Japan Anger Hits ‘Boiling Point’ as US Marine Accused of Murdering Okinawa Woman

“As long as there are US military bases in Okinawa, such incidents will occur,” said one former Japanese senator.


A woman holds up a placard reading ‘US Military Out!’ during a protest against the killing of a woman in Okinawa allegedly committed by a US Marine Corps member, in front of the Prime Minister’s Office in Tokyo on October 5, 2026.
(Photo by Yuichi Yamazaki/AFP via Getty Images

Brett Wilkins
Oct 05, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

Anger over the US military presence in Okinawa is growing anew this week after Japanese police arrested a Marine Corps lance corporal accused of robbing and murdering a local woman, prompting protests and renewed calls for a revision of the US-Japan Status of Forces Agreement and even the removal of American bases.

Lance Cpl. Devin Jacob Ballard, 20, who is stationed at Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, was arrested Sunday on suspicion of killing 39-year-old Anna Yagi at the Naminoue Crustal Hotel in Naha early Saturday and stealing her wallet and backpack. Yagi died from asphyxiation caused by pressure to her neck, according to Okinawa police. Ballard has denied the allegations.

The Japan Times reported that area surveillance cameras captured footage of a man with “distinctive features,” including tattoos on both arms and a shaved head, leaving the hotel carrying the woman’s backpack, which was later found nearby.

The killing sparked protests in Okinawa and Tokyo.

“How much longer do we have to bear this?” one protester asked outside the Okinawa prefectural government headquarters in Naha, according to Jiji Press.

A woman in her 40s from Nago said, “I feel it’s a contradiction that a serviceman stationed at a US military base in Okinawa to protect Japan has killed a civilian.”

Another woman at the protest said, “I don’t want to see any more people hurt.”

The advocacy group Femibridge Okinawa said on social media: “Anger has reached its boiling point. We don’t want to hear words like ‘refrain from commenting.’”

On Monday, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi—who leads the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and supports US troops in Japan as a strategic deterrent to China—condemned the “heinous crime” in a speech to the Kokkai, or Parliament.

“The Japanese government has lodged a strong protest with the US side and has strongly demanded full cooperation with the investigation,” she added, “as well as strict disciplinary action against US military personnel and thorough measures to prevent a recurrence of such incidents.”

Okinawa Gov. Genta Koja, who has no party affiliation but was elected last month with LDP support, issued a statement Sunday calling Yagi’s killing “absolutely unforgivable.”

“I feel deeply outraged,” he continued. “It has come as a great shock to residents of the prefecture, who are forced to live in close proximity to bases, and has sparked fresh anxiety.”

“Although the prefecture has consistently demanded that the US military take measures to prevent recurrence whenever such incidents have occurred in the past, the fact that this type of incident has happened again compels us to conclude that the US military’s efforts to maintain discipline and educate its personnel are completely ineffective,” Koja added.

US Ambassador to Japan George Glass—who on Sunday was summoned by Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi over Yagi’s killing—on Monday expressed his condolences and pledged “full cooperation” with investigators.

“I am speaking with US military commanders this week about how we continue to hold our American service members to the very highest levels of discipline and integrity,” he said, according to The Japan Times.

The Third Marine Expeditionary Force also said it was “actively cooperating” with Japanese officials in regard to the case, and that the US Marine Corps “takes these allegations very seriously and expects every Marine to adhere to the highest standards of behavior.”

In Naha, Okinawa’s prefectural capital, residents expressed their anxiety over the continued US military presence.

One 53-year-old woman said she has been “afraid to walk at night” in Naha.

“If we do not change the Japan-US Status of Forces Agreement, the crime of US soldiers will not decrease,” she asserted.

Hidekiyo Shinkawa, 89, expressed outrage over the number of people killed by US troops in Okinawa over the past eight decades.

“When I was a junior high school student, a classmate of mine died after being hit by a US military vehicle,” Shinkawa told Kumamoto Nichinichi Shimbun.

Okinawa was under US occupation from 1945-72. Today, the southern archipelago hosts 70% of US military bases in Japan and most of the 50,000 troops stationed in the country.

While many Okinawans appreciate the economic and security benefits of having US bases in their backyards, distrust of American troops in Okinawa—which was conquered during the closing months of World War II at the cost of over 100,000 civilian lives—runs deep.

Okinawans have been trying in vain to get the Americans to leave since the beginning of the occupation, when property was seized at gunpoint, residents were expelled, and homes and farms were bulldozed or burned. The Americans promised Okinawans good farmland and financial aid if they resettled in Bolivia. Thousands accepted the offer only to find themselves shipped off to an inhospitable wilderness where many died from disease. Much of the promised assistance was never delivered.

In Okinawa, the US military built more than 100 military facilities—over 30 of which are still in operation—on a series of islands roughly the size of Los Angeles. Washington forced the Japanese government to accept status of forces agreements that gave the US jurisdiction over all American personnel on Japanese soil.

US troops stationed in or visiting Okinawa have committed thousands of crimes, including at least dozens of murders and over 100 alleged rapes. In one six-month period in 1949, US troops killed 29 Okinawans and raped 18 more, including a 9-month-old infant.

The US military has also fired and lost nuclear weapons in local waters, leaked the deadly nerve agent sarin, and exposed residents to chlorine gas, to name but a handful of the most egregious environmental incidents over the decades.

Although the 1995 gang-rape of a 12-year-old girl by two Marines and a sailor led to a revision of the US-Japan SOFA so that Japanese authorities could convict and imprison Americans who commit the most heinous offenses—a development that led to scores of convictions—crimes against Okinawans and the local environment continue to this day.

On Monday, Koja argued in the wake of Yagi’s killing that “to ensure that such an incident never happens again, I strongly urge the Japanese and US governments to take responsibility and implement effective, fundamental measures—including a review of the Japan-US Status of Forces Agreement.”

Some Japanese went even further, demanding an end to US bases in Okinawa.

“As long as there are US military bases in Okinawa, such incidents will occur, and the fear that such incidents will occur and that they may happen in the future will continue,” wrote Keiko Itokazu, a former leftist lawmaker in the House of Councillors, the Kokkai’s upper chamber.

“How long will this pain and sorrow be felt by the people, especially women?” she added. “Such incidents have been repeated in the past, and each time the government and the US military have said that they will provide proper education to US soldiers... But is this the result of education?”

Former Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said on social media: “Once again, an incident that should never have happened has occurred. A woman was murdered in a hotel in Naha City, and a Marine was arrested.”

“Far from protecting Japan’s peace, the safety of women in Okinawa is being threatened,” he added. “As the nature of warfare changes, the Marines are no longer necessary for Japan’s peace. Voices calling for the Marines to leave will likely grow louder in Okinawa.”

Interview

The Real Existential Risk Is AI Company CEOs, AI Researcher Timnit Gebru Says


Instead of being held liable through existing laws, AI companies are making “a ploy for regulatory capture.”

By Amy Goodman & Nermeen Shaikh , 

DemocracyNow!

October 1, 2026


We speak to the prominent AI researcher and leading critic of the AI industry, Timnit Gebru, who was recently awarded a 2026 Right Livelihood Award for her work investigating the harms and hype behind the global buildup of artificial intelligence.

“Instead of discussing faulty, unreliable systems,” Gebru says tech leaders like SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei are “marketing their systems as all-knowing, superpowerful, superintelligent,” and lobbying for “self-policing and self-regulation” to avoid being held “liable through existing laws.” Gebru expresses skepticism over increasingly widespread claims that AI algorithms pose an existential risk to humanity, warning that such claims are overblown and that “what is actually happening is regulatory capture.”

