No, not Jeffrey Epstein. The financier in question is Daniel Vorcaro, the now-jailed evangelical banker who was on the mind of many voters as they headed to the polls in this Sunday’s congressional and presidential elections in Brazil. In a surprise result, Right-wing senator Flávio Bolsonaro and son of the jailed former president, Jair Bolsonaro, won 47% of the vote over incumbent Leftist Lula Da Silva’s 45 percent; the pair will face a run-off on October 25. But despite the apparent backlash against Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT), the case of Vorcaro reveals something deeply rotten about Brazil’s establishment, both Left and Right.   

A native of Belo Horizonte, Daniel Vorcaro’s father, Henrique, headed a real-estate empire in the state of Minas Gerais. For decades, the Vorcaros were prominent financial backers of the Lagoinha Baptist Church — one of the country’s most influential evangelical churches, headed by the televangelist Márcio Valadão and his son, André. (Since the turn of the century, the evangelical share of Brazil’s population has ballooned to around a third.) Accordingly, the younger Vorcaro was inculcated at an early age in the evangelical excess of Lagoinha; at one point, Daniel himself hosted a musical program on the church’s television channel. His sister, Natália, also married Fabiano Zettel, a Lagoinha pastor, lawyer, and wellness influencer (and Daniel’s future business partner).

By 2004, Daniel Vorcaro inherited the bulk of his father’s real-estate empire. Then, in 2018, he assumed control of what was then called Banco Máxima, now Banco Master. Practically overnight, the bank changed from a sleepy, small-time lender into a major player in Brazilian finance. The bank’s modus operandi consisted of offering investment securities with promises of large returns. This, despite the bank lacking the necessary collateral. By the start of the 2020s, Banco Master’s asset base swelled to more than $1 billion, including around $400 million in public pension funds across 14 states. And Vorcaro himself became a fixture of São Paulo’s Faria Lima, Brazil’s equivalent of Wall Street. 

In truth, Banco Master’s business model was effectively a pyramid scheme. Fraudulent credit was sold to cover older obligations and subsequently laundered through a series of investment funds. The bank evidently went as far as to also launder money from the Primeiro Comando da Capital, Brazil’s most powerful crime syndicate. 

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The evangelical banker also had a peculiar sense of “Christian charity.” Banco Master paid $4 million from its fraudulent funds to Lagoinha’s temple; messages between Vorcaro and his brother-in-law Zettel showed the latter protesting that construction would stall without further funds. Head pastor André Valadão at Lagoinha has denied wrongdoing, referring to related accusations of irregular payments as “religious persecution.”

By 2024, irregularities within Banco Master drew the attention of Brazil’s central bank, leading Vorcaro to attempt multiple failed sales of the bank; former President Michel Temer and former Supreme Court justice Ricardo Lewandowski were recruited as paid consultants for an eventual sale. Finally, on Nov. 17, 2025, a consortium of Emirati investors and the Brazilian conglomerate Grupo Fictor purchased Master for an undisclosed sum. The next day, the central bank announced the immediate liquidation of the lender, citing widespread fraud — the largest of its kind in Brazilian history. Vorcaro was subsequently arrested while trying to board a private jet out of the country. He now awaits trial in detention.

The fallout from Banco Master has reverberated across every corner of Brazil. His extravagant parties, held in and outside the country, were evidently used as an “insurance policy” in order to coerce protection from attendants. The evangelical banker reportedly hired foreign escorts precisely so they couldn’t understand sensitive conversations in Portuguese. And his alleged private militia, used to intimidate journalists and coerce contacts, at one point reportedly reached out to the PCC, the crime syndicate, for protection. One member of his militia committed suicide while in custody. 

Much like Epstein, the upstart Vorcaro displayed an uncanny ability to ingratiate himself with the highest echelons of Brazil’s political elite, easily sliding past partisan boundaries. 

Ibaneis Rocha, a former center-Right governor of Brasília, directed the state-owned Bank of Brasília (BSB) to buy Master assets and attempt an acquisition of the lender that was ultimately blocked by the Central Bank. When I arrived in Brasília last week, on my way from the airport, a banner referring to Rocha’s vice governor and her successor Celina Leão read: “Where are they Celina? Where are the BSB funds?” 

But among the largest direct transfers of fraudulent funds from the Vorcaro empire was to none other than Flávio Bolsonaro, the former president’s son, who is himself running for the same office. (The presidential race, pitting Flávio against the incumbent President Inácio Lula da Silva from the Left, will head to a runoff.)

In the years before the banker’s detention, Flávio wined and dined with Vorcaro and flew in his private jet, maintaining close contact practically until the moment of the financier’s arrest. Just days before his failed getaway, the financier received a message from Bolsonaro stating: “brother, I am and will always be with you.” Flávio, it turns out, solicited around $26 million from Vorcaro for a biopic about his ex-president father, titled Dark Horse. What would have been the most expensive film in Brazilian history was never made, and instead, might have funded Flávio’s brother’s lobbying efforts in Washington and Mar-a-Lago. 

But the Left is implicated, too. Jacques Wagner, the Workers’ Party, or PT, leader in the Senate, reportedly defended Master’s interests in the upper chamber. The former finance minister during Lula’s first term, Guido Mantega, was reportedly paid around $200,000 a month from Master-linked entities. Rui Costa, a former PT governor for Bahia and Lula’s current chief of staff, privatized and sold the payroll-loan firm CREDCESTA to a Banco Master partner. 

But the scandal’s real center of gravity lies within Brazil’s judiciary. In recent years, the Supreme Court, and especially Justice Alexandre de Moraes, have been heralded inside and outside Brazil for their roles in opposing the autocratic aims of Bolsonarismo. (Ironically, the court was previously instrumental in Lula’s 2018 conviction, which effectively handed Bolsonaro the presidency; and Moraes was once reviled by the Left for convicting Lula on dubious charges of passive corruption.) 

Fast forward four years later, and the justices annulled all charges against Lula, who narrowly defeated Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 election. Prior, during, and following his loss, the far-Right firebrand made multiple cartoonish attempts at remaining in office past his term — some of which involved trying to assassinate Lula and even a failed military coup. The court rightly sentenced Bolsonaro to 27 years in prison for these crimes, with Moraes presiding over the trial; in response, President Trump imposed 50% tariffs on Brazil in 2025. 

The Supreme Court and Moraes have also employed at times heavy-handed tactics, such as installing a harsh censorship regime against conservatives and critics of judicial power in order to “defend democracy.” Behind these actions against the Right — however justified or not — lies something even more troubling, however: Moraes and others on the courts are, themselves, also implicated in the Vorcaro scandal. 

Moraes’s wife received payments worth $15 million out of a $25 million legal-services agreement with Banco Master. In exchange, Moraes reportedly offered Vorcaro forewarning of investigations into Master. Justice Dias Toffoli received around $7 million from the jailed banker via a family resort fund. Meanwhile, on the court’s Right flank, a Vorcaro associate donated around $1 million to Bolsonaro appointee André Mendonça’s think tank. Further, associates of Bolsonaro appointee Kássio Nunes Marques, including his son, seemingly negotiated millionaire contracts with Banco Master; Justice Marques reportedly slept with a prostitute hired by the evangelical banker.  

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Game of Thrones-esque intrigue has since ensued on the 11-member court between competing factions headed by Moraes and Mendonça. Justices loyal to either Lula or the Bolsonaros have each sought to selectively reveal or suppress their respective ties to Vorcaro with the ultimate aim of aiding the campaigns of their political patrons. 

Judicial corruption in Brazil is obvious, and Lula has pledged to establish an independent council to nominate justices and impose fixed terms on the court (justices currently serve indefinitely until the age of 75). For his part, Flávio Bolsonaro has promised to limit the court to constitutional decisions, end decisions by individual justices, and clamp down on nepotism. It remains an open question which, if any, of these reforms will be enacted should either candidate win the presidency.

The reality is that the victor is virtually certain to opt for continued protection of allies in and outside of the court who are implicated with Vorcaro or face reprisals from opposing justices. Regardless, the stakes are high given that the next president will fill one vacancy and appoint replacements for four justices who will be forced to retire due to age limits. 

The truth is that, unlike Bolsonaro and his family, Lula is not directly implicated in the Banco Master scandal. (Up until recently, it was Bolsonaro who saw his poll numbers tank due to his close ties with Vorcaro.) But because the president has chosen to protect Moraes via his loyalists on the court, many Brazilians have gravitated to Bolsonaro under the auspices that the Right-wing populist offers a more credible alternative for reform. 

One voter told me he was voting for Bolsonaro in order to end lawfare and censorship against conservatives. (On the other hand, Mendonça’s recent conduct suggests that opponents are right to fear a novel censorship regime against progressive views, particularly over Israel.) 

Finally, beyond the judiciary, a Flávio Bolsonaro presidency, like that of his father, would be devastating for Brazilian labor. And the family has lobbied the White House for sanctions, tariffs and terror designations against their own country. The 80-year-old Lula, on the other hand, effectively represents the status quo; his party has governed Brazil for 17 of the past 24 years. Poverty has fallen, but wages have remained largely stagnant, and Brazilians are deeply in debt. Reforms such as debt relief and a provisional ban on gambling have come far too late, and only under electoral pressure. 

Prior to the first round of elections, one street vendor in Brasília told me he was tired of the country’s political class and was voting for libertarian populist Renan Santos; a service worker at a nearby museum likewise told me she would vote for neighboring Goiás Governor Ronaldo Caiado. In the end, however, it seems both may have opted to instead punish Lula and vote for Bolsonaro. Come what may in Brazil, the reality is that the country’s institutions will likely remain in thrall to the ever-present, and increasingly evangelical, oligarchs like Vorcaro. 

Except, the episode was no soap opera. All this unfolded in real life: a set of convoluted events following the August 17 attempted assassination of Nadia Beller, a renowned lawyer and activist in the Andean nation of Bolivia. Her lover, now facing attempted murder charges for allegedly trying to have her killed? Fernando Cerimedo, 45, an Argentine political operative with close ties to some of the hemisphere’s most prominent Right-wing leaders — including Donald Trump. Since 2023, Right-wing parties and leaders have clinched 12 out of 15 elections in the Americas, with Cerimedo playing a decisive role in at least three of them. 

The rise and spectacular fall of Cerimedo — dubbed “MAGA’s man in Latin America” and “the Steve Bannon of South America” — shed a cold light on the powerful networks driving the region’s “New Right.”

Born in the Atlantic resort city of Mar del Plata, Argentina, Cerimedo’s biography reads much like that of other archetypical political grifters such as, say, George Santos. At various times, the now criminal defendant worked as a taxi driver, an insurance agent, and a high-school teacher. Less plausibly, he claims to have won a scholarship as a triathlete to attend Harvard, where he trained alongside Navy SEALs. And similarly, he’s claimed to have worked for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign after obtaining a degree in marketing from the University of Phoenix, making him perhaps the only person to have attended both Harvard and the online for-profit university. 

In the event, after some time spent abroad, Cerimedo returned to Argentina and began working for the marketing firm McCann. In 2016, he was convicted of selling the same apartment in Mar del Plata to two separate buyers.

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Three years later, Cerimedo and the Spanish commentator Javier Negre founded the popular social-media account La Derecha Diario, or “The Daily Right,” which they transformed into a formal news publication of the same name in 2021. Much of La Derecha Diario’s content is poorly sourced, if not outright deceptive, resembling the rage-baiting disinfo mills that now dominate X (formerly Twitter). Likewise through his parallel firm Numen Publicidad, Cerimedo turned troll farms and political AI slop into an exportable product — one he marketed to Right-wing leaders in Brazil, Argentina, Honduras, and Bolivia.

By 2022, Cerimedo had joined the re-election campaign of former Right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, whose son Eduardo he claimed to have met at Harvard. His dissemination of false claims regarding Brazil’s voting machines helped mobilize mobs who stormed Brazil’s capital in January 2023 following Bolsonaro’s defeat at the hands of the Left’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, popularly known as Lula. Later that year, Cerimedo secured a role as communications chief for Argentine President Javier Milei’s successful 2023 campaign; the operative reportedly played a key role in landing Milei an interview with Tucker Carlson.

It was through this ecosystem that Cerimedo became connected with a Who’s Who of the hemispheric Right, which has now blended with MAGA and has its unofficial headquarters in Miami. There, Latin-American exiles from places like Cuba and Venezuela promote an omni-hawkish worldview that also encompasses escalating against Russia in Ukraine, efforts to weaken the pro-Palestinian government in Spain, and regime change in Iran. 

