by José Maria Ramos
1. A Vision for a Different Hemisphere
Bad Bunny skips across the Super Bowl halftime field, dancers behind him carrying the flag of every country in the Americas. “This is America,” he declares, the hemisphere as one community rather than a hierarchy.
That claim runs against five hundred years of history. Quijano (2000) called this history the coloniality of power: a racial and geographic order that puts North above South, and European above Indigenous and African. The empires that built the order are gone, but the order remains. The Americas have kept producing alternatives to it, and those alternatives have always faced a geopolitics built to destroy them. De Sousa Santos (2014) argues that dominant powers do more than defeat alternative futures. They erase the evidence that another order was ever possible, so the present one looks inevitable.
I argue that in the Americas, as in many part of the Global South, creating alternative futures is a practice of political enactment and survival. It is a struggle over sovereignty, solidarity and empire, and without that struggle there is no ethical future. The same struggle runs through the region’s own prospectiva tradition, from the ECLAC/ILPES school to Medina Vásquez (2014), which has long treated foresight as a tool for liberation.
2. Foreclosing a Hemisphere’s Futures
On the third of January 2026, in an operation lasting a little over two hours, United States forces bombed Caracas, illegally kidnapped Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, flew him to New York, and US president Trump announced that Washington would “run” Venezuela and take its oil.
This moment of gangsterism is not isolated. A single event can be explained away on its own terms. But there is variety. There is raw military force: the invasion of Venezuela, and US airstrikes on drug laboratories on sovereign Mexican soil. Economic coercion: tariffs of forty and fifty per cent on Brazil, tied in the executive order’s own language to that country’s prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro; tariffs on Mexico calibrated to fentanyl and migration; the sanctioning of Colombia. Lawfare: Magnitsky sanctions against a sitting Brazilian Supreme Court justice (McGovern, 2025); sanctions on President Petro and his family (Washington Office on Latin America [WOLA], 2026; Americas Society/Council of the Americas [AS/COA], 2026). Electoral manipulation: Trump’s endorsement of Nasry Asfura in Honduras, his threat to cut funding, his mid-campaign pardon of a Honduran ex-president serving forty-five years for drug trafficking (Associated Press, 2025); his endorsement of Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia. And the softest instrument of all, no imposition but an invitation, the eager alignment of Milei, Bukele, Noboa, Paz, Kast, each of whom seeks Washington rather than resists it, trading embassy relocations to Jerusalem and deportee mega-prisons for tariff exemptions and a place in the good graces of the north (WOLA, 2026; AS/COA, 2026).
| Instrument | Mechanism | Cases |
| Military force | Invasion, capture, airstrikes on sovereign soil | Venezuela; Mexico (drug-lab strikes) |
| Economic coercion | Tariffs and sanctions as leverage, tied to domestic political matters | Brazil (Bolsonaro); Mexico (fentanyl/migration); Colombia |
| Lawfare / targeting of individuals | Magnitsky sanctions, visa revocations, indictments of officials | Brazil (Justice Moraes); Mexico (governor + 10 officials); Colombia (Petro) |
| Electoral intervention | Endorsements, funding threats, symbolic pardons | Honduras (Asfura); Colombia (de la Espriella) |
| Invited elite alignment | Voluntary convergence traded for exemption and favour | Argentina, El Salvador, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile |
Table 1: Contemporary US influence processes in Latin America
Robinson (1996) argues that the United States long ago learned to prefer low-intensity pseudo-democracy to the crude coup – securing its interests not by suspending elections but by cultivating the elites who will win them and then govern in Washington’s interest anyway. He calls this “polyarchy”: a toolkit, from the tariff to the invited embrace, that preserves democratic form while hollowing out sovereign substance. The invasion of Venezuela is the exception that clarifies the rule – the moment polyarchy is not enough, a blunter instrument is used. Polyarchy is the velvet glove of modern US style imperialism.
3. From Events to Pattern: Galtung’s Structure of Imperialism
Galtung’s (1971) Structural Theory of Imperialism gives the clearest account that connects the dots. Domination works through an alliance inside the dominated country: a small group whose interests are tied more closely to the wealthy core than to their own population – a landowning class, an export elite, a political leadership that has thrown in its lot with the north. Galtung called this the “bridgehead.” The core need not control a whole society; it need only sustain the bridgehead and let it align the country with its core’s interests.
A Colombian export elite has more in common, materially, with Washington than with a Colombian campesino. Where that alignment holds, no coercion is needed. Milei, Bukele, Noboa, Paz and Kast are not victims of imperialism. They are the bridgehead, and they want the arrangement because it pays them. Coercion becomes necessary only when a government stops serving as the bridgehead and starts governing for its own people. Then come the tariffs, the sanctions, and if necessary, the invasion.