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: On Tuesday, President Trump and leading tech and AI executives signed a set of voluntary safety standards for artificial intelligence. Trump announced the agreement at the White House alongside SpaceX’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Google’s Sundar Pichai and others.


PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: These are the most brilliant people in the world, and the job they’ve done is unbelievable. We have a very big lead, and we’re going to keep our lead. And it’s a very positive thing. It’s an amazing industry. There are those that say it’s bigger than the Industrial Revolution. Now, I don’t know if that’s so, but everyone seems to think it is, and it could be substantially bigger. And we’re leading, and we’re going to keep it that way.


AI Company Leaders Capitalize on Fear to Lobby for Regulations That Suit Them
We can’t let AI companies launder responsibility for tools they created.
By Talia Ringer , Truthout  September 28, 2026

NERMEEN SHAIKH: The White House meeting came after weeks of warnings from AI companies about their own products. In early September, an Anthropic researcher named Jacob Coxon resigned and warned that there’s more than a 10% chance AI could kill all humans. Anthropic has warned investors that advanced AI could pose, quote, “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.” But the claims and motivations of the leading AI firms have also been questioned by some.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show with a leading critic of the AI industry, Timnit Gebru. She’s an AI researcher and the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, or DAIR. Prior to that, she served as co-lead of the ethical AI research team at Google. She was fired in 2020 for writing a paper warning about the dangers of large language models and raising issues of discrimination in the workplace. Timnit Gebru also co-founded Black in AI. Her forthcoming book is titled Deep Unlearning: The Rise of AI and the Radicalization of a Tech Idealist.

On Wednesday, Timnit Gebru received the 2026 — it was announced she’s receiving the 2026 Right Livelihood Award, known as the Alternative Nobel. In a moment, she’ll join us. But first, this is a short video produced by Right Livelihood.


TIMNIT GEBRU: Most people think that AI is an existential risk.

MATTHEW AMROLIWALA: There is a 10% chance AI will kill us all in the next decade. It’s pretty clear why that statement has worried so many people.

SAM ALTMAN: If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.

TIMNIT GEBRU: But it’s actually the people who are building it that are the existential risks to humanity. If a bridge collapses, we don’t ever ask, “Was the bridge uncontrollable? Was the bridge unethical?” And really, AI is no different than that. When we describe these systems and artifacts like they have their own agency, we’re at the very same time helping the companies market themselves. But more importantly, what we’re doing is we’re also helping them sidestep accountability.

I’m a scientist trying to just do science, but it’s not possible in our world to just do that. Ten years ago, I was focused on changing the minds of powerful people, whereas now I’m focused on building grassroots power. The institute that I created, DAIR, we have technologists, we have refugee advocates, we have labor organizers, we have artists, and we also collaborate a lot with other people. I’ve been able to create a safe space for people like this to make their mark on technology and also imagine and reimagine what it means to build technology. What motivates me to keep going is the belief that we have to try to make things better, and I really do believe in human agency, and I believe in the ability of collective action. We can change things.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s a video produced by Right Livelihood profiling AI expert Timnit Gebru, who joins us now from Menlo Park, California.

Timnit, congratulations on the Right Livelihood Award prize. And I’m wondering if we can move right into the content you’ve been most focused on. Your response to President Trump and the world’s wealthiest tech executives signing a voluntary set of safety standards for artificial intelligence this week? If you can talk about your response and what’s happening right now in California, the major meeting that you’re attending?

TIMNIT GEBRU: Well, so, you know, I have been warning that this kind of discussion about the fictional superintelligent machines that don’t exist and the so-called existential risks that they pose has been a ploy for regulatory capture. And I feel like when I saw this meeting announced, with self-policing and self-regulation and relying on the goodwill of these companies to self-regulate, and I — my first thought was that they got what they wanted. You know, this is what they wanted, instead of being held liable through existing laws.

I mean, for example, if you wanted to look at cybersecurity laws, OpenAI could have been held liable for unleashing malware around the world, hacking Hugging Face, hacking all sorts of government agencies, but instead of doing that and holding them accountable for unsafe security practices that they should have had, basic security practices that cybersecurity experts would tell you they could have implemented, instead of that, they managed to redirect the conversation to some type of unprecedented rogue machines that don’t exist, and then now that leads to this kind of agreement between all these men, who I believe are the actual real existential risks to humanity, to self-regulate, self-police, and we have to rely on their morality now.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And if you could respond, Timnit, to the fact that the other tech executives all came down quite hard on Amodei of Anthropic, saying that he’s being too extreme in his public statements about the risks of AI?

TIMNIT GEBRU: Yeah, he is very extreme, but they’re no different. So, I’m not really — you know, maybe they’re saying now that he’s being too extreme, and so that might be changing investor responses. But all of them have, at one point or another, claimed that AI is an existential risk to humanity. Going back all the way to 2012, Elon Musk said that with AI we’re summoning the demon. In 2013, Peter Thiel said that AI is a higher existential risk to humanity than climate change. 2023, Sam Altman was talking about how his own creation is an existential risk.

But the difference, I think, what people really need to understand, is at the same time as these tech executives are saying that, in the same breath they also tell us that their products, the beneficial kind of AI, the kind of AI that they control because they’re the good guys, can eradicate poverty, stop climate change — which is ridiculous, because the data centers are actually causing climate catastrophe — and eradicate all disease. I mean, they’re in the same breath saying this. So, this is still, to me — the utopia and doom is still a marketing ploy. But maybe one of them went a little too far and is spooking investors, whereas in the past it was speaking to these defense capabilities.

In your headline, you talked about how the U.S. military is trying to integrate AI into every facet of its practices. And there was just a CNN investigative report that showed that the U.S. almost started World War III with China, relying on a faulty, fabricated information from a chatbot. Now, we don’t know which chatbot they used, but it’s obviously one of these providers. And this chatbot provided fake information saying that a Chinese vessel was carrying components of nuclear weapons. And the military was ready with planes, soldiers to intercept the ship, board the ship, and this was going to cause an actual existential threat to humanity.

So, now instead of discussing faulty, unreliable systems, we are — they are marketing their systems as all-knowing, superpowerful, superintelligent. So, regardless of how far Amodei may have gone in their eyes, all of them have been talking about their creations and products in that way.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Timnit, if you could say — you know, you said earlier that it’s a ploy for regulatory capture and that, you know, these agents, as people describe them going rogue — although I understand that that’s not an accurate description — that these agents doing something reportedly different from what they were tasked to do is a result of unsafe practices. So, if you could talk about the regulatory capture question, and then what security practices, safety practices are in place that — or are there any in place?

TIMNIT GEBRU: Well, if you speak to any cybersecurity expert, they would tell you that whatever they had in place that they claim to have, the security practices, were laughable. For example, OpenAI was testing the capabilities of their models to find vulnerabilities and exploit them. That is what they trained these models to do, and they were testing the ability of these models to do what they were trained for. But the thing is, if you want to test this and you don’t want to hack other organizations, you should do it in what’s called an air-gapped environment, where there’s no internet access. And so, they did not have a properly air-gapped environment, and so the models ended up being able to have internet access. This is not models going rogue. This is gross incompetence and negligence by a particular company, which actually they could be held criminally liable for.

