Bloomfield records US strategy accelerating endogenous rightward shift across hemisphere

Summary

Steve Bloomfield documents a US national security strategy that has identified, backed, and sought to accelerate a Latin American rightward shift whose causes are endogenous to the region, with documented operational wins and Bloomfield’s forecast that the right’s grip will “continue to strengthen regardless of who occupies the White House.”
The strategy’s documented operations include a $40 billion Argentina bailout conditioned on midterm outcomes, personal US sanctions on Colombian President Gustavo Petro, a US military operation that brought Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to the United States, a threatened 50 percent tariff on Brazilian imports in July 2025, a 25 percent tariff on some Brazilian goods in July 2026, and the May 2025 designation of Brazil’s Red Command and First Capital Command (PCC) as terrorist organizations.
Bloomfield’s own evidence undercuts the strategy-as-cause claim: Trump-aligned candidates in Peru and Chile avoided his endorsement for fear it would cause more trouble than it was worth; Bolivia’s MAS government won 3.16 percent in last year’s election after 20 years of increasingly chaotic rule; US pressure on Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva produced a polling bump; and Bloomfield’s own framing identifies “the spread of organized crime linked to drug trafficking” as the bigger driver.
The strategy exports a security-populism pattern that originated in El Salvador under President Nayib Bukele, documented by Bloomfield as involving an “authoritarian clampdown,” the arrest of tens of thousands “mostly without legal process,” “eroded” democracy, and “trampled” human rights, packaged with US endorsement and offered to other governments beset by cartel violence.
The Shield of the Americas, a coalition of 18 rightwing Latin American and Caribbean heads of state promising “lethal military force to destroy the sinister cartels and terrorist networks,” is the documented multilateral vehicle, with Flávio Bolsonaro pledging to sign Brazil onto it if he wins Sunday’s first-round presidential election or the probable 25 October runoff.

Steve Bloomfield, the former international editor of the Observer, writing in the Guardian on 4 October 2026, documents a US national security strategy that commits the United States to “restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere” and to interfere in the political life of countries it considers part of its sphere of influence, rewarding governments and movements “broadly aligned with our principles and strategy.” The strategy has produced concrete operations across the hemisphere: a $40 billion Argentina bailout conditioned on midterm outcomes, personal US sanctions on President Petro, a military operation that brought President Maduro to the United States, tariff threats against Brazil, and the designation of two Brazilian criminal organizations as terrorist organizations. Over the past 18 months, seven rightwing or far-right candidates have won Latin American presidential elections, with Trump openly backing most of the victors. Brazil’s first-round election on Sunday, with a probable 25 October runoff, will test whether Flávio Bolsonaro’s pledge to join the Shield of the Americas converts the strategy from designed space into lived practice. Bloomfield’s own evidence complicates the strategy-as-cause claim: the bigger driver, on Bloomfield’s account, has been “the spread of organized crime linked to drug trafficking,” and US interference has had “arguably…limited direct effect on the regional shift to the right.”

The documented operations

The strategy, on Bloomfield’s account, has been carried out through a sequenced set of financial, military, economic, and judicial instruments. Argentina received a $40 billion US bailout, with the funding conditioned on President Javier Milei’s party not losing the midterm elections, Bloomfield reports. In Colombia, Trump personally sanctioned leftwing President Gustavo Petro and accused him of being an “illegal drug leader,” Bloomfield reports. In the most dramatic documented move, a US military operation in Venezuela brought President Nicolás Maduro to the United States; the day after, the State Department posted a photograph of Trump above the slogan “This is OUR hemisphere,” according to Bloomfield.

In Brazil, Trump threatened a 50 percent tariff on all Brazilian imports in July 2025 and called the case against Jair Bolsonaro a “witch hunt,” Bloomfield reports. The attempt to influence Brazil’s judiciary, on Bloomfield’s account, “backfired”: Lula refused to bow to US pressure, the trial went ahead, and Jair Bolsonaro was found guilty and sentenced to 27 years in prison. In July 2026, as the campaign entered its final phase, Trump imposed a 25 percent tariff on some Brazilian goods. The State Department then tried to dispatch two officials to Brazil to investigate “electoral integrity”; Brazil denied them visas, accusing the officials of coming to “meddle in Brazil’s elections,” Bloomfield reports.

The May 2025 designation of Brazil’s Red Command and First Capital Command (PCC) as terrorist organizations has put Lula on the back foot in the campaign, according to Bloomfield. Jair Bolsonaro is currently serving a 27-year prison sentence after being convicted of plotting to overturn his 2022 election loss; investigators, on Bloomfield’s account, uncovered a sprawling conspiracy including a plot to kill Lula, his running mate, and a supreme court judge, and a draft decree to overturn the result.

