The new frontyard: Why Latin America has become the playground for imperial and fascist experiments
First published at Naomi Klein’s Substack.
Latin America is riding a far-right wave, and the political map tells the story in vivid color. Around the turn of the century, the “pink tide” ushered in leftist governments and a “green tide” of feminist movements advanced abortion rights. Recently, however, the tides have shifted: twelve of the last fifteen presidential elections have been won by right-wing candidates. Clearly, the regional canvas is being repainted.
What might an increasingly far-right hemisphere look like? Modeled on Argentine President Javier Milei and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, and unfolding in the shadow of Donald Trump and Marco Rubio, it appears violent, chaotic, and yet also coordinated. As illustrated by Rubio’s recent initiatives around the so-called Resurgence of Political Terrorism and the Shield of the Americas, the far right increasingly operates as a sort of “internationalist” project.
With deepening financial, ideological, theological, and political ties, the international far right is better connected, more aggressive, and faster-paced than ever before. Their use of new technologies and fusion with Big Tech proliferates their ideas, while lining their pockets at the same time. Such are the forces recoloring the regional map.
This far-right or “right-wing international” — as Milei himself has called it — is emerging in the cracks of a geopolitical earthquake. We no longer inhabit a bipolar world, as during the Cold War, or a unipolar one, with the U.S. trumpeting itself as world hegemon. We are now witnessing real multipolarity, with China, Russia, the EU, Iran, and others checking U.S. power.
For many, the intensification of regional powers evokes the Monroe Doctrine, the nineteenth-century policy that designated Latin America as the “backyard” of the United States. Hoping to wield greater influence over the Western hemisphere, the Trump administration has leaned into this history, comedically rebranding it the “Donroe Doctrine” and reasserting the idea of the “backyard.” Yet this old metaphor fails to capture just how central Latin America is becoming for the shifting geopolitical order and for the far right itself. Today Latin America is better understood as the “frontyard”: an emergent playground of imperial and fascist experimentation.
Mobilizing in the frontyard, far-right governments are uniting around shared causes and constructing new enemies. Intensified extractivism, financialization, and militarization are their transnational causes. Their “internal enemies,” too, are of an increasingly transnational variety: roaming migrants, Indigenous peoples, feminist and queer subversives, environmentalists, and now, “narco-terrorists”.
This new and latest term, synthesizing the “war on drugs” with the post-9/11 scareword, works simultaneously as an appeal to security and a call for elimination. And as “terrorism” semantically expands to every conceivable adversary, it is becoming clear that internationalism — solidarity in struggles across different territories — is the ultimate target of today’s far-right international. In short, the global right is networked as never before, but any cross-border solidarity on the left is increasingly cast as criminal.
The “anti-terrorism” of the Americas
On July 16, Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller’s long-planned conference on “The Resurgence of Political Terrorism” was convened in Washington, D.C. Delegates from over 60 countries were in attendance to hear the Trump administration preach about the gravest threat to “civilization” and to coordinate police and military in response. In the aftermath of the administration’s cuts of federal programs that monitor far-right violence, the conference was premised on the highly dubious claim that the vast majority of historical and contemporary violence emanates from “the far left.”
“This is an international conference because we are facing an international, a transnational threat,” Rubio declared in his plenary address. “These are not distinct and isolated cells. They are interconnected networks. They do not recognize our borders. They do not believe, in fact, in the nation state itself.”
Like much of Rubio’s speech, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau’s remarks focused on the 1970s, with particular emphasis on the South American organizations Tupamaros and Montoneros, which he designated as terrorist groups. For the reference to Argentina, this is a clear inversion of historical narrative: it disregards the state terrorism perpetrated by the military dictatorship. Instead, it adopts the very language of the genocidaires in its characterization of these political organizations. When Landau celebrates the “defeat” of the left resistance — “it can be defeated because it has been defeated, and we can defeat it again” — he is speaking of a defeat that included the torture and disappearance of thousands of people, acts that have been tried and convicted in Argentina as crimes against humanity.
After the opening plenary, Argentine Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno delivered the luncheon keynote. He assured the audience that Milei’s government will continue to coordinate with the United States to eliminate everything and anything it considers “left-wing terrorism.” “What we are facing,” Quirno warned, “is an enemy that knows no borders and keeps moving, looking for loopholes.”
The US-led initiative against “political terrorism” has been compared to Operation Condor by experts like Argentine federal judge Adrián Grünberg, the president of a tribunal that put these events on trial for crimes against humanity. The first meeting of the CIA-backed Operation, held in 1975 in Pinochet’s Chile, gathered the dictatorships of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil. According to the tribunal, this is where they formalized an agreement “for the purpose of organizing a system of repression, persecution, and annihilation of left-wing political opponents throughout the region.”
Argentine congressman Horacio Pietragalla Corti, who was taken by the military at five months old after his parents were murdered in 1976, and returned to his family in 2003, has formally petitioned for access to public information on the scope of Argentine participation in the U.S. initiative. Yet even before the full truth has come out about this bloody past, the continent now finds itself in the grips of a new, even more ambitious coordinated campaign.
The “Shield” of the Americas
Following the indiscriminate killing of hundreds of “narco-terrorists” at sea and the invasion of Venezuela, the Trump administration launched its key hemispheric initiatives, the Shield of the Americas and the Americas Counter-Cartel Coalition (A3C). With the stated purpose of targeting crime, drug trafficking, migration, and Chinese influence in the hemisphere, these projects represent the most wide-ranging effort to coordinate over a dozen right-wing governments in Latin America and the Caribbean.