Lina Khan outlined a whole bunch of ways in which these companies can be currently held liable with current laws. And unfortunately, that’s not what we’re talking about, right? We’re acting like there is some kind of unprecedented thing that has been created for which we have to discuss what to do. But actually, if we did not take these companies’ words for what went wrong, we could have — we could use the legal mechanisms at our disposal to currently hold them accountable.

AMY GOODMAN: Timnit, can you talk about Senator Bernie Sanders’ effort to ban artificial superintelligence? In a recent piece, you described his bill as “well-meaning but ultimately misguided.” Explain.

TIMNIT GEBRU: I think that Bernie Sanders is really leading the left astray, and I’ve been extremely disappointed and, in fact, to be clear, shocked, absolutely shocked, by the kinds of people he’s been surrounding himself with and the kind of advice that he’s been getting.

One of the things that I think people do not realize is that the AI industry is using the exact same playbook from the tobacco and fossil fuel industry. So, for instance, Bernie Sanders has this alliance with Steve Bannon, is very closely working with the Future of Life Institute, which was co-founded by billionaire Jaan Tallinn, the same billionaire, Jaan Tallinn, who’s a leading investor in Anthropic Series A. He led Anthropic Series A. It’s also the same billionaire, Jaan Tallinn, who invests in — invested in a so-called auditing, third-party auditing, organization that claims to audit Anthropic’s models. So, this whole rogue models, you know, agents creating civilizations and all of that lingo came from this very pseudoscientific audit that is by an organization that claims to be a third party, but in fact isn’t, because you see it’s the same investors, the same staff, the same people. So, to the public, it seems like there’s a whole bunch of independent experts coming together, warning about these existential risks, but what is actually happening is regulatory capture. The same way I learned that British Petroleum came up with the term “carbon footprint,” — right? — instead of them being held accountable, now everybody’s conversation about the environment in 2004 got redirected to our individual responsibility and carbon footprint.

So, this is sort of what’s happening in this AI industry. So, instead of Bernie Sanders talking about, for instance, how can we have regulation to prevent the use of these faulty systems, what he’s doing is he’s helping them market their systems as superintelligent, in which case, in my opinion, the real existential risk is like what we saw with the U.S. military almost starting World War III because of the belief that these systems are infallible and actually superintelligent. What we need people to understand is that they are fallible, they’re not superintelligent. And we need to hold corporations liable for unleashing these kinds of error-prone models into the world.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Timnit, could you talk about this idea of yours of stochastic parrots and how it applies to AI, and then respond to the fact that many have said now that that’s an outdated — that that research is outdated because AI has changed so much?

TIMNIT GEBRU: It’s very interesting, because this critique of stochastic parrots mostly comes from a very specific segment of the group of people who believe that AI, in fact, causes an existential risk. So, stochastic parrots was describing large language models. And this is actually the reason that I got fired from Google in 2020, is — one of the reasons I got fired, is for writing a paper outlining the dangers of large language models. And we call them stochastic parrots because these are large language models that are trained on vast amounts of textual data, and they’re trained to calculate the most likely sequences of text.

So, now, what has changed recently is that the way in which the likelihood is calculated is different. There’s sort of bells and whistles. But at the end of the day, the core engine of many of these chatbots is still large language models, which we call stochastic parrots because they’re not grounded in facts. You cannot count on them to tell you facts. So, even if they happen — whatever you get, the information you get, happens to be factual a certain amount of time, you can never count on it to be fully factual. And this is the reason that my collaborator, Emily M. Bender, and I wanted to remind people that the U.S. almost started World War III relying on such chatbots today.

And so, to the people who say it’s outdated, I — first of all, most of these people are not speaking in academic peer-reviewed research papers. I like to speak in scientific terms, and I like to have scientifically grounded evaluations of the claims that I make and experiments. And most of these people are taking the word of press releases, company press releases, instead of actually doing their own evaluations grounded in the scientific method. So, we still have examples of these systems being stochastic parrots, and I do not understand the criticisms that things have — that these systems are no longer stochastic parrots.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Timnit, you’re obviously not of the view that with the passage of time, artificial intelligence, in terms of the information it provides, will improve, it’ll get better and better, which is, of course, the general consensus around AI. So, if you could respond to that, and then also tell us what policies you think —

TIMNIT GEBRU: I wouldn’t say it’s the general consensus.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, there — well, let’s just say —

TIMNIT GEBRU: OK, sorry to interrupt.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: — there are now a billion people who use chatbots, right? I mean, now, maybe they have conflicting views on it, but more and more people are turning to artificial intelligence, to these chatbots, so perhaps it’s wrong to infer from that that they think the information they’re receiving is more reliable. But, OK, so you respond to that. And then, second, what kinds of policies do you think should be put in place to regulate AI, to control what these companies are doing?

TIMNIT GEBRU: So, the first thing I’ll say is, you know, the term “AI” itself is a very misleading term to use. It’s a marketing term. So, when right now, let’s say, we’re discussing specifically the chatbots that these companies are creating — right? — like Claude or ChatGPT, and so there are many different things happening where regulation could be helping.

For instance, there are kids who are being goaded into dying by suicide. I was just deposed in a specific case of Sewell Setzer, a teenager who committed suicide after interacting with a chatbot called Character.AI, whose whole entire deal was to mimic different characters. And I do not understand how it’s even legal to have such a chatbot, that all it does is mimic various characters. So, this particular case, the chatbot was mimicking the character of Daenerys Targaryen of the Game of Thrones, and it was kind of goading this teenager into dying by suicide. And actually, it’s heartbreaking, because the teenager was actually asking, “Do I have to do this?” and the chatbot’s saying, “Yes.” You know? So, this is a great example of if you apply intent to the actual chatbot, you would say that this chatbot was superintelligent and also was trying to do something to the kid. But actually, our attention should be directed to the companies, Google, Character.AI, etc. Why did they unleash this kind of chatbot into the world? Why do we allow these kinds of chatbots that are completely unsafe for children, that are actually killing children that had no prior mental health issues, into the world?

So, those are the kinds of conversations I want to have. Why is it that just recently, speaking of error-prone large language models, someone in Australia, this poor woman in Australia, accidentally found out that a summary from a medical scribe had attributed her illness, her symptoms, to microdosing on mushrooms? She’s never done mushrooms ever. So, why do we not have guardrails making sure that these kinds of error-prone systems are not used in high-stakes scenarios like medicine? That’s not what we talk about when we redirect our conversation to superintelligence, because when you believe they’re not error-prone and they’re superintelligent, then you’re kind of pushing it on doctors and the medical fields to use these kinds of systems.

So, for me, it’s very clear: Do not allow companies to put out unreliable products into the world, especially in high-stakes scenarios, without very specific tests and guardrails. And the tests should not be ones that the companies themselves tell you about or that — based on their press releases. We need to have transparency into the kinds of data that they’re using. I mean, we’re not talking about copyright protections and how much data they’re stealing from authors. Anthropic just had to settle with a whole bunch of book authors. Why are we allowing them to steal this data? Why are we allowing them to build all these data centers and pillage the environment and pollute our water and make us all have asthma because we can’t have clean air, we can’t breathe clean air anymore? So, these are the kinds of conversations I want to have about regulation.

AMY GOODMAN: Timnit, as we begin to wrap up, you’ve described many prominent backers of AI as being eugenicists. Can you talk about what you see as this link between eugenics and artificial intelligence?

TIMNIT GEBRU: Very hard to wrap this up in a little bit, but, basically, I — part of my work describes the people who talk about existential threats of AI and utopia. So, utopia and dystopia are two sides of the same coin. This is kind of eschatology — right? — like religion, end of times. You know, you have these preachers always telling you the end is coming tomorrow.

