2025 saw progressive governments in Latin America and the Caribbean delegitimized and displaced. Right-wing forces have seized on drug-related crises to attack the so-called Pink Tide governments, driving a reactionary backwash and putting new, neoliberal administrations in power. The irony is that the rise in drug use and crime is driven by neoliberalism’s failure to meet social needs. But this has been successfully cloaked.

A further irony is that governments with the strongest records in limiting the social damage caused by illegal narcotics have been the principal targets of US destabilization campaigns.

Despite the reactionary backwash, more than half the region’s population is still governed by progressive administrations, of which the largest countries are Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia.

This could change in 2026, with presidential elections in Colombia and Brazil, where right-wing challenges threaten progressive gains. As the Financial Times observes, “Brazil’s global balancing act is trickier than ever.” Peru, where left-wing President Pedro Castillo was deposed and imprisoned two years ago, may also continue rightwards in elections scheduled for April. Of the current Pink Tide governments, Mexico appears best insulated from an imminent reversal.

Presiding over these developments is an increasingly assertive US hegemon, citing a “Donroe” corollary to the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine as justification for the havoc it is wreaking. Now formalized in the National Security Strategy, it's policy aims to “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence” in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). As Venezuelan Ambassador Samuel Moncada warned the UN Security Council, Venezuela is only the “first target of a larger plan” to divide and conquer the region “piece by piece.”

Through a combination of elections, judicial maneuvers, and extra-parliamentary pressure, including direct interference by Washington, countries that were formerly left or left leaning have swung sharply to the right. This trend was evident in LAC’s four major elections in 2025—in Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, and Honduras.

Across the region, the right now arguably constitutes a significant Washington-aligned force.

There were, however, crumbs of comfort for progressives. In Ecuador, the victorious President Daniel Noboa—whose win is likely attributable to electoral fraud—has since lost key popular referendums. In Bolivia, President Rodrigo Paz faces massive popular resistance as he moves to impose austerity economics. And in Chile, the defeated communist candidate Jeannette Jara did nevertheless secure 42% in December’s runoff vote.

Progressive governments have also shown a degree of unity in opposing US aggression against Venezuela, although Mexico and Brazil have also had to contend with Washington’s direct pressures on them. In Mexico, this included overt military threats.

The rightward shift is starkly illustrated by Chile’s election, where the outgoing Gabriel Boric had been a “flash in the pan” and unfulfilled expectations have “reshaped the political horizon of the left.” In March, when José Antonio Kast takes office, Chile will have a “Nazi” in power—or at least a self-avowed defender of the Pinochet dictatorship and the son of an actual German Nazi. Kast’s first foreign visit after his win was to Argentina’s hard-right Javier Milei, restoring an alliance between the two major Southern Cone countries. Both have large, right-leaning middle classes that sustained dictatorships in the recent past.

“Trump’s policies have intensified the extreme polarization in which the far right has replaced the center right,” notes Steve Ellner, retired professor at Venezuela’s Universidad de Oriente.

Across the region, the right now arguably constitutes a significant Washington-aligned force encompassing not only Chile and Argentina but also Paraguay, Bolivia, Ecuador, Panama, and El Salvador. All support Washington’s military aggression against Venezuela and genocide in Palestine. As Vijay Prashad observes, this new right bloc shares the libertarian economic doctrines of the Pinochet-era “Chicago Boys” (Kast’s brother was one of them), dramatized by Milei waving a chainsaw to symbolize his attack on the state.

Both left and right agree that organized crime poses a major threat to LAC’s security. Although statistics show that most of the region is safer than a decade ago, violence has surged in some previously safe countries and reactionary forces have pushed crime as an issue in many others. “Polls show that in at least eight countries, including Chile, security is the dominant voter concern, driving many Latin Americans to demand iron-fisted measures and show a greater tolerance for tough-on-crime policies,” reports the New York Times.

The right’s response is captured by the phrase la mano dura (“the iron fist”), exemplified by the torturous prisons of Nayib Bukele’s El Salvador. Such approaches have proven more attractive to electorates in Chile, Honduras, and Ecuador than the community-based strategies advanced by the left—even though they are proven to work. Rafael Correa successfully reduced crime in Ecuador a decade ago. Xiomara Castro, too, achieved a significant decrease in Honduras, where the homicide rate dropped to the lowest level in 30 years. Left-leaning Mexico most dramatically reduced homicides by 37%.

The right’s alarming yet successful rhetoric links rising crime to drug trafficking and immigration. Trump-style measures have been sold to many Latin Americans yet, as Michelle Ellner of CodePink explains, in Cuba and Venezuela he is blocking migrants from entering the US “while systematically destroying the conditions that allow them to survive at home.”

This framing resonated even in Chile, which remains Latin America’s safest country despite an increase in gang-related crime. Kast successfully blamed the increase on Chile’s half million Venezuelan migrants, whom he threatens to deport, while also proposing to construct a US-style border wall.

The principal driver of the region’s crime is the drug trade. The unseen elephant in the room is the US—the world’s largest market for illegal narcotics as well as the leading money launderer of drug profits and the cartels’ gunrunner of choice. Yet Washington portrays itself as an ally in drug-related crime prevention, claiming to be tackling “narco-terrorism” not only in Venezuela but also in Colombia and Mexico.

This is hypocrisy of the highest order. As Venezuelan writer Francisco Delgado Rodríquez points out: “The only culprits are cartels and bandits with Latin American surnames, and their US counterparts or partners never appear, defying common sense given that the volumes of drugs, weapons, and profits generated necessarily require organized structures of their own on US soil.”

Nicaragua-based analyst Stephen Sefton also notes “the central role of the US government in manipulating the regional structures of organized crime and money laundering.” In reality, “US government propaganda uses the alibi of fighting organized crime and drug trafficking to justify its extensive military presence in the region.”

Trump has elevated this hypocrisy to new heights by releasing a former Honduran president who was serving a 45-year US prison sentence for drug trafficking and links to violent crime. Trump’s........

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