On Saturday, the State Department announced it would seek $1 billion in “security assistance” for Colombia just after its new right-wing president, Abelardo de La Espriella, took office. The announcement, according to the State Department, comes after a “Presidential Delegation, led by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, represented the United States at the August 7 inauguration of President Abelardo de la Espriella.”
The announcement comes on the heels of U.S. President Donald Trump interfering not just in Colombia’s election, but in many elections across Latin America since he took office for his second term. Many of the U.S.’s actions have been well documented, and Trump himself even admitted to interfering in elections in Honduras and Chile. The State Department also welcomed Colombia joining the Shield of the Americas, a conglomeration of sycophantic leaders indebted to Trump due to his coordinated election interference helping them win their elections.
It should be noted that joint operations conducted by the Shield of the Americas under the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition umbrella have been used to target opposition in Ecuador, among other countries, under the guise of counter-narcotics operations. For his part, de La Espriella, a Colombian-born U.S. citizen who had previously declared he was an atheist and abruptly aligned himself with prominent white Christian nationalist groups in the U.S. and Europe, also embraced Trump’s policies for the region and proposed similar operations.
Like other current Latin American leaders, Colombia’s new president has spent a considerable amount of time forging ties with various white nationalist groups. One of those is Foro Madrid, an arm of Spain’s Vox Party. The group’s main goal is to create links between far-right political groups across Latin America and control the region. Their “Letter of Madrid” reads like a recolonization manifesto, not much different from U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s pitch at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year.
Foro Madrid’s intentional use of the phrase “Iberio-American axis,” which plays on some connections between Spain, Portugal, and Latin America, ignores the brutal history of those associations. The core logic behind the group’s position is deeply tied to Eurocentrism and nearly identical to the legacy of “El Blanqueamiento” (the whitening) of Latin America. But it doesn’t end with de La Espriella’s connections to Spain’s white nationalist Vox Party.
Several current Latin American leaders are part of the same networks. Chilean president José Antonio Kast, U.S.-backed Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, and various other leaders are also tied to the Vox Party in Spain. Others, such as Javier Miliei and Daniel Noboa, are now intricately connected through the White House and the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which are both pursuing a similar agenda seen across various prominent white nationalist political groups.
It’s also no mistake that many of these leaders have been linked to international criminal networks and drug smuggling operations. De La Espriella built his career as an attorney defending some of the most corrupt people in Colombia. Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa’s businesses have been tied to drug smuggling networks in Europe. Argentine President Javier Milei is mired in corruption scandals and endorsed a candidate with ties to a drug trafficker. Honduran President Nasry Asfura has ties to many convicted traffickers, including notorious drug smuggler and former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was pardoned by Trump just before Honduras’ election.
In the U.S., the only difference in white nationalist groups is the domestic appeal; however, the goal of bringing far-right political factions together across three continents is moving full steam ahead. Meanwhile, Western news media’s focus is on controlling political narratives and fearmongering about socialism like it’s a soap opera. The white nationalist takeover of the Americas doesn’t register with the corporate news media because they also stand to profit from it as the United States pours billions into backing far-right autocrats across the region.
The U.S. making efforts to help elect far-right autocratic leaders isn’t new, but the Trump White House has made it more apparent than ever, either through incompetence or Trump’s incessant need to brag about everything. The U.S. under the current administration fits in with Spain’s Vox Party and Germany’s AfD because the vast majority of these groups boast similar agendas: white nationalism, sometimes hidden behind Christianity.
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