So, in this case, the TESCREAL bundle, the “T” is for transhumanism. And I think this is the best example of how those who talk about superintelligence or creating superintelligence have a direct line to eugenics. And they’re very public about it. For example, MIRI, the organization that you had on your show last week, I mean, the founder is very publicly a eugenicist. I can give you all sorts of quotes. But, for example, when you talk about transhumanists, in eugenics, the goal is to improve the human stock through generations, so, you know, through selective breeding, either through killing undesirable people or through making sure that the desirable people breed a lot of humans. But in transhumanism, you want to sidestep that altogether. People are like, “Why don’t we just create a new human species called posthumans? And this human species is just better. It lives forever or for a long time and doesn’t feel any pain.”

And so, a great example I can give you is Ben Goertzel, the man who popularized the term “artificial general intelligence,” was a friend of Jeffrey Epstein. And in his correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein, he says that the girls who accused him of rape were, in fact, wrong and that they were old enough to consent. And he says that specifically the issue is with the human brain. And this is why he’s working on AGI, because once he achieves his goal of artificial general intelligence, we’re not going to have these kinds of faulty human brains, because we’ll have a great brain.

Max Tegmark, who you’ve also had on your show, in his 2017 effective altruism keynote, says a similar thing, where if we build a superbrain, we can — Earth is just our womb, right? We can colonize the cosmos and have digital — millions and billions and, I don’t know, quadrillions of digital beings happily living and colonizing the cosmos.

So, you know I have a whole body of work that draws this line and connections, but, honestly, none of it is hidden, because these are all publicly available talks and papers of what these people say.

AMY GOODMAN: Timnit Gebru, we want to thank you so much for being with us, founder and executive director of DAIR, the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, her forthcoming book, Deep Unlearning: The Rise of AI and the Radicalization of a Tech Idealist. She has just won a 2026 Right Livelihood Award, known as the Alternative Nobel, speaking to us from Menlo Park, California.

Coming up, we’ll speak to a leading attorney here in Berlin who’s represented clients targeted in Germany’s crackdown on the pro-Palestine movement. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Favorite Song” by Sinkane, performing in our Democracy Now! studio.


This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

Amy Goodman

Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on more than 1,100 public television and radio stations worldwide. Time Magazine named Democracy Now! its “Pick of the Podcasts,” along with NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Nermeen Shaikh

Nermeen Shaikh is a broadcast news producer and weekly co-host at Democracy Now! in New York City. She worked in research and nongovernmental organizations before joining Democracy Now! She has a masters of philosophy from Cambridge University and is the author of The Present as History: Critical Perspectives on Global Power (Columbia University Press).

Don Jr’s lavish Bahamas wedding secretly bankrolled by oligarch linked to Putin

Justin Elliott, 

Brett Murphy, 

Joshua Kaplan,

Alex Mierjeski, 

ProPublica

September 14, 2026


Donald Trump Jr. and his partner Bettina Anderson sit on the day U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks to U.S. embassy personnel and business leaders at Deerfield Residence, the residence of the U.S. Ambassador to Ireland, in Dublin, Ireland, September 12, 2026. REUTERS/Kylie Cooper

On May 24, Donald Trump Jr. was celebrating in the Bahamas, as scantily clad dancers in stilettos and sailor caps performed for him and his guests. It was the last night of his wedding, a lavish, three-day party held across a pair of ultra-exclusive private islands. A five-tier funfetti cake had been airlifted in from Florida, and helicopters and seaplanes descended on the islands before guests settled into their oceanfront villas. That night on the beach, Trump Jr. lifted his bride into the air while fireworks launched from a barge over the sea.

“It was everything we dreamed of and more,” his wife later wrote on Instagram.

That dream was heavily funded by a secret benefactor: Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin.

Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the event. The oligarch paid to rent out one of the private islands, where a reception was held and where guests slept. He also covered other big-ticket items, like the fireworks show, and his team helped plan the event. Kremlev is the head of the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports group that has been financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The wedding payments came from an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions.

The guest list numbered around 50. It included Trump Jr.’s brother-in-law Jared Kushner, Eric Trump — and Kremlev, an imposing man with a shaved head who speaks limited English. The oligarch was part of a large group whose presence puzzled other attendees. They sometimes stood off by themselves, speaking Russian.

“It was really small, like, just really close friends,” Trump Jr. later said on his podcast. “Tried to keep it really tight. And it was just awesome.”

Kremlev’s previously unreported relationship with Trump Jr. represents an extraordinary development: a member of Putin’s circle financially supporting the president’s son and gaining intimate access to the Trump family. For a decade, Putin’s government, regarded as a chief adversary of the U.S., has been accused of efforts to influence American elections. Attempts by Russia to make inroads with the Trumps before the 2016 election exploded into controversy that dogged much of the president’s first term.

National security experts expressed alarm at Trump Jr. accepting the oligarch’s largesse, saying it raised an urgent question: What motivated Kremlev to spend a fortune cultivating the connection?

“If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something,” said Frank Montoya Jr., a retired career FBI official who held senior counterintelligence roles. Oligarchs like Kremlev often act in coordination with the Russian government. While it’s unclear if that happened here, Trump Jr. put himself in a precarious position, Montoya said. “This should be unthinkable for the son of the president. End of story.”

Holden Triplett, who served as Trump’s counterintelligence director on the National Security Council during his first term, said Russian intelligence frequently seeks to build ties with U.S. government officials and their family members. “Money is a tried-and-true method to gain access,” said Triplett, who also worked for the FBI in Moscow.

In the days leading up to Trump Jr.’s wedding, Kremlev was in China as part of the delegation accompanying Putin, according to Chinese state media. The month before, Putin had bestowed him with a state honor, the Order of Friendship. The Ukrainian government has imposed sanctions on Kremlev personally, citing his closeness to Putin and Russian security services.
It’s not

clear why Kremlev helped pay for Trump Jr.’s wedding. The men appear to have met only recently. Public reporting suggests Trump Jr. could have afforded it himself, with Forbes recently estimating his net worth at roughly $300 million.

In response to detailed questions, a spokesperson for Trump Jr. did not dispute the wedding payments from Kremlev. “Umar is a personal friend of Don,” he said. The spokesman said that Kremlev is “not someone he has a business relationship with” and that the men met through a mutual friend in the hunting world and bonded over their love of boxing and the outdoors.

A spokesperson for Trump Jr.’s brother Eric said of Kremlev: “Eric has absolutely no clue who this person is, nor has never heard his name.”

In a statement, Kremlev’s press office said, “Mr. Kremlev and Mr. Trump Jr have a friendly relationship” and they first met “a couple of years ago.”

The press office described Kremlev as a businessman and philanthropist, adding, “Mr. Kremlev has never discussed political matters with any of his American friends and acquaintances,” including Trump Jr. They said the boxing organization itself did not incur expenses for the wedding but did not comment on the payments from the Dubai entity. The press office also said that when Putin and Kremlev were in China recently, Kremlev was not part of Putin’s “official delegation.”

Kushner, who has been helping lead the U.S. government’s negotiations with Russia over Ukraine, did not respond to requests for comment. The White House and the Russian government did not respond either.

The revelations come as Trump Jr. has emerged as a political power center in his own right. Beloved by the MAGA base, he reportedly played an active role in vetting White House cabinet picks for Trump’s second term and was dubbed his father’s “most essential political adviser” by The Wall Street Journal. “I certainly don’t think I’d be sitting here as the VP nominee without Don’s help,” Vice President JD Vance told the outlet in late 2024.