Petro, Lula, Sheinbaum and Maduro each refused that role, and the refusals were not equivalent. Petro and Sheinbaum pursued redistributive reform with democratic mandates. Lula grounded his refusal in sovereignty and multipolarity, which strengthened him at home rather than weakening him. Maduro presided over authoritarian decay and economic collapse, and his refusal was by then more symbolic than substantive. The structure treated them alike. A government does not need to be popular, competent or democratic to be targeted. It only needs to decline the bridgehead role.
It is worth naming what the bridgehead synchronises. The United States has allowed capitalism to cannibalise its own social body: housing speculation pricing out the many, a pharmaceutical industry driving an opioid epidemic, an industrial food system that creates disease, a firearms industry with an interest in the sale of weapons, the list goes on. The victory of capitalism there is the victory of the few over the many. The bridgehead extends that logic across borders: elites north and south synchronise their interests against their own populations. The goal is accumulation, and it does not matter whether it comes at the expense of people abroad or at home.
In March 2026 Trump launched the “Shield of the Americas” at his Miami resort, a seventeen-nation security coalition ostensibly aimed at the cartels. The membership revealed the ulterior motive. Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, the countries most affected by drug trafficking and most indispensable to any genuine counter-narcotics effort were not invited; the roster was instead the aligned elite in full: Milei, Bukele, Noboa, Kast and their peers. Hegseth opened the summit quoting Andrew Jackson, an architect of native American genocide, and rallied the assembled leaders as “Christian nations under God” against “radical narco-communism” (The Globalist, 2026), Reagan’s propagandistic fusion of leftist politics with drug criminality. The declared enemy is the cartel; yet the structural function is the reassertion of hemispheric dominance in the shadow of China and BRICS, whose trade with the region has grown forty-fold since 2000. Galtung’s bridgehead, institutionalized and dressed in what Mignolo (2011) calls the rhetoric of modernity, by which every extraction arrives disguised as salvation: civilization, security, progress.
Galtung explains the mechanics of the bridgehead. Quijano’s coloniality of power (2000) explains the subjectivity that makes it feel legitimate. Milei and the Bolsonaristas speak openly of a Christian West under siege, while Noboa and Bukele offer a Westernised corporate techno-capitalism. Both reject cultural pluralism, or fold it into a homogenising security state. Milei shut down Argentina’s anti-discrimination institute and stripped Indigenous communities of protection from eviction. Bolsonaro promised to stop Indigenous land demarcation.
These governments treat Indigenous land claims and environmental protections as obstacles to transnational investment. That puts the state’s economic apparatus at the service of white-mestizo elite interests. The result is a structural colour-blindness that reinforces the colour hierarchy it claims not to see. So when these states deploy the emergency powers and militarised policing that Washington’s Shield of the Americas rewards, the criminalisation, the violence and the displacement fall hardest on poor Afro-descendant, mestizo and rural Indigenous communities.
Centuries ago a race / caste / colour hierarchy was invented as the organising principle of social life in the Americas. Yet it still persists and supports the formation of bridgeheads of elites between Washington and the Americas who experience themselves as Western, white, and modern. Where a bridgehead cannot be cultivated or elected, economic pain and tariffs are used. Where it is defiant and holds something Washington needs, it is removed.
Seen this way, the range of instruments for polyarchy stops being a puzzle. The methods vary with the resistance, not with the purpose.
3. A Century of Destroyed Alternative Futures
Greg Grandin, in America, América (2025), reverses the history most North Americans are taught in school. The ideas we now regard as the moral furniture of the modern world – the sovereign equality of nations, non-intervention, the notion that social and economic rights belong in a decent society – were not gifts bestowed by the North on a backward South. They were forged in the South, often in the act of resisting the North, then absorbed when convenient or destroyed when they threatened its interests.
Bolívar dreamed of a confederation of equal republics a century before the League of Nations; Latin American jurists built non-intervention into international law while US marines were still landing in Caribbean ports. For Grandin, the South has been the laboratory of the hemisphere’s best political ideas, and the graveyard where the North has come to bury them.
In Guatemala in 1954 a democratically elected government had, in ten years, handed land to a hundred and thirty-eight thousand families, built a functioning social security system, run a national literacy campaign, and begun building the roads and ports that would free the country from a single US fruit company. It was working – which is exactly why it could not continue (Gleijeses, 1991). The CIA operation that destroyed it was justified by the fiction of Soviet penetration, but the real fear was the demonstration effect: a small country succeeding on its own terms would give the rest of the hemisphere ideas.