Cerimedo’s presence at the heart of these circles is now an embarrassment for the movement across the region, what with the alleged killer’s numerous photo-ops with the likes of the Bolsonaros, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the Miami Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart. But by far his most influential American patron was Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale.

Parscale and Cerimedo subsequently collaborated on Bolivia’s 2025 election, most notably in the successful campaign of President Rodrigo Paz. Parscale has recently come under fire for a $46.5 million Israeli-financed international communications operation aimed at shaping how AI systems frame responses about Israel via text messages to US citizens. Unsurprisingly, a core feature of the pair’s activities in Latin America has been to lobby in favor of closer relations with the governments of Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Later that year, Cerimedo reportedly helped conservative candidate Nasry Asfura secure a crucial endorsement from Trump in the Honduran presidential election. Asfura, from the right-wing National Party, narrowly won the presidency and Trump went on to pardon the new president’s close ally and convicted predecessor, Juan Orlando Hernandez — who’d been sentenced to 45 years in prison by a George W. Bush-nominated judge for funneling 500 tons of cocaine into the US homeland.

Cerimedo followed Rodrigo Paz into the Bolivian government, where he assumed the role of “chief adviser to the president” per his own business cards. It was during this period that the married Cerimedo began a relationship with Beller, the lawyer and political analyst from Santa Cruz, the country’s lowland metropolis. Ironically, Beller previously won election in 2019 as a lawmaker for the Left-wing Movement Towards Socialism but was prevented from assuming office due to a coup against then-President Evo Morales; at the time, Cerimedo celebrated the coup against Morales, whom he labeled a “narcodictator.”

Prior to the shooting, Beller had accused Cerimedo of domestic violence, publishing photographs of bruises and private messages apparently substantiating the alleged abuse. The day of her attempted murder, Beller claims, she was heading to meet with sources promising damaging information on former President Morales. The gunmen shot her three times at close range, though she survived, in her telling, by playing dead. Cerimedo was arrested hours later at Viru Viru airport, trying to board a flight to Buenos Aires. Four days later, a Bolivian judge charged him as the mastermind of an attempted “femicide” against Beller; his defense floated a theory of self-inflicted injury.

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But the true-crime story has turned into a political earthquake. Speaking from her hospital bed, Beller has made a mix of credible and outlandish claims about her lover’s ties to the CIA; kickbacks from the Paz administration; and involvement in the Bolivian drug trade. 

That last claim tracks with two separate investigations against Cerimedo. Searches of two properties tied to Cerimedo in La Paz turned up cash stuffed into drawers, a satellite phone, a vehicle modified to resemble an official government car, and furniture built with concealed compartments. Bolivian prosecutors have since raided what the local media have described as a bot farm on another property linked to him. Adding fuel to the fire, Vice President Edmand Lara seized on the opportunity to fuel an ongoing feud with President Paz, claiming that Cerimedo was the most powerful person in the country after the president.

Cerimedo has denied all accusations against him from his cell, and he should be entitled to a presumption of innocence unless and until he is proved guilty. It’s salutary that the dirt dished by his lover will be tested in court — and equally that some of his past, proven skulduggery is coming to light, to the great embarrassment of the hard Right in Latin America. It’s certainly poetic that the operative who made his career trafficking in the scandals and hypocrisy of his Left-wing opponents now faces life behind bars for the attempted murder of his extramarital partner.

In an official statement, La Derecha Diario announced that the publication was severing ties with its disgraced cofounder and denied involvement in Beller’s attempted killing. Will all this foreshadow the end, and perhaps the reversal, of the region’s shift to the Right in recent years? The answer remains to be seen. Certainly, it’s a dark omen for Milei & co, and the real-life narconovela is far from over.

It remains a mystery why an administration that styles itself “America First” has prevented third countries from selling food and oil to Havana, exacerbating an ongoing humanitarian crisis. Most Cubans now survive on fewer than two hours a day of electricity, with hospitals struggling to supply patients on life support. The reason, in short, is that Team Trump’s policy toward Cuba now is almost exclusively driven by ideology, rather than rational statecraft. 

The ideology, in turn, is defined by Miami’s enclave of Cuban and other Latin-American exiles. Fundamentally stuck in their native lands, they’re determined to wield American treasure and manpower to redress old grievances. This, instead of attending to the home front, which in South Florida is racked by petty corruption, cultural maladjustment, and the politics of shouting down opponents instead of debating them. 

You could, in fact, call it a form of Third Worldism. 

Yet that term is, ironically, the vague omni-menace conjured by Trump administration hawks to justify their approach to Cuba, among other places. Last month, the State Department unveiled a 100-page report titled Cuba: The Capital of 21st-Century Communism. A seminal piece of MAGA propaganda, the document argues — laughably — that Cuba represents an existential risk to Americans through its sponsorship of “Third Worldism”: an anti-Western animus, replacing traditional Marxism, that supposedly unites resentful foreign hordes the world over.

Speaking with Fox News on the administration’s Cuba policy, Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed the report, stating: “To the average American, you see Cuba, a small country — but people forget that they actually are an influence and espionage superpower.” 

Rubio’s words were transparently aimed at integrating MAGA talking points with the, well, Third World grievances of his fellow Miamians. Figures like YouTube influencer Alex Otaola, businessman Marcell Felipe, and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.). In fact, it’s these Miami neocons — of mostly Cuban but also Nicaraguan and South American descent — who, in a sense, refuse to assimilate to “Northern” concerns and aspirations, even as they reside here. They also command disproportionate influence on US foreign policy.

 Within the confines of South Florida, it’s hard to miss signs of Third Worldism of a more mundane variety: dead people sign off on building inspections in the Cuban-American suburb of Hialeah; Miami’s notoriously corrupt city council also attempted to cancel 2025’s municipal elections. For decades in South Florida, “Cocaine Cowboys,” such as the infamous drug kingpin Sal Magluta, evaded justice, including one occasion when Magluta walked out of jail after bribing officials. In the past decade, attempted overthrows of not one, or two, but three sitting foreign presidents were plotted by private citizens in Miami, one of which resulted in the 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse.     

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Of course, in Miami, English is a second language. Stumble upon the odd heartland tourist in Miami Beach — like my Appalachian in-laws — and you’ll witness MAGA horror at the sight of hedonistic spring breakers mingling with “too many Latins,” many of whom don’t appear to speak English. Indeed, they don’t. Roughly 75% of residents of Miami-Dade County speak Spanish, with 25% lacking English proficiency. Yet the irony is that many of Miami’s Latin invaders are among the most fervent “anti-communist” supporters of President Trump.

Enter the household of your typical MAGA Miamian for “cafecito,” and you’re likely to view an angry YouTube stream from city native Alexander Otaola. A testament to GOP inclusion, the flamboyantly gay Otaola is an archetypal Miami neocon. Much like Fidel Castro, the bearded pundit diatribes extemporaneously for three hours every weekday, railing against the perceived enemies of US-sponsored “freedom and democracy.” With an audience of around 1 million, his show, ¡Hola Otaola!, is interladen with infomercials for Miami-based plastic surgeons, gold chains, and “anti-communist realtors.”

In 2024, Otaola ran a failed campaign for Miami-Dade county mayor. Naturally, the erstwhile Nixon and Trump consigliere Roger Stone was an advisor; in their shared appearances, the pair’s exchanges were consistently moderated by a Spanish-language interpreter. The fact that the Otaola doesn’t speak English likely cost him with English-language voters. 

Much the same can be said of Otaola’s countless controversies over his censorious — some might say “Third World” — tendencies. The Miami YouTuber rightly derides the Cuban regime over its rampant censorship, surveillance, and state-sponsored humiliations of dissidents. Yet Otaola himself promotes routine boycotts of Cuban artists from his “red list” of those who perform on the island. 

In 2023, he staged a protest caravan to censure a book talk, on the US government’s preferential policies toward Cuban immigrants, by Boston University professor Susan Eckstein. Otaola’s protesters also heckled Eckstein during the event, calling her “comunista”; his student supporters naturally claimed that her presence on campus made them feel “unsafe.” As one Cuban-born attendee later told me, Otaola’s antics reminded him of nothing so much as the Stalinist tactics used by the Havana regime to humiliate opponents, known as “acts of repudiation.”

Reacting to the release of the Cuba Report, Otaola lauded Rubio and the State Department for documenting “step-by-step, minute-by-minute how Havana has been training, funding, and organizing [Left-wing] groups in order to destroy free societies.” To be sure, the body of the report documents the very real affinities — and, in some cases, linkages — between Havana and Leftist radicals like the Weather Underground and the Democratic Socialists of America; last week, DSA co-chair Megan Romer mouthed the revolting words: “Cubans have access to their democracy in a way that we do not.”

Yet the State report is, in some ways, a break with Miami-neocon orthodoxy. Contrary to the view of older exiles, who hold that Fidel was practically born a Communist, the State Department claims that Marxism “was not the original battle cry of the Cuban Revolution.” Instead, it was the far more insidious “Third Worldism”: a planetary struggle, erupting after World War II, between decolonized countries and “Western civilization itself.” Never mind that Washington supported postwar decolonization in Asia and Africa. 

Where is this stuff coming from? A possible source of inspiration may be the Cuban-American businessman Marcell Felipe. The head of several of Miami’s neoconservative jobs programs — including the media group América TeVé, Inspire America Foundation, and the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora — Felipe has been at the forefront of Cuban-American outreach within the MAGA Right.

As an attendee of the 2021 National Conservatism conference in Orlando, I was disillusioned to see Miami neocons like Rubio and Felipe alongside ostensible MAGA restrainers such as JD Vance and Michael Anton. During his address — titled, “Why Cubans Get the Marxist Threat” — Felipe presaged Rubio’s future report, arguing that Havana had adapted its communism in order to infiltrate US institutions via “cultural Marxism.” 

By definition, Miami neoconservatism is an evangelical, imperial ideology incompatible with the concept of national sovereignty. At every turn, Miami neocons, Rubio most notably, have found ways of integrating otherwise distinct foreign-policy objectives. Whether it’s fusing regime change in Cuba and Venezuela with the Iran war and the war on drugs, the view from South Florida hawks is that any and all evils trace back to a sinister, interconnected axis stretching from Beijing to Tehran to Moscow to Havana. “Third Worldism” is just the latest spin on this omnicause — one which conveniently centers Cuba and Iran.

Unsurprisingly, the Miami trio of lawmakers Carlos Gimenez, Maria Elvira Salazar, and Mario Diaz-Balart are the most consistently hawkish on everything from fomenting proxy wars against Russia in Ukraine, Syria, and West Africa to putting boots on the ground in Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and, of course, Cuba. Within the trio, the most emblematic is Diaz-Balart, whose roots trace back to the highest echelons of the pre-Castro dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

A darling of the gangsters Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, Batista turned Havana’s luxury hotels and casinos over to the US mob in exchange for a personal cut of casino earnings — a reality fictionalized in The Godfather Part II. In turn, his CIA-trained forces killed or disappeared at least 1,500 dissident Cubans during the 1950s. During this time, Diaz-Balart’s father, Rafael, served as Batista’s undersecretary of the interior and as majority leader in the Cuban House of Representatives. In many parts of the West, familial ties to a murderous Third World dictatorship would disqualify any politician in the eyes of voters. But in neoconservative South Florida, such ties portend a life term in Congress.

The irony is that Diaz-Balart’s father was a youth supporter of Batista going back to the dictator’s populist — and Communist-supported — first term in the 1940s. Batista featured members of the Marxist Popular Socialist Party in his cabinet until 1944 and maintained tacit support from the party until 1958. Indeed, the fact that opposition to Batista was both overwhelming and ideologically diverse contributed to the CIA’s pre-1960 determination that Fidel Castro wasn’t a communist; a further irony is that Diaz-Balart’s paternal aunt, Mirta, married Castro.

Naturally, all of this is glossed over by Diaz-Balart and other Miami neocons, who romanticize a pre-Marxist utopia on the island and ignore the legitimate grievances that led to the 1959 revolution in the first place. (In the same way, deluded progressives like DSA co-chair Ashik Saddique gloss over those who aided the revolution but nonetheless were jailed or executed for opposing Castro.)

