The Hemisphere: A Seventy-Year Architecture, Operating

Iván Cepeda's father was assassinated by US-backed paramilitaries in Colombia in 1994. In June 2026, Cepeda lost the Colombian presidency by 200,000 votes to a lawyer whose legal career was built defending paramilitary actors. Across the past three years, eight Latin American countries have elected right-wing governments with documented US backing. The architecture is not new. The architecture has institutional continuity.

By A. Kade

In this piece

• Iván Cepeda, 1994 to 2026
• The nine-country pattern
• The Venezuela strike
• Seventy years
• The hemispheric ring
• Closing
• Update: the earthquake response

•••

In Barranquilla, on the night of June 21, 2026, supporters of Abelardo de la Espriella gathered to celebrate his victory in the Colombian presidential election. Many of them wore red baseball caps. The caps were printed with the slogan Make Colombia Great Again. De la Espriella, a 47-year-old lawyer and businessman with no previous political career, had defeated Senator Iván Cepeda by a margin of approximately 200,000 votes, the slimmest in Colombian electoral history. Outgoing president Gustavo Petro had publicly alleged first-round fraud. The race had been characterised throughout by what Petro called Washington's "interference" in his country's election, including the arrest by US immigration authorities of Beto Corral, a Colombian left-wing activist who had been campaigning for Cepeda in the United States while his asylum application was being processed. Trump had publicly labeled Cepeda a "radical left-wing Marxist" during the campaign. Within an hour of the runoff result being confirmed, Trump called de la Espriella personally to congratulate him.

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The man on the losing side of that election was 62 years old. He had built a thirty-year career as a senator, a human rights defender, and one of the most prominent figures in Colombian political life. He had spent much of that career trying to document, prosecute, and politically defeat the right-wing paramilitary networks that had operated in Colombia since the early 1990s with US institutional support flowing through what would eventually become Plan Colombia.

Iván Cepeda had a specific reason for the work. His father had been killed by those paramilitaries.

Manuel Cepeda Vargas, communist senator, journalist, and one of the last surviving leaders of the Patriotic Union party, was assassinated on August 9, 1994, in Bogotá. He was shot at close range while travelling to Congress. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights, in a 2010 ruling, held the Colombian state responsible for the killing, finding that the assassination had been carried out by paramilitary actors operating with documented links to Colombian military intelligence, military intelligence that was, at the time of the killing, the recipient of significant US security assistance, intelligence cooperation, and training under the bilateral framework that would consolidate, in 2000, into Plan Colombia. The Inter-American Court's ruling is a public document. The chain of institutional support is a matter of public record.

Iván Cepeda spent the next three decades of his life as a Colombian senator and human rights organiser, building the political coalition that elected Gustavo Petro in 2022, Colombia's first left-wing president in the country's history, and that nominated Cepeda himself as Petro's successor in 2026.

The man who defeated him by 200,000 votes spent the same three decades building a legal career representing exactly the kind of paramilitary actors who had killed his father.

This is, in its plain content, the structural symmetry of the contemporary Colombian state. The architecture of US institutional support that produced the paramilitaries that killed Manuel Cepeda Vargas in 1994 has, over the subsequent three decades, produced the political and legal infrastructure that elected Abelardo de la Espriella to the Colombian presidency in 2026.

The continuity is two generations. The continuity is documented.

This piece is about that continuity, as it is now operating across the Western Hemisphere as a whole.

•••

In the three years between December 2023 and June 2026, the political map of Latin America has been redrawn. The transformation has been described in the Spanish-language press as the segunda ola conservadora , the second conservative wave. The first was in the mid-2010s, displacing the early-21st-century marea rosa or pink tide. The second is now in its acceleration phase. As of this writing, nine countries in the region have elected right-wing governments since 2023, with documented US institutional support in each case:

Argentina , December 2023. Javier Milei, a self-described libertarian who campaigned wielding a chainsaw, defeated the Peronist candidate. Milei subsequently dismantled large parts of the Argentine state, plunged millions into poverty, restructured currency policy, and signed extensive cooperation agreements with the United States and Israel. His coalition strengthened its position in the 2025 midterm elections.