The pattern of reward

The documented sequence runs through alignment. Over the past 18 months, seven rightwing or far-right Latin American candidates have won presidential elections — Bloomfield’s enumeration — and Trump openly backed most of the victors. “We’re doing very well in South America,” Trump said last month, according to Bloomfield. “Lots of people that I got elected.” Argentina’s Milei is among the documented winners; the Shield of the Americas, a coalition of 18 rightwing Latin American and Caribbean heads of state that Bloomfield reports promises “lethal military force to destroy the sinister cartels and terrorist networks,” is the documented multilateral vehicle. Flávio Bolsonaro has pledged to sign Brazil onto the Shield if he wins the Sunday first-round presidential election or the probable 25 October runoff. “If he wins, Trump wins,” Bloomfield wrote, “and the hemisphere really will be his.”

The documented costs accrue, on Bloomfield’s account, to governments and movements outside that alignment: Petro personally sanctioned, Maduro displaced militarily, Lula electorally targeted through tariffs and the PCC/Red Command designations, the institutional forms of the Latin American left rendered, in the strategy’s framing, illegible.

The substrate’s counter-evidence

Read in its own terms, Bloomfield’s evidence undercuts the strategy-as-cause claim. Trump-aligned candidates in Peru and Chile avoided Trump’s endorsement for fear it would cause more trouble than it was worth. Bolivia’s MAS government was responsible for its own downfall, winning 3.16 percent in last year’s election after 20 years of increasingly chaotic rule. US pressure on Lula produced a polling bump after the July 2025 tariff threat. Crisis Group, cited by Bloomfield in a report last year, said drug-related organized crime has been a problem across the continent for decades, but “never has it spread so wide, and rarely has it penetrated so deeply into states and communities.” Bloomfield’s own framing: “the bigger driver has been the spread of organized crime linked to drug trafficking,” and leftwing governments “have been punished for failing to address the violence more than they have been toppled by US pressure.” “US interference,” Bloomfield reports, “has arguably had limited direct effect on the regional shift to the right.”

If the strategy were winning the hemisphere on its own terms, the article’s evidence would show it. The article instead documents targeted successes — Argentina’s Milei, the Maduro operation, the Shield coalition — wrapped around a shift driven principally by crime and institutional collapse.

The hemispheric place

The strategy alters what the documented record places as the character of the hemisphere. The natural geography — climate, resources, populations — is unchanged. What the strategy targets is the man-made substrate: borders, governments, security architectures, political coalitions. On Christian Norberg-Schulz’s distinction (Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, 1979), a place’s character is articulated as gestalt — orientation plus identification plus the modes of dwelling — and what the strategy proposes is a new character for the place: a hemisphere whose legible inhabitants are the 18 rightwing-aligned governments of the Shield, whose illegible inhabitants are the leftist governments that have been personally sanctioned (Petro), militarily displaced (Maduro), or electorally targeted (Lula).

On Kevin Lynch’s imageability framework (The Image of the City, 1960), the State Department’s “This is OUR hemisphere” photograph operates as a landmark visible from many positions, organizing wide territory, anchoring orientation absolutely. The State Department posted the image the day after Maduro arrived in the United States, according to Bloomfield. Paths are the military operations and financial pressure instruments — the $40 billion Argentina bailout, the tariff threats, the Venezuela operation. Edges are national borders rendered permeable to US action. Nodes are the embassy presence and the assembled Shield coalition; the cities of Buenos Aires, Brasília, Caracas, and Bogotá function as contested nodes where the joint between US strategy and local politics either holds or breaks. Districts are categorized by alignment: allied, conditional, adversarial.

On Edward Relph’s distinction between designed and lived space (Place and Placelessness, 1976), the hemispheric strategy is conceived in the language of designed space, but it operates on a substrate that has been dwelling in lived space — in the plural and contradictory orientations of the Bolivarian tradition, the Latin American left’s institutional forms, and the democratic experimentalism of the pink tide. The Shield of the Americas and the “OUR hemisphere” slogan are gestures that, on Gaston Bachelard’s figure (The Poetics of Space, 1964), eliminate the sovereign corner where a nation’s politics is conducted.

The Bukele pattern

If a foreign president’s policies are having an influence on Latin America, Bloomfield wrote, it is El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. Bloomfield describes Bukele’s approach as an “authoritarian clampdown” that has involved arresting tens of thousands of people, mostly without legal process, and has become a model for other rightwing leaders in countries beset by gang and drug cartel-related violence. Bloomfield wrote that democracy has been eroded and human rights trampled upon, but Bukele claims that his strategy, best described as “security populism,” has turned one of the most violent countries in the world into one of the safest. Other rightwing populists have found success in vowing to emulate him, according to Bloomfield.

On Christopher Alexander’s pattern language (A Pattern Language, 1977), the Shield of the Americas reads as a power-geometric figure, concentric and radiating from a single center. The Bukele security-populism pattern is the documented pattern now offered to other governments beset by cartel violence, packaged with US endorsement and military cooperation. On the framework Bloomfield’s evidence imports, the pattern’s predicted experiential consequence is that it will produce the same aliveness or deadness in each new instantiation it produced in the first.