The same logic governed Chile. When Salvador Allende was elected in 1970 promising socialism through democratic means – nationalising the copper US corporations controlled, distributing milk to every child, sending health trains into the countryside – Nixon’s instruction to the CIA was blunt: make the economy scream. But it is Kissinger’s reasoning that gives the game away. Allende’s danger, he wrote, was that his “‘model’ effect can be insidious.” Not his weakness – his example. “What are we going to say,” he asked, “when other countries start to democratically elect other Salvador Allendes?” (Kornbluh, 2013). The coup came on the eleventh of September 1973, and in Allende’s place came seventeen years of Pinochet, fascism, disappeared people, and the first full experiment in neoliberal and “shock therapy” economics later imposed across the region. The alternative was not merely defeated; it was replaced with its precise inverse.
What followed in the Southern Cone was a coordinated architecture of terror, and the United States was its silent partner. In Brazil, the 1964 coup was endorsed and supported by Washington and a naval task force. In Argentina the junta that seized power in 1976 murdered and disappeared thirty thousand people – union leaders, students, anyone who agitated even for cheaper bus fares, thrown alive from aeroplanes into the River Plate. Kissinger’s message to the generals, through their foreign minister, was that if things had to be done they should be done quickly, before the US Congress made support difficult: a green light, heard in Buenos Aires exactly as intended. These regimes coordinated through Operation Condor – a transnational assassination network linking Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil, which one US cable called a “Murder Inc.” (McSherry, 2005). Washington supplied it with intelligence and training, much of it through the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, where generations of Latin American officers learned the interrogation through torture techniques they carried home. The hemisphere’s torturers, disproportionately, shared an alma mater, and it was in the United States (Gill, 2004).
In Nicaragua the Sandinistas overthrew the US-backed Somoza dynasty in 1979 and committed the cardinal sin of progressive structural reform – a literacy crusade that cut illiteracy dramatically in a single year, land reform, rural health clinics (Arnove, 1981). The Reagan administration answered by arming the Contras, whose war deliberately targeted the very clinics and schools that were the revolution’s proudest achievements; when Congress cut the funding, the administration continued in secret, selling arms to Iran and diverting the proceeds – Iran-Contra, whose deepest meaning was that destroying the Nicaraguan alternative was worth breaking US law.
Cuba endured the longest siege of all: six decades of embargo, hundreds of documented attempts on Castro’s life, invasion at the Bay of Pigs – punishment not for failing but for the unforgivable success of building, under blockade, health and education systems that outperformed much of the hemisphere, even as it carried the real contradictions of a one-party state. The viciousness was proportional to the example.
What was destroyed in each case was not a threat of force but a threat of example, in De Sousa Santos’ (2014) terms “the production of non-existence”. Guatemala, Chile, Nicaragua, Cuba – none endangered the United States militarily. Their danger was epistemic: they were demonstrations that another arrangement of social life was possible, not in theory but in practice, enacted by real people on real ground.
4. No nos arrodillamos
The history of the Americas is a history of generating alternatives of their own, charting sovereign futures by refusing the bridgehead role, and paying for the refusal.
In Mexico, on the first day of 1994, as NAFTA came into force, the Zapatistas rose in Chiapas – Indigenous communities declaring that the future NAFTA promised was a death sentence, and that they would govern themselves instead (Harvey, 1998). They asked for no recognition from the state and sought no seat in it. They simply began, in the mountains of the southeast, to practise an autonomy the structure could pressure but could not easily reach.
In October 2025 Gustavo Petro – the first left president in Colombia’s history, a former guerrilla, by then sanctioned by the United States and placed with his family on a list naming him a participant in the global drug trade – answered the accusation with four words (U.S. Department of the Treasury, 2025). No nos arrodillamos. We do not kneel. The nations of this hemisphere are not merely objects of northern power. They refuse, and the refusal has a history.
Washington’s political pressure is aimed at nations in the America’s persistent tendency, across two centuries, to generate governments that refuse the bridgehead role and insist on governing in their own people’s interest. Consider what was refused in each case that drew the heaviest fire. Petro had raised the minimum wage, pushed a labour reform, moved pension income toward the poor, declared a moratorium on new oil exploration, and most provocatively, broken relations with Israel over Gaza and joined South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice (International Court of Justice, 2024). Lula had steered Brazil back into BRICS and refused to treat Washington’s priorities as his own (Reuters, 2025). Sheinbaum held the one line Mexico would not cross – US boots on Mexican soil – and kept shipping oil to Cuba in defiance of the embargo (Associated Press, 2025). These are not the acts of victims but of governments doing precisely what the structure exists to prevent: exercising sovereignty and solidarity over their own futures.
From Petro’s four words back through two centuries, the region keeps generating movements and futures that will not take the bridgehead role. Most are pressured. Some are broken. And yet they keep coming.