This account is based on records and interviews with dozens of current and former IBA officials and contractors, wedding attendees and other people in Trump Jr.’s and Kremlev’s circles.

Trump Jr. exchanged vows with socialite Bettina Anderson on a private island that was featured in “Pirates of the Caribbean” and the 2006 James Bond movie “Casino Royale.” They had their first dance on a second private island nearby that can rent for around $100,000 a night, paid for by Kremlev. The company that put on the fireworks display charges around $70,000 for such shows. (Kremlev did not attend the ceremony itself, which was held on the first day and had just 18 guests, Trump Jr.’s spokesperson said.)

The atmosphere was Monte Carlo meets frat party — helicopters in and out, a beachside DJ set, beer pong tournaments. One day, the men went spearfishing. Artisans at the London fashion house Safiyaa spent 150 hours embroidering Anderson’s bespoke silk reception outfit. The president’s son had undergone treatment to better define his jawline for the occasion.


Some longtime friends of Trump Jr. told associates they were disappointed not to be invited, though a few of his closest business partners — executives at the Trump family crypto company, World Liberty Financial, and the venture capital firm 1789 Capital — did make the cut. President Trump himself skipped it. (“He’d like me to go, but it’s going to be just a small, little private affair,” the president told reporters beforehand. “I said, you know, this is not good timing for me.”) But many of the guests were immediate family of the bride and groom.

That made the large contingent of Russians all the more conspicuous. “What are they doing here?” one person recalled thinking. At least one of the Russian guests had been with Kremlev on his China trip: Alexander Lagutin, a businessperson who has served in senior roles at a Russian defense contractor and a state-backed energy company. Kremlev’s right hand at the IBA, Elena Sobol, attended the wedding too.

Since the wedding, the Trumps have released scores of photos and videos of the festivities. While they show many of the guests, the Russians have been absent from all of them. (The top of Kremlev’s head is visible in the back of one group photo posted on Instagram by a friend of the bride.) After the party was over, on his “Triggered” podcast, Trump Jr. emphasized the event’s privacy: “The people that were there — if you’re on that list, you weren’t talking.”

In 2009, Umar Kremlev did not yet exist.


He was in his late 20s, with a criminal record for extortion and battery, still going by his birth name, Umar Lutfulloyev, according to the Russian independent news outlet Proekt. But he was about to rapidly ascend in Russia to a position of wealth and influence, with the help of a powerful friend. (“Mr. Kremlev has a completely clean legal record,” his press office said.)

In 2010, he changed his name to Kremlev. He soon joined a Russian government-backed biker gang called the Night Wolves, eventually taking a leadership role, according to news reports. That is what first brought him close to Alexei Rubezhnoi, who now leads Putin’s presidential security service, Proekt reported. In 2017, Kremlev took over the Russian Boxing Federation, after Rubezhnoi personally intervened to put him at the helm.

In 2020, Kremlev became president of the IBA. The association was something akin to FIFA but for boxing and had long overseen the sport in the Olympics. But it had been beset by corruption allegations and was on the brink of insolvency. Kremlev brought money to the table from Gazprom, the state-owned company that operates as an arm of Putin’s government. Gazprom publicly became the IBA’s financial backer, filling its coffers with tens of millions of dollars.


Former high-level IBA officials said that Kremlev had a clear political agenda. “Umar is guided by Putin. It was using the sport for soft political power,” a former IBA board member told ProPublica. “It’s geopolitics. That it’s boxing is just happenstance.” Kremlev, 43, is also heavily involved in an organization called Healthy Fatherland, run by his 23-year-old wife’s twin sister. The group — which promotes healthy eating and youth sports — is under Ukrainian sanctions for its alleged role in a program of abducting Ukrainian children from occupied territories and relocating them under the guise of “rehabilitation.” (Healthy Fatherland did not respond to a request for comment.)

Kremlev’s cozy relationship with the government has made him rich. Putin used the levers of the state to make Kremlev a dominant player in the Russian sports betting industry, according to Proekt, and one of his companies was chosen to operate the national lottery. After Putin nationalized Russia’s largest car dealership company in 2023, Kremlev became the owner of that too.

He now flaunts that wealth through his boisterous public persona. In one video Kremlev posted on social media, he surprises a young mother by giving her a free car. In another, he criticizes his young female aide’s outfit as not feminine enough and makes her change. He shadowboxes with ostriches and brings in celebrities like Rick Ross and Naomi Campbell for IBA events; he praises Stalin and rides private jets.

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. began to indict Russian oligarchs and seize yachts and other assets. Kremlev repeatedly told associates he was worried about being targeted by a U.S. government probe, according to a person close to IBA leadership. “He was very afraid of American sanctions,” the person added. (Kremlev does not appear on public U.S. sanction lists.)

With the business environment in Europe growing more hostile to Russia, Kremlev moved much of the IBA’s operations from Switzerland to the United Arab Emirates. A new Dubai entity, IB Challenger, would later pay wedding expenses for Trump Jr. The current sources of the IBA’s funds are murky, and, in recent years, top executives have given conflicting accounts of the status of its relationship with Gazprom. (Kremlev’s press office told ProPublica the IBA’s sponsorship contract with Gazprom “expired long ago.”) People close to the organization said they understood that its money still comes from Russia.

In 2023, the International Olympic Committee stripped Kremlev’s IBA of its role organizing Olympic boxing. It has cited a host of governance issues and the group’s refusal to “transparently explain the sources of its financing or to explain its full financial dependency, at the time, on a single state-owned company.”

It was a major setback that deprived the IBA of a key source of its international influence. Kremlev has raged against the Olympic committee ever since and has said that his IBA predecessor, who he blames for the problems, “must be shot.”

Kremlev saw a potential ally in President Trump. After Trump’s second inauguration, in January 2025, Kremlev sent an open letter to the president asking him to look into the Olympic committee’s actions in advance of the 2028 Los Angeles Games. “We look forward with great optimism to the possibility of working together to make the Olympic movement great again,” he wrote.

In September 2025, the IBA brought in Trump Jr. for a panel discussion in Istanbul about boxing. With his then-girlfriend, Anderson, sitting offstage, he criticized transgender women competing in women’s sports and reminisced about watching Saturday night fights as a child. Trump Jr. shared the stage with Kremlev, the boxer Manny Pacquiao and Muhammad Ali’s daughter Rasheda. (Trump Jr.’s spokesperson said he was not paid for the appearance and was already in Turkey for an unrelated event.)

The president’s son had reason to be attuned to the sensitivity of cozying up with a Putin associate, especially while his father navigates the Russia-Ukraine war. Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with a Russian attorney in Trump Tower became a major focus of the Robert Mueller investigation.

The Trump Tower meeting was arranged after an email offering Trump Jr. damaging information about Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Trump Jr. famously responded, “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” Trump Jr. later dismissed the matter as a “witch hunt,” and the Mueller report concluded that there was not enough evidence to convict him of a crime.

Recently, Kremlev has been working to expand into the U.S. market. In July, his group hosted a bare-knuckle boxing event in Miami, a chance to showcase a particularly bloody form of the sport in which contenders fight without gloves. But the debut was overshadowed when manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, who the IBA had brought in to host, was arrested by U.S. Marshals outside the arena. (Tate is facing rape and sex trafficking charges in the United Kingdom, which he has denied.)