Ecuador , April 2025. Billionaire oligarch Daniel Noboa was re-elected as president despite presiding over a record-setting crime wave that produced 9,216 murders in 2025, the highest in the country's history. A country that was, a decade earlier, among the safest in Latin America had, under Noboa's administration, become one of the most violent. The election was disputed by left-wing candidate Luisa Gonzalez. The US has provided millions in military assistance to Ecuador since Noboa signed a military cooperation agreement with Washington in 2024, after years in which the previous left-wing government had restricted US access.

Honduras , November 30, 2025. Nasry Asfura, a right-wing candidate, secured a narrow 40.3% victory over centrist Salvador Nasralla at 39.6%. Trump publicly endorsed Asfura via Truth Social during the campaign: "I hope the people of Honduras vote for Freedom and Democracy, and elect Tito (Nasry) Asfura, President!" An investigation published by Canal RED in early 2026 alleged that the Trump administration, with financial and political backing from Israel, manoeuvred to return former president Juan Orlando Hernández to power. Hernández was sentenced in 2024 to 45 years in US federal prison for conspiring to import cocaine into the United States and for accepting bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel. The architecture, in the Canal RED account, was prepared to install a convicted cocaine trafficker.

Bolivia , October 2025. Senator Rodrigo Paz, of the centre-right, defeated the Movement for Socialism candidate. The MAS, which had governed Bolivia for most of the previous two decades under Evo Morales and his successor Luis Arce, lost every seat in the Chamber of Senators and all but two seats in the Chamber of Deputies. The collapse was structural rather than narrow. As of June 2026, Bolivia is under a state of emergency, with the military deployed to suppress protests.

Chile , December 14, 2025. José Antonio Kast, of the far-right Republican Party, defeated Communist Party candidate Jeannette Jara by a decisive margin, 58.2% to 41.8%. Kast had run multiple previous presidential campaigns from positions in the Chilean far right, including positions that openly defended aspects of the Pinochet dictatorship's record. The Chilean centre-right chose, in 2025, a strategy of cooperation with Kast's coalition rather than running a separate moderate candidacy.

Costa Rica , February 1, 2026. Right-wing populist candidate Laura Fernandez Delgado won the first round of the presidential election with a decisive margin.

Peru , early June 2026. Keiko Fujimori, daughter of former dictator Alberto Fujimori, defeated left-wing candidate Roberto Sanchez by approximately 40,000 votes. The margin came almost entirely from overseas voters in Spain and Japan. Sanchez has alleged administrative irregularities in the handling of overseas ballots. Peru's previous left-wing president Pedro Castillo had been removed from office by a right-wing congress in December 2022, with dozens killed in subsequent protests. The 2026 election concluded a four-year process of the Peruvian left being institutionally dismantled.

Colombia , June 21, 2026. The de la Espriella victory described above.

El Salvador , ongoing. Nayib Bukele, in office since 2019, consolidated his authoritarian governance through the 2024 re-election (despite a constitutional prohibition on consecutive terms that his own appointed constitutional court had set aside) and now operates what the international press has begun to describe as a one-party state with the most extensive prison population per capita in the world.

That is nine countries in three years. The structural reading of the pattern, that the rightward turn is the coincidental aggregate of anti-incumbent sentiment and security concerns , which is the framing favoured by the Atlantic Council, the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung's regional analysts, and most Anglophone establishment commentary, does not survive contact with the level of US institutional involvement documented in each individual case. The pattern is not coincidence. The pattern is policy.

•••

The pivot point of the pattern's acceleration was, by general agreement of the regional analysts, January 3, 2026.

On that date, the United States military launched strikes inside Venezuela. The strikes destroyed key elements of the Venezuelan military's command infrastructure. Within forty-eight hours, President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores had been captured and rendered into US custody. Maduro is currently awaiting trial in the United States on charges including narcoterrorism, drug trafficking, and aiding the activities of organisations the United States has designated as terrorist. The strikes were not authorised by Congress. They were carried out under the authority of the Second Trump Administration's revised National Security Strategy, which had been issued in late 2025 and which explicitly named the Western Hemisphere as a priority theatre, with the stated goals of "combating drug trafficking" and "reducing the influence of extra-continental powers" , meaning, specifically, Russia, China, and Iran.

