central to Bukele’s efforts to legitimize his rule through these results. Yet the tactic invites greater scrutiny, revealing the state’s inability to tackle violence effectively.

    Source: Wikimedia Commons

    El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, a former advertising executive, first rose to power in 2019 promising to root out corruption and eradicate gang violence. In 2024 he won a second term in office, despite a constitutional ban on immediate presidential re-election. During his time in power, Bukele has systematically dismantled the country’s democratic institutions. The ongoing state of emergency has made headlines around the world for both its spectacle of cruelty and its controversial nature as a security policy. Police have detained over 91,500 citizens, including more than 33,000 people without gang involvement, and prison abuses have led to at least 523 deaths in state custody. Nonetheless, the measure remains widely popular with Salvadorans who, for decades, were terrorized by gangs.

    Bukele’s electoral autocracy hides behind a democratic façade to maintain legitimacy. To demonstrate effectiveness and maintain support, both domestically and abroad, the regime is building its soft power. According to the official narrative, the president is leading El Salvador’s transformation from the world’s murder capital into a safe and modern nation that is open to tourists and investors. To lend credence to this rhetoric, and to raise the brand visibility of Bukele and El Salvador, the country has been hosting major sports and cultural events. In recent years, it has held international surfing competitions, a Miss Universe pageant, and a five-show residency by Shakira. At the 2026 Venice Biennale, El Salvador debuts with its first-ever national pavilion. Adding to this soft power projection is the growing number of self-published hagiographies that extol Bukele’s leadership and the performance of his administration.

    A recent example is The Bukele Method by Andrés Guzmán. Until recently, the Colombian lawyer and cybersecurity consultant served as El Salvador’s Presidential Commissioner for Human Rights and Press Freedom. In this role, Guzmán was tasked with countering external criticism of the country’s backsliding on democracy and the rule of law. His text is a compilation of half-truths that appear designed to whitewash the Bukele regime’s human rights record and bolster its legitimacy by touting its alleged security gains.

    To take on the gangs, Guzmán asserts, the administration had to begin by stamping out the corruption that had permitted these groups to build their criminal empires. The author takes particular aim at the pacts that the traditional parties, ARENA and the FMLN, had brokered with the gangs to mobilize electoral support and reduce visible homicides. Rather than driving an institutional clean-up, Bukele’s lawmakers passed, in 2021, reforms that placed the justice system under the president’s control. Appointments of regime loyalists, mass firings of non-aligned state workers, and the dismantling of public sector unions concentrated power in the president’s hands. Investigations into government corruption and Bukele’s own gang pacts folded, while tighter transparency restrictions eroded independent oversight.

    Guzmán justifies the state of emergency by pointing to its alleged results. In typical populist rhetoric, he paints the autocrat as a hero who made tough decisions, defied his enemies (the opposition, the gangs, international watchdogs), and attained his goals: the dismantling of the gangs and a historic decline in homicides. Or, as the author puts it, mothers can finally sleep without the fear of a gang member knocking on the door at night. This story hides the fact that the “security miracle” relied on Bukele’s gang deals, whose breakdown triggered the state of emergency, as well as statistical manipulation — the homicide count excludes killings by police, murders in prisons, and bodies found in unmarked graves.

    Guzmán claims to have rigorously reviewed all human rights complaints and found them to have been exaggerated. But this contradicts independent reports showing that the state has hidden thousands of allegations and rejected thousands of habeas corpus petitions. A recent report by an international group of experts concluded that the human rights violations may in fact amount to crimes against humanity. Guzmán admits that mistakes were made, referring to arbitrary detentions. However, only some 8,000 citizens have been liberated, under conditions, and it was their testimonies that shed light on the prison abuses. The remains of dead detainees speak for themselves.

    In defending the state of emergency, the author poses a false dilemma: the government could pursue this measure, or do nothing in the face of an existential threat. But this either-or fallacy ignores that police intelligence about gang members had long existed. Bukele chose to act on this information only once he had institutional control and no longer needed the gangs.

    Following Bukele, who defines democracy as simply the will of the people, Guzmán contends that the president’s resounding re-election victory in 2024 validated his security strategy. In this deceptively simple logic, international watchdogs have no right to interfere in the domestic affairs of a sovereign nation. What matters is that Salvadorans endorsed the state of emergency by granting their leader a democratic mandate. But depicting “the people” as a homogenous group, unified in their support for Bukele, erases the voices of those who try to stand up to his abuse of power.

    Ultimately, the state of emergency is a simulation of legality that tries to hide the state’s incapacity to deal with violence. Laws passed by Bukele’s Legislative Assembly have reshaped a justice system that lacked the capacity to successfully prosecute offenders. In mass trials involving hundreds of defendants in a single proceeding, citizens with no prior gang involvement sit alongside real gang members. In the absence of any meaningful defense, prosecutors present flimsy evidence and unreliable witnesses to achieve convictions of entire criminal structures. Soft power efforts such as Guzmán’s publication promise the kind of performance-based legitimacy that the Salvadoran regime craves. The “Bukele method” should indeed be examined — not because it constitutes a blueprint for security, but because closer scrutiny reveals it to be, like Bukele himself, a marketing product.

    *Sonja Wolf is the author of Mano Dura: The Politics of Gang Control in El Salvador (University of Texas Press, 2017).

