For decades, the US military’s “foreign policy” for Latin America has been mostly centered around different versions of counterinsurgency, Cold War, post-Iraq War, and post-Operation Enduring Freedom 1 & 2, with the idea of finding relations through “hearts and minds.” Present reality, however, requires the US Department of Defense (DoD) to understand that the influence of competing powers in the region, such as China, Russia, and Iran, requires a new strategy, a counter-subversion strategy based on “stomachs and hands” instead of the idealistic “hearts and minds.”

For decades, the US military has trained foreign forces under the assumption that counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine is the key to stability. It’s a strategy built on lessons learned throughout the world during the Cold War and in Iraq and Afghanistan, where non-state actors waged long, bloody insurgencies against US forces under the premise that an honorable, admirable, and paternalistic US military assistance would secure the hearts and minds of foreign military forces, and by extension, their populations. And it did work for a long time. However, in Latin America, where cartels, former leftist guerrillas, and street gangs dominate the battlespace and have turned it into a perverse grey space, the Pentagon keeps applying the same outdated playbook.

It’s a fundamental error, one that empowers the wrong people, creates false perverse incentives, and yields little strategic return for the US. The threats in Latin America don’t look, fight, or think like the enemies of Iraq or Afghanistan, or the old guerrillas of the Cold War. Instead of religiously manipulated jihadists seeking to establish an Islamic emirate, the real enemy is a sophisticated, transnational criminal network fueled by drug money, state corruption, and foreign backers, including China’s Communist Party (CCP) and leftist globalist nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

The US isn’t fighting a counterinsurgency war in Latin America. It’s fighting a subversion war. And yet, it has no doctrine for it.

COIN’s Inadequacy in Latin America

COIN was designed for conflicts where insurgents seek to govern. It assumes a clear enemy, a defined population, and a battle for legitimacy. But in Latin America, cartels and criminal groups don’t want to govern; they want to corrupt, infiltrate, and co-opt state power to serve their financial and geopolitical interests. In the past, the enemy wanted to govern, the new enemy wants to control.

The US approach has been to train Latin American militaries as if they’re fighting the Taliban. The reality? Many of these forces are riddled with corruption, deeply embedded with cartels, or outright compromised by them or by foreign intelligence services. American training often ends up strengthening the very networks working against US interests.

To make matters worse, by failing to account for the external support these groups receive from China, Russia, Iran, and NGOs with their own agendas, the US  has allowed anti-American influence to grow and penetrate allied forces and agencies in the region. Additionally, many local advisors at US embassies urgently need to be removed, especially those who are legacy from USAID or INL and those who come from failed globalist transitional justice projects in their countries. New trusted cadres must be vetted and brought in to replace them.

The Case for a Counter-Subversion Doctrine

Hearts and Minds vs. Stomachs and Hands

In general terms, counterinsurgency is based on the premise that foreign military forces or resistance forces have an intrinsic patriotic motivation (hearts) to defend or fight for their country and maintain or establish a useful relation with the US (minds). In this globalized world, and in a region that has been forcefully contaminated and coopted by socialism, sadly with the direct involvement of ideologized US agencies like the late USAID, INL, and others, as patriotic as foreign military officers and soldiers and bureaucrats of the security and intelligence agencies might be, their career systems and ecosystems have been partially reengineered to be utilitarian, unprincipled, and to become sepoys of socialist foreign diplomats, be it from the US Embassy, the UN, or any of the other donating countries.