The Venezuela strike was the first overt US military intervention to overthrow a sitting Latin American government since the 1989 invasion of Panama. It was the first US military operation to capture a sitting head of state of a Western Hemisphere country in the post-Cold War period. The structural message it sent across the hemisphere was unambiguous. The Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung's regional analysts noted, in their April 2026 report on the Latin American political shift, that the Venezuela strike had "cemented" the rightward turn, meaning that political and economic actors across the region had registered the strike as the operational signal that overt opposition to US-aligned political vehicles was no longer safe.

The strike was not a one-off. It was the kinetic phase of a strategy that had been operating, in its political and economic phases, for nearly seventy years.

•••

The institutional infrastructure of US engagement with Latin American politics did not begin in 2026. It did not begin in 2023. It did not begin in the post-Cold War period. It is roughly seventy years old as a continuous institutional commitment and it has, across those seventy years, produced an extensive and documented record of intervention.

Fuck them.

I use the word at this point because polite English would be lying about the moral content of an institutional commitment that crosses generations and produces specific dead people in specific named graves. The historical record is not abstract. The institutional continuity is not metaphorical. Manuel Cepeda Vargas was killed in 1994 by paramilitaries operating with documented links to a Colombian military intelligence apparatus that was, at the time, the recipient of US institutional support. His son lost a presidential election in 2026, by 200,000 votes, to a man whose legal career was built defending paramilitary actors operating under the institutional framework that the same US support helped consolidate over the subsequent two decades. The architecture is not abstract. The architecture has institutional continuity. The architecture has identifiable victims, in identifiable graves, with court rulings naming the chain of responsibility.

The seventy-year record is, in its principal documented instances:

Guatemala, 1954. The Central Intelligence Agency organised, financed, and directed the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Jacobo Árbenz, on behalf of the United Fruit Company, whose agricultural land Árbenz had begun to redistribute. The coup installed a military government that ruled, in various configurations, for the subsequent four decades, during which approximately 200,000 Guatemalans were killed in the civil war that followed, the great majority of them indigenous Maya civilians, in what a 1999 UN Truth Commission described as acts of genocide.

Cuba, 1961. The Bay of Pigs invasion, a CIA-organised attempt to overthrow the Cuban government, failed operationally but established the institutional pattern of covert paramilitary action against Latin American governments that did not align with US interests.

Brazil, 1964. The Brazilian military government that took power in the April 1964 coup did so with documented US logistical and intelligence support. The dictatorship that resulted lasted twenty-one years and produced an extensive record of state violence against the Brazilian left.

Chile, 1973. The military coup against Salvador Allende was supported by extensive prior US covert action, including the destabilisation campaign known internally at the CIA as Track II. Augusto Pinochet's subsequent dictatorship lasted seventeen years and killed an estimated 3,000 people, with 30,000 more tortured.

Operation Condor, 1968-1989. The coordinated system of right-wing dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay shared intelligence, conducted joint operations against opposition figures across borders, and assassinated political opponents in third countries. Operation Condor killed approximately 60,000 people across the participating dictatorships' two decades of operation. Declassified CIA cables and State Department documents released since the 2000s have established that US intelligence agencies were aware of Condor's operations, provided technical and intelligence support to the participating regimes, and in at least some cases coordinated specific operations.

Central America, 1980s. The Reagan administration's support for the Nicaraguan Contras, for the Salvadoran military junta during that country's civil war, and for the Guatemalan military government during the latter phase of the Guatemalan genocide produced extensive documented human rights violations. The number of deaths across the three countries' wars exceeds 250,000.

Panama, 1989. The US invasion of Panama overthrew General Manuel Noriega, whom the US had previously supported, and installed a US-aligned government.