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    by clalsstaff on June 3, 2026  •  Permalink
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    China, Taiwan and Paraguay

    By Esteban Caballero

    Political Scientist, Independent Investigator for FLACSO-Paraguay, and Columnist for Ultima Hora

    Secretary Marco Rubio meets with Paraguayan President Santiago Peña at the Department of State in Washington, D.C., January 21, 2025. (Official State Department photo by Freddie Everett) Source: Wikimedia Commons

    Xi Jinping’s warning that “the Taiwan issue is the most important matter in relations between China and the United States” will go down in history. However, for the government of Paraguay, Donald Trump’s subsequent statements on the subject could prove even more unsettling. Speaking in a measured tone, the U.S. President acknowledged that Xi “holds a very firm opinion and does not want to see an independence movement,” adding that he, too, “does not intend for anyone to declare independence.” Furthermore, he left it unclear whether or not he would authorize a new arms sale to Taiwan.

    Even if these amounted to only a few of the many assertions made by the heads of state of China and the United States at their recent summit, Santiago Peña and his Foreign Minister, Rubén Ramírez Lezcano, likely paused for a moment to reconsider Paraguay’s stance regarding Taiwan. Should they, perhaps, review their close relationship with Taipei in light of a potential shift in global geopolitics? Paraguay belongs to the small group of 12 countries that still recognize Taiwan; alongside Guatemala, it is one of only two Spanish-speaking nations to do so.

    The doubts to which we allude do not concern the progress of cooperative agreements and trade relations with Taiwan. Both are advancing favorably. These are matters involving technical cooperation, market access, and infrastructure financing. During Santiago Peña’s administration, this kind of cooperation with Taiwan has been significantly bolstered—a progression that culminated during the President’s recent visit to the island in May 2026. Returning from that visit, he announced an agreement for a massive AI data center project, although its feasibility remains to be assessed.

    What may well have generated uncertainty within the Paraguayan government is Trump’s apparent complacency in the face of warnings from Xi Jinping. Such an attitude on the part of the U.S. President would signal a departure from the tougher stance of American foreign policy hawks and would compel the Paraguayan Foreign Ministry to rethink its strategy—particularly the approach of presenting ties with Taiwan as proof of its firm rejection of Chinese influence in Latin America in order to ingratiate itself with the Trump administration. Nothing is set in stone, but this possibility is increasingly making its way into their deliberations.

    Management of relations with Taiwan forms part of the Santiago Peña administration’s—in our view, excessive—effort to draw closer to the Trump administration and align itself with the State Department, headed by Marco Rubio. In this vein, Paraguay has backed U.S. military intervention in Venezuela and Iran, declared itself an unwavering ally of Israel, and supported the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Furthermore, alongside Argentina, it is the only other Latin American country to serve on Trump’s Board of Peace. Added to this is its enthusiastic participation in the Shield of the Americas summit, held in Miami in March of this year.

    Demonstrations of alignment have also been made through measures of cooperation and collaboration regarding migration, security, and the fight against drug trafficking. The Peña administration has cooperated with the United States in the realm of migration, including a willingness to function as a “third country”[1] to process asylum applications for the U.S. It also endorsed a memorandum to facilitate the return of migrants denied admission to U.S. territory back to their countries of origin “with the assistance”[2] of Paraguay.

    In the realm of security, Peña announced the designation of the Cartel de los Soles, the Comando Vermelho, and the Primeiro Comando da Capital as terrorist organizations, in line with the U.S. narrative regarding transnational organized crime and its links to state networks in the region. Concurrently, Paraguay signed a Status of Forces Agreement with the U.S.—a legal instrument that governs the status of foreign troops, including their entry, criminal jurisdiction, taxation, immunities, and operational protocols. In practice, such agreements typically facilitate troop deployments, military exercises, and defense cooperation; however, they can also spark domestic debate concerning the scope of immunity of foreign personnel, the extent of the host state’s oversight, and the tensions they may trigger with neighboring nations, such as Brazil.

    This alignment has led to Paraguay being regarded as a reliable ally of the United States, and the measures adopted are presented as a reaffirmation of the historic alliance between the two countries. Today, that relationship is expressed within a new framework of cooperation, in which “security” and “counterterrorism” occupy a central place.

    Nevertheless, the concrete benefits for Paraguay have not been particularly visible. It appears that Paraguay is conceding far more than the United States is yielding. Consequently, the prevailing opinion in various circles is that this has been too high a price to pay for the lifting of sanctions—imposed by the Treasury Department during the Biden administration—against the companies owned by Horacio Cartes, the former president and current chairman of the ruling party.

    This is also the reason why concerns are arising regarding the scope of current foreign policy. If one observes the steps that have been taken, a pattern seems to emerge: a short-term outlook and the absence of a cohesive state policy. Santiago Peña has committed himself to a U.S. administration that may not endure in its current form following the November 2026 midterm elections. President Trump’s popularity is on the decline; the Democrats are gaining ground. The decision to align with the U.S., even in violation of international law, overlooks the fact that small states must uphold the protections afforded by such law regarding the defense of their sovereignty. Forging such a close alliance with Israel, and the most radical elements of the Netanyahu government, has isolated Paraguay from the international community. Finally, coupling all of this with an adoption of far-right rhetoric may yield short-term gains; however, once that political cycle concludes—as was the case in Hungary—the ensuing disappointment could be profound.

    [1] See Signing of a Safe Third Country Agreement with Paraguay – United States Department of State

    [2] See: https://www.mre.gov.py/paraguay-y-ee-uu-amplian-cooperacion-migratoria/

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    by clalsstaff on June 2, 2026  •  Permalink
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    Posted by clalsstaff on June 2, 2026

    https://aulablog.net/2026/06/02/china-taiwan-and-paraguay/

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