The signal coming out of Miami this past weekend was that in the “Trump Corollary” you’re either a vassal or a target.
Twelve Latin American and Caribbean right-wing leaders gathered at Trump National Doral Resort and Spa for what looked suspiciously like a feudal court. Argentina’s Javier Milei, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa, and Chile’s President-elect José Antonio Kast all made the pilgrimage to the golf resort to pledge fealty to the “king” of U.S. imperialism as he launched his “Shield of Americas” initiative.
At press time, it is unclear whether the guests got their rooms comped or still had to pay the going nightly rate to the resort’s owner. Regardless, like any good king, Trump made sure they knew their place.
For one, the promised bilateral meetings with the Latin American heads of government never materialized. Instead, each got a handshake, a photo op, and even a moment of confusion as the president stumbled over their names. Trump reportedly informed his guests he had no intention of learning “your damn language.”
In the end, 17 countries signed onto Trump’s “Americas Counter Cartel Coalition”—the official organization behind the Shield of the Americas marketing. It is yet another military alliance that seeks to mobilize armed forces against alleged criminal organizations “to defeat these threats to our security and civilization.”
The coalition, of course, includes some strange bedfellows—nations whose own leaders have been implicated in the very drug trade they now apparently pledge to destroy. But consistency has never been the point, whether it’s Trump or any other U.S. administration.
The point is always alignment to the goals and dominance of U.S. imperialism in a time of shifting geopolitical alliances and increased capitalist rivalries. War Secretary Pete Hegseth, in true fascistic fashion, opened by rallying the region as “Christian nations under God” against “radical narco-communism.”
Kristi Noem, recently fired from her post at Homeland Security, was trotted out as the new “special envoy” to the coalition. She will be tasked with coordinating the “destruction of cartels” and the exclusion of “adversaries that wish to change our way of life”—which can only be read as countries who pursue their own sovereignty and economic development contrary to the dictates of U.S. imperialism.
Frequent readers of People’s World will recognize developments at Doral as the Trump National Security Strategy coming to life before our eyes. That document, issued back in November 2025, of course made no secret of the administration’s ambitions: to “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine,” “deny non-hemispheric competitors” (i.e. primarily China and to a lesser extent Russia) access to strategic assets, and generally restore U.S. pre-eminence through whatever means necessary—international law, national sovereignty, and democratic rights be damned.
The NSS was itself the open public declaration of a game plan that’s been pursued since Trump’s return to power in January last year. Storming back into the White House determined to shore up U.S. corporations’ slumping economic dominance, the administration spent the better part of the past twelve months trying to rope in trading partners with tariff threats and shutting out market competitors via sanctions and export restrictions.
With Chinese firms giving Silicon Valley a run for its money in high-tech fields like AI, robotics, quantum computing, and EVs, the capitalists who’ve grouped themselves around Trump are desperate to stem their losses. In practice, that means supporting the construction of a U.S.-dominated economic bloc stretching from the Arctic to the tip of South America.
Narcotics might be how the administration is selling this alliance to the public, but the “Shield of the Americas” is more concerned with shielding corporate profits from competition than anything else.
The trade war was the opening act of this campaign, while the NSS signaled an intention to move toward more coercive means. Trump’s Miami summit should be seen, then, as the political counterpart to the military escalation that’s already underway.
U.S. forces are now engaged in joint bombardment campaigns in Colombia and along the Ecuadorian border. And of course, let’s not forget the illegal strikes and killings against Venezuelan boats in Caribbean and Pacific waters which have killed more than 150 people—extrajudicial executions that attracted approximately zero attention from the capitalist media.
And then there’s the Jan. 3 illegal kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores—a military operation that killed more than 100 people, including 32 Cubans. Washington now has de facto control of Venezuelan oil.
Finally, there is the ongoing U.S. oil blockade against Cuba. That operation, which intends to strangle the island’s economy into submission, is creating a humanitarian catastrophe and sparking global condemnation.
The “counter cartel” coalition convened last weekend provides the framework for similar operations elsewhere.
What’s positive is that not all countries in Latin America came to bow in Miami. The presidents of Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela—the region’s largest economies led by more progressive leaders—were not present.
But still, the far-right in the region marches on, apparently united in little except their willingness to bend the knee to the Trump regime and U.S. imperialism. All of this unfolds at the expense of working people—in the United States no less than in Latin America.
The NSS that underpins this new offensive is not, despite its name, about keeping Americans safe. It’s about keeping U.S. monopolies dominant. It’s about ensuring that the billionaires who own everything can continue to extract profits from the hemisphere without interference from trivialities like sovereignty, self-determination, or the democratic choices of other peoples.
“America First,” in practice, means the U.S. ruling class first. Everyone else—including the vast majority of Americans in the Western Hemisphere—can get in line behind the reactionary Latin American presidents waiting for their photo op with Trump.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the authors.
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