There is a version of history in which the United States and Israel subjugate Latin America through force, threat and blackmail. It is a comfortable version, because it distributes the roles neatly and absolves the peoples of the continent of their own responsibility. The real version is less consoling. The infrastructure of control, the military bases, the arms contracts, the counter-insurgency doctrine, the surveillance systems, was already in place long before Javier Milei won in the first round, long before José Antonio Kast was inaugurated in Santiago on 11 March 2026, long before Abelardo De la Espriella prevailed in Colombia that same June. Nobody invaded the continent. The continent voted.
The Pre-existing Architecture
The United States Southern Command, known by its acronym SOUTHCOM, oversees American operations in Latin America and the Caribbean. It is neither a new nor a discreet presence. Colombia hosts nine American military bases, the third highest concentration in the region. In December 2023, under the government of Gustavo Petro, representatives of SOCSOUTH and the Colombian Special Forces signed at the Tolemaida base a Bilateral Action Plan for the period 2025–2029. The agreement provoked no diplomatic crisis. It was presented as routine.
It is worth pausing on that detail. Petro is the Colombian president who brought the Palestinian cause to international forums, who suspended arms purchases from Israel, who named the genocide with that word when others were searching for euphemisms. And he is also the president who signed that plan at Tolemaida, who integrated the Colombian Navy into the Combined Maritime Force under American strategic command in January 2024, who kept the nine bases intact throughout his mandate. This is not a contradiction that reflects badly on Petro. It is a demonstration that reflects well on the architecture. What speeches call sovereignty and what documents call cooperation designate the same arrangement, and that arrangement survives without difficulty the governments that publicly detest it.
The mechanism does not require ideologically compatible governments in order to function. The bases do not close when the left wins. The training contracts are not rescinded. The counter-insurgency doctrine is not erased from the special forces manuals. What changes with governments is the level of enthusiasm with which the renewal is signed. The architecture is more durable than any moral position one adopts towards it.
The Subcontractor
Israel does not operate in Latin America as a hegemonic power. It operates as a specialised supplier, and the speciality that distinguishes it from other arms vendors is the doctrine included in the price. It is a concept that can be stated with precision, the most dangerous enemy is not outside, it is inside. What Israeli terminology calls internal security was translated successively in Latin America as counter-insurgency, democratic security and the war on drug trafficking. The names change. The function of identifying an internal enemy that justifies the repressive apparatus remains.
Carlos Castaño Gil, co-founder of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, spent a year in Israel in 1983. He was eighteen years old. What he learnt there was not merely military technique; it was a way of conceiving the social organisation of violence. The AUC became the largest right-wing paramilitary force ever to exist in the Western Hemisphere, responsible for 38.4% of the civilian deaths documented in the Colombian conflict between 1981 and 2012, according to the Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica.
“I learnt an infinite number of things in Israel, and I owe that country part of my essence, my human and military achievements. I copied the concept of self-defence from the Israelis; every citizen of that country is a potential soldier.”
Carlos Castaño Gil, Mi Confesión, 2001
The retired Israeli lieutenant colonel Yair Klein arrived in Colombia in 1988 to train at Puerto Boyacá the paramilitary groups that would form the operational core of the AUC, teaching techniques in explosives, car-bomb placement and political executions. Convicted in absentia by Colombian justice in 2001 and sentenced to eleven years in prison, he was never extradited. He lives in Israel.
After the Israeli operation on Gaza in 2008 and 2009, the Colombian government acquired Israeli drones for intelligence and reconnaissance operations against the FARC. The sales argument was explicit, the equipment had been tested under real combat conditions. The technical expression “battle-tested” functions in the arms industry as a quality certification. What it certifies is the number of dead upon whom the system was trialled. When Israeli defence exports reached a historic record of 19.2 billion dollars in 2025, the Ministry of Defence explained without ambiguity the origin of that commercial success.
“The unprecedented operational achievements, combined with the combat experience gained during the war, generated high demand for Israeli technology among many countries.”
Israeli Ministry of Defence, official statement, June 2025
The Palestinian body functions, in market terms, as a quality certificate. It is the laboratory where the product is tested before being exported. Latin America has been for decades one of its most consistent clients.
The Referendum
Between 2023 and 2026, the political map of Latin America was reconfigured in a way that no intelligence operation could have produced with such efficiency. The vote produced it. Milei with 55.7% in Argentina, Bukele re-elected with 84.6% in El Salvador, Kast at La Moneda after Boric ended his mandate with over 60% disapproval, De la Espriella in Colombia. This is not a list of coups d’état. It is a list of electoral results with documented participation rates and international scrutiny.