The School of the Americas. Founded in 1946, initially operated in Panama, transferred to Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1984, renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in 2001, and currently operating, the institution has trained Latin American military and security force personnel including many who became responsible for human rights abuses, coups, and assassinations across the continent. The list of named graduates includes Manuel Noriega of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri of Argentina, Hugo Banzer of Bolivia, Roberto D'Aubuisson of El Salvador (founder of the death squads that assassinated Archbishop Óscar Romero), Hector Gramajo of Guatemala (responsible for command of operations during the genocide), and Vladimiro Montesinos of Peru. The institution continues to operate, with current Latin American security personnel attending under the renamed WHINSEC framework.

Plan Colombia, 2000-present. US security assistance to Colombia of approximately $10 billion across two decades, officially counter-narcotics in framing, operationally extending to counter-insurgency and the building of the institutional capacity of the Colombian state, including the security forces. The paramilitary networks that killed Manuel Cepeda Vargas in 1994 operated in a Colombian military-intelligence environment that was the recipient of, and was institutionally shaped by, the pre-Plan and Plan-era US assistance.

Honduras, 2009. The military coup that overthrew President Manuel Zelaya was followed by US diplomatic recognition of the resulting government within months, despite continued protests from the Organization of American States.

Bolivia, 2019. The forced resignation of President Evo Morales, following protests organised in part by groups with documented US connections, was followed by an interim government that conducted what international human rights organisations subsequently characterised as a coup. Morales returned to office through subsequent elections; the institutional damage took years to undo.

Venezuela, 2026. The strikes described above.

The list is not exhaustive. It is a partial inventory.

The seventy-year continuity is the structural fact. The 2023-2026 hemispheric realignment is operating within that continuity. The architecture is not a Trump-era phenomenon. The architecture is the institutional commitment of the US state to backing political vehicles in Latin America that serve US economic, security, and ideological interests, regardless of those vehicles' commitments to democratic governance, human rights, or the well-being of the populations they govern. The current administration is, in its specific public-endorsement methods and its specific operational signals, more open about the commitment than recent administrations have been. The commitment itself is bipartisan and pre-dates the current administration by approximately seven decades.

•••

There is one further point about the catalog that deserves to be named directly.

The Other Speed, published in this publication earlier this month, described the European Union's formal arrangement for distinguishing between its inner six member states, Germany, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Italy, and the outer twenty-one, who are being treated as the slower, less integrated, less consulted partners in the EU's accelerating economic integration. The Return Hub, published the following week, described the EU's formalisation of detention infrastructure in third countries, mostly African, as a regulated instrument of migration policy.

The Hemisphere describes the equivalent arrangement on the other side of the Atlantic. The United States operates a hemispheric political project that organises the Western Hemisphere along inner-and-outer-ring lines. The inner ring is the United States itself. The outer ring is the Latin American periphery, whose political vehicles, security forces, economic arrangements, and intelligence services are being institutionally aligned with the inner ring's preferences through a mixture of diplomatic pressure, conditional aid, security cooperation, public endorsement, covert intervention, and, in the Venezuela case, direct military force.

The architecture of the EU's inner-and-outer-ring distinction and the architecture of the US's hemispheric inner-and-outer-ring distinction are not parallel as a coincidence. They are parallel because the contemporary Western architecture has, in both its European and its American manifestations, settled on a similar structural shape: an integrated and consulted inner core that determines policy direction, and a peripheral ring of nominally sovereign states that are being shaped, increasingly openly, to align with the inner core's preferences regardless of their own electorates' preferences. The difference between the EU's outer ring and the US's outer ring is that the EU's outer ring contains states that are members of the same union as the inner six. The US's outer ring contains states that are nominally fully sovereign foreign countries. The structural shape of the arrangement is identical.

The architecture has, across the spring of 2026, made all three rings, the EU inner core, the EU's detention outer ring, the US hemispheric outer ring, visible in plain documentary writing within the same eight-week period. The three pieces in this publication's archive that cover them together form a complete spatial picture of how contemporary Western institutional power organises the continent and the hemisphere.

The pattern is the architecture. The architecture is the policy.

•••

In Bogotá, on the day before the runoff, Iván Cepeda gave a speech to supporters in which he said he would respect whatever result emerged from the official canvass. He was specific about the conditions under which he would do so, once the Electoral Tribunal had completed its review of contested ballots, once the official count was certified, once the verification process was complete. He was, in the speech, doing what his thirty-year career had taught him to do: protecting Colombian institutional integrity even at the cost of his own electoral hopes.