Instead, the congressman devotes most of his time to regime change abroad; Diaz-Balart’s office features an autocrat collage of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, Iran’s Ali Khamenei, Cuba’s Raul Castro, and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega with the labels: “Arrested,” “Eliminated,” and “Indicted.” 

Accordingly, Diaz-Balart has celebrated the State Department’s screed against Cuban-sponsored “Third Worldism.” Yet much like his late relative-by-marriage Fidel Castro, the congressman has very recently embraced the anti-colonial cause elsewhere — in North Africa. 

Last month, tens of thousands of Moroccan migrants swarmed Ceuta, a city on the North African Coast which Spain has controlled since the 15th century. One could be forgiven for assuming that the Spanish-descended Diaz-Balart would be an avid defender of Spanish Christendom over the invading Muslim hordes. Quite the contrary: the Miami neocon has called for Moroccan annexation of Ceuta and its sister enclave, Melilla, arguing that the pair “are not in the geographic territory of Spain.”

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Wait — what happened to anti-Third Worldist zeal here? Shouldn’t an opponent of Third Worldism defend Christian Spain’s honor? 

Nope. Contrived as they may seem, the congressman’s words ultimately follow a neoconservative logic centered on Cuba. The Spanish government under Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has been harshly critical of Israel and of America’s conduct in Iran; the Islamic Republic is, of course, a staunch ally of Havana. In contrast, Morocco has taken pains to ally itself with Trump and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu — a fact which presumably validates the country’s decolonial grievances against Spain. This, even as Diaz-Balart condemns other forms of decoloniality as Third Worldism.

By far, the most damning aspect of Miami-neocon Third Worldism is the fact that the ideology is responsible for some of America’s worst homegrown terrorists. The State Department’s Cuba report rightly condemns Cuban support for Left-wing groups that carried out hundreds of bombings throughout the United States in the 1970s. “In one 18-month period between 1971 and 1972,” the report notes, “the FBI counted some 2,500 bombings on American soil” by homegrown radicals. Yet the report conveniently omits that some of these radicals were Right-wing Cuban-Americans, and many of their victims were fellow Cuban exiles who were perceived as insufficiently anti-communist.

In the same decade, authorities linked Cuban-Americans to 113 bombings in the United States, including the 1976 car bombing of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier, conducted in concert with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s intelligence services. Beyond the US homeland, Miami-based Cuban exiles were responsible for 45% of all bombings on the planet in 1974. In 1976, the Coordinación de Organizaciones Revolucionarias Unidas, headed by Miami terrorist Orlando Bosch, bombed Cubana Flight 455, killing all 73 people on board; CORU was likewise responsible for killing Letelier days prior. Bosch was eventually arrested before being pardoned by George H. W. Bush, thanks to lobbying by Miami Rep. Ilean Ros-Lehtinen, who called Bosch a “patriot and hero” upon his release.

The sad truth is that the uniparty in Washington has long condoned Third Worldism on the part of the Miami neocons; Bosch worked at various points for the CIA. The fact that Miami Third Worldism has risen to new heights under Trump owes largely to the president’s choice of Rubio as secretary of state. As MAGA apostate Pedro Gonzalez has argued, moreover, Trumpism can sometimes display the aspects of a Third World movement; last December, Miami-Dade’s Hialeah suburb announced the construction of a bronze, 12-foot statue of “Donald Trump the Fighter.” Whether in rhetoric or substance, Trump resembles many hostile and friendly Latin American caudillos.

Come what may, it seems clear that competing strands of tinpot Third Worldism will continue to hold sway over the most jingoistic and deluded in MAGA and the DSA respectively. In the unlikely event of a course correction in MAGA or Miami, the city’s neoconservative Latinos would do well to emulate their Mexican-American peers. Aside from a handful of US-based elite Mexicans, most Mexican-Americans — many of whom have lived in the United States for centuries — neither know nor care what goes on politically south of the border; adults of Mexican heritage likewise have one of the highest rates of English proficiency: at 69%, compared 59% of Cubans and 51% of Venezuelans.

Until Miami neocons assimilate into the American polity by renouncing their faith in regime-change wars — and learning English — they will inevitably entangle the rest of us in the petty grievances of America’s Magic City.

We’ve seen other signs of stealth-conflict: a car crash killing two CIA agents in Mexico – who may have been involved in an alleged CIA assassination campaign against cartel operatives; the indictment by US authorities of Sinaloa Gov. Rubén Rocha Moya, a member of Sheinbaum’s Morena party, over alleged drug ties. Finally, the State Department revoked visas in June for Morena Govs. Alfonso Durazo and Américo Villarreal, stating that both were under investigation.

All of this has come amid conflicting statements from Trump officials. Last month, Drug Enforcement Administration head, Terry Cole, claimed that the Mexican government and cartel networks were “one and the same.” Days later, the US ambassador to Mexico, Ronald Johnson, credited Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum for an ongoing crackdown against the cartels, including a nearly 70% reduction in fentanyl flows to the US. Washington and Mexico City now exhibit a two-track relationship: one in which the two countries cooperate closely over security and another in which the White House appears hellbent on weakening the Mexican government. In the new paradigm of Trump II’s bellicose foreign policy, the latter is an ominous sign that Mexico could be the next target of US military intervention.  

Narcocorruption in Mexico is endemic and particularly rampant in failed states like Sinaloa and Tamaulipas. Sinaloa Gov. Rocha Moya, recently indicted by the US, was an alleged ally of the Chapitos faction of the Sinaloa Cartel — so named after loyalists to former kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. In the lead-up to the 2021 gubernatorial election, the cartel kidnapped Rocha Moya’s electoral opponents. In return, the governor has allegedly given the Chapitos forewarning of anti-narcotics operations. He resigned in May following his indictment by US authorities, though the Mexican government seems unlikely to extradite him.

But it is hard to make a case that the Morena party is uniquely tainted. For one thing, virtually all of Sinaloa’s governors in recent decades have had alleged links with the state’s eponymous cartel; in the 1980s, Institutional Revolutionary Party Gov. Antonio Toledo Corro reportedly harbored Guadalajara kingpin Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo in his home after the latter ordered the killing of DEA agent Enrique Camarena.  

Yet the fact that US authorities have selectively and exclusively targeted Morena politicians suggests that the Trump administration’s chief concern is neither good governance nor the drug trade. In May, the investigative think tank InSight Crime compiled a list of the most notorious Mexican officials accused of organized crime. Of the ten officials listed, six were associated with the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), two with the opposition National Action Party (PAN), and only two — including Rocha Moya — with Morena. 

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Sheinbaum, moreover, has rightly noted that Washington has denied all 269 of Mexico’s extradition requests since 2018, including former Tamaulipas governor Francisco Cabeza de Vaca. A dual citizen, Cabeza de Vaca is currently at large in Texas, despite embezzling roughly $300 million in concert with the Gulf Cartel. His affiliation with the Right-wing PAN has led many in Morena to accuse the Trump administration of condoning organized crime by perceived allies. 

Indeed, since 2025, the White House has pardoned or granted clemency to dozens of friendly fraudsters and convicted traffickers, including Chicago’s Gangster Disciples kingpin Larry Hoover and former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez. And the irony is that the first Trump administration arguably viewed AMLO, Sheinbaum’s mentor and predecessor, as a strategic ally. Officials such as former Organization of American States ambassador Carlos Trujillo lauded Mexican cooperation over trade and immigration, stressing shared interests and ideological pragmatism between both countries.  

Trump I shockingly condoned record-low drug seizures under AMLO, following the dissolution and replacement of Mexico’s Federal Police with the military National Guard in 2019. In his first term, the US president similarly heeded López Obrador’s counsel against designating Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations and dropped trafficking charges against Mexican Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos. And while Trump I also denied all of AMLO’s extradition requests, it nonetheless prosecuted former opposition party PRI and PAN officials such as former Security Minister Genaro García Luna and Nayarit Attorney General Edgar Veytia.

In contrast, it’s clear that the more interventionist — and Miami-influenced — Trump II no longer regards Mexico as an ally; in June, López Obrador went as far as to pen an open letter to his erstwhile friend, writing: “For the good of all, bring back the old Trump.” Even as Sheinbaum has deepened cooperation with Washington on immigration and security, much of the GOP is now virulently hostile to the Leftist president and her party. Many Republicans sincerely believe that Sheinbaum was “installed” by the cartels. Others, such as Miami neocon Carlos Gimenez, believe that Mexico is a “narcocommunist dictatorship” — a view shared by parts of the Mexican opposition.

Trump and MAGA hardliners have repeatedly called for strikes inside Mexico — a prospect that Sheinbaum has rebuffed. In one of many occasions in which Trump has referred to strikes, he gloated: “That [sounds] like a war. Would I do it? I’d be proud to.” And the White House strategy of punishing Leftists and elevating conservatives, deployed in other Latin American countries, appears to now include Mexico as well. Last year, Trump sanctioned and tariffed Brazil over its Supreme Court trial of former Right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro. In May, the State Department revoked visas for five board members of Costa Rican newspaper La Nación over its criticisms of the Trump-aligned government.   

Of course, unlike other Latin American countries, Mexico shares a border with the US and is the country’s largest trade partner. In the event of military action, the Mexican government could simultaneously close the border to roughly $1 trillion in trade and flood it with migrants by removing visa requirements on Cubans and Venezuelans. Given ongoing catastrophes in both countries, it is likely that millions of migrants would subsequently undo Trump’s signature accomplishment of slashing illegal crossings. Never mind the likely Mexican refugees fleeing US ordnance.  

Unlike the unpopular Trump, moreover, Sheinbaum has her country’s support: her approval rating has hovered around 70%, giving her a better chance of weathering a protracted standoff with Washington. Viewed in this light, US lawfare against Morena politicians can be read as an effort to weaken the Mexican government ahead of an eventual conflict, diplomatic or military or both.

In the case of Sinaloa, the White House’s actions have tragically worsened security — a key reason why previous administrations avoided indicting incumbent governors. Following the arrests of Sinaloa kingpins Ovidio Guzmán, Joaquín Guzmán and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, the cartel has split between Guzmán and Mayo loyalists. With the Chapitos-and-Guzmán-allied Rocha Moya out, the Mayos have exploited the power vacuum to settle scores. Local journalist Luis Armando Becerra, a native of Culiacán in Sinaloa, told me that while he found the US indictments to be credible, officials “failed to consider its effects on local security.” 

The Trump administration now appears to be taking a subtler approach toward Morena officials. Despite having their visas revoked, Govs. Durazo of Sonora and Villarreal of Tamaulipas, as well as Gov. Marina del Pilar of Baja California, whose visa was revoked in 2025, have traveled to the US under a parole program reserved for informants. In July, a leaked phone call between Del Pilar and a purported FBI intermediary showed the governor offering to cooperate with US authorities.

It’s unclear whether US officials plan on indicting any of the aforementioned governors. Del Pilar is known to have associated with traffickers through her ex-husband; while plausible, Durazo and Villarreal’s alleged links to organized crime have yet to be substantiated. More likely is that the Trump administration aims to gather testimony for a bigger indictment; another possibility is that it is trying to co-opt governors it views as politically or geographically strategic. 

Much of the Mexican opposition believes that Washington aims to indict López Obrador, arguing that his son’s lavish lifestyle is a sign of drug money; the State Department has yet to give a motive for revoking the younger López’s visa. The DEA, however, has long attempted to substantiate alleged links between AMLO and the cartels — to no avail. In 2024, ProPublica revealed that the agency investigated claims that traffickers funneled $2 million into López Obrador’s 2006 presidential campaign, but couldn’t prove whether the former president “sanctioned or even knew of the traffickers’ reported donations.” Subsequent attempts to incriminate AMLO based on testimony from kingpins have failed to bear fruit.

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Alternatively, the Trump administration has shown a keen geographic interest in the US-Mexico border; Morena Govs. Del Pilar, Durazo and Villarreal control states neighboring Texas, Arizona, and California. The remaining border states of Nuevo León, Coahuila and Chihuahua are run by opposition governors, whom the White House likely sees as allies. Unlike Del Pilar, Nuevo León governor Samuel García has yet to face scrutiny from Washington despite comparable familial ties to traffickers. 