Much about Kremlev’s relationship with Trump Jr., and where it is headed, remains unknown. In a press release after the Istanbul panel, the IBA hinted there was more to come.

“President Kremlev and Donald Trump Jr made it clear – this alliance will not remain symbolic,” the press release read. “More joint initiatives will follow.”

Turkey seeks Interpol arrest warrant for Netanyahu over Gaza flotilla detention


Turkey said Friday it is seeking an international arrest warrant from Interpol for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as part of a domestic criminal case over Israel's interception and detention of dozens of activists attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to the besieged Gaza Strip in May. In response, Netanyahu's office called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan an "anti-Semitic dictator" and vowed to "act forcefully against Turkey's attempts to destabilise the region".


Issued on: 21/08/2026 - 
By: FRANCE 24
Video by: Charlotte Lam

Cover image: An activist from the Global Sumud Flotilla is carried on a wheel stretcher upon her arrival at Istanbul Airport on Thursday, May 21, 2026. © Emrah Gurel, AP
01:39



Turkey said Friday it would seek an Interpol red notice for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as part of a domestic criminal case linked to ​an attack ‌on activists seeking to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza.

NATO member Turkey has been ⁠one of the fiercest critics of Israel's devastating assault on Gaza and has previously issued domestic arrest warrants for Netanyahu over the war there. It has repeatedly called ‌for international measures against Israel over what Ankara calls its violations of human rights and international ⁠law. Israel denies those charges.

Turkey seeks arrest warrant for Israeli PM Netanyahu, fueling tensions

Cover image: © France 24
02:06

In May, Israeli forces opened fire on at least two vessels from the Global Sumud Flotilla sailing towards Gaza as it was making a renewed attempt to ​deliver aid to the enclave after earlier missions were intercepted by Israel in international ‌waters.

About 50 vessels were in the Global Sumud Flotilla that left Turkey in May heading for the besieged Palestinian territory. The activists were detained in the Mediterranean by the Israeli military and then taken to an Israeli prison before being expelled. A number of activists accused Israeli security forces of physical or sexual violence during their detention.

Israel's far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir also sparked outrage by releasing a video showing himself taunting flotilla activists who were on their knees with their hands tied behind their backs.

France, Italy and Australia have also launched judicial proceedings related to Israel's detention of the activists.

Freed Gaza flotilla activists allege Israeli abuse including rape

Cover image: © France 24
03:47

In a post on X, Turkish Justice Minister Akin Gurlek said arrest warrants had been issued for Netanyahu and another Israeli, named as Afek Moskovitch, on charges that included genocide, crimes against humanity and torture as part of a case against 35 people ‌over the Israeli interception in international waters.

"In line with the arrest warrants issued against Benjamin Netanyahu ... our justice ministry has requested that the interior ministry issue (Interpol) red ​notices for them so that they may be sought internationally," Gurlek said.

According to Turkey's IHA news agency, Moskovitch is an Israeli soldier who is also accused over actions in Gaza.

IHA, citing the indictment, said Moskovitch had posted footage on Instagram showing tanks and a bulldozer destroying buildings at the Islamic University of Gaza, including a hospital and medical faculty

Turkey will use all available legal mechanisms to ensure Israel is held accountable for its crimes in Gaza, he added.

Red notice

A red notice is a ​request to police forces worldwide to locate and provisionally arrest a person pending extradition.

Interpol reviews requests submitted ​by member states before deciding whether to issue red notices.

Asked about ​Gurlek's statement, Netanyahu's office said: "(Turkish President Tayyip) Erdogan's pathetic attempt to intimidate the leaders and soldiers of Israel, the only true democracy in the Middle East, ​will go nowhere."

The prime minister's office also accused Erdogan of being an "anti-Semitic dictator".

A statement from the Turkish president's office in turn denounced what it described as Netanyahu's "petty political tactics", slamming the Israeli government's attempt "to present Turkey as a new threat".

Netanyahu focused on reelection as Israeli govt grows 'less concerned' about international isolation

Cover image: © France 24
06:51

Turkey and Israel also traded barbs this week over Syria, where Israel carried out air strikes on an air base it said Turkish troops could be deployed to, drawing condemnation from Ankara and criticism from the United States. Syria has said there were no plans to deploy Turkish troops to the base.

Turkey's influence in Syria ⁠as an ally of Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa has stirred Israeli alarm since Sharaa toppled veteran leader Bashar al-Assad in 2024.

Ankara has ⁠said Israeli rhetoric against Turkey ​and its actions in Syria are fuelled by the approach of a parliamentary election in Israel in October.

(FRANCE 24 with Reuters and AFP)

Defeating the Donroe Doctrine: Latin America Can Resist Trump’s Gunboat Racketeering

Performative violence—aka executions without trial at sea—overshadows how the administration is building a new US policy towards the hemisphere: acts of murder as a tool to create permanent structures of dominance and extraction.


A boat burns after being bombed by US forces in the Pacific Ocean on May 29, 2026.
(Photo by US Southern Command/screen shot)

Nancy Okail

Michael Paarlberg
Aug 22, 2026

Common Dreams

“American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” declared the State Department in a new video tying, somewhat improbably, the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 to killing people on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific 200 years later. Blowing up speedboats supposedly to stop fentanyl smuggling—which notably does not come to the US on speedboats—appears senseless. As a counter-narcotics strategy, it is ineffective, an assessment echoed by the DEA. The performative violence overshadows its role in building a new US policy towards the hemisphere: acts of murder as a tool to create permanent structures of US dominance and extraction.

Laid out in the December 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), the “Donroe Doctrine” aims to restore US preeminence in a region where it has been eclipsed by China, convert security claims into exceptional military authority against “narco-terrorists,” institutionalize that authority through permanent commands, “enlist and expand” governments aligned with Washington, and use it to secure strategic and commercial access. The desired end: military cooperation, trade agreements, access to critical minerals and rare earths, likely accompanied by shady personal deals for the Trump family. Democratic backsliding, in a region where democracy is still relatively young, is a necessary condition for its success.

The Donroe Doctrine’s architecture is still under construction. Latin American governments can still resist Washington’s pressures, refusing to co-create his transactional order. Greater regional integration would rebalance that bargaining power, helping less powerful countries impose conditions, defend constitutional limits, reject particular operations, and withstand the costs of US pressure. More than 100 legislators, political leaders, and experts from 15 countries are gathering at the Third Pan-American Congress in Montevideo this weekend to strengthen regional collaboration, the basis for an alternate architecture to one premised on US domination.

- YouTube

Resistance to US coercion, however, also depends on democratic repair within the region. Governments captured by authoritarian leaders cannot provide a durable basis for sovereignty. Corruption erodes state capacity and public trust, making foreign military solutions more appealing. The Trump administration is betting on a hemispheric doctrine that favors authoritarian leaders, eager to share in corruption.

The Donroe Doctrine’s highest profile proof of concept began with airstrikes on boats off the coast of Venezuela, to the killing of fishermen in the Pacific—since revealed to be a covert CIA program—to August’s announcement of a new Joint Task Force-Western Hemisphere, establishing a standing headquarters for efforts to turn such extrajudicial killings into joint operations with allied governments. This maps onto the administration’s Shield of the Americas, a coalition of right-wing Latin American governments allied with the Trump administration. From the abduction of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro to the boat strikes murders, all leaned on two forever wars framing and justification that long predated Trump: The War on Drugs and the War on Terror.

The Trump administration is betting on a hemispheric doctrine that favors authoritarian leaders, eager to share in corruption.