None of these results can be explained solely by foreign interference or media manipulation, though all those factors existed and can be documented. What explained them, above all, were the voters. People with identity cards and voting booths who chose what they chose for reasons that do not always coincide with the analyses the left produces about its own defeats. Insecurity, inflation, exhaustion with progressive governments that had promised more than they could deliver, attachment to the familiar, even when the familiar is subordination.
The architecture of control built over decades did not need to impose itself. It only needed to wait for the hemisphere’s voters to choose, for their own reasons, governments that would have no objection to activating it. The most effective mechanism of domination is one that is not maintained by coercion because the dominated have internalised its conditions as their own. It is not a new formula. Galeano knew it. He wrote it with pain. Here it is noted as data.
The Three Exceptions
Brazil, Mexico and Uruguay remain, in June 2026, under left or centre-left governments. Lula, Sheinbaum with a 76% approval rating, Orsi with the Frente Amplio since March 2025. The three cases are real. None of them is a victory for the Latin American emancipatory project.
Brazil is the only continental economy capable of absorbing pressure from Washington without breaking, not through political virtue but through size. Mexico owes its left-wing stability to four decades of Morena building electoral patience before reaching power, and to a geography that turns any tension with Washington into an immediate problem for both sides. Uruguay is a solid democracy of three and a half million inhabitants where the Frente Amplio governed for fifteen consecutive years and built institutions that survived alternation. None of the three represents a replicable model in Colombia, Chile or Argentina.
What distinguishes the three exceptions is not the moral superiority of their voters. It is specific historical and institutional conditions that the other countries did not have, or had and squandered. To treat them as centres of resistance is an analytical error. They are statistical anomalies in a structural movement they have not reversed. Lula’s Brazil has not closed a single American military base on its territory. Sheinbaum’s Mexico negotiated migrant containment with Trump. Orsi’s Uruguay passed an austerity budget. The left that remains is not the left the region needs. It is the left the region managed to keep.
What Is Inherited
The governments that came to power in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru between 2023 and 2026 did not build the architecture they inherited. They found it ready, calibrated and functioning. The bases were there. The training contracts were active. The agreements with Israeli security companies were signed. The channels with SOUTHCOM were open. All that the new governments had to do was stop pretending it made them uncomfortable.
The reconversion of the paramilitary groups that survived the Petro period in Colombia is the most illustrative case. The successor structures of the AUC, successively renamed Bacrim, Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia and Clan del Golfo, maintained their territorial presence and their links with sectors of the armed forces throughout the left-wing government. The arrival of De la Espriella does not create these structures. It normalises them, as Uribe had done two decades earlier. Violence does not escalate abruptly because it does not need to. The architecture already controls the territory. It only needs a government that stops calling it by its name.
The most precise signal is not found in inaugural speeches but in the administrative gestures that follow them. Milei restored relations with Israel in the first month of his mandate. Kast arrived at La Moneda with a security agenda built around police cooperation with that same country. De la Espriella spoke during his campaign of recovering the confidence of strategic allies, without needing to specify which ones. The architecture recognises that language because it wrote it itself, in the manuals that remain in force.
What Castaño learnt in Tel Aviv in 1983 was not only how to train armed men. He learnt how to build a society in which every citizen perceives themselves as a potential soldier, how to make mutual surveillance a civic value, how to name the internal enemy in such a way that anyone can be one. That doctrine does not need to be taught again with every change of government. It is already in the manuals, in the training of officers, in the institutional culture of the security forces. It transmits itself, as all inheritances transmit themselves that nobody wanted but nobody returned.
The continent was not conquered. It learnt to conquer itself, and it calls that democracy.
…
G.S.
Sources
- Al Jazeera, “Israel’s Latin American trail of terror” (2003)
- Latin American Research Review, “The Colombia-Israel Nexus” (2017)
- SIPRI Arms Transfers Database
- DIMSE, “Colombia”
- Security in Context, “Colombia’s Shifting Military Ties” (2023)
- Infobae, “Plan de acción bilateral Colombia-EEUU 2025-2029” (2023)
- INDEPAZ, “¿Una base militar en la isla Gorgona?” (2024)
- Times of Israel, “Israeli arms sales break record, reaching $19.2 billion in 2025” (2025)
- Wikipedia, “Yair Klein”
- Wikipedia, “Right-wing paramilitarism in Colombia”
- Nueva Sociedad, “El México de Morena” (2025)
- Nueva Sociedad, “La izquierda uruguaya en el poder” (2026)
- Carlos Castaño Gil, Mi Confesión (2001), Bogotá