Indeed, the April deaths of two CIA officers were in the PAN-governed border state of Chihuahua. The two officers were found to have entered Mexico illegally with the blessing of embattled Chihuahua Gov. Maru Campos. Despite being nearly suspended from office over the incident, Campos subsequently authorized a joint surveillance hub with US agencies in Ciudad Juárez. US lawfare against Morena governors may ultimately be aimed at safeguarding CIA operations along the border — including its alleged assassinations of cartel members.

And yet, Sheinbaum’s government is arguably the most cooperative and competent Mexican partner that Washington has ever dealt with on security. The president and her security minister Omar García Harfuch have overseen a remarkable crackdown against organized crime, prioritizing mid-level cartel members in tandem with kingpins in addition to a policy of mass incarceration. 

Outside of Sinaloa, Sheinbaum’s strategy has managed to limit infighting within and between cartels following decapitations of kingpins such as Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) head Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera. Authorities quashed subsequent retaliations throughout the country within 72 hours. Just days after DEA head Cole’s comments regarding the Mexican government, Security Minister Harfuch thanked the DEA for its help arresting fugitive Janero Van Demario Garrett for cocaine trafficking.

Fentanyl seizures south of the border have risen to record highs while seizures north of the border have plummeted to record lows. Mexico has also illegally extradited nearly 200 kingpins to the US. Government figures point to a record 50% reduction in homicides across the country, with independent analyses putting the figure closer to a nonetheless historic 20%. Sheinbaum and Harfuch have even prosecuted more than 60 local officials with ties to organized crime, including from Morena. The charitable reading of White House pressure is that it has given the president cover to make difficult but welcome changes; last year, Sheinbaum reportedly forced the resignation of Mexico’s spectacularly corrupt attorney general, Alejandro Gertz.

Yet the sad reality is that neither Trump nor MAGA care about concrete results on security. And so long as millions of Americans remain addicted to illicit drugs, no amount of bombs will make a difference to the logic of the drug trade. Instead, the Trump administration would do well to continue aiding Mexican efforts at incarcerating violent criminals; it could also explore a program of mandatory institutionalization and rehabilitation for public drug abuse at home.

However, if success is selling televised, performative “wins” to supporters, the picture changes. In Mexico’s case, that could mean dropping missiles on alleged “narcoterrorists,” never mind the roughly 25 million Americans who visit Mexico each year, the 1.6 million US citizens who call the country home, and the likelihood of setting off a costly and indefinite endeavor with untold blowback for civilians in both countries.

The hallmark of a forever war entails a nebulous objective against an irregular actor on an open-ended timeline. In every way, the MAGA pipe dream of cartel wars in Mexico fits this description — and the groundwork is being laid.

Some analysts suspect that Morocco’s sudden lapse in enforcement may be in response to deepening ties between Spain and Algeria — the latter alleged to have sponsored Sahrawi separatists in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara. In 2021, Morocco similarly waved through some 8,000 migrants to punish Madrid for hosting a Sahrawi leader. But a related — more insidious — reason for the latest breach is that Rabat is leveraging an increasingly close relationship with the Trump administration and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel.

MAGA has branded Spain Public Enemy No. 1 over its government’s strident posture towards the US and Israel during the Iran war. The socialist government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has refused to allow Washington access to its Rota and Morón military bases, its consistent failure to meet Nato defense-spending targets also fueling MAGA ire. In March, the center-right American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin wrote a policy brief calling on the White House to formally recognize Ceuta and Melilla as occupied Moroccan territory. True to the spirit of Third-World decolonialism, Rubin wrote that Spain was “a colonial power running colonies across the Strait of Gibraltar”.

Within days, neoconservative congressman Mario Díaz-Balart had entoned Fidel Castro, stating that the enclaves were “not in the geographic territory of Spain” and should be “established, negotiated, and discussed between friends and allies”. Similarly, Reuters reported in April that a Pentagon email outlined options against Spain, including Nato suspension; the treaty states explicitly in Article 6 that territories in continental Africa are exempt from collective defense obligations.

For its part, Rabat has since transformed into a vital partner of Washington and Tel Aviv under the Trump-brokered Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states, including Morocco, in 2020. Ironically, Rabat proceeded to leverage the development in the service of its own expansionist aims, with the first Trump administration recognizing Rabat’s sovereignty over Western Sahara.

The dispute over Western Sahara traces back to Spain’s 1975 withdrawal from what was then called Spanish Sahara. Under the Madrid Accords, Spain handed administration of the territory to Morocco and Mauritania; Mauritania withdrew from its share in 1979 after heavy losses to Sahrawi guerrillas. A 16-year war followed, pitting Moroccan forces against the so-called Polisario Front. Rabat eventually built an extensive sand wall — fortified with landmines and troops — partitioning the territory. In November 2020, Moroccan troops entered the UN-patrolled buffer zone to disperse Sahrawi protesters, prompting the Polisario to declare an end to the three-decade truce and a return to armed struggle. The two sides have since traded sporadic strikes along the sand wall.

Rabat has since made inroads on virtually every diplomatic front. Following normalization through the Abraham Accords, Morocco signed a security agreement with Israel in 2021, proving vital for the conflict in Western Sahara; in January, the two nations signed an additional joint military work plan. Then, in February, secret talks chaired by the US brought Moroccan, Algerian, Mauritanian, and Polisario delegations together for the first time since 2019.

In true Trumpian fashion, Morocco announced on Monday that it was naming the Dakhla-Tiznit highway, which runs through Western Sahara, after the US President. Ecstatic, Trump exclaimed on Truth Social: “Thank you to Highly Respected Mohammed VI, the King of Morocco — Such a Great Honor! I look forward to traveling the entire length of this Great Highway someday, hopefully soon!”.

All of this comes as a royal headache for Sánchez ahead of a general election in 2027. His record of raising wages and opposing US and Israeli war crimes has boosted his standing both at home and abroad. Yet a slew of corruption scandals, and a lax immigration policy, have seen his party, PSOE, as well as allies in Sumar and Podemos, consistently trail the Right-wingers of Vox and the People’s Party (PP) in polls.

In recent years, the bulk of low-skilled immigration to Spain has overwhelmingly come from Spanish-speaking Latin America. As a result, negative attitudes towards immigration are rather less pronounced in Spain than other European countries. At the same time, though, Spaniards overwhelmingly oppose illegal migration — especially from Arab and Subsaharan African countries.

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In January, Sánchez’s government issued a blanket amnesty for virtually all illegal immigrants living in Spain. The move, while laudable for granting labor rights to millions of workers, provoked an outcry, with roughly 60% of Spaniards expressing disapproval. Barring overwhelming enforcement on new arrivals, the issue with any such move is that it inevitably incentivizes further illegal immigration.

Sánchez now faces a quandary: clamp down in Ceuta and risk alienating affluent progressives in his coalition, or do little and suffer at the hands of the Spanish Right and the broader public. The former, naturally, is the sounder course. There is, moreover, room for the Prime Minister to maneuver geopolitically while outflanking the progressive Sumar and Podemos’ fantasies of an open-border utopia. After all, Sánchez can credibly accuse Morocco of acting at the behest of the US and Israel against a Nato member. At the same time, he could make a case in favor of overwhelming enforcement against illegal immigration precisely because of the March amnesty.

There is some reason to think that Spain’s famously sly Prime Minister could opt for just such a path, particularly as support for Sumar has collapsed from roughly 13% to 6%, and with Podemos in the doldrums too. The Socialist leader has defied the odds at consecutive elections, favoring high-stakes gambits against his Right-wing adversaries. Nonetheless, the PSOE and its allies have consistently failed to win more voters than the PP and Vox, instead relying on minor, regional parties to govern.

As both Denmark’s and Slovakia’s Social Democrats have shown, the key to Leftist success rests largely on a tough but humane immigration policy. In the wake of the surge in Ceuta, a member of PSOE’s youth wing made a surprisingly sensible plea. “The truth is, I hope this crisis pushes the PSOE to look at the immigration policies of its Northern European sister parties and realize it’s time to move away from what I see as an open-borders approach influenced by the more radical left,” they wrote. “That means protecting those who genuinely need asylum, maintaining secure borders, and avoiding mass regularizations.”

In the two decades since the film’s release, Left-of-center politics has inculcated millions of young Americans — me included — in the belief that climate change poses an existential crisis. In the documentary, Gore himself used the false analogy of a slow-boiled frog to describe societal complacency in the face of supposedly impending doom. “It takes a sudden jolt sometimes before we become aware of a danger,” intoned Gore, “If it seems gradual, we are capable of not reacting.”

Over time, the routine abuse of this philosophy made me question core tenets of the climate movement, most notably the supposed threat of imminent apocalypse. In no uncertain terms, many of its followers adhere to a quasi-religious cult: climate fundamentalism. Like related iterations of cultural progressivism, climate fundamentalism distorts facts, disregards progress, and prescribes self-defeating policies in the service of deliberately nebulous and unrealistic goals.

Many of An Inconvenient Truth’s most alarmist claims turned out to be wildly inaccurate. In 2007, Britain’s High Court of Justice found nine scientific errors that would need to come accompanied with pertinent explanations from instructors should they wish to screen the film in schools. Twenty years on, the peaks of Kilimanjaro remain snowcapped, Glacier National Park features glaciers year round, and Florida’s coastline is largely unchanged. Even in the worst of cases, Gore’s prediction of a sunken Sunshine State would take more than a millennium to become reality.

To be sure, the film’s broad explanation of manmade climate change and associated negative consequences were mostly well substantiated. A historic heat wave in Europe has reportedly contributed to thousands of excess deaths since June; flooding in my native Florida and wildfires in California are both increasingly frequent and severe. The question to ask, however, is whether any of these phenomena — and climate change more generally — constitute a terminal risk to humanity. 

Former President Joe Biden certainly thought so. In 2023, he stated: “the only existential threat humanity faces even more frightening than a nuclear war is global warming going above 1.5 degrees in the next 20 to 10 years.” The issue, of course, is that Biden’s assertion was patently incorrect. In human terms, climate change — unlike nuclear war — is a gradual process. Treating it otherwise is both counterproductive and obscures rational, commonsense measures that would otherwise mitigate negative consequences for the global poor and working classes. Expanding wind, solar, geothermal, and nuclear power can help limit warming in the long run. 

Yet a 1.5-degree-centigrade increase in the Earth’s average temperature won’t extinguish humanity. Anyway, it’s a virtual certainty by 2040, barring an unlikely breakthrough in carbon capture technology. In turn, local, regional, and national governments will continue to funnel resources toward dams, levees, desalination plants, wildfire mitigation, tree cover, and air conditioning.  

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Much of the Middle East’s current population of more than 500 million would be unviable without current household rates of air conditioning (about 90% in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar) and existing desalination plants, some of which have been targeted in the region’s ongoing conflict. The obvious solution to saving lives from European heat waves is to emulate other high-latitude peers like Japan and South Korea and expand the continent’s meager AC coverage. Yet opposition to such proposals has come from none other than climate fundamentalists. 

In Britain, the ostensibly populist Green Party opposes AC expansion on the grounds that cooler homes would produce more fossil fuel emissions. In France, Leftist standard-bearer Jean-Luc Mélenchon told Le Monde in June, “we must absolutely not install air conditioning everywhere; that would only make things worse.” Never mind the fact that only about 5% of France’s energy consumption consists of fossil fuels. 

For those of us committed to a practical, state-led energy transition, France’s eminence in nuclear power stands as a model to follow. Between 1975 and 1990, when renewables were wildly unreliable and far from cost-effective, the country built more than 50 nuclear reactors, achieving near-total energy independence and creating more than 200,000 jobs to boot. But, for decades, climate fundamentalists were among the most rabid opponents of nuclear power on account of exaggerated environmental and societal risks from nuclear waste and potential accidents. 

In Germany, the “climate-conscious” establishment Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, and, especially, the Greens completed a total liquidation of the country’s existing nuclear plants by 2023. In addition to deepening dependence on natural gas from Russia and the United States, the phase-out predictably boosted the use of coal, oil, and natural gas, which currently account for 60% of primary energy consumption. The same year, the celebrity degrowth quadrumvirate of Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ralph Lauren, and RFK Jr. spearheaded a campaign that successfully closed New York’s Indian Point Power Plant. Just so, the state has since made up the energy shortfall with natural gas.