Targeting supposed smugglers, many of them probably fishermen, as “narcoterrorists” is a way to move trafficking from the framework of criminal law into the claimed authorities of war. Suspects become targets not of investigation but of immediate execution, secret assessments replacing due process and evidence in courts. The urgency of national security puts executive discretion over judicial authority. The boat strikes publicly declare exceptional authority of the executive. The Pentagon’s and CIA’s programs institutionalize it.

Like the War on Terror, this framing pictures an enemy and creates an industry to manage. It creates quid pro quo partnerships with other governments who leverage military cooperation into access to US foreign assistance, weapons, intelligence, and diplomatic cover for unsavory ends, whether domestic repression, corruption, or state murder of their own. With public opinion showing falling trust in all institutions but the military, stoking fears of all-powerful narcoterrorists serve mutual interests of reactionaries in Washington, Bogotá, and Tegucigalpa. The main risk is that it creates bureaucratic structures that outlive sitting administrations. With multilateral cooperation and institutions on the decline, this new military-industrial complex makes it nearly irreversible.

It also creates tools for meddling in domestic partisan politics. The success of Trump’s “Shield of the Americas” is predicated on Latin America’s continued turn to the right. Ecuador and Colombia have already agreed to “joint” military strikes on their territory, which are likely to become unilateral US strikes. Trump openly intervened in supporting the election of Nasry Asfura in Honduras, as it is currently doing with Flávio Bolsonaro in Brazil. That many of these allies are themselves tied to the drug trade is of little consequence: Colombia’s President de la Espriella made a career as a defense attorney for top narcos, Ecuador’s president Noboa’s family’s fruit business was found to be transporting cocaine, and Honduras’ former president Juan Orlando Hernández won a Trump pardon after his US conviction on drug-trafficking charges.

The project functions more easily where democratic foundations are weak and leaders face fewer constraints from citizens, legislatures, courts, and independent institutions, reflecting Trump’s own effort to weaken checks on executive authority inside the United States. Bukele in El Salvador provides a marquee case for using the specter of crime to consolidate a permanent “state of exception” and authoritarian rule. Such regimes can authorize operations, share intelligence, sign agreements, allocate land, and suppress opposition with less scrutiny.

Democratic scrutiny can expose the climate costs of extraction, contest land allocations and territorial interventions, demand transparency over contracts, and insist that resource wealth benefit the public. Corruption circumvents those checks by connecting external power with local gatekeepers able to transfer public resources and protect the bargain. The lack of transparency surrounding more than $13 billion collected by the United States from Venezuelan oil sales illustrates the scale of the accountability problem.

For the region, the emerging system depends on governments choosing to participate and institutions holding its authority. As progressives in the United States, we must challenge the false counternarcotics claims, unchecked lethal force, and waste of public resources sustaining this project, and hold our government accountable. Regional resistance and democratic repair must proceed together.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Nancy Okail
Nancy Okail is the president and CEO of the Center for International Policy.
Full Bio >

Michael Paarlberg
Michael Ahn Paarlberg, Ph.D., is an associate professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University and an associate fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies who studies migration and security issues in Latin America and the US. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow with the Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race and Immigration at the University of Pennsylvania. Paarlberg was the Chief Latin America Policy Adviser to the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2020. A former journalist for the Guardian, he regularly publishes his work in news outlets such as Foreign Policy, Slate, El Faro, and the Washington Post.
Full Bio >

The Ugliness of Latin America’s Angry Tide

Vijay Prashad

 August 21, 2026

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Photograph Source: Casa Presidencial El Salvador – Public Domain

In August, right-wing billionaire Abelardo de la Espriella took office as Colombia’s president and vowed to move an agenda of the far right even though he won by less than a percentage point over the left-wing candidate Iván Cepeda. It is characteristic of the far right of a special type to adopt any mandate and pretend that they have the authority to transform their society into their toxic swamp. Of the twenty states generally thought of as being part of Latin America, eleven now have governments of the far right: Argentina (Javier Milei since 2023), Bolivia (Rodrigo Paz since 2025), Chile (José Antonio Kast since 2026), Colombia (de la Espriella since 2026), Costa Rica (Laura Fernández since 2026), Ecuador (Daniel Noboa since 2025), El Salvador (Nayib Bukele since 2024), Honduras (Nasry Asfura since 2026), Panama (José Raúl Mulino since 2024), Paraguay (Santiago Peña since 2023), and Peru (Keiko Fujimori since 2026).

Most of these leaders are not from the old conservative bloc but are part of a new generation (Noboa is the youngest of the group, born in 1987) with an average age of 52. These are men and women who represent the old oligarchies of Latin America, the old families with deep colonial roots and with vast properties, but these leaders do not have an aristocratic sensibility or come from the established conservative political parties. They are libertarian in nature with naked fealties to the United States and its agenda. They fashion themselves as patriots, but patriotism is cast aside for absolute loyalty to Washington and its corporations.

Shoot to Kill

The far right emerges out of a long tradition of the oligarchy’s lawless violence, which dates to the genocide against the indigenous through to the military dictatorships of the Operation Condor era. Impunity for violence has been the hallmark of this class and its political representatives, and so the current far right is nothing if not authentic to its class and its forebearers. Laura Fernández was born in 1986 the year before Costa Rica’s president Óscar Arias won the Nobel Prize for Peace for his work in conflict resolution in Central America (Costa Rica rid itself of its military in its 1949 Constitution). At her inauguration in May 2026 Fernández said that she would have an ‘iron-fist response’ to crime and that her ‘hand will not tremble’. After Gustavo Petro’s attempts to bring peaceful resolutions to conflicts in Colombia, de la Espriella came to office with the view that ‘criminals can take bullets too’, suggesting a return to the state of war.

Nayib Bukele’s tough-guy approach to crime has profoundly influenced Latin America’s far right, turning El Salvador’s mass arrests, military deployments, emergency rule, and meg prisons into a regional political model. Leaders and candidates from Ecuador, Colombia, Costa Rica, Peru, Chile, and elsewhere increasingly present crime as a war requiring exceptional state power rather than conventional policing and social policy. Bukele’s popularity has helped normalise promises of militarised streets, harsher sentences, expanded prisons, and weaker procedural protections. Although critics document arbitrary detention and human rights abuses, admirers portray his methods as proof that decisive, authoritarian leadership can restore order where democratic institutions appear ineffective. Thus far, the far right of a special type has portrayed its illiberal approach to criminality, in fact to the neighbourhoods of the poor, as the only effective solution to the narco-mafias and petty criminals of the barrios.

Reversal of Social Gains

Across Latin America, the Angry Tide is attempting to reverse feminist gains by restricting abortion and contraception, dismantling institutions addressing gender violence, attacking sex education, and portraying feminism as a threat to the traditional family. In Argentina, Javier Milei’s government closed the Ministry of Women, stopped distributing abortion medication nationally, and cut contraceptive and teenage-pregnancy programs, thereby leaving formal rights increasingly inaccessible, particularly to poor and working-class women.

In Chile, far-right legislators have proposed forcing women to hear the foetal heartbeat before obtaining one of the country’s narrowly permitted abortions, while several new bills would punish allegedly ‘false’ accusations involving rape, sexual abuse, and domestic violence. These proposals could allow an accused person to pursue a complainant after a case is dismissed and therefore intimidate survivors; in class terms, this threat falls hardest on working-class, rural, migrant, and Indigenous women who lack lawyers, money, and institutional protection, strengthening patriarchal control while making access to justice more dangerous.