At a March roundtable with Milei, Bukele, Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa, and Chilean President Jose Antonio Kast, among others, Rubio introduced Kristi Noem as Special Envoy to the Shield of the Americas. The former Homeland Security secretary, who just recently had overseen ICE’s “mass deportation” campaign in U.S. cities, declared a shared mission “to go after these narco-terrorists that are destroying our people.”
In detailing the A3C, Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller echoed the sentiment. This program designates “several cartels and transnational gangs as foreign terrorist organizations” and pledges to “operationalize hard power to defeat these threats to our security and civilization.” This runs parallel to Miller’s domestic work targeting “Antifa” as a terrorist organization, which has already yielded results: extraordinary terrorism-related sentences–at least 50 years in prison each–given to fifteen anti-ICE protesters following their “noise demonstration” outside a Texas detention center to show solidarity with those inside. In the case of A3C, Miller explained that “there is not a criminal justice solution to the cartel problem.” Cartels, he added, are “the ISIS and Al Qaeda of the Western hemisphere, and should be treated just as brutally.”
These are also the grounds on which the U.S. has justified its multilevel attacks on Venezuela and Cuba. Shortly after its “anti-terrorism” conference, the U.S. State Department released a 100-page report titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.” The neo-McCarthyite reading of Cuban influence seeks to connect international histories of the left from the Black Power and guerilla movements in the 1970s to movements around Black Lives Matter, Antifa and the Democratic Socialists of America today. It concludes that the U.S. now faces three different categories of terroristic threats: “narco-terrorists and international gangs,” “historical Islamist terrorists,” and “violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists.”
The existentialized war framing of the Shield of the Americas combines Miller’s focus on domestic repression with Rubio’s gambit for hemispheric militarization. Its framework gives new impetus to coordinate against the far right’s long-standing enemies. And now, every enemy the far right wishes to dispense with — Indigenous, transfeminist, environmentalist, and labor movements — is being smeared with the spectral crime of “terrorism.”
The “frontyard” of the Americas
Resonances can be found between the 1970s and today. But it is important to highlight the novelties that characterize the current geopolitical situation. If the U.S. once spoke of the “backyard” to promote itself as a democracy over and above its Latin American neighbors, the “frontyard” better describes an emergent order in which the U.S. and its far-right allies pursue shared projects, make collective statements, and drop the lip service to democracy. Unlike the Cold War order in which Latin American countries needed to be “cleaned up” to join the liberal democracies of the North — through a coup d’etat, if need be–it is now a place where authoritarian exit strategies from liberal democracy are being tested out.
Looking at the concrete processes remaking the regional landscape, the frontyard refers to techno-financial (especially crypto and AI), extractivist (critical minerals and fossil fuels to power them) and militaristic expansionism. Where Pinochet’s Chile was neoliberalism’s workshop in the 1970s, today it is Milei’s Argentina being offered up as a laboratory for capitalism’s next phase.
All of these forces have come together in Peter Thiel’s personal installment in Argentina, where Palantir’s predictive AI technology is being fused with state architecture. His image of the country as a “bunker” or “Plan B” for nuclear catastrophe or other apocalypses reveals the “ End Times Fascism” dimensions of this project, as Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor call it.
Thiel’s is but one of countless examples of new investments in security, with many used to protect mining, logging and fossil fuel projects from social discontent. At the same time, the impoverishment of the population is being rerouted through financial devices. Crypto and “fintech” represent the new infrastructure for exploiting poverty caused by austerity policies, but also shaping perceptions of finance as a site of freedom and proof of individual merit.
With the attacks on Venezuela and Cuba, the electoral interference in Colombia and Peru, and the early signs of manipulation in the October presidential election in Brazil, 2026 marks a turning point. For a region fast becoming a frontyard of fascist experimentation, Milei offers a model. Beyond deepening ties with Trump and greenlighting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, he is now advancing labor, environmental and land reforms which kickstart a new phase of natural and digital extractivism, siphoning new forms of value from the public to private capital. “Argentina invites AI to free itself,” Milei declared in the Financial Times, arguing that AI companies should be given legal personhood and left unregulated. In his vision, Buenos Aires would be to the AI era what Amsterdam was to the age of sail.
In admiration of the Argentine laboratory, Flávio Bolsonaro invited Milei onstage to dance at his July 24th campaign launch in Brazil. This week the new President of Peru, Keiko Fujimori, embraced him in Lima during the transfer of command, just as Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz did at his inauguration last year. After celebrating Fujimori’s opportunity to resurrect her father’s dictatorship, Milei will visit two other aspirational dictators, Daniel Noboa in Ecuador and Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia. Noboa is rapidly advancing authoritarian measures on multiple fronts, and de la Espriella, who takes power on August 7, campaigned on the message that he will be the Milei-style leader the country needs to “disembowel” the left.
Within the Shield of the Americas, the far-right international, is attacking all forms of global solidarity it deems “terrorism.” The paradox is that its campaigns of persecution and criminalization are premised on a recognition that internationalist and anti-fascist alliances remain worldmaking forces themselves, capable of checking the fascist drive for unlimited power. It’s an important reminder of the latent power of true internationalism.
Verónica Gago is a Researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) in Argentina and a feminist organizer. She is the author of Neoliberalism from Below (Duke University Press 2017) and Feminist International (Verso 2020).
William Callison is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Hunter College, CUNY. He is co-editor of Mutant Neoliberalism (Fordham 2020) and co-author, with the Zetkin Collective, of The Great Driving Right Show: Cars, Crisis, and the Rise of Fossil Fascism (published by Verso this week).