Climate fundamentalism’s self-destructiveness is by no means limited to developed countries. In Chile, efforts by then-President Gabriel Boric to promote lithium extraction were stalled by activists who accused the progressive leader of “greenwashing.” Aiming to avert a supposed “desertification” of Colombia, Leftist president Gustavo Petro halted all novel oil exploration, despite the fact that the country produces virtually no fossil-fuel emissions. Finally, in Brazil, foreign and domestic NGOs have sabotaged efforts to pave dirt roads in the Amazon on the grounds that better infrastructure will lead to increased deforestation. Never mind the fact that deforestation under President Lula Da Silva has fallen near an all-time low.

For all of its faults, An Inconvenient Truth committed a laudable if heretical act by the standards of modern climate fundamentalism: it acknowledged progress. In it, Gore celebrated collective action that reversed the hollowing of the ozone by phasing out harmful chemicals in aerosols. But when it comes to the ongoing energy transition away from fossil fuels, yet another tenet of climate fundamentalism is that any and all progress — however significant — must be played down, if not ignored outright.

In reality, much of the developed and even the developing world have made great strides since the premiere of An Inconvenient Truth. In Europe, total emissions have fallen in half since 2006. Despite Germany’s nuclear self-sabotage, non-fossil fuels currently account for roughly 70% of total energy production. And while much of the Continent’s total consumption is still reliant on fossil-fuel imports, reforestation — and, consequently, CO2 absorption — since 1990 has expanded forest cover to around 35% of Europe’s total land area.

In Latin America, CO2 emissions have remained stagnant since 2000, despite the fact that the region’s population has increased to 672 million in that period, up from 500 million. In the same period, deforestation in Brazil has fallen by over 80%. Even during the four-year period of state-sponsored land grabs and slash-and-burn agriculture of the Right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, deforestation was still around half the rate prior to 2005.

Then there is China. Historic breakthroughs in renewables, electric vehicles, and nuclear power will see the Asian titan replace much of its still-coal-dependent grid within the coming decades. The Middle Kingdom’s overwhelming dominance in exporting both solar panels and EVs is likely to power an energy transition throughout much of the developing world.

Progress has even been made in gas-guzzling America, where CO2 emissions have fallen to 4.9 billion tonnes in 2024, down from 6.1 billion in 2007. And while renewables continue to make up a growing share of the country’s energy matrix, the reality is that the bulk of this decline is a result of the shale boom replacing coal with far cleaner natural gas. Make any of this known to climate fundamentalists, and they will instinctively counter that any and all anti-apocalyptic evidence is “denialist” and funded by the fossil-fuel lobby.   

Put another way: the correct course, in the view of the climate fundamentalists, is to deny, delay, and roll back as many fossil fuels as possible regardless of the effect on the working class. Higher taxes on gas sales, restrictions on oil and gas production, and overreliance on renewables in Democratic states have led to exorbitant energy costs, even at times when gas prices nationally are low. Yet the fundamentalists won’t relent. Writing on X, as The Lever cofounder David Sirota described Biden’s reluctance to go beyond shutting down the Keystone XL Pipeline and the shale boom under Barack Obama as a “crime against humanity.” (This, even though the latter brought about 700,000 jobs and a decline in emissions.)  

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There is a better way for those of us interested both in pro-worker politics and a realistic energy transition.

Socialist mavericks like the Canadian journalist Leigh Phillips, Syracuse University professor Matt Huber, former German Left party MP Sahra Wagenknecht, and the now-defunct publication The Liberal Patriot have argued that concerns over climate change cannot come at the expense of workers and ordinary consumers. Putting pressure on working-class consumption only helps to elect the far Right. 

Yet heterodox Leftists like Huber have been excoriated by fundamentalists for daring to question core tenets of the climate movement. Huber made the commonsense argument that Democrats would do better to restore much-needed credibility with non-college voters as opposed to virtue signaling over climate. Writing in The New York Times, he opined: “American voters broadly agree that climate change is a real concern and support addressing it, but they largely do not see it as a top priority. The Pew Research Center routinely asks Americans to rank their top concerns and climate change is consistently near the bottom.” That made Huber the hated “main character” in the progressive corners of social media for the better part of a week.

None of this is to exonerate the Right and, especially, the Republican Party for their fanatical opposition to renewables. In the same way that climate fundamentalists scoffed at Americans’ pain at the pump post-Covid, the Trump administration gutted much of the Biden administration’s subsidies for renewable energy amid spiraling energy prices from the AI boom. Then, in February, the White House launched the ongoing Iran War, causing oil prices to spike.

Democrats are right to point out that renewable tech in solar, wind, and battery storage is increasingly cost-competitive and viable for solving renewables’ short-term intermittency. At the same time, batteries remain impractical for mitigating long-term intermittency, meaning that fossil fuels and nuclear still have a role to play in maintaining stable and abundant energy — and employing millions of workers. Much to their credit, climate activists from across the political spectrum, including the fundamentalists of the 2010s like Greta Thunberg, have since warmed to nuclear power, which is currently experiencing a relative global renaissance. 

Anthropogenic climate change is quite real and worthy of collective action. By all means, states should continue to drive innovation and investment in improvements to renewables and nuclear energy. Al Gore, then, sowed the seeds of an inconvenient and self-defeating cult. His fundamentalist successors would do well to reassess the myriad ways in which they’ve contributed to their own discredit.

Above all, de la Espriella is more or less Colombia’s answer to Argentina’s Right-wing populist President Javier Milei: bombastic, cartoonishly subservient to US power, wont to break but not to build. His victory is a testament to Colombian progressives’ folly in adopting the climate, security, and identity politics of the Western Left.

Much like President Trump, de la Espriella fits the Right-wing archetype of the outsider businessman, complete with allegedly dubious deals and flamboyant self-promotion. In the Colombian’s case, the millions came from his legal firm and his extracurriculars include recording music videos and shamelessly promoting self-branded luxury goods on his eponymous podcast.

De la Espriella has been derided as el abogado de la mafia, “the mob’s attorney,” for representing clients like Colombian narco-paramilitary warlord Salvatore Mancuso and Colombia’s former President Álvaro Uribe (2002 – 2010). The most consequential is Uribe, who is alleged to have run death camps with Mancuso’s United Self Defense Forces of Colombia, racking up thousands of civilian casualties while conducting war against FARC, the Left-wing guerillas-cum-drug dealers. De la Espriella previously made the unrealistic promise to nominate Uribe as his vice president. For his part Mancuso, who served time in the United States for drug trafficking, claimed in 2025 that he and de la Espriella were childhood friends.

As an attorney, de la Espriella also represented Colombian-Venezuelan businessman Alex Saab between 2014 and 2019, long after the latter’s ties to the former Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro were well known. On May 19, Saab was extradited to the United States for allegedly laundering $350 million via American banks for the Maduro regime. Days later, the Colombian journalist Daniel Coronell published documents showing that de la Espriella received almost $400,000 in illicit funds from Saab’s companies.  

In his own words, de la Espriella’s international role models are Trump, Argentina’s Javier Milei, and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. From Bukele, de la Espriella has borrowed his appearance — the two men look remarkably similar — and his hard-line security policies. But by far, his greatest influence is Milei, who anthropomorphizes himself as a lion in accordance with libertarian social Darwinism. In the same vein, de la Espriella styles himself El Tigre, often engaging in song and dance with AI-generated felines at his rallies.

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Like Milei, de la Espriella professed elite libertarian views before launching his presidential bid. Up until recently, his market fundamentalism came paired with vocal support for euthanasia, abortion, and adoption by same sex couples. The issue, of course, is that this combination of progressive social views and market worship is repellent to the working class. De la Espriella now claims that he evolved on these issues, exalting the traditional family and calling abortion “an abomination.”

More dubious still is his conversion from godless globalist to a Catholic patriot. In 2017, de la Espriella stated in an interview that he denied the existence of anything that reason can’t explain. When asked why he married his wife through the Catholic Church, he replied, “We all commit foolishness and stupidities for love.” In the same vein, the millionaire attorney is a tri-citizen of Colombia, Italy, and the United States, and lived abroad in Florence and Miami for at least a decade prior to his campaign.

Recognizing these vulnerabilities, de la Espriella now claims that he found God in 2020 following his aunt’s death from Covid, though pre-campaign evidence of his religiosity is scant. Now, the president-elect champions Christian nationalism and has adopted the slogan Firme por la patria — “firm for the fatherland.”

In practice, this firmness seems to involve a great deal of deference to Washington — or rather, southern Florida’s Trump World. This month, de la Espriella stated that he voted for Trump and is a registered Republican in the United States. He has also celebrated the White House’s extrajudicial killings of alleged “narco-terrorists” near Colombian waters, though none of the victims have been proven to have engaged in drug trafficking. Undaunted, de la Espriella has gone so far as to say that he would welcome US strikes inside Colombia.

Much of this explains why de la Espriella’s victory was so slim. Petro, moreover, will leave office as the most popular Colombian leader since Uribe. After spending much of his term mired in telenovela-esque scandal and identitarian excesses, Petro engineered a stunning turnaround that saw his approval ratings recover to nearly 50%.       

In 2024, the administration passed a pension reform expanding coverage for almost 14 million Colombians, including some 3 million seniors living in extreme poverty. Petro also restituted around 1 million out of a total of 3 million hectares for victims displaced by guerrilla conflict. Jhon, an ex-soldier and displaced person from rural Tolima, told me that his hometown had since flourished thanks to government investment, including improved infrastructure and rural health care. “People are growing coffee and bananas again,” he said.

The Petro administration also passed a historic labor reform, reducing the workweek to 42 hours and restoring workers’ rights and benefits that were previously cut by Uribe. Workers now receive overtime worth an additional 35% of wages after 7 p.m., as opposed to 9 p.m. previously, in addition to 90% overtime on weekends and holidays in 2026, set to rise to 100% next year. Additionally, the government has raised the minimum wage around 40% in real terms since 2022, including an unprecedented 23% hike for 2026. Contrary to scaremongering about job losses and “Venezuelization,” poverty and unemployment have fallen to record lows. 

So why, then, did so many Colombians vote for a politician who can only be described as a MAGA-Miami asset? 

The answer is that Petro’s pro-worker turn proved too little, too late. In recent years, much of the Latin-American Left has taken to the activist-academic progressivism of the Western Left, which largely appeals only to credentialed cosmopolitans. Cepeda’s margins with working-class Colombians fell decisively relative to Petro in 2022. Supporters will inevitably fixate on de la Espriella’s surge among fickle, middle-class voters, but this ignores serious failings of policy by the Leftist establishment.  

Colombia produces virtually no fossil-fuel emissions, yet Petro halted all novel oil exploration under the pretense that humanity has 12 years to avoid extinction from climate change. Around half of government revenue derives from the sale of petroleum, most of which comes from the state firm Ecopetrol. Yet Petro resolved to destroy Ecopetrol, whose revenue collapsed by more than half during his term. Up until 2025, Colombia was wracked with stagflation — low growth, high inflation — a predictable consequence of the government’s energy sabotage. 

Catastrophically, Cepeda’s campaign remained committed to the outgoing president’s climate fundamentalism, despite a spiraling energy crisis. In a show of sheer stupidity, Petro and Cepeda put Ecopetrol’s union in the impossible position of choosing between labor rights and the promise of renewed exploration under de la Espriella. To his credit, the president-elect has committed to a commonsense, all-of-the-above strategy that includes fracking (which Petro has described — try not to roll your eyes — as a “crime against humanity”).

Security was also a top concern among Colombians. When it came to tackling common crime, particularly in urban areas, Petro has embraced “criminal-justice reform” of the kind that has hobbled cities run by Democrats the world over. His government attempted — and thankfully failed — to reduce prison sentences for crimes like murder. He also condemned building prisons for fear of perpetuating “mass incarceration.”

Asked by a youth influencer about how he would respond to someone breaking into his own home, Petro waxed philosophical on criminals as victims of society. In contrast, de la Espriella has promised to build mega-prisons modeled on Bukele’s in El Salvador.

Dealing with the militarized cartels, guerrillas, and Right-wing paramilitaries that dominate parts of the Colombian countryside is a different matter, however. Petro’s record on this front, while poor, is roughly comparable to that of his post-Uribe predecessors. Since 2022, Colombia’s high national homicide rate, about 25 per 100,000, has remained stable. While cocaine production has soared to a record high, critics omit that production has risen consistently since 2012. Accordingly, Petro has seized record amounts of the drug.