In Brazil, Flávio Bolsonaro has made a crackdown on drug cartels and organized crime gangs the centrepiece of his campaign. “We’re going to give the streets back to the Brazilian people,” Flávio Bolsonaro said at a recent campaign stop, according to Bloomfield, vowing to chemically castrate rapists and reduce the age of criminal responsibility. On Jay Appleton’s prospect-refuge-hazard test (The Experience of Landscape, 1975), prospect — the sight of safety and possibility — is offered selectively through the Bukele frame; refuge — the bounded intimate space of national autonomy — is actively dissolved by the strategy’s stated willingness to interfere; and hazards are reframed so that cartel violence appears as the solvable threat, while the hazard of US intervention itself — the tariff threats, the visa denials, the sanctioned presidents — appears as instrumental rather than as a feature of the landscape residents must navigate.

What happens next

The Brazil election on Sunday, and the probable 25 October runoff, will test whether Flávio Bolsonaro’s pledge to sign onto the Shield converts designed space into lived practice. The substrate indicates the conversion is contested. Lula received a polling bump after standing up to Trump in July 2025. Brazil denied visas to the two State Department officials accused of coming to “meddle in Brazil’s elections.” A recent Brazilian advertisement accused Flávio Bolsonaro of being “Trump’s candidate” and said the US president wants “to colonise Brazil, take our riches, steal our future and leave us in the dust,” Bloomfield reports. Brian Winter, editor in chief of Americas Quarterly, told Bloomfield that “some in Brazil joke that Lula’s most effective surrogate is Trump.”

Trump arguably paved the way for this new generation of Latin American political leader, Bloomfield wrote. His first victory in 2016 showed that posing as an outsider, using coarse language and embracing authoritarianism could be popular. Jair Bolsonaro was the first to emulate him, embracing the “Trump of the Tropics” tag. If Flávio Bolsonaro wins this month, either on Sunday or in the probable 25 October runoff, Trump’s ideology will dominate the continent, Bloomfield argued.

The security-driven shift to the right is likely to outlast Trump himself, according to Bloomfield. As long as voters believe only security populists can address organized crime, the right’s grip on Latin America will continue to strengthen regardless of who occupies the White House. Bloomfield’s proposition sits in tension with the “preeminence” framing that opens his account: if the right’s grip persists independent of the strategist, the strategy is not the cause of the shift; it is a posture adopted toward a shift whose causes are endogenous. The strategy’s claim of credit, on the documented record, is stronger than the record warrants.

The defense, the response, and the constrained claim

The defense, on the substrate’s terms: organized crime is a documented and severe problem across the continent; Latin American voters have, through elections, expressed demand for security-first politics; the United States has legitimate interests in hemispheric security, including the disruption of drug-trafficking networks that affect US public health; the strategy, on this defense, is responsive to genuine conditions rather than imposed on them.

The response: the response to genuine conditions can be evaluated separately from the instruments chosen, and the documented instruments are themselves contestable on grounds of proportionality, sovereignty, and effectiveness. For Latin American democratic governments, the documented sequence shows financial, economic, military, and judicial instruments deployed against governments that do not align with the administration’s preferred outcomes; the conditionality of the $40 billion Argentina bailout, on Bloomfield’s account, transforms aid from a sovereign transaction into a political instrument. The Bukele pattern the strategy exports is reported by Bloomfield to have produced “eroded” democracy and “trampled” human rights in its country of origin; the pattern’s replication across the hemisphere is a contestable choice rather than a neutral diffusion. For Brazilian voters and Latin American publics, the documented direct effect of US interference is, on Bloomfield’s account, “arguably” limited; the strategy’s stronger documented leverage runs through the diffusion of the Bukele pattern, which has created demand for security populism the strategy is positioned to supply. For the foreign-policy establishment, Bloomfield’s proposition that the right’s grip will “continue to strengthen regardless of who occupies the White House” is consistent with the diffusion of the security-populism pattern that began in El Salvador, while the separate question of attribution runs the other way: the pattern, per Bloomfield, is driven by organized crime and by Bukele’s example, not primarily by US policy.

The constrained claim that survives, on Bloomfield’s documented record: a US president has identified, backed, and sought to accelerate a shift whose causes are endogenous; he has had specific wins; and the right’s grip on Latin America will, on Bloomfield’s account, “continue to strengthen regardless of who occupies the White House.”

Analytical techniques used in this piece

This analysis applies the methods below. Each links to a short, plain-English explainer you can read and reuse.

Genius Loci — Sense of Place: Reads the character and felt quality of a place.
Red-Team Advocate: Argues the adversary’s case in full to expose what a plan underrates.
Moral Hazard: Insulation from the downside invites the very risk-taking it was meant to protect against.