Introduction

This analysis was written before the Trump administration presented its National Security Strategy (NSS) on December 5, which reiterates a continental shift in U.S. imperialist policy, particularly toward Latin America. The document emphasizes: “After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region.” With this, the NSS signals the explicit return of the United States to an offensive policy of hemispheric domination, geopolitical dispute with other powers, and increasing pressure on the region as a strategic space for imperialist recolonization.

We are now facing one of the most significant instances of imperialist aggression in Latin America in recent history, with the intensification of the U.S. siege of Venezuela backed by the largest military deployment in the Caribbean region since the Cold War. If a military escalation of direct aggression against Venezuela were to materialize, it would accelerate the offensive with which the United States seeks to impose its hemispheric dominance and regain its undisputed control over Latin America. We are facing a potential scenario that could imply a profound change in the region, should the military escalation advance.

Even if a negotiation were reached that could force Maduro to leave office without major military intervention, it would be an event of enormous significance, as it would be the product of imperialist interference; this would completely condition Venezuela’s future. In any case, all possible scenarios are serious: Regional instability caused by (even limited) military escalation; a solution imposed by Washington and the consequent deepening of imperialist tutelage in the region; or even “peaceful” agreements conditioned by imperialist designs — all would mean Venezuela’s subordination to a reinforced hemispheric order. This would have an indelible impact on Latin America as a whole.

In the context of the relative decline of U.S. hegemony, exacerbated by competition with China and the fragmentation of the international order, Latin America is a region of strategic importance for the United States. Its presence there serves to prevent the advance of Chinese investment and trade corridors in the region, including greater control of the Panama Canal, as well as to control the flow of immigration and the transfer of immigrants through Mexico. This partly explains its offensive policy in the hemisphere and in Latin America in particular. As Juan Chingo and Claudia Cinatti argue in the text International Document for the FT-CI Conference:

Latin America has once again become a priority for U.S. foreign policy and one of the battlefronts in the trade and geopolitical dispute with China, which has made advances not only in trade relations but also in strategic investments in the region, such as the port in southern Peru linked to Brazil, which effectively establishes a bi-oceanic land corridor, and the space station in Argentina for deep space observation. For the United States, the region is fundamentally important for controlling immigration flows, especially along the southern border with Mexico, which is one of the cornerstones of Trump’s policy.

In this context, Latin America and the Caribbean are experiencing growing political polarization due to the renewed imperialist offensive, with Venezuela as its epicenter. Trumpism has created a turning point through imperialist pressure: economic sanctions, tariff threats, naval deployments in the Caribbean, and coercive maneuvers against governments that do not fully subordinate themselves to Washington. At the same time, it has reinforced its control over allies such as Argentina, Ecuador, and El Salvador, though not without creating friction with influential regional powers such as Brazil.

These geopolitical tensions interact with the internal dynamics of the region. Although class struggle in Latin America seems to lag behind processes such as those in Europe or particular social movements in the United States, the region has seen a series of social uprisings, from the Chilean uprising of 2019 to the Peruvian rebellion of 2025. However, these rebellions failed to open up a strategic way out; they were diverted or contained by belated “progressivism” and reformist leaderships — as in Mexico, Colombia, and Chile — where discontent was channeled within the framework of the regime. This resulted in a sustained tendency toward social confrontation without a revolutionary leadership capable of transforming it into a viable alternative for the working class. Given this contradiction and without such a perspective, future rebellions may face the risk of reactionary outcomes, hence the crucial need for a revolutionary political strategy.

The Trumpist turn in Latin America is not limited to tactical measures; it seeks a strategic reordering to roll back China’s trade relationships and prevent it from consolidating new ones, as well as blocking any investment that erodes the primacy of U.S. capital. For this reason, the Trump administration, beset by multiple crises, privileges coercion over consensus. When hegemony declines, force appears to be the means to restore it.

This is a project of “hemispheric reconquest” that seeks to rebuild the United States’s economic control through cultural and ideological penetration, supported by local right-wing forces, social media, and conservative fundamentalism. To this end, the old reflexes of the Monroe Doctrine have been reactivated, now in a sort of “Don-roe Doctrine”: a geopolitical-military program that conceives of the western hemisphere as an extension of U.S. national territory with greater direct intervention under the banners of “hemispheric security” and the “war on narco-terrorism.”

In this context, the region faces social and economic crisis, political polarization, and weak regimes unable to respond to imperialist aggression. Latin America is becoming a central arena where Washington is attempting to restore its hemispheric command and rebuild the primacy of U.S. capital in its “backyard.”

The crisis of global accumulation, expressed in the financialization and overexploitation of peripheral countries, as David Harvey warns,1David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (London: Verso, 2006), 413-442. translates in Latin America to a combination of economic stagnation, social crisis, and political polarization. The region is once again becoming a battleground between world powers (particularly the United States and China) and a laboratory for new forms of authoritarianism and Bonapartism of various kinds, as can be seen with Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Javier Milei in Argentina, Daniel Noboa in Ecuador, and even Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela.

The new imperialist offensive

Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025 marked a turning point in U.S. policy toward Latin America: his administration has openly and systematically reactivated sanctions, trade threats, military deployments, and covert operations, with the aim of restoring a relationship of political and military subordination that limits any regional strategic autonomy.

From the “war on terror” to the “war on narco-terrorism.” The administration’s discourse shifted from the “war on terror” to the “war on narco-terrorism.” National security documents drafted during the 2024 transition redefine Latin America as a priority threat zone and legitimize military expansion under the pretext of combating drug trafficking and “regional terrorism.” The entire military deployment in the Caribbean and the installation of the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier in the area, the expansion of bases in Panama, and the reactivation of the Fourth Fleet constitute the infrastructure of this strategy. This shift operates as a new hemispheric security doctrine that reactivates counterinsurgency in a preventive manner, enabling the CIA to carry out “covert actions” in territories treated as hostile, such as Venezuela, Cuba, or Nicaragua — reviving the logic of gunboat diplomacy, now executed by U.S. drones.

Economic blackmail as a tool of domination. The imperialist offensive does not only operate on the military level: Trump uses tariffs and sanctions as a mechanism of subordination. Trump’s erratic policies toward Mexico form the paradigmatic case: threats to impose 50 percent tariffs, tax remittances — equivalent to 4 percent of the country’s GDP — and trade concessions contingent on immigration regulation. Under pressure, Claudia Sheinbaum’s government is reinforcing the militarization of the southern border and limiting the entry of Chinese products, revealing the structural limits of “progressivism” that manages dependence rather than confronting it.

Similarly, Washington is imposing sanctions on Colombian exports to force Gustavo Petro’s government to align itself with its regional agenda. In contrast, under Milei’s control, Argentina is receiving an unprecedented $40 billion financial bailout, managed by U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, as a reward for its ideological loyalty. The message is clear: allies are rewarded, the disobedient are punished. This dynamic shapes a war for imperial positioning in the economic arena, where financial capital functions as a device for inter-state discipline.

Recolonization of resources and the new Monroe Doctrine. Behind the nationalist rhetoric of Trumpism lies a strategy of economic recolonization. Washington’s interest is to transform Argentina into a semi-official protectorate, ensuring access to strategic resources (lithium, gas, and food) and preventing China’s advance in infrastructure and communications sectors. The same is true in Peru and Brazil, where U.S. companies are pushing for control of the bi-oceanic corridors and the Amazon. If in the 19th century the Monroe Doctrine affirmed the exclusion of European powers, today it seeks to keep China and Russia out of the hemisphere and restore the United States’s direct political and economic control over the region. However, this is a Monroe Doctrine in times of decline, where dominance is exercised not from strategic confidence but from defensive compulsion.

Crisis of hegemony and the China-United States rivalry. The new imperialist offensive cannot be understood without placing it in the broader crisis of the world order. From Lenin’s perspective in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, the dispute between powers is an expression of competition for the extraction of surplus value on a global scale. Today, China has become the leading trading partner of most Latin American countries and a key investor in strategic sectors: lithium mining (in Bolivia, Argentina, Chile), infrastructure (in the Peru-Brazil bi-oceanic corridor), and telecommunications (as with Huawei in Mexico and Brazil). The United States perceives this presence as an existential threat to its hemispheric dominance. But it is essential to bear in mind that the China-United States rivalry creates a situation of double dependence for Latin American economies: subordinate to the dollar and the U.S. market, but increasingly linked to Chinese demand and financing. We are facing a contested peripheral capitalism. Neither power proposes a progressive solution; both reproduce the transfer of value and consolidate dependent integration, showing that competition between powers is nothing more than subordination.

The ideological-military apparatus of imperialism. Trumpism combines military unilateralism with an ideological discourse that legitimizes state violence and structural racism. Domestically, the slogan “America First” is associated with the criminalization of Latin American and African immigrants; externally, it translates into the dehumanization of entire peoples. This apparatus articulates a reactionary mass pedagogy, where “narco-terrorism” fulfills a dual ideological function: on the one hand, it naturalizes military intervention; on the other, it justifies internal repression in Latin American countries under allied governments. The latter is clearly reflected in the recent police massacre in Rio de Janeiro, where Bolsonaro supporter Governor Claudio Castro carried out a sweeping police operation that ended in a massacre of civilians — most of them Black and poor — anticipating forms of reactionary Bonapartism on a continental scale.

Imperialism in crisis. Unlike previous phases of U.S. imperialism — such as postwar expansionism or the “Cold War” — the Trumpist offensive is unfolding in a context of organic crisis in U.S. leadership. The combination of internal social fracture, political polarization, and international delegitimization limits its capacity for projection. However, precisely for this reason, Trump’s policy tends to become more erratic and violent: when power declines, coercion becomes its substitute. As Trotsky pointed out in 1934, the decline of a ruling class is expressed not only in its weakness, but also in the brutality of its methods. This contradiction opens up a scenario where the possibility of resistance and counteroffensive by the masses becomes more real, as attempts to rebuild hegemony from above can accelerate the crisis of local regimes. Our strategic task is to transform this decomposition into a war from an independent perspective of the working class, overcoming national-popular solutions and coalitions of class collaboration.

Latin America under pressure: armed neoliberalism, extractivism, and dependent economies

Latin America’s dependent economies are in a new cycle of structural crisis, aggravated by the aftermath of the Pandemic, stagnant investment, and pressure from international financial capital. Although this text does not focus on the dynamics of the Latin American economy as a whole, it is important to note that, according to the latest economic report by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC),

Latin America and the Caribbean will go through another economic slowdown in 2025. After rebounding in the first two quarters of 2024, regional GDP growth lost momentum towards the end of the year, and annual growth is expected to dip from 2.3% in 2024 to 2.2% in 2025. This trend is in line with a decade of low growth: at an average of just 1.2% for the period 2016–2025, GDP growth is even lower than it was in the 1980s.

These annual growth rates are considered insufficient to reverse the effects of a decade of fiscal adjustment and deindustrialization.

It is also important to note the deepening levels of social inequality. According to ECLAC, more than 32 percent of the Latin American population lives below the poverty line, while the richest 10 percent concentrate 77 percent of the wealth. Financial capital and extraction, mining, agro-export, and energy conglomerates continue to dictate the direction of national economies.

The debt crisis is once again emerging as a central mechanism of subordination. Argentina, Ecuador, and Honduras allocate between 25 and 40 percent of their budgets to interest payments, while the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank make each refinancing conditional on new structural reforms. The region is thus repeating a classic scenario between an indebted state, dominant foreign capital, and a local bourgeoisie acting as an intermediary while incapable of planning autonomous development. The second Trump administration does not usher in a new model, but rather reactivates the historical mechanisms of subordination: debt, privatization, and commercial blackmail. Debt functions as a device of “external direction” that integrates Latin American states without the need for direct occupation. This is the essence of this stage: economic recolonization in the name of “reactivation” and “macroeconomic stability,” within the framework of imperialism’s offensive for hemispheric control, with the United States exerting great coercive force on our continent.

Privatization, flexibilization, and disciplining. Neoliberalism did not disappear with the “progressivism” of the previous cycle; it mutated. After the limits of the “progressive” wave (2003-2015), the Latin American ruling classes regained the initiative, combining market policies with new forms of state authoritarianism. The result is what some critical economists call “Neoliberalism 2.0”: an updated version of structural adjustment, legitimized by crisis and sustained by repression. This bourgeois offensive seeks to rebuild domination after the exhaustion of the “progressive” consensus, shifting leadership from the terrain of consensus to direct coercion. In Argentina, Milei takes this tendency to the extreme, promoting the liquidation of the welfare state using the justification of “economic freedom.” In Ecuador, Noboa is pushing regressive labor reforms and repressing strikes by teachers and oilworkers. In Peru, the regime that inherited the coup against Pedro Castillo combines savage neoliberalism with militarized repression in the southern Andes. Even in countries with governments that present themselves as progressive — such as Brazil, Colombia, Mexico — macroeconomic policies remain orthodox: inflation targets, fiscal surpluses, and concessions to extractive multinationals. This confirms that “progressivism” manages dependency without any intention of breaking it.

This is supported by four fundamental pillars: 1) the precarization of work in the form of the rise of informal employment, digital platforms, outsourcing, and elimination of collective bargaining agreements; 2) the privatization of common goods in the form of the sale of strategic assets (energy, telecommunications, infrastructure) to international consortiums; 3) permanent austerity in the form of the reduction of public spending and pension reform as requirements for “investor confidence”; and 5) the criminalization of protest in the form of “anti-picket” laws, militarization of territories, and judicial persecution of workers or union leaders. This is armed neoliberalism, combining the logic of the market with that of the state of emergency. Today, Latin American capital can no longer reproduce itself without repression: coercion has become a central component of its profitability.

As David Harvey warns, contemporary accumulation increasingly depends on dispossession,2 Although we use the term “dispossession” here for its descriptive value, we acknowledge the limits of this category as described by Esteban Mercatante “La Lógica Turbulenta del Capital.” and in Latin America this dynamic is expressed through extractivism, territorial privatization, and militarization. The result is an authoritarian reconfiguration of the state that prepares conditions for preventive Bonapartism in the face of possible mass uprisings.

Extractivism and environmental plunder: the new frontier of accumulation. Extractivism is consolidating its position as the backbone of the regional economy: Latin America is now one of the world’s main sources of strategic minerals, lithium, copper, nickel, and natural gas, as well as agricultural products for export. This orientation is not new, but it takes on a qualitatively different dimension in the context of geopolitical competition and the global ecological crisis.

The so-called “energy transition” in the central countries requires increasing volumes of lithium, copper, and rare-earth minerals. Far from promoting a process of industrialization, this demand deepens the primary export pattern. Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia account for 60 percent of the world’s lithium reserves, but extraction is controlled by transnational corporations from the United States, China, and Australia, in partnership with local elites. This “lithium triangle” thus operates as a laboratory for a new “green” dependency. The Trump administration has made this process part of an explicit energy security strategy, redefining critical minerals as part of the defense infrastructure and enabling economic and military intervention in the name of “national interest.”

Environmentally, the consequences are devastating: record deforestation in the Amazon, contamination of aquifers in the highlands, and displacement of indigenous and rural communities. Green capitalism does not overcome exploitation: it reconfigures it in the name of the climate.

The return of Trump — a climate denier and dismantler of environmental agreements — gives U.S. corporations carte blanche to move forward without restrictions. His administration has not only reactivated fossil fuel projects, but as we have said it promotes an “ecological Monroe Doctrine” aimed at securing strategic resources under the pretext of competing with China. In effect it subordinates Latin American states to global chains of appropriation of nature and devastation.

Extractivism also operates as a mechanism of political and territorial control: it dismantles communities, divides movements, and militarizes entire regions. In Ecuador and Peru, the criminalization of indigenous and environmental leaders is combined with the presence of transnational mining companies and private security forces. The equation is straightforward: natural resources plus repression equals imperialist profitability.

This combination of environmental plunder and coercion has an immediate impact on the region’s emerging regimes: where accumulation depends on resources, permanent exception grows. The case of Bukele shows how the exploitation of nature and state coercion become inseparable. While exporting an image of technological modernization, his government opens the country to mining and energy capital under permanent regimes of exception. The 2017 ban on metal mining is being eroded through indirect concessions, special economic zones, and the militarization of rural territories, showing that neoliberal Bonapartism functions as an internal guarantor of extractive accumulation and the surrender of strategic resources.

Social polarization and the centrality of the working class. The social consequence of this model is increasingly acute polarization. While the ruling class concentrates extraordinary rents, the proletariat and the urban middle classes are experiencing widespread impoverishment. The material conditions are ripe for large-scale social upheavals. Although its composition has changed, the Latin American proletariat has not lost its centrality: today, industrial workers coexist with precarious service workers, immigrants, women, and youth expelled from the future.

The Pandemic accelerated a process of making work more informal and atomized, but it also gave rise to new forms of organization. The strikes by delivery workers in Mexico and Brazil during the Pandemic, and those that occurred more recently in other countries — such as the mining strikes in Peru, and feminist and socio-environmental mobilizations in Chile and Argentina — express a resurgence of action by important sectors, although they are still fragmented. In the face of what is to come, we need to develop a deeper, more massive resistance that at the same time allows us to overcome dispersion; with the working class at the center, this means establishing organizations of struggle that open the way for revolutionary leadership and unify all these movements against capital.

The working class faces objective obstacles — structural precariousness, union bureaucracies, state co-optation — and subjective ones — such as union bureaucracies, reformist leaderships, and a crisis of representation and strategic horizons in revolutionary terms. This was one of the major limitations of uprisings in recent years.

The reality of Latin American “progressivism.” The progressive cycle, which at the time presented itself as an alternative to neoliberalism — Lula in Brazil, Andrés Manuel López Obrador and now Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico, Gustavo Petro in Colombia, and Gabriel Boric in Chile — reaches the end of 2025 facing great contradictions.

Mexico — with the clear strength of the Fourth Transformation — and Brazil — with the possibility of re-election for Ignacio Lula — contrast with the probable arrival of the Right in Colombia and Chile, following the growth of social disillusionment in the wake of the governments of Petro and Boric.

These governments, despite their different contexts, are caught between the pressures of financial capital and expectations from below. Their strategic limits are exposed as they attempt to reconcile redistributive policies with structural dependence, which in the context of the international crisis translates into increasingly less covert adjustments. In Brazil, Lula’s third government faces the power of agribusiness and a conservative Congress, responding with policies of conciliation. In Mexico, Sheinbaum’s administration balances between Washington and Beijing and its promises to confront neoliberalism; at the same time it is putting more power in the hands of the military while it yields to Trump’s tariff policies and has become a funnel country that slows the flow of immigrants to the United States. For that it has been praised by the Trump administration for being an example of “coordination.” In Colombia, Petro is facing sabotage from financial capital and the Armed Forces, while his reform agenda is stalled and capitalist plans remain intact.

Mexico: militarized “welfare,” territorial control, and the loss of hegemony of 4T “progressivism.” Claudia Sheinbaum has consolidated the strategic positioning of the armed forces, including making high-ranking figures administrators, operators, builders, and supervisors of various megaprojects and operations associated with welfare programs. Under the guise of protection and security, the army is given power in logistics, supervision, and resource distribution, as well as the delivery of direct support and the operation of the Welfare Bank in rural areas, especially indigenous lands. These measures allow the state to turn social policies into a military instrument of territorial reorganization and control in regions that weaken historical forms of community self-organization. The 4T maintains legitimacy among broad popular sectors, but it does so by relying on a daily military presence that reconfigures social organization in a vertical manner.

This tension is visible in Chiapas, where militarization, welfare programs, socioeconomic degradation, and the advance of organized crime have produced an incipient process of social decomposition, even in territories previously linked to Zapatismo. In response, the government is reinforcing a military-welfare containment scheme that seeks to manage disorder without transforming it. Growing subordination to U.S. immigration policy is turning southern Mexico into a space of geopolitical control, where military forces and social programs act as a containment dam.

The hegemony of the 4T thus combines electoral legitimacy and direct links with impoverished sectors with a growing dependence on coercive and welfare mechanisms. This reveals the limits of “progressivism,” which, in the face of its policies of crisis management, militarization, and imperialist subordination, opens up elements of erosion that show the limits of its project.

However, although “progressivism” opens up a political vacuum on the Left that the extreme Right (from Bukele to Milei) is trying to fill with authoritarian and anti-establishment rhetoric, it is not a foregone conclusion that this erosion will lead to a revolutionary outcome. It depends on the emergence of processes of struggle and self-organization from below: committees and coordinating bodies, unions led by the rank and file, social movements, and the construction of revolutionary organizations with real insertion in the working class. Without these elements, the most likely scenario is reactionary radicalization or new reformist variants of crisis management, not a left-wing solution. However, social forces are beginning to accumulate that could reactivate more radical tendencies if the economic crisis deepens.

Emergence of new authoritarian right-wing movements

The rise of the Right and the Far Right in Latin America is not an isolated phenomenon. It responds to imperialism’s need to ensure social discipline and structural adjustment through strong governments, tendencies toward Bonapartism, and the reconfiguration of alliances and security frameworks. This strategy is articulated at the international level: Republicans in the United States, European conservative currents, and Latin American leaders coordinate in spaces such as the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which fosters ideological narratives, resources, diplomatic legitimacy, and strategic coordination. This is not mere political coincidence, but rather the consolidation of a transnational bloc that seeks to restore the neoliberal order through authoritarian means.

In Argentina, far-right Javier Milei aligns his foreign and economic policy with Washington and Israel. This strengthens authoritarian regimes and their repressive apparatus, combining shock adjustment, privatization, and criminalization of social protest to impose their plans. His discourse against the “caste” functions as ideological cover for economic recolonization and seeks to reconfigure common sense in an anti-communist and denialist direction. Milei positions himself as a central figure in the reactionary camp in the Southern Cone, commanding the regional Right and polarizing the national situation against the working class, retirees, women, youth, and other mobilized sectors.

In El Salvador, under a permanent state of emergency and with an extraordinary strengthening of the armed forces, Nayib Bukele is consolidating an authoritarian neoliberal Bonapartism with openly dictatorial features: concentration of powers, absence of judicial independence, suspension of due process, constitutional reforms, and indefinite reelection. His regime functions as a laboratory for social control and an exporter of a model based on the country’s militarization, mass incarceration, and the annulment of rights. The police-military apparatus is expanding not only in volume but also as the ideological core of the regime. Agreements with international financial capital, accelerated indebtedness to the IMF, and geopolitical subordination to Washington deepen the Salvadoran state’s dependence. The “effectiveness” of the model is sustained by fear as a tool of social control and systematic practices of state terrorism.

In Peru, both the new illegitimate government of José Jerí and previously the civil-military dictatorship of Dina Boluarte have sought to forcibly stabilize a regime of war against the working class and indigenous peoples. Massacres in the southern Andes, selective repression, and widespread criminalization, with the endorsement of the Organization of American States (OAS) and the United States, ensure control of strategic resources and block any solution promoted from below by the indigenous, rural, and working majorities. The combination of militarization, extractivism, and counterinsurgency is once again presented as synonymous with “governability.”

But these right-wing forces do not have it easy. Noboa’s recent defeat in the referendum is also seen as a setback for Trump, as one of the questions referred to the installation of U.S. military bases. Behind Noboa’s proposals was a strategic plan to reconfigure the state in favor of an authoritarian, neoliberal line subordinate to foreign capital, seeking to grant reinforced powers and build a legal framework functional to the logic of militarized “security” and neoliberalism. His goal was to strengthen governance in the service of the IMF and imperialism, but he suffered a severe setback.

In Bolivia, following the debacle of Evo Morales’s government and the implosion of his party Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), the right wing alliance of Rodrigo Paz and Edmand Lara has risen to power under the banner of a reactionary restoration backed by capital. Their agenda seeks to dismantle social gains, open up territories to transnational plunder, and reconfigure the state along conservative lines subordinate to imperialism. Although this represents a new mainstay for the continental right, the correlation of forces in the country is still undefined.

In Chile, the Right is on the verge of returning to government with Antonio Kast. But, as our comrades in Chile point out about the advance of the Far Right and the reconfiguration of the political map:

It was a clear electoral victory for the Right, but those who see it as a strategic victory are mistaken. The result, with the emergence of the Far Right, the erosion of “progressivism,” and a new political map with attenuated polarization leaning toward the conservative camp, is unfolding in an organic or hegemonic crisis in which no social or political force of the ruling classes has a project that can garner the organic support of its entire class, much less that of the majority of the working and popular classes.

Where these right-wing forces encounter resistance, they fail to stabilize. This is the situation in Ecuador, Peru, and Argentina, where strong confrontations and even national strikes are taking place, beyond their last electoral breath. The dynamics of governments such as Bukele’s in El Salvador, whose strength lies in the passivity and ebb of the mass movement and extreme militarization, are not the norm.

Together, these authoritarian right-wing governments function as internal agents of the imperialist offensive: they guarantee austerity and order, enable the unlimited opening of territories to transnational capital, and dismantle labor, democratic, and social rights, while persecuting workers, youth, and indigenous peoples. Their strategic function is clear: to restore the neoliberal project by force and block any prospect of a left-wing alternative.

Politically unstable and socially explosive Latin America

Latin America is a strategic region due to its natural resources and geopolitical position, but it is undergoing an explosive combination of political instability and accumulated social tensions. For U.S. imperialism, it remains a vital space for its economic and military survival; for China, it is a key reserve of raw materials and a market for expansion.

For the working classes and oppressed peoples, the continent is increasingly becoming a battleground between subordination and emancipation.

Class struggle, resistance, and new subjectivities. The phase that began with Trump’s second term and the imperialist offensive in the region did not produce social passivity. Under neoliberal discipline and the fragmentation imposed by austerity, a reactivation of social issues is emerging. Inflation, precariousness, and the rising cost of living can generate protests and a new combative spirit. In a continent marked by extreme inequalities, financial elites accumulate extraordinary profits while real wages in the region fell by 8 percent between 2020 and 2024. Fiscal adjustment, privatization, and repression, in line with the “Trump-IMF recipe,” are consolidating as structural policies.

The Latin American working class and its composition. Far from disappearing, the proletariat is transforming in its composition and forms of struggle. Deindustrialization, tertiarization, and the expansion of informality have changed its morphology, but not its strategic role. Although the realities vary from country to country, the region as a whole is home to automotive, mining, and oil workers, rig workers, care workers, wage-earning peasants, precarious immigrants, and young people excluded from formal employment. This heterogeneity, while an obstacle in itself, contains a decisive strategic potential: the unity of the exploited around common demands. The insertion of workers into the logistical and extractive nodes of global capitalism gives them real power. The challenge is political: to transform this social force into a conscious subject.

Feminism, youth, and new subjectivities. The last decade was marked by the emergence of feminist and youth movements that redefined the language of protest. From Ni Una Menos and the Green Tide to the Chilean and Mexican mobilizations, feminism became a point of convergence between class, gender, and race. Working women, immigrants, and young people are on the front lines in contexts of austerity and state violence. This is not institutional feminism: double exploitation and patriarchal violence are pillars of dependent capitalism, which raises the need for a socialist feminism articulated together with class struggle.

At the same time, precarious youth are emerging with force. The absence of a future, the educational crisis, and police repression fuel a subjectivity marked by rage and a break with traditional parties. From Chile and Colombia to Mexico and Argentina, a spontaneous, horizontal radicalism open to anti-capitalist politicization is being expressed from below: no longer just for rights, but against the dead end imposed by capital.

The climate crisis and extractivism act as triggers for new forms of resistance, converging with the struggles of young people and workers. Indigenous peoples and rural communities are at the forefront of conflicts over territory, water, and minerals: CONAIE against Noboa in Ecuador; the Aymara and Quechua rebellions in southern Peru; the Amazonian peoples against agribusiness and oil companies in Brazil. These struggles combine environmental defense, self-determination, and questioning of the capitalist development model. Their radicalism stems not only from their ecological content, but also from their practical critique of private ownership of nature.

Environmental struggles, the working class, and indigenous peoples. The climate crisis and extractivism have become catalysts for new resistance movements. Indigenous peoples and rural communities are at the center of conflicts over territory, water, and minerals. In Ecuador, the indigenous movement led by CONAIE confronted Noboa’s policies; in Peru, the Aymara and Quechua communities led the rebellion in the southern Andes; in Brazil, the Amazonian peoples are resisting agribusiness and oil companies. Although we are still far from the large mobilizations that once took place in Latin America — such as the indigenous struggles in early 2000 in Ecuador that brought down entire governments, or the indigenous-led protests in Bolivia that brought the MAS to power, or even the movements of indigenous people in Chiapas in Mexico. Faced with attempts by international powers and organizations — including “progressive” sectors of capital — to co-opt “green capitalism,” the most advanced movements are raising the slogan: “There is no ecological transition without social revolution,” connecting the ecological struggle with an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist perspective.

Migration, racism, and the internationalization of the struggle. Trump’s imperialist offensive reactivated openly xenophobic policies against Latin American peoples: tougher immigration laws, mass deportations, and the externalization of borders. Mexico, Guatemala, and Panama function as containment zones where immigrants are criminalized to satisfy Washington’s demands. However, immigration also produces an unprecedented internationalization of the Latin American proletariat. Millions of workers in the United States have become a decisive fraction of the American proletariat, carrying with them traditions of struggle and a transnational identity. Agricultural strikes in California and service-worker protests in New York show how struggles transcend borders, reopening the practical validity of proletarian internationalism.

Union and social movement bureaucracies. One of the main obstacles to these resistance movements becoming a revolutionary force is the weight of union bureaucracies and reformist leaderships. In almost all countries, these apparatuses function as mediators of the state, dampening class struggle and blocking the political independence of the working class. However, combative coordinating committees, rank-and-file initiatives within unions, and intersectoral assemblies of workers and students are beginning to emerge, seeking new forms of representation. With this arises the need to promote programs of class independence and self-organization.

The subjectivity of the working class. In the midst of a systemic crisis, a new political subjectivity may be emerging. In some countries, there is a growing tendency to distrust traditional parties, reject the regime, and seek alternatives on the left. This is not yet a predominant trend, but it is part of a changing ideological climate. This is taking place in the context of ongoing struggles, where the question is how to overcome leaderships that are hindering progress with their populist proposals or limited reforms that do not fundamentally challenge the social order that makes the domination of capital possible. These elements and the struggles we have to wage may converge with other socialist and anti-capitalist traditions. Subjective recomposition can advance from direct experience and can be strengthened by the intervention of the revolutionary Left, which is what we are committed to in the Trotskyist Fraction – Fourth International (TF-FI).

Potential and limits of a new cycle of struggles. The terrain of class struggle in 2025 shows an uneven and combined situation: conflict in Argentina, Peru, and Ecuador, and tense stability in Brazil and Mexico. Trump’s imperialist offensive may act as a catalyst for a new anti-imperialist wave, as happened with Reagan in the 1980s, but in a more urbanized, proletarianized context with accumulated experience of mobilization. The objective conditions for a new revolutionary cycle are maturing, but its development will depend on whether dispersed social energy is transformed into independent organization, self-organization, and a revolutionary leadership capable of responding to the magnitude of the moment.

Strategic perspectives and tasks, anti-imperialism, and class independence

Trump’s second presidency does not usher in a stable cycle, but rather marks a moment of rupture or a turning point within the organic crisis of global capitalism. The imperialist offensive towards Latin America reflects a declining hegemony that seeks to reassert itself through coercion and the subordination of regional states. In this context, as we stated at the beginning, the region once again occupies a central place in the global strategy of capital: as a supplier of strategic resources, a territory for investment, and a frontier of social containment. But it is important to warn against and denounce the multilateral “alternatives” that some sectors, such as China, are promoting as a way out or counterweight to the U.S. offensive.

From our perspective, Latin America is in a phase where contradictions are accumulating and the objective conditions for acute political processes of class struggle are maturing, although its progressive dynamics will depend on the ability of the working class and exploited sectors to organize independently and build a revolutionary political leadership, breaking the cycles we have been experiencing in recent decades.

In the current situation we face in Latin America, with an ever-increasing escalation of imperialist aggression, including siege and military threats that we have not seen in decades, the banners of anti-imperialism are gaining strength and are a key issue in our program. The level of military aggression we are witnessing against Venezuela, with constant sudden changes, puts this country at the center of our anti-imperialist struggle. This struggle is intertwined, as we have been carrying out together with our comrades in the United States, with the fight for the unity of the working class in the imperialist country and in Latin America. That is why we, the organizations that make up the Trotskyist Fraction – Fourth International (TF-FI), have been strongly denouncing imperialist aggression in Venezuela and calling on trade unions, social movements, and left-wing parties to join a major continental campaign to defeat this new imperialist onslaught.

But we understand our anti-imperialism from the theory of Permanent Revolution, without giving in to the bourgeois nationalist variants that are now more than degraded, or the policies of conciliation of the reformist and Stalinist currents that are being recycled in the face of imperialist aggression. This discussion is not abstract. We are currently faced with currents that argue that we should not criticize the Maduro government in the face of the current imperialist aggression, nor should we take measures that affect imperialist interests in our countries in the context of the transition program.

The Latin American situation is marked by increasing polarization. The governments of Lula, Petro, Boric, and Sheinbaum, in their different political contexts, represent attempts to manage dependent capitalism with an inclusive discourse behind strategies of negotiating crumbs within the imperialist order. At the other end, figures such as Milei, Noboa, and Bukele embody the offensive of financial capital and the post-liberal authoritarianism of a reactionary extreme Right. Both poles are complementary: the failure of “progressivism” fuels reaction, as we saw in the first wave with Hugo Chávez, Néstor Kirchner, and Evo Morales, and reaction legitimizes “progressivism” as the “lesser evil.” The result is a dead-end oscillation that keeps the masses trapped between frustration and fear. The task is to break this false dichotomy: what is needed is neither neoliberal restoration nor impotent “progressivism,” but political independence for the working class.

Faced with this scenario, the only consistently anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist perspective is class independence. This is demonstrated once again by the complicit silence of progressive formations and governments, from Peronism in Argentina to Lula in Brazil, who claims to have recently had a “very positive” conversation with Trump and who has just pointed out that the U.S. president is “fully willing” to cooperate with Brazil in the fight against drug trafficking, underpinning the excuse used by the United States to advance its aggression against Venezuela. Historical experience, from popular fronts to the recent “progressive” cycle, shows that any subordination of the working class to the national bourgeoisie leads to demobilization and defeat. Without political independence, resistance is diluted in the administration of order; with class independence, it can be transformed into a strategic force capable of opening a path to revolutionary emancipation.

We must build revolutionary factions in the labor, student, women’s, and environmental movements that raise the unity of the working class (bringing together employed, unemployed, and precarious workers), and the unity of the aspirations and demands of the working class with those of other oppressed and exploited sectors under capitalism. This struggle is inextricably linked to the building of revolutionary internationalist parties and the establishment of organs of self-determination of the masses that open the way to governments of the working class and the exploited in rupture with capitalism and in transition to socialism — united across the region in the perspective of a confederation of socialist states of Latin America and the Caribbean.

This article was originally published in Spanish on December 7, 2025 in Ideas de Izquierda.

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