In contrast, Petro’s “Total Peace” initiative — negotiating peace deals or terms of surrender with multiple armed groups simultaneously — has created more problems. In May, infighting within a FARC splinter group led to nearly 50 dead in the Colombian Amazon. The competing factions were allegedly torn between guerrillas interested in negotiating with Petro and others keen on exploiting illicit economies.

Norberto, a schoolteacher and de la Espriella supporter, told me he wasn’t opposed in principle to talks with armed groups but felt that Petro lacked an iron fist and follow-through during negotiations. Indeed, the architect of Total Peace was none other than Cepeda, Petro’s heir and would-be successor, who doggedly refused to explain what, if any, changes he would make to the policy as president. Then again, de la Espriella’s promises of mass bombings, perhaps conducted by Washington, are unlikely to meaningfully improve security in the countryside; Petro’s predecessor, Iván Duque, tried a similar strategy with mixed results. 

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More broadly, the problem with the president-elect’s promise to imitate Bukele on law and order, is that Colombian courts, unlike their Salvadoran counterparts, are unlikely to tolerate an indefinite suspension of due process. Even then, the example of Noboa’s Ecuador shows that autocratic methods may still prove insufficient against militarized cartels as opposed to simple street gangs; de la Espriella himself has noted that Colombia’s drone-specialized armed groups are far better-equipped than El Salvador’s street gangs.

Colombians have taken a gamble on de la Espriella. Yet — as with Petro — they are likely to be disappointed. Indeed, it is likely that Colombia will descend into mass unrest by year’s end. Like his Right-wing peers elsewhere in the region, the president-elect is enamored with Milei’s “chainsaw austerity,” which he aims to enact via a Trumpian executive decree. Promises to privatize all state companies and slash 40% of public employees are certain to deliver mass protests identical to those in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Chile.

The saddest part about the president-elect’s market fundamentalism is that — unlike with the cartoonishly mismanaged Argentina — there simply is no case for mass cuts in Colombia. The Andean nation’s debt-to-GDP is just 60%, compared to Argentina’s whopping more than 150% in 2023. Colombia’s deficit is admittedly high at more than 6%, yet critics neglect that mass cuts would kill economic growth, thereby increasing total debt. Much like Petro’s dogmatic capture on climate change, de la Espriella is equally captured by a fanatical hatred of public services; ironically, the bulk of Colombian public employees form part of the country’s desperately needed armed forces.

There is a painful lesson here for the Latin-American Left. Mexico’s Morena under Presidents AMLO and Claudia Sheinbaum remains the only ruling party Left-of-center in the region to have won re-election since 2020. Sheinbaum, a climate scientist, has championed the state oil firm Pemex and even pushed to expand fracking in tandem with renewables. And contrary to her image as a progressive heroine, the Mexican president and her hard-line security minister, Omar García Harfuch, have tripled Mexico’s incarceration rate, leading to a historic reduction in homicides. Wage hikes have likewise been steeper in Mexico.

Until Left and Right can get it into their heads that voters despise their respective groupthink — on climate change, crime, market fundamentalism, and worship of foreign interests — they will continue to alternate power in the most destructive manner possible. It remains to be seen whether de la Espriella and the current crop of Right-wingers in the Americas stave off a bloodbath in the next wave of elections. 

The symbolism of the Venezuelan exfiltration op, on the anniversary of Noriega’s surrender, speaks volumes about the Trump administration’s thinking on Venezuela. The conclusion of Operation Just Cause in 1990 delivered a rare success in US-imposed regime change: Panama has since emerged as a vibrant democracy. The same may not be true of Venezuela.

As of this writing, the exact circumstances of Maduro’s capture remain unclear. Members of the Venezuelan opposition claim that the arrest was negotiated with the regime, implying that some of the dictator’s underlings turned against him. Asked at a news conference whether opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado would take power, Trump replied: “They have a vice president, y’know?” and suggested that Machado lacks the popular “respect” needed to govern. But he later implied in an address that Washington would oversee a regime transition and run Venezuela’s oil industry.

A Panamanian scenario the White House might be considering is one in which Vice President Delcy Rodríguez will call for free and fair elections, as a result of which some other figure — perhaps Edmundo Gonzalez, who ran in Machado’s place in 2024’s stolen vote — assumes the presidency. Another alternative is that Maduro’s regime remains largely in place, with Rodríguez and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello kowtowing to Trump’s oil and deportation demands.

Then there are the dangerous scenarios. Infighting between regime loyalists and the opposition could provoke a prolonged conflict akin to the guerrilla battles and terrorism that racked neighboring Colombia for decades. Even if Venezuela avoids outright state collapse as in Libya or Haiti, Marxist guerrillas and other pro-regime elements are likely to wage an insurgency against an opposition government.

Maduro’s regime is unlikely to survive if Trump follows through on his threats of further strikes should the remnant junta not meet his demands. Opposition from the Venezuelan military and guerrilla proxies could prove resilient to US air strikes, with Rodríguez stating she intends to retain power (though it is possible that she maintains a more pro-American posture than her ex-boss, Maduro). The White House has also shown a reluctance to put boots on the ground. Trump, however, has floated the prospect of funding American support — perhaps even an occupation — through the appropriation of Venezuelan oil.

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To be fair to Venezuelans, and Miami neoconservatives like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, it’s plausible that Maduro’s ouster could prove a modest success. A good indicator of a country’s prospects of returning to democracy is a past history of electing and peacefully transferring power. Unlike Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, or Syria, Venezuela had a relatively strong tradition of continuous (if flawed) democratic government before Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, took power in 1999.

Despite years of repression and a grievous humanitarian crisis, Venezuelan civil society remains vibrant. Numerous polls have suggested that majorities in the diaspora are willing to repatriate to a post-Maduro government. Cheering crowds have erupted throughout the country in scenes reminiscent of Saddam Hussein’s downfall in Iraq.

There’s likewise cause to believe that many within the regime voted for the opposition in the 2024 election. For all of his faults, Chavez was an effective populist, in that he always valued his regime’s legitimacy via popular will, expressed at the ballot box. While deeply corrupt, the Leftist icon won all four of his elections fairly and by large margins. This fact brought him to the short-sighted conclusion that his regime could only fall thanks to fraud by his elitist opponents. His government thus instituted a seemingly foolproof electoral process, whereby all participants signed and received electoral tallies with unique QR codes from electronic voting machines.

In 2024, it was these tallies, courageously collected and uploaded by the Venezuelan opposition, that corroborated a likely 40-point victory by Maduro’s opponent, Gonzalez. In the wake of more than 10 years of mass killings, torture, mismanagement, opposition own goals, sanctions. and US-backed coup attempts, Chavez’s regime lost all claims to popular legitimacy under his successor, Maduro. If a future opposition government can retain the loyalty of the armed forces, it’s more likely that a guerrilla insurgency could be contained; elected leaders could then begin to rebuild the institutions that Chavismo destroyed.

Yet there’s enough reason to doubt a happy ending in Venezuela. It may not be possible to ensure a stable opposition government without lasting support from the US military. Unlike Noriega, Maduro’s regime never exercised a true monopoly of force. Rather, it achieved relative peace in recent years by cutting deals with various armed groups on a case-by-case basis. Thousands of guerrillas from the Colombian National Liberation Army, known as the ELN, and FARC dissidents control vast swaths of the country, particularly along the Colombian-Venezuelan border. Both groups have pledged to defend the regime’s “Bolivarian Revolution” and have decades of experience combating security forces, sabotaging vital infrastructure, and conducting acts of terror.

The best model for a guerrilla insurgency in Venezuela comes from the height of Colombia’s Armed Conflict at the end of the 20th century. During the 1980s, ’90s and early aughts, guerrillas and drug cartels conducted hundreds of car bombings, massacred civilians, and even captured the Palace of Justice in the heart of Bogotá. Colombia, however, avoided the kind of economic collapse and inflationary chaos seen recently in Venezuela and has a highly sophisticated military, hardened by more than 60 years of experience in counterinsurgency tactics. Venezuela, by contrast, has an undisciplined and profoundly corrupt military, armed with mostly outdated equipment.

It’s possible and even likely, moreover, that elements within the Venezuelan military will refuse to lay down their arms and carve out fiefdoms in conjunction with criminal and insurgent groups. Even in Panama, it took months to completely quash Noriega loyalists after his surrender, despite the presence of some 27,000 American troops.

Venezuela has more than 10 times the area and six times the population as Panama. In practice, the regime built by Chavez, a colonel, was a military dictatorship akin to Noriega’s and other US-backed regimes in the Americas. Thus, the military is the most decisive facet of the country’s future, with or without Maduro. The regime has more than 500 generals, the most of any country in the world and a means for dividing spoils and coup-proofing its leadership. Any successor to Maduro will confront 500 problems in attempting to extricate the military from its criminal rackets.

The regime’s relative security in recent years via mass repression and symbiosis with armed groups also saw the country’s homicide rate fall to 26 per 100,000 last year, down from 90 per 100,000 in 2016. A power vacuum could portend an explosion in violence amid a truly failed state carved up by various factions. Unlike Panama in 1990, Venezuela has been teetering on the verge of failed-state status since the price of its bulk commodity, oil, first collapsed in 2014. Its economy is roughly four times smaller than what it was during the aughts and is the third most corrupt on the planet after Somalia and South Sudan.

Against this backdrop, nation building will be a tall order.

Whatever is in the cards for Venezuela’s future, the Trump administration should remember its campaign promises and avoid dragging Washington into another forever war, this time in America’s own backyard. Even if chaos doesn’t trigger a mass exodus of refugees, a prolonged military presence will necessarily boost legal immigration, thanks to chain migration through military personnel marrying locals. For all its talk of restoring an American arcadia by way of 100 million deportations, the administration itself has halted deportation flights to Venezuela by repeatedly closing the country’s airspace.

Maduro’s ouster also has significant geopolitical implications. Hours before his capture, the dictator met with a special envoy from Chinese President Xi Jinping. Beyond symbolic statements of solidarity, the Chinese Communist Party almost certainly relayed a message that Caracas, an unreliable debtor to Beijing, was on its own. The harsh truth for Maduro is that he wasn’t worth saving by his preoccupied Chinese and Russian allies.

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The “anti-imperialist” leader largely dug his own grave by alienating his most vital regional allies. Chavez spent decades promoting Venezuelan soft power in the region through discounted oil sales. But by threatening to invade and annex two-thirds of Guyana and later Trinidad, Maduro turned once-close allies in the Caribbean into states willing to act as the staging grounds for his own ouster; he also sponsored guerrilla violence against his Leftist neighbor, Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro, for failing to recognize his “re-election.”

At the same time, Trump’s embrace of naked plunder on charges of “counternarcotics” sends a clear signal to the CCP that an equally preposterous pretext is fair game for invading Taiwan. Considering that the president has pardoned dozens of convicted fraudsters and drug traffickers — including former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was indicted by Trump-appointed stalwart P. Kevin Hastel of trafficking 500 tons of cocaine into the homeland—the White House’s war-on-drugs justification stretches credulity.

The message sent to other Leftist governments in the Americas is that they can be deposed at any time and for any reason. Speaking on Fox News on Saturday, Trump suggested that it was the cartels that really run Mexico, rather than President Claudia Sheinbaum: “I’ve asked her a number of times, ‘Would you like us to take out the cartels?’… Something is gonna have to be done with Mexico.”

Then again, if Venezuela deseconds into a true failed state, or if American troops get mired in a South-American Afghanistan, it’s possible that the administration will learn from its mistakes and avoid turning the rest of Latin America into the Middle East. Alternatively, modest success in a post-Maduro state could embolden the White House to bomb neighboring Colombia, Brazil, Central America, and, of course, Mexico, as some MAGA luminaries have always wanted. Never mind the refugees who would then storm the southern border.

For now, Venezuelans can rejoice that their country’s long night of Bolivarian tyranny might be coming to a close. It is to be hoped that the American people’s reluctance to sink into a Latin-American quagmire will ensure that whatever comes next will be on Venezuelans’ own terms.

Early on, there was some hope that the White House would forgo the first term’s amateur coup attempts and moralistic posturing against Maduro. Among his first acts in 2025, President Trump dispatched special envoy Richard “Ric” Grenell to broker an America First understanding with the Caracas regime.