5. The Long Arc of Transformation
In the Americas, as in many other parts of the Global South, imagining alternative futures cannot be decoupled from the structural political foundations that allow these alternative futures to take root and flourish. As I’ve shown, to create real alternative futures, the peoples of the Americans have developed structural alternatives that the United States has repeatedly tried to destroy. The imposition of US imperialism, the Monroe Doctrine and designs for a new Trumpian Monroe therefore present unique challenges. This last section attempts to address this and consider a long arc of transformation.
Hemispheric Solidarity
No country in the Americas can build an alternative future on its own. Each depends on outside capital, technology, markets and currency, and that dependence is what makes coercion work. Sovereignty has to be collective before it can be national.
This is not a new insight in the region. ECLAC has argued since Prebisch (1950) that Latin America enters the world economy as a periphery, and peripheries do not set their own terms. Its foresight school grew from that analysis. In the 1970s a Latin American team answered the Club of Rome with the Latin American World Model (Herrera et al., 1977). Where the Club of Rome saw physical limits, the Bariloche team saw political ones, in the unequal distribution of power between and within nations. They then modelled an egalitarian, self-sustaining society to prove it would work. The tradition has also been honest about its weakness. Alonso (2007) noted that the region’s foresight work rarely reaches those who make political decisions.
The embryo of that solidarity exists. CELAC (2011) gathers thirty-three nations without the United States and Canada. SUCRE once settled regional trade in local currencies, bypassing the dollar. Petrocaribe moved Venezuelan oil on sovereign terms. Mercosur and ALBA built the early scaffolding (Cusack, 2019). What is missing is depth. The region needs economic solidarity that can survive partial delinking, political solidarity that speaks with one voice against coercion aimed at isolated states, and security solidarity that makes invading any member too costly.
Strengthening democratic institutions against corruption
Yet regional solidarity is not a guarantees in itself, for the bridgehead is not imposed from outside; it is grown from within, from leaders who betray their own people for a place in the good graces of the north, who hollow out the alternative through simple corruption. This is Sarkar’s warning: he insisted that leaders must guard the cycle against recapture, because every ruling class, having won power in the name of the people, tends to consolidate it against them (Inayatullah, 2002). Grandin’s history is littered with the type – the Guzmáns and the Somozas, local elites who made themselves the instruments of foreign extraction. The vision must be inspiring but unglamorous: transparent institutions, independent courts, a free press, and the deep democratic accountability that makes leaders answerable to their communities rather than to corruption, capital or to Washington. Without it, every structural alternative carries the seed of its own betrayal.
Autonomy for the pluriverse
The nation is not the final ground either. It can become its own straitjacket. Below the region and the state lies a deeper scale: communities governing themselves. Escobar’s pluriverse, a world in which many worlds fit (Escobar, 2018), cannot be legislated from a capital. It can only be lived from below, through community governance of the commons. This is where Sarkar’s insistence on economic decentralisation points,(Inayatullah, 2002): in communities whose daily practice carries a vision the dominant order cannot absorb. It requires real devolved power, including territorial rights, self-government, and control over land and resources. Only then can the Maya and the Aymara, the quilombo and the comunero, build futures that refuse a single universal modernity.
Bad Bunny and Abya Yala
Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl, dressed in white, named every country in the hemisphere before a hundred and twenty-seven million people. He performed in Spanish and refused to translate. He centred Puerto Rico, a colony. The naming was not a list but a restoration – of a geography that US education systematically erases. In US schools, “America” names a country; everywhere south of it, América names a continent. What this has always concealed is Abya Yala, the Kuna name for the continent in its full reach, from Karukinka to the Nunangat, a hemisphere that precedes the colonial map and continues to defy it (Keme, 2018). Bad Bunny returned the word to its continental meaning, and brought the many flags into community.
The deeper challenge was never the north as a place; it was the colonial order that split a single hemisphere into a “white” north and a “brown” south and ranked the one above the other. Over the long horizon what emerges is a hemisphere which creates the solidarity, autonomy and sovereignty to imagine and create the diverse futures that its nations, communities and peoples choose, whatever their language, culture or biology. It is in fact the most basic right, the right to choose ones own path and ones own futures.
Statement on the Use of AI
The author is solely responsible for this article’s argument, analysis, and conclusions. Generative AI (Claude, Anthropic) was used as a research and drafting assistant. Its use extended beyond language editing and is disclosed here in full.
AI assistance was used to locate and summarise contemporary sources, to surface candidate theorists and literature for the author’s consideration, to produce draft passages from the author’s outlines and stated arguments, and to condense text against word limits. The theoretical framing, selection and integration of sources, structure, interpretation, and all conclusions were determined by the author, who rewrote AI-drafted material and revised the manuscript across multiple iterations.
All references were independently verified against primary and published sources. Claims that could not be verified were removed or amended. The author accepts full accountability for the accuracy and integrity of the content.
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