Miami Weiss: The Peak of Genuflection

ByLa Jornada Editorial Board

This editorial by the La Jornada editorial board originally appeared in the March 8, 2026 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper. The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect those of Mexico Solidarity Media or the Mexico Solidarity Project.

President Donald Trump hosted his counterparts from Argentina, Javier Milei; Bolivia, Rodrigo Paz; Costa Rica, Rodrigo Chaves; Dominican Republic, Luis Abidaner; Ecuador, Daniel Noboa; El Salvador, Nayib Bukele; Guyana, Irfaan Ali; Honduras, Nasry Asfura; Panama, José Raúl Mulino; Paraguay, Santiago Peña; and Trinidad and Tobago, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, along with the president-elect of Chile, José Antonio Kast, at his golf course in Doral, Miami.

The attendees, handpicked for their ideological affinity and political subservience to the magnate, did not attend the presentation of the so-called Shield of the Americas as equals sharing concerns and viewpoints, but rather as subordinates receiving orders and thunderously applauding their boss’s every whim, even when he stands before ten Spanish speakers and tells them, “I’m not going to learn your damn language.” At the reception, Trump declared that the “consensus” is that the only way to defeat organized crime and the nonexistent narco-terrorist groups is to “unleash the power of our armed forces,” for which he will deploy “the supreme power of the United States,” which, thanks to him, is “once again” the world’s leading military power. In reality, it has never ceased to be so, nor has it experienced any substantial increase in its capabilities under Trumpism; only the level of willingness to use unilateral and arbitrary force has changed.

Beyond the Republican’s blunders and his obsession with blaming Mexico for the insatiable consumption of illicit substances in American society, the most striking aspect of the meeting is that each of the attending leaders uses tough-on-crime rhetoric while simultaneously carrying an extensive criminal record. Milei has twice promoted cryptocurrency scams; he placed José Luis Espert at the top of his congressional list, even though it was already public knowledge that Espert received $200,000 from drug trafficker Fred Machado; he sold his party’s candidacies; and he allowed his sister to collect “commissions” from suppliers of the National Disability Agency. Paz was indicted for corruption, embezzlement, and awarding contracts detrimental to the state for promoting projects with serious irregularities and inflated prices when he was mayor of Tarija. Chaves has dozens of open cases against him for corruption, including abuse of power, embezzlement, influence peddling, and illegal campaign financing. He was sanctioned and demoted by the World Bank after a pattern of sexual harassment of female subordinates was proven. Noboa, who maintains Ecuador under a state of emergency and cultivates an image of a gangster willing to do anything against drug trafficking, has justified the constant discoveries of cocaine shipments on ships belonging to his family’s shipping company. The Specialized Prosecutor’s Unit against Corruption Networks (UFERCO) in Honduras accuses Asfura of structuring a money laundering scheme, embezzlement of public funds, and fraud from his position as mayor of Tegucigalpa. The list of offenses extends to the rest of the Latin American and Caribbean leaders, and, of course, the host is the first US president convicted of a serious crime. Thus, it is clear that the Shield of the Americas has nothing to do with combating crime, but rather with advancing the imposition of the Monroe Doctrine.

A couple of days before the summit, Costa Rica’s president-elect, Laura Fernández, described Mexico as “a prime example of where we don’t want to end up” in terms of violence, organized crime, and drug trafficking. Fernández served as Minister of the Presidency and Minister of National Planning and Economic Policy in the Chávez administration, whose agenda she wholeheartedly endorses. If the future president truly wants to spare her country the immense suffering endured by ours over the past two decades, she should consider that the security crisis began when a politician from her own far-right political persuasion did what she is now preparing to do: open Mexico wide to US intelligence agencies, subordinate internal decisions to Washington’s interests, ignore the socioeconomic roots of crime, and wage war against her own citizens, in which state violence became the measure of success for a control strategy disguised as security. The lessons of the Calderón administration are also valid for the rest of the rulers (and the ruled) who still see or pretend to see in the White House’s “war on drugs” an offensive against criminal structures and not the mechanism of imperialist domination that it is.