Under the deal, Chevron could continue to export Venezuelan crude Stateside through the renewal of a Biden-era oil license. In exchange, Caracas agreed to accept deportation flights of its citizens — a vital priority given the subsequent suspension of Temporary Protected Status for some 350,000 Venezuelans in the US homeland. The administration thus made good on two campaign pledges: boosting fossil fuels and deporting illegal migrants. 

Sadly, this understanding underwent a series of erratic twists in the ensuing months, a turn of events caused mostly by Miami’s community of Right-wing Latin-American exiles.

Fly to Miami from the American heartland, and you’ll find what can appear like a Right-wing foreign country, where Spanish prevails over English; and where denizens of Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, and, especially, Cuban extraction pray at the altar of neoconservative ideology. This, even as they have recreated the clientelist politics of their homelands within the city council. 

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Drug trafficking, money laundering, as well as state- and nonstate-sponsored regime-change operations across the hemisphere form part of the city’s past and present mythology. Influencers like Alexander Otaola grandstand in the form of three-hour, Castro-esque rants on YouTube, offering any and all justification for toppling regimes from Havana to Tehran.

Unsurprisingly, Trump’s initial pragmatism on Venezuela didn’t play well in Miami. Similarly, many were also blindsided by the administration’s DOGE-era austerity drive. In tandem with the virtual dismantling of USAID, the White House slashed more than $100 million in grants for the National Endowment of Democracy and related South Florida NGOs set up to combat the Cuban, Venezuelan, and Nicaraguan regimes. In March, two of the city’s hawk honchos — Orlando Gutierrez-Boronat, the spokesperson for the NED-funded Cuban Democratic Directorate, and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart — assured the Spanish-language network Telemundo that the administration would restore funding for the city’s neoconservative jobs programs.

Sure enough, Miami elites deployed their man on the inside, Marco Rubio, as well as the Miami-Dade trio of lawmakers Diaz-Balart, Carlos Gimenez, and Maria Elvira Salazar. The secretary of state (and later acting national-security adviser) quickly got to work restoring the various regime-change programs and helping appoint a list of allies to key government offices, including Miami native Mauricio Claver-Carone as special envoy to Latin America, former Miami-Dade Commissioner Kevin Cabrera as ambassador to Panama, Florida neoconservative Mike Waltz as national-security adviser and later UN ambassador, and longtime hemispheric hawk Christopher Landau as deputy secretary of state.  

The trio of representatives threatened to sink Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill in Congress unless the administration rescinded Chevron’s oil license. The White House caved, with severe consequences for the welfare of the oppressed Venezuelans that Miami neocons claim to represent. 

Unable to deport them to their home country after the deal was nixed, the administration labeled 238 Venezuelan nationals as “narcoterrorist” combatants, deporting them to El Salvador’s gruesome Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). Yet 87 percent of the deportees lacked criminal records, which reportedly infuriated Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele, who had explicitly insisted that only hardened criminals be sent for imprisonment in the CECOT. 

All the more ironic was the revelation that many of the same deportees qualified as Venezuelan dissidents, having suffered persecution from the regime after participating in anti-Maduro demonstrations during the 2010s. Beyond the Salvadoran debacle, the administration’s draconian treatment of legal and illegal immigrants — and in some cases, US citizens — has stirred animosities in South Florida.

Historically, Florida Republicans have been more than willing to “import voters” via an open border with Cuba through the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act. Activists like Gutierrez-Boronat have argued that any and all Cubans are eligible for asylum on account of the island’s repressive conditions as a Communist country. Similarly, Rubio was an ardent defender of the Biden administration’s Temporary Protected Status program for Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans up until he joined the Trump administration.

Like Rubio, local influencers and elected officials have since attempted to spin mass deportation to a conflicted South Florida constituency; in my hometown of Coral Springs, Fla., agents in military gear surrounded a home with rifles to arrest an unarmed handyman with no criminal record. Accordingly, Rep. Salazar cosponsored the bipartisan Dignity Act, pairing national and mandatory E-Verify with a path for certain illegals to obtain legal status. For this crime, MAGA luminaries like Ryan Girdusky called for Salazar to be primaried.

But amid the back and forth, Rubio again got busy cultivating his influence operation. Miami’s dutiful son is today simultaneously serving as secretary of state, national-security adviser, and US archivist. Seeking to placate Bukele and to outflank Grenell, Rubio brokered a three-way prisoner swap repatriating CECOT’s Venezuelan nationals in exchange for the release of 10 US citizens under Venezuelan custody. Chevron’s oil license was once more renewed, which subsequently led to the resumption of deportation flights to Venezuela in July.

But apparently, to Rubio’s mind, this was a temporary reprieve. The secretary soon focused his efforts on persuading MAGA’s militarist and Jacksonian factions, which have long yearned for cartel wars in Mexico, to redirect their fire and fury toward Venezuela. In addition to Rubio and his allies, it’s worth noting that Trump is surrounded by Florida natives well versed in the narrative of Venezuelan “narcoterrorism,” including Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich.

The secretary has likely persuaded the president as well as Stephen Miller that removing Maduro would not only halt drug flows, but also enable further deportations by installing the subservient Venezuelan opposition. And while Maduro has allegedly offered to hand over all of Venezuela’s resource wealth to Washington, the hawks no doubt argue that the opposition, once in power, would hand over the country’s oil anyway; in October, Trump ordered Grenell to halt further outreach to Caracas. 

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Finally, the White House’s about-face on Venezuela also serves a clear electoral logic. In 2024, Trump won a historic 45% of Latinos, including 70% and 50% of Cuban- and Venezuelan-Americans, respectively. A year later, the president’s approval rating with the same group has fallen to just 27%, including an 18-point drop among Latino Republicans. Electorally, regime change in Venezuela provides a strong incentive for Latino neocons to overlook abuses like deporting a Cuban national without charge or process to a maximum security prison in Eswatini. When I asked my Venezuelan neighbor on the subject, he said he resented Venezuelans being treated like animals but would look the other way if Washington deposed Maduro.

Yet there are significant flaws in the plan. Venezuela has been on the cusp of failed-state status for more than a decade and is the third most corrupt country on the planet. Regime change via foreign military intervention could trigger complete state collapse, inviting warlords and armed groups to carve up the country into criminal fiefdoms. Leftist guerrillas like the ELN and FARC are deeply entrenched within Venezuelan society and have pledged to defend the regime’s “Bolivarian Revolution.” A violent insurgency of the kind waged by both groups during the Nineties in neighboring Colombia against a US-installed government would likely lead to calls for further interventions from Washington; quagmires in Latin America are no more pleasant than those in Mesopotamia.

Such a scenario could trigger more emigration to neighboring countries and eventually the United States, not to mention jeopardize oil production and ironically strengthen the drug trade. Trump has claimed that for every boat bombed in the Caribbean, 25,000 lives were saved in the homeland. Yet Venezuela acts mainly as a transit country for no more than 13% of Colombian cocaine and zero percent of the far deadlier fentanyl.

Under Trump, fentanyl flows through the southern border have declined by more than 40% thanks to the president’s border policies and historic cooperation with the government of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. So far this year, Sheinbaum has extradited nearly 60 drug lords north of the border, including Chinese fentanyl kingpin Zhi Dong Zhang on Friday; fentanyl precursor chemicals are known to originate in China before being shipped to Mexico. Why divert energy and focus from these efforts to a regime-change war in a country that, though misruled, has little to do with fentanyl?  

As for regime change, in 2019, Marco Rubio posted a bloodied image of former dictator Muammar Gaddafi in response to protests against Maduro. But Gaddafi’s overthrow was in retrospect a disaster, creating state failure and disorder that continues to radiate in North Africa and Southern Europe. Overthrowing Maduro willy-nilly could create similar conditions — only much closer home. Rather than enable a post-Gaddafi Libya in our hemisphere, the Trump administration would do well to sideline Rubio and his allies and cut another deal with Maduro.    

In the end, the officials graced me with clemency, thanks in part to advocacy by the boat’s captain. “Not long ago, they would have ignored you, but things have changed”, the captain later explained, referring to Venezuela’s ongoing crisis.

The experience showed me first-hand how Latin-American countries enforce their borders when confronted with mass migration — and taught me a valuable lesson about cross-border travel. Had I been deported, however, the penalty would only have been a speedy return to the United States — as opposed to life inside a “Terrorism Confinement Center” in El Salvador: the fate of hairdressers and landscapers — in addition to hardened criminals — under President Trump.

Many in MAGA World seem to believe that no corrective is too severe, no countermeasure too cruel, in response to the border chaos inherited from Joe Biden. Yet more than 100 days into his second term, Trump’s deportation effort is a failure on its own terms — notwithstanding the shock-and-awe impression.

Make no mistake: the border was in a catastrophic state under the previous administration. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the number of illegal immigrants swelled by approximately 10 million during Biden’s term. The parameters under which irregular visitors could claim asylum were stretched to such a point that the term “refugee” lost all meaning, leading to a backlog of 3.2 million claimants. Industrial-scale smuggling boomed, and vital public services across the United States groaned under the weight of mass migration.

Ordinary Americans, including many Latinos, warned that economic migrants were abusing an overly generous asylum regime — a reality I observed firsthand in 2022 and 2023 as an immigration case worker. Finally, in June 2024, Biden stanched the flow somewhat with an executive, prompting a decline in the numbers. Yet under Team Biden, removals from within the homeland dropped to about half of what they had been in Trump’s first term, about 50,000 a year.

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Confronted with this reality, an overwhelming majority of voters expressed support for cutting illegal immigration and ramping up deportations. On the former (cutting the flow), Trump has unquestionably delivered. By March, border crossings fell to just 7,000, a quarter-century low. This has been, by far, the most unambiguous success of an otherwise confused presidency.

Mass deportations, however, are a different story.

Thus far, the pace of total deportations is lower than it was under Biden in 2024. True, this is in part a function of fewer crossings. But there is no question that many of those who entered in recent years are still here. While credible data on interior removals under Trump II have yet to be released, it’s plausible that the deportation figure hovers around 50,000. It’s far more than under Biden, to be sure, but still a far cry from the 120,000 deported at the same point in 2009 by Barack Obama (earning Obama the moniker “Deporter in Chief” from progressives).

Having failed at delivering big numbers, Trump officials have apparently resorted to spectacular stunts and sadism as substitutes.

In March, the administration deported 238 Venezuelans and 23 Salvadorans to Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele’s so-called Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, a latter-day gulag. Like many others, I gave the White House the benefit of the doubt, assuming that a Department of Justice renowned for prosecuting gang members couldn’t possibly send civilians with no criminal sentences to a prison built for MS13 and Barrio 18’s most hardened members.

Except, the White House continues to withhold the names and purportedly heinous crimes of those deported to Bukele’s CECOT, treating them as state secrets. Most of the inmates were designated as “alien terrorists” and stripped of the ability to contest that designation under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act — the White House’s ridiculous theory of the case being that the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang is conducting an “invasion” of the US homeland at the behest of the Caracas regime. Under the terms of the agreement with El Salvador, outsourced detainees are imprisoned indefinitely in the CECOT. No trial, not even proper sentencing.

On 20 March, CBS published the names of the imprisoned Venezuelans from a leaked government document. A subsequent investigation by The New York Times ran all 238 names through public databases in the United States, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Chile, finding serious accusations or convictions for just 32 of the deportees. Another two dozen were accused or found guilty of lower-level offenses, such as trespassing and speeding. The remainder had no criminal records in either the United States or abroad; an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official also admitted in a sworn declaration that “many” of those deported had no criminal records. Deported, to be clear, to a gang confinement center. For life.

In deciding if someone is a member of Tren de Aragua, Trump officials placed inordinate emphasis on tattoos. A separate government document obtained by the Times, titled “Alien Enemy Validation Guide”, uses an eight-point system to identify gang members, with tattoos yielding four points. One such case with no criminal record was that of Arturo Suarez Trejo, a landscaper and urban musician with numerous tattoos who was detained while filming a music video.

Two others with no criminal records — Francisco García Casique, a barber, and Neri Alvarado, a bakery-shop worker — had tattoos of family members’ names, one of which included a ribbon for autism awareness. As Ronna Rísquez, the author of a 2003 book on Tren de Aragua, has noted, the group doesn’t use tattoos as markers of affiliation — in marked contrast to the likes of MS13 and Barrio 18.

