The ultra-conservative document drafted by the Heritage Foundation as a roadmap for Republican governance has not only fulfilled the fascist dream of the United States, but this roadmap is now being used by the governments of the Shield of the Americas.
By Daniela Pastrana – Sep 28, 2026
The expansion of the far right in Latin America is giving continental form to Project 2025—the anti-democratic Republican plan drafted by the Heritage Foundation with the support of more than 100 Christian nationalist organizations in the United States and various officials close to Donald Trump.
Although Trump distanced himself from Project 2025 before the 2024 elections, in the first year alone of his administration, he approved close to half of its policies, and they are now being implemented by the governments of Javier Milei in Argentina, José Antonio Kast in Chile, Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia, Laura Fernández in Costa Rica, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Nasry Asfura in Honduras, and Keiko Fujimori in Peru.
A report by OpenDemocracy published by Pie de Página recalls that earlier this month, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts participated in the fourth regional gathering of the Madrid Forum of the Disenso Foundation, chaired by Santiago Abascal, leader of the Spanish far-right party Vox.
At that meeting, Roberts recounted that the ultra-conservative offensive began long before the Mandate for Leadership (the 900-page Project 2025 document) was written. The mandate was driven by organizations and networks that train and fund conservative politicians, lawyers, and activists, among others.
“Heritage Foundation is proud to have contributed to unifying this movement,” Roberts said during the Santiago meeting, attributing to the Madrid Forum, Vox, and Heritage Foundation itself the electoral “victories” of the leaders gathered there. Roberts also stated that “elections are only the beginning of the political process. What really matters is what we conservatives do with political power when we have it.”
According to OpenDemocracy’s analysis: “The message gives a key to the evangelical ideology within which Project 2025 is framed: the Seven Mountains Mandate, which holds that Christians must dominate seven spheres of human life—family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, economy, and government. This mandate implies, at some point, going against democracy—a fact that its defenders barely bother to conceal.”
The report notes that Roberts visited Chile in addition to Colombia and Peru. In Colombia, he met with the vice president to offer training to public officials, and in Peru, he underlined the strategic importance of Latin America for bringing “the America First” policy to fruition. The Peru visit took place as US Secretary of State Rubio was meeting in Lima with Keiko Fujimori, where she announced her support for the Shield of the Americas.
This is no coincidence, as Project 2025 proposes “making irregular warfare a cornerstone of security strategy,” according to OpenDemocracy—including “cyber, informational, economic, and counter-terrorism irregular warfare,” lawfare, diplomatic pressure, and the public naming and shaming of persons and organizations considered enemies.
In that vein, Heritage Foundation organized the Miami Security Forum in March at a Trump hotel, bringing together US and Latin American officials, politicians, military experts, and security specialists.
**What is Project 2025?**Trump has repeatedly denied any involvement in Project 2025, even writing on his Truth Social network that he has “no idea” who is behind the plan and that some of its ideas are “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
However, as Diario Red América Latina reported in March 2025, each of the 156 actions taken in the first two months of his government had been anticipated in the project, and several senior officials of his second administration participated in its drafting, including Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr, Senior Trade and Manufacturing Advisor Peter Navarro, Securities and Exchange Commission Director Paul Atkins, former border czar Tom Homan, and Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought.
Produced by the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 establishes a roadmap that the next conservative president should follow—a tradition that dates back to Ronald Reagan presidency. Published in 2023, it attracted widespread attention during the 2024 presidential campaign when Democrats highlighted the document as a reason to oppose Trump.
Its agenda is plain: a hard line against immigration and the progressive elimination of the right to asylum; tax cuts for the wealthiest and the rollback of environmental and health protections; dismantling public education; limiting union rights; removing benefits for single-parent families; completely banning abortion—including by applying an 1873 anti-obscenity law—and restricting access to contraceptives.
One of the plan’s central axes, according to a comprehensive Forbes analysis also published in March 2025, “is a strong influence on nuclear families, with the aim of boosting marriage and birth rates, for example through abortion restrictions.”
The Forbes article highlights statements made by US Vice President J.D. Vance—”a close ally of the Heritage Foundation”—at the anti-abortion March for Life rally in January of that year. “The metric of national success is not our GDP or our stock market but whether people feel they can raise prosperous and healthy families in our country,” said Vance. “It is our government’s job to make it easier for young mothers and fathers to have children, to bring them into the world, and to welcome them as the blessings we know them to be here at the March for Life.”
According to a report by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), cited by OpenDemocracy, the “cornerstone” of this axis is the Geneva Consensus Declaration—a non-binding anti-abortion document signed in 2020, two weeks before Trump lost his first reelection bid. The declaration has 43 signatory countries. Argentina and the Dominican Republic joined in recent weeks.
The Forbes text carries out an exhaustive comparative analysis between Project 2025’s policies and the executive orders issued by Trump in the first two months of his government—the majority reflecting the proposals in full or in part. For example, when it labels “irresponsible federal spending” as the “secret lifeblood of the Great Awakening,” alleging that federal funds are used for “almost every center of power occupied by the left,” or when it proposes abandoning the Paris Climate Agreement — which Trump did on day one—and denounces the Biden administration’s “radical climate agenda,” it mirrors Trump’s own declarations.
Project 2025 also devotes considerable space to a “radical reform of soft power diplomacy,” focused on democracy, human rights, and humanitarian aid, according to OpenDemocracy. “Heritage’s obsession was to dismantle the ‘corrupt’ US international development agency USAID, which appears 156 times in the Project 2025 manual—second only to ‘abortion,’ which is repeated 199 times.”
This is an objective achieved, the analysis states. “Trump eliminated 80% of the international assistance channeled largely through USAID, which in 2023 amounted to some $68 billion.”
Furthermore, as Project 2025 recommends, the Trump administration made clear that religious organizations will be prioritized as recipients or intermediaries of the little international assistance that survives. In August, the State Department announced some US $2 billion in health assistance for a series of religious groups, led by World Vision and Compassion International, among others.
**“God above all”**The OpenDemocracy report describes how key figures of the Latin American far right have used religion to advance their objectives.
Milei, for example, told teenagers at a secondary school: “God’s program brings abundance and harmony. The Marxist program is a satanic program that, instead of bringing paradise, brings you hell.”
Abelardo de la Espriella—whose government Roberts praised as “impressively bold”—took office in a religious ceremony in which he declared that “God must be placed at the center of every decision.” De la Espriella has posed among the corpses of alleged terrorists killed in security operations, and ends his public events shouting “Long live Christ the King.”
The report also references former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro—convicted of attempting a coup in 2023—who used to end his speeches with the phrase “God above all.”
Opaque moneyFinally, the report addresses donors, noting that of the roughly 100 sponsors of Project 2025, only 15 disclosed their international spending in their financial reports.
“Between 2019 and 2024, these 15 groups directed at least [US] $77 million toward influencing policy and society across five continents, according to their tax returns. Of that amount, [US] $2.1 million went to Latin America and [US] $2.7 million to Canada and Mexico—North America, according to the Internal Revenue Service’s geographic classification. These organizations, registered with the IRS as non-profits, can receive tax-exempt donations but are not required to disclose who their donors or overseas beneficiaries are. They are not even required to name the countries—the IRS only requires them to indicate the regions.”
The leading international spender among those promoters that declare foreign donations is Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), an organization of jurists that conceived the strategy to overturn abortion rights in the US and is labeled as an anti-LGBTIQ hate group—something the organization denies—by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a US civil rights organization. Its external arm, ADF International, has offices in Vienna, Brussels, Geneva, London, Washington, and New York and is accredited as a non-governmental organization at the UN, the OAS, the European Union, and the European Parliament.
The second is the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a pro-Israeli think tank that denies the genocide in Gaza and is opposed to Iran, China, Russia, and Turkey. The organization appears as a member of the Project 2025 advisory board in the Mandate for Leadership book and features as such in successive Heritage Foundation press releases from May 2023, October 2023, and February 2024, although an FDD spokesperson told OpenDemocracy by email that the foundation “is not and has never been part of Project 2025.”
Also listed are two ultra-conservative universities, Hillsdale College and Liberty University, which direct the majority of these funds toward student scholarships, travel for “missions,” and overseas study programs.
Featured image: Evangelical Christian leaders pray before US President Donald Trump (right) signs an executive order during the National Day of Prayer. Photo: Molly Riley/White House/Zuma Press/Europa Press.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
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