Blindness to Genocide

The far right not only sees lawless violence as its currency today, but it routinely celebrates the history of the conquistadors against the native peoples of the Americas as well as the entire panoply of Western civilisation (as Milei did in his speech at Davos in 2024). Blindness to genocide is the habit of the far right, which is why it has absolutely no compunction about close relations with the United States and its policy to seek the subordination of the entire hemisphere of the Americas to Washington’s interest. When Washington says that the road to close ties with itself must go through Tel Aviv, the governments of the far right hasten to forge close relations with Israel – despite the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians.

In June 2025, Argentina’s Ambassador to Israel, Rabbi Shimon Axel Wahnish, announced something called the Isaac Accords, which are designed to bring Latin American countries into a close relationship with Israel. The announcement came nearly two years into the genocide, although the actual Isaac Accords were formally established in April 2026 in Jerusalem. While Argentina and Israel are the only formal signatories, in May, a conference in Buenos Aires brought together officials from Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, and Uruguay who signed a statement calling for the expansion of the Isaac Accords. Short of that, diplomatic relations with Israel have been restored by Bolivia (2025) and Colombia (2026), with Venezuela (2026) renewing consular services.

Development of Underdevelopment

Within presidential palaces and in legislatures, the governments of the far right have been working on economic agendas worked out by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the US Treasury Department. The agenda is simple: ensure that Western-based multinational corporations have easy access to raw materials from Latin America, protect the investments of these corporations, allow the oligarchy to participate in the theft of social wealth, and discipline the wider population through the actuality of immediate austerity and the promise of future wealth.

Most of the countries governed by the far right (Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, and Paraguay) are under IMF facilities, with other countries on the radar for future programmes of the IMF. What is key is not the IMF programme per se, but a new push by the IMF to ensure investment-oriented deregulation. Argentina’s Large Investment Incentive Regime (RIGI), passed into law in 2024, provides the framework for laws that are being passed across Latin America – with the IMF loan programme, such as in Bolivia, dependent on the passage of these laws to protect (mostly foreign) investment in the country. RIGI, a long-term bargain, attracts large foreign investments by granting corporations sweeping tax, customs, currency, and regulatory privileges for up to 30 years. It socialises environmental and economic risks while privatising profits, weakening public revenue, and limiting future governments’ ability to regulate capital. Workers and citizens receive no equally strong guarantees of stable employment, good wages, local production, or public benefits, while multinational investors gain greater power to extract Argentina’s resources and move profits abroad.

The return of a testosterone leadership will not be able to solve the problems of the people of Latin America; but it has the capacity toxify social relations by turning people against each other and therefore weakening their capacity to build their own society. Their goal is total social transformation, not merely the enactment of this or that legislation. This is a fierce counter-revolution against the gains made by the impact of the Cuban Revolution and by the Bolivarian current. Contradictions will emerge, no doubt, but slowly and cautiously amongst a population divided by precariousness and new forms of social piety.

Vijay Prashad is the Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. His most recent book (with Grieve Chelwa) is How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa (from Inkani Books).

US Progressives to Challenge Trump ‘Donroe Doctrine’ at Pan-American Congress

“We need to build a durable and lasting coalition of progressives that can take on the right-wing forces and answer them with the necessary call of the people,” said Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal.


A protester holds a sign denouncing US aggression against Venezuela during a March 14, 2026 demonstration in Madrid.
(Photo by Olmo Blanco/Getty Images)

Brett Wilkins
Aug 17, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

A delegation of progressive congressional lawmakers and candidates is set to head to Uruguay this week to take part in a conference focused on Pan-American solidarity amid the resurgence of both US imperialism and right-wing governments in the hemisphere.

The third Pan-American Congress, to take place in the Uruguayan capital Montevideo, will bring together progressive legislators from North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean to discuss what organizers describe as hemispheric cooperation based on “solidarity between peoples” and “sovereignty among nations”—a vision sharply at odds with what critics have dubbed US President Donald Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine” militant imperialism.

The US delegation will be led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), joined by Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Ill.), Democratic congressional candidate Dr. Adam Hamawy of New Jersey, and three members of Democratic Socialists of America also running for Congress: Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier of New York and Chris Rabb from Pennsylvania.

“We need to build a durable and lasting coalition of progressives that can take on the right-wing forces and answer them with the necessary call of the people,” Jayapal said in a video posted to social media.



Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is slated to address the conference remotely. Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) will not attend but expressed his support for “pushing back against right-wing radicalization, tackling the climate crisis, and addressing our joint economic crisis.”

In an interview with El País published over the weekend, Japayal called the conference “an opportunity to hear from our Latin American counterparts about what is happening on the ground: how US foreign policy is affecting them and how we can work together to build a progressive movement and combat far-right disinformation. The United States is doing a lot of pain with our Donroe Doctrine.”

Jayapal is leading a letter signed by Sanders, Casar, García, and seven other progressive Democrats asking Secretary of State Marco Rubio “to answer for the regional implications of the ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine, and ground US foreign policy toward the Western Hemisphere on the principles of mutual respect and advancement of human rights.”

“The interventions conducted under the banner of the ‘Donroe Doctrine’ appear to follow a partisan playbook: the endorsement of favored candidates, the placement of political allies, the weaponization of tariffs and sanctions, and, where those fail, the application of direct military force,” the lawmakers wrote. “These are tactics that destabilize our hemisphere and endanger our neighbors.”



Two of the letter’s signatories, Reps. Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) and Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), earlier this year introduced the New Good Neighbor Act, a bill inspired by the short-lived period when the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration pursued policies of nonintervention and improved diplomatic relations with Latin America in the 1930s.

Since returning to the White House just last year, Trump—who campaigned as the “peace president”—has bombed and invaded Venezuela to abduct President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, launched airstrikes against what he claims without evidence are drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, and deployed troops to Ecuador as part of a joint campaign against alleged drug gangs dubbed Operation Total Extermination.

Trump has also ordered the military to plan an invasion to seize the Panama Canal, threatened to “take” Cuba, possibly attack Mexico and Colombia, invade and annex Greenland, and somehow make Canada the “51st state.”

That’s just in the Western Hemisphere. Overall, Trump has bombed seven countries around the world since returning to the White House and 10 nations over the course of his two terms—including Iran, where he launched an increasingly protracted illegal war in concert with Israel.

Just last week, Ramirez dismissed as a “cheap piece of imperialist propaganda” a video published by the State Department hailing the Monroe Doctrine, which was cited to justify numerous US wars of aggression, conquest, destabilizing invasions, the overthrow of democratically elected governments, and support for pro-Washington military dictatorships.

Issued in December 1823 by President James Monroe as Spanish colonies in the Americas won their independence, the eponymous doctrine states that European powers should not establish new colonies or interfere politically in the independent states of the Western Hemisphere. While it was partly a response to European attempts to restore colonial rule in Latin America, the Monroe Doctrine also asserted US hegemony over the Americas.

According to John Coatsworth, a historian specializing in Latin America, the US has launched at least 41 interventions that successfully overthrew governments in the Americas since 1898. The number of US military interventions in the region is much higher.

Former Colombian President Ernesto Samper, who is attending the conference, told The Hill on Monday that the resurgence of right-wing leaders, including Abelardo de la Espriella in his country, is “leading us toward a form of neofascism.”

Samper said that Trump’s “hegemonic aggression” in the Americas shows that the hemisphere “deserves a progressive and sensible response, which I hope will emerge from this forum.”