Given that ICE arrested 976 gang members in February, it’s fair to describe the vetting process behind the Salvadoran deportations as incompetent, and that’s being generous. A charter flight even arrived with eight women — a surprise that proved too extreme for even Bukele, who harangued his American counterparts for violating the terms of their agreement. The women were ultimately returned to the United States, with many claiming that officials asked passengers to sign affidavits confessing membership in Tren de Aragua.

Beyond Trumpian chaos, the GOP’s characteristic incoherence appears to have contributed to the Salvadoran debacle. Days into Trump’s presidency, Venezuela’s Maduro regime acquiesced to deportation flights in exchange for the renewal of Chevron’s oil license in the country. Furious, Miami hawks in Congress threatened to withhold their votes from the slim GOP majority. The White House immediately caved, leading to an abrupt end to Venezuelan repatriations and the subsequent invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. The plight of CECOT deportees has since been a propaganda boon for Maduro, as thousands have poured onto Venezuelan streets to protest against Washington’s forced disappearances to El Salvador.

The Trump administration also wrongfully deported the Salvadoran national Kilmar Abrego García, though his case is a complicated one. Kilmar’s family business was allegedly extorted by Barrio 18 in his home country. Had he solicited asylum when he first traveled to the United States, he could have claimed a credible fear of persecution. Instead, ICE nearly deported him in 2019. By that point, Kilmar wasn’t eligible for asylum, but a judge granted him “withholding of removal” on the grounds that his life was still at risk in El Salvador.

Kilmar’s alleged ties to MS13 remain unproved, and he complied with yearly check-ins at ICE. Yet the reality is that the case is uncomfortable for both sides of the debate. It’s reasonable to question Abrego García’s current immigration status; by 2019, his family business was defunct and the threat of Barrio 18 diminished. At the same time, he should have been eligible for residency through his marriage to a US citizen. Ironically, recipients of withheld removal like him are ineligible for permanent residence but can receive work permits.

None of this excuses the Trump administration’s denial of due process to Kilmar Abrego, let alone hundreds of apparently nonviolent offenders condemned to life in a foreign gulag. Surprising as it may be to MAGA, the Fifth Amendment entitles noncitizens to due process. Considering that the president is floating sending US citizens to the CECOT, and is attempting to deport legal residents over anti-Israel op-eds — it’s fair to wonder if Trump is bent on importing Maduro’s and Bukele’s governance model, even as he deports their citizens.

Instead of governing by decree like Maduro or Bukele, the White House could pursue long-term, durable reform in the legislature. A reasonable compromise with Democrats could be to close the loophole in the Immigration and Nationality Act which allowed virtually any border-crosser to apply for asylum under Biden. In exchange, Republicans could acquiesce to the regularization of spouses of US citizens, a move which would help accelerate deportations by annulling the ongoing issue of custody for the children of illegal spouses.

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Unfortunately, much of the GOP is currently committed to ending asylum outright. It’s similarly telling that Christian conservatives justify imprisoning the fathers of US citizens in CECOT. The fact that immigration enforcement was more or less abrogated during most of Biden’s term doesn’t justify violating constitutional amendments. Unsurprisingly, Trump’s once-vaunted approval on immigration is in free fall, particularly among Latinos, a key segment of the Republicans’ new base.

Contrary to much of the party’s narrative about serving a “multiracial working class”, the GOP appears bent on alienating previously die-hard supporters, such as Venezuelan-Americans. Unlike MAGA partisans, the broader working class has little interest in terrorizing migrants for the sake of likes on the X app.

For their part, Democrats would do well to acknowledge that popular support for restrictionism is an inevitable consequence of mass illegal immigration. The fact that migrants’ own countries of origin have experienced the same trend — as I learned on my trip to Peru — suggests that more is at play than Left-of-center parties “accepting conservative frames on immigration”, as progressives worry. Even in Left-wing Mexico, 55 percent oppose allowing entry to foreign migrants.

For Left and Right, the Obama administration’s common-sense mix of pathways to citizenship and overwhelming enforcement was a key source of its appeal with Latino and working-class voters. It should, moreover, give Democrats pause that Biden’s — and Hillary Clinton’s — abandoning of Obama’s winning formula subsequently enabled both of Trump’s ballot-box victories. In their Fox News-distorted reality, Republicans also fail to recognize that the “Kenyan-born” Obama respected due process, even as he deported almost 3 million in his first term.

The mistake of MAGA Republicans and progressive Democrats alike is that they each fail to understand that their priorities are comparably unpalatable to most Americans. So long as both factions remain beholden to the preferences of nativist incels and cosmopolitan elitists, respectively, they will continue to sow maximal cruelty, exploitation, and sectarian hatred among the very people they claim to represent.

One clear reason is economic: Mass low-wage migration depresses wages, especially on the lower rungs of the labor market. Progressives would do well to come to grips with this reality, even as the Trumpians would be wise neither to overstep their mandate nor to limit their policy to showy and polarizing deportation actions.

To see why, it’s worth examining the history. Between 1965 and 1995, the share of Americans who favored lower immigration rates rose to 65%, up from a third. The shift in attitudes corresponded with a dramatic rise in low-skilled legal — and especially illegal — immigration. Migrant encounters at the US-Mexico border reached 1.64 million in 2000, more than double the rate in 1980 (the 2000 peak would be surpassed under Team Biden).

Mass illicit immigration was and continues to be a feature of the neoliberal model that first took hold in the Seventies. The neoliberal order establishes the primacy of the market over state and society by promoting the free flow of goods, capital, and, crucially, people (that last element is often omitted by progressive critics of neoliberalism). Unsurprisingly, the decade that saw the highest volume of illegal immigration was the Nineties — an era of unfettered globalization, deregulation, and free trade epitomized by the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Nafta facilitated the exploitation of cheap labor south of the border by outsourcing manufacturing jobs to Mexico. The agreement was also devastating for Mexican small farmers, who couldn’t compete with subsidized US agriculture. The resulting mass of indigent farmers migrated largely north into the open arms of American agribiz—the same force responsible for ruining their livelihoods. In 1990, the share of illegal farm workers in the United States was just 12%. By the turn of the millennium, it was about half, where it has remained since.

Until the 2010s, many Democrats embraced a comparatively hard line on illegal immigration, in keeping with the party’s working-class base. In his 1995 State of the Union address, President Bill Clinton lamented how “the jobs [illegal immigrants] hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants”.

Back then, it was free-market Republicans like Ronald Reagan who celebrated the exploitation of illicit labor in jobs “Americans won’t do”. Never mind that these jobs were overwhelmingly occupied by Americans prior to the arrival of millions of illicit workers. Never mind, too, that native-born workers still form the majority of the workforce in sectors with large numbers of illegal employees, such as construction, household labor, dry cleaning, and landscaping.

An earlier generation of labor leaders and social democrats viewed mass illegal migration as one component in a broader suite of policies, including outsourcing and union-busting, meant to squeeze wages. United Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez, for example, repeatedly denounced illegal migration and would make a point of alerting the authorities to employers hiring such workers. In 2007, Bernie Sanders said: “On one hand you have large multinationals trying to shut down plants in America, and on the other hand, you have the service industry bringing in low-wage workers from abroad”. The result: “wages go down”.

Negative sentiment toward immigration is driven by the net volume and type of immigration to a given country, dividing native populations from newcomers over wages, skills, and cultural background. The last variable, culture, is mercifully less salient in the United States, given the country’s spectacular capacity to assimilate migrants. In sufficient numbers, though, low-skilled illegal immigration necessarily provokes a backlash, including in cases where migrants and the native-born otherwise lack meaningful cultural differences.

To be fair to open-borders advocates of the Left and the libertarian Right, public opinion had been comparatively indifferent to large volumes of low-skilled legal immigration until recently — that is, except among Republicans. Plus, despite high overall immigration, illegal immigration declined dramatically after 2000, with border crossings plateauing at around 300,000 a year in the 2010s. By this point, the Nafta shock in Mexico gave way to the low-growth but resilient Mexican economy of today, leading to a 90% reduction in illegal entries by Mexicans. Mexico’s role as a source of outmigration was soon eclipsed by the likes of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

Successive presidents also oversaw crackdowns at the southern border and boosted deportations. The Obama administration instituted family detention, deporting 2.9 million people in its first term and 1.9 million in its second. By comparison, the first Trump administration managed 1.5 million deportations, including a smaller proportion of violent criminals.

Then came the social-justice revolution of the mid-2010s, which consummated the Democratic Party’s capture by college-educated professionals. Mantras such as “no human being is illegal” gathered strength in Democratic circles as activists denounced Obama as the “Deporter in Chief”. The progressive zealots got a boost from Trump I, the cruelty of whose child-separation policies did wonders for the cause of limitless migration. Despite the first Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy, illegal immigration remained unchanged up until the pandemic; pandemic-induced travel restrictions caused overall immigration to fall near zero in 2020.

At that point, more Americans (34%) favored increased immigration than disfavored it (28%) for the first time. Emboldened in their opposition to Trump, Democrats excised what little immigration dissent remained in the party. Having previously called open borders a “Koch Brothers proposal”, Bernie Sanders embraced a moratorium on deportations and called for decriminalizing border crossings under pressure from the liberal press.

The Biden administration followed suit, announcing a temporary pause in deportations and adopting a near limitless interpretation of asylum law. While a global surge in immigration was to be expected following the end of pandemic restrictions, voters correctly interpreted Democratic policy as offering an unprecedented incentive to would-be migrants. At least 10 million foreign nationals without legal permanent status entered the country since 2021, per the Congressional Budget Office, the most of any four-year period in history.

In June 2024, Biden backtracked, issuing an executive order barring migrants from soliciting asylum when average daily encounters exceed 2,500. The result was a decline in monthly crossings by around 80%. The move was supported by minorities and working-class voters but abhorred by affluent progressives. Indeed, by the end of 2024, monthly crossings were lower than under Trump prior to the pandemic.

So here we are. The question now is how tough immigration enforcement should be, and whether Republicans — and eventually, Democrats — will once again overreach in their respective preferences.

The starting point for the debate is a simple proposition: namely, that mass deportations are entirely justified, representing a return to Obama-era deportation policy. Under Biden, a total of 1.49 million newcomers were removed — a shockingly paltry figure, given the total number of unlawful entries. Currently, Team Trump seems to be prioritizing the 1.4 million migrants who have received final orders of removal. Logistically speaking, it will be difficult to deport even this number anytime soon.

The goal of the new administration should be to craft a lasting immigration policy benefiting American workers. This will require gaining buy-in from Democrats where possible. Improving the asylum system requires sending a signal to migrants they are certain to be deported unless they have a credible claim of asylum. At the same time, employing more immigration judges for the current asylum backlog is eminently desirable and an area where Republicans could work with Democrats. It’s counterproductive for the sitting president to antagonize deportees’ receiving countries — however obnoxious their leaders may also be.

A points system based on migrants’ skills — ideally similar to that used by Canada prior to the pandemic — should also be adopted. While it’s true that Americans have historically tolerated high levels of low-skilled immigration, restrictionists are correct that chain migration doesn’t ultimately serve the national interest or workers. Shifting from family-based to skills-based migration would go a long way toward taming the anti-immigration fervor of the GOP base.

During his first term, Trump expanded Obama’s family-detention policy in an effort to deter migrants of all stripes. This and later family separation was what resulted in the administration’s failure to deport more violent criminals than its predecessor: Trump I turned public opinion against itself. Disturbingly, Trump’s proposal to expand migrant detentions in Guantanamo Bay suggests a willingness to double down on past failures, though the administration appears to be prioritizing removals with infractions beyond just illegal entries thus far.

Further, the Remain in Mexico policy was a marked improvement that helped curtail the 2018 spike in illegal immigration, whose revival will similarly benefit the current asylum backlog. Contrary to progressive critiques, Mexico as a whole isn’t unsafe, with many migrants residing in vibrant metropolitan areas while they solicit asylum. Then as now, the policy’s success will turn on Trump’s willingness to maintain a productive relationship with Mexican leaders.

Like her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has displayed a willingness to work with Trump, making record arrests of migrants and drug seizures, as well as constructing facilities to receive deportees. Having cajoled Mexico (and Canada) into substantial action, the effectiveness of the president’s tariff threats cannot be denied. Given his decision to impose tariffs anyway, however, it will be hard for either country to justify continued cooperation with Washington.

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Republicans should also note that their rationale for a military intervention in Mexico directly contradicts the premise of the Remain in Mexico policy. If carried out, an invasion would fuel a migratