Latin America, a center of experimentation in authoritarianism and transnational crime

By: Hugo Marcelo Balderrama - 09/03/2025

Guest columnist.
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In 2011, Hugo Chavez founded the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). The organization was designed to replace the Organization of American States (OAS). Initially, as a sign of their alliance with extra-regional authoritarian regimes, China and Russia enjoyed observer status.

Obviously, they used that status to push their anti-American and anti-Western agenda. For example, between 2017 and 2019, the People's Republic of China used CELAC as the main forum to pressure El Salvador, Panama and the Dominican Republic to break relations with Taiwan and recognize Beijing. Likewise, Russia took advantage of its influence to establish its narrative regarding Ukraine. Even Sergei Lavrov, Minister of Foreign Affairs, stated that Latin America and Russia have common agendas.

However, the alliances between China and the authoritarian governments of the region were not born with CELAC, but have their genesis in the Sao Paulo Forum of 1990, something that Shen Beili herself, vice minister of the CCP, recognized in 2022. With all this background, it is more than clear that the regional left, especially during the 1990s, operated in the shadow of the Red Dragon. It should not be strange to find Maoist influence both in the way of coming to power, coups d'état such as the one in Bolivia in 2003, and in the way of fighting dissidents and even seeking to sweep away Judeo-Christian culture, specifically the values ​​of Christianity, as in the case of Bolivia's educational law.

Iran's Islamic theocracy is another influential player in the region. Indeed, Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro has repeatedly boasted of military agreements with Iran, even calling it a "sister nation."

In Bolivia, as a show of soft power, Iran has managed to change the training doctrine of the Armed Forces and, at the same time, establish training centers for civilians in Chapare, the headquarters of Evo and his coca-growing narco-henchmen. This brings us to another actor with great political weight: transnational crime.

The alliance between the Sao Paulo Forum and crime is evident in three scenarios, let's see:

In 2003, after the coup d'état in Bolivia, Carlos Mesa signed amnesty decrees for all the rebels and terrorists who had broken the constitutional order. Almost in parallel, he initiated trials of responsibility against the high military command and against the ministerial body of the overthrown government, among them, Mirtha Quevedo and Carlos Sánchez Berzaín. Note the paradox: those who attacked peace, freedom and democracy are left free of dust and straw, but those who defended the country were turned into villains.

Rafael Correa, when he gave them legal status, treated the Latin Kings gang members as harmless kids: "They remind me of boy scouts," were his words. These criminal groups became an important part of the hybrid war that 21st Century Socialism has against Ecuador and the presidency of Daniel Noboa.

On January 31, 2015, Bachelet modified the Chilean Arms Control Law. The spirit of the law was to tighten the requirements for the purchase and possession of legal weapons for civilians and to prohibit the use of automatic weapons by police officers. A decade after the enactment of this law, the results were defenseless civilians, police officers facing drug traffickers at a total disadvantage, and the accelerated growth of the Aragua Train in northern Chile.

Note the strategy: first, the criminal is portrayed as a victim of society. In other words, a criminal who assaults a passerby is actually defending himself from an "evil" social system that excludes him. Second, decent citizens are completely disarmed. Finally, the police's institutionality is destroyed, forcing officers to look on from the sidelines at any crime, even within their own institution.

In conclusion, decent citizens of Latin America will not only have to face transnational criminal groups that are violent, well-armed and ambitious to consolidate their impunity. They will also have to face a group of complicit States that have promoted this criminal model, with a clear and unified vision of taking and retaining power, as is already happening in Venezuela, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Bolivia.

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