Across Latin America, progressive forces are under concerted attack from the United States and its comprador allies. The instruments vary: bombs and abduction in Venezuela; blockade and the threat of invasion in Cuba; and elsewhere, electoral interference, economic coercion, and the cultivation of a reactionary international of right-wing leaders who model themselves on Donald Trump — and welcome his recolonisation of the continent.

From the Observatory of the Progressive International, we can see the broad contours of this Donroe Doctrine as it rocks its way through the democratic processes of the region.

In Argentina, Javier Milei has enacted the most sweeping programme of structural adjustment in the country's history — over 2,000 businesses shuttered, 73,000 jobs destroyed, real wages crushed so thoroughly that consumer demand has evaporated. Argentina now carries over $40 billion in obligations to the IMF, locked into pension restructuring, radical labour flexibilisation, and the dismantling of worker protections.

Meanwhile, a critical minerals agreement with Washington, the gutting of glacier protections, and $33 billion in mining concessions under Milei's RIGI regime are preparing the country's lithium, copper, and rare earths for extraction by Rio Tinto, BHP, Glencore, and Barrick. Milei’s agenda is to prepare Argentina for plunder. Trump has backed his programme openly and directly intervened to help his ally in key legislative elections, offering to facilitate a bailout only if Milei’s coalition won.

Or we can look to Honduras. There, Trump openly supported the right-wing and ultimately victorious presidential candidate, Nasry Asfura — and pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran president and convicted drug trafficker. National Electoral Council Councilor Marlon Ochoa, the official who reported electoral irregularities in the 2025 presidential elections, faced brazen political persecution and was forced to seek political asylum abroad.

In 2025, alongside Honduras, the right swept Bolivia and Chile. José Antonio Kast of the Republican Party won with 58% of the vote against Communist Party candidate Jeannette Jara — the first time since Chile's return to democracy in 1990 that such a conservative government has taken power.

In Ecuador, Daniel Noboa was re-elected on a pro-Washington platform — yet still failed to secure public approval for a US military base in the country, rejected by voters in a national referendum. Noboa has since proceeded regardless, deepening security cooperation with Washington through bilateral channels outside the terms his own electorate rejected.

Simultaneously, Ecuador is undergoing the accelerated weaponization of the courts against the country’s most consequential progressive force — a calculated campaign to extinguish political opposition through the machinery of justice. Progressive International’s Council member Andrés Arauz, the former presidential candidate for Ecuador’s leftist Citizen Revolution party, was formally charged in May 2025 by Attorney General Diana Salazar Méndez with “illicit association” in the so-called Caso Ligados — seeking to recast "political coordination" — the very lifeblood of any democratic process — as a "criminal conspiracy".

This is a struggle over Latin America’s resources, over its territory and above all, the authority to determine its future.

On 16 April — the sixty-fifth anniversary of Fidel Castro's declaration of the socialist character of the Cuban Revolution, delivered on the eve of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion — President Miguel Díaz-Canel warned that Cuba faces the most dangerous moment in its history. "Cuba is not a failed state,” he said. "Cuba is a besieged state."

The United States has confirmed, through executive order and public declaration, that regime change in Cuba is an official objective for 2026. Trump has stated that he expects to have the "honour of taking Cuba."

Since the 3 January abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Washington has imposed an oil blockade on Cuba — the most comprehensive since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Pentagon officials have since accelerated contingency planning for military operations against the island.

Until the Russian-flagged Anatoly Kolodkin tanker breached the blockade and docked in Matanzas port on 31 March, no foreign oil had reached the island for three months. Total grid failures had become routine. Hospitals struggle to keep equipment running. Crops go unharvested due to a lack of diesel. The UN Secretary-General has warned that the humanitarian situation will "worsen, or even collapse" if Cuba's oil supply is not restored.

New research published this week by the Transition Security Project, founded by Progressive International member Common Wealth, points to a structural way out for the energy siege: a near-fully renewable grid within a decade, financed at a viable cost. In breaking fossil fuel dependence, Cuba would also break the United States’ ability to weaponise energy scarcity against it.

The stakes of the present struggle over sovereignty in Latin America are thus increasingly high — but as the Transition Security Project proposal shows, there are opportunities to turn that struggle into an opportunity for the region’s enduring transformation.

In Colombia, the 31 May presidential election will determine whether the country's first left-wing government can persist beyond its first term. Iván Cepeda — human rights defender, son of the assassinated Communist leader Manuel Cepeda Vargas — leads the polls as the Historic Pact candidate, with Indigenous leader Aida Quilcué as his running mate.

In Brazil, Lula da Silva has confirmed he will seek a fourth term in October, outpacing all right-wing rivals while Bolsonaro serves a 27-year sentence for his role in a coup attempt.

In Peru, leftist congressman Roberto Sánchez has defied every prediction by surging to a runoff against Keiko Fujimori on 7 June — his support drawn overwhelmingly from Peru's poorest communities.

Elsewhere, the struggle for democracy is not only electoral.

On 8 March, the Progressive International's Peace Brigade was on the ground in Venezuela to witness the country's sixth National Popular Consultation — a direct-democracy exercise in which over 36,000 development projects proposed by communal councils were put to a popular vote across 10,000 precincts. Each commune voted on a series of proposals, with the winning project receiving public funding. (You can read more about the process in the report from our Peace Brigade).

What is playing out across Latin America in 2026 is a confrontation between two architectures. The first is the architecture of empire: a renewed Monroe Doctrine and its agenda of hemispheric control. The second is the architecture of sovereignty, integration and peace — the unfinished project of Bolívar, Martí, Chavez and the tradition of Nuestra América: a vision in which the peoples of the Americas have the right to govern themselves, control their resources, and chart a future beyond imperialism.

In this confrontation, the defence of democracy cannot be separated from the struggle against domination. Through our Observatory, the Progressive International will accompany, defend, and document those democratic processes — from elections to communes — that assert popular sovereignty against empire.

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