The day after the runoff, Cepeda conceded.

His father had been killed by paramilitaries thirty-two years earlier, in a country whose military intelligence apparatus was, at the time, receiving US institutional support. The 2010 Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruling, the formal judicial finding on the institutional context of the killing, is publicly available in Spanish and English. The man who defeated him by 200,000 votes had made his legal career representing paramilitary actors operating under institutional arrangements that the same US support had helped consolidate.

This is not a coincidence. This is the architecture. The architecture has institutional continuity. The architecture has documented victims. The architecture has named graves and named killers and named legal teams that defended the killers and named political vehicles that elected the defenders to the highest offices.

The Cepeda story is one instance. Across nine countries in the past three years, the same architecture has been operating, with the same outcomes for the same populations.

The architecture is not new.

The architecture is not over.

The architecture is the policy.

The hemisphere is the latest phase, on the same machinery, with the same beneficiaries, and the same dead.

•••

A. Kade writes The Kade Frequency , an investigative publication on institutional power, financial capture, and the long project of making democracy something real.

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•••

Update, June 26, 2026

On June 24, two days before this piece was finalised, two earthquakes struck Venezuela, magnitude 7.2 and 7.5, thirty-nine seconds apart, at 6:04 PM local time. The mainshock was Venezuela's strongest since 1900. At least 235 people are confirmed dead. More than 4,300 are injured. Over 40,000 are missing. The US Geological Survey estimates the final death toll could reach 100,000.

The earthquake hit five months and twenty-one days after the United States bombed Venezuela to overthrow Maduro.

The structural shape of the international response is what this piece has been about, operating in real time on a humanitarian disaster. The acting head of state who is now thanking the international community for assistance is Delcy Rodríguez, installed as Interim President under what is called a "normalisation agreement" with the United States after Maduro's capture. The US reopened its embassy in Caracas on March 30, 2026 as part of that agreement. The United States has been Venezuela's largest oil buyer since the strikes; US-controlled Venezuelan oil exports rose from approximately $600 million in January 2026 to approximately $3.7 billion in April 2026, a six-fold increase under the new arrangement, before the earthquake hit.

The institutional lead of the US disaster response is United States Southern Command, the same SouthCom that conducted the January strikes. SouthCom announced on June 25 that it is "surging available assigned" US forces to the region, including the amphibious transport ship USS Fort Lauderdale (LPD 28), the littoral combat ship USS Billings (LCS 15), C-17 Globemaster and C-130 Hercules transport aircraft, reconnaissance platforms, and rotary-wing aircraft. The Trump administration pledged $150 million in aid, $100 million to a UN humanitarian fund and $50 million to aid organisations already working in the country. Secretary of State Rubio personally announced the deployment of search-and-rescue teams from Fairfax County, Virginia, and Los Angeles. The same Cabinet department that managed the January strikes is now managing the June rescue.

Other Western countries are coordinating through Washington. France pledged 85 search-and-rescue specialists, with President Macron specifying that the aid would be delivered "in response to the needs expressed by the Venezuelan authorities" , the careful diplomatic phrasing that elides which authorities are currently understood to govern Venezuela. Germany pledged up to six A400M transport aircraft. Spain offered a field hospital. The Netherlands offered a search-and-rescue team and €2 million in aid. Italy, Portugal, and the Vatican (Pope Leo XIV: €100,000 from the Apostolic Almonry) offered support. The coordination of the Western response runs, in operational terms, through the institutions of the architecture.

Cuba, Russia, China, Iran, and Brazil have offered humanitarian assistance. Cuba, Venezuela's historical closest ally, was conspicuously absent from acting President Rodríguez's official list of acknowledged international supporters, despite Cuban health workers continuing to provide services on the ground. The omission is itself a signal of where the Venezuelan interim government understands its diplomatic alignment to lie.

This is what the architecture looks like when the natural-disaster phase arrives. The same Southern Command that conducted the January strikes deploys the June rescuers. The same diplomatic machinery that called Maduro an illegitimate narco-trafficker calls Maduro's successor administration the "Venezuelan authorities" for aid-delivery purposes. The reconstruction phase, which will require enormous investment over years, will be channelled through frameworks the United States and its allies are positioned to shape. The aid is real. The need is real. The architecture's positioning to convert the humanitarian opening into long-term institutional access, through the embassy reopened in March, through the oil-export arrangement consolidated in April, and now through the rescue command running through Southern Command in June, is also real.

The Cepeda story is the historical instance. The Venezuelan earthquake response is the architecture's current instance. The hemispheric continuity is the documented fact.

The architecture does not require ideological consistency to operate. The architecture requires only access. The earthquake provides access.

•••

Sources and references

The Colombian election of June 21, 2026: the result, de la Espriella's victory by approximately 200,000 votes, was reported by Reuters, AP, Al Jazeera, the BBC, El Tiempo , Semana , and El Espectador on June 21-22, 2026. Trump's congratulatory call was reported by Euronews and AFP. The Beto Corral arrest was reported by Telesur and AP. The Make Colombia Great Again caps detail was photographed and reported by Getty Images and the AP. Petro's allegations of first-round fraud were reported across the Colombian and international press.

The assassination of Manuel Cepeda Vargas in 1994 and the subsequent Inter-American Court of Human Rights 2010 ruling: the court's full judgment, Cepeda Vargas v. Colombia , is publicly available at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights website. The institutional context, including the US assistance to Colombian military intelligence in the pre-Plan-Colombia period, is documented in declassified State Department cables released through the National Security Archive's Colombia Documentation Project.

The Venezuela strikes of January 3, 2026: widely reported across major US and international outlets. Maduro and Flores are in US custody awaiting trial as of this writing.

The country-by-country pattern: the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung's April 2026 regional report, Latinobarómetro's polling, the Atlantic Council's December 2025 2026 outlook , the GIS Reports analysis from May 2026, El País , Euronews, and the Middle East Eye opinion piece by Latin America analyst dated June 22, 2026, together provide the broad picture. The Canal RED investigation on Honduras and the alleged US-Israeli backing of Juan Orlando Hernández was published in March 2026.

Operation Condor and the historical institutional commitment: the foundational documentation is John Dinges, The Condor Years (2004); Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File (2003); the National Security Archive's Chile Documentation Project and Argentina Documentation Project ; and the declassified CIA, State Department, and DIA cables released across the 1999-2024 period under various Freedom of Information Act litigation. The death toll figures for the Guatemalan civil war derive from the 1999 Guatemala: Memory of Silence report of the UN-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification.

The School of the Americas / WHINSEC: the institution's history, named graduates, and contemporary operation are documented at the School of the Americas Watch archive, in Lesley Gill's The School of the Americas (2004), and in the institution's own public materials.

Plan Colombia: the $10 billion figure is widely cited across US, Colombian, and academic sources covering the 2000-2020 period of the program's operation. The detailed budgetary records are available through US State Department and Congressional Research Service reports.

The June 24, 2026 Venezuela earthquakes and international response: USGS PAGER assessments; AP, Reuters, CNN, Al Jazeera, Euronews reporting June 24-26, 2026; the State Department's "Responding to Venezuela Earthquakes" public statement issued June 25, 2026; US Southern Command's public statement on the X platform announcing the surge deployment; the Council on Foreign Relations data on US-controlled Venezuelan oil exports (the $600M January / $3.7B April figures) cited by CNBC's June 25, 2026 reporting; Al Jazeera's catalog of the international responses including the named European, Latin American, and Asian countries' offers; Cubaheadlines coverage noting Cuba's conspicuous absence from acting President Rodríguez's official acknowledgements.

The piece's central analytical claim, that the contemporary hemispheric political realignment is operating within a documented seventy-year institutional continuity of US engagement with Latin American political development, is not novel. It is the consensus reading of the historical and contemporary literature on US-Latin American relations. The piece's contribution is to name the pattern as it currently operates, with the specific 2023-2026 cases connected to the longer institutional record they continue.

By the same author

Two books in restrained literary nonfiction

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