The global cowboys
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the mastermind and enforcer of the Trump administration's plans for Latin America, is the son of Cuban immigrants. During the election campaign, he explained that his parents had arrived in the US in 1959 fleeing persecution by the Castro regime. This was a lie Rubio spread to win votes among the anti-Castro Cuban community: in reality, his parents arrived in the US in 1956 (he was born in 1971), and the Rubio family had little or nothing to do with the resistance against Fidel Castro's dictatorship. They did, however, have a curious experience in the mid-1980s, when Marco Rubio was fourteen: his family lived temporarily in a house that served as a cocaine warehouse for a drug trafficking gang led by Orlando Cicilia, who was the current Secretary of State's brother-in-law. This fact alone establishes a stronger connection between Marco Rubio ("Narco Rubio," an easy joke in Miami) and drug trafficking than that between Colombian President Gustavo Petro, whom Trump has singled out as the next to receive a fanciful visit from the DEA and Delta Force in the wee hours of the morning, with deaths.
We were discussing the Trump administration's plans for Latin America. Basically, they consist of seizing the continent's natural resources (oil, gold, copper, rare earth elements, coastline, and rainforest for tourism development), with the support of puppet or allied governments. Therefore, it's necessary to eliminate leftist rulers (whether dictatorships or democracies), accusing them of being criminals and drug traffickers, and replace them with rulers loyal to the neoliberal creed, exemplified by Milei in Argentina or Bukele in El Salvador. These rulers can also be dictatorships or democracies (at least formally), and they can also be criminals and drug traffickers: the only requirement is that they be compliant with Trump. Another example is Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who was serving a sentence in a US prison precisely for drug trafficking, and who was pardoned by Trump a month ago. The pardon coincided—not by chance, obviously—with the electoral victory of Hernández's successor as presidential candidate, Nasry Tito Asfura, a victory that Trump, on his Truth Social network, described as "a great political and financial success."
Wealth in cash or in kind: that's all there is to it. Trumpism's idea of governance, and of politics itself, begins and ends with money. cowboy diplomacy It's a continuous assault: it consists of arriving in a rival town, overthrowing the authorities, installing a friendly sheriff, and emptying the bank and the treasury. saloonRubio, along with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the mediocre writer JD Vance as Vice President, are the lieutenants with whom Trump intends to finally realize the old imperialist dream of complete Yankee domination over Latin America. Europe, that Europe that watches him with a mixture of astonishment and submissiveness, awaits its turn to be violated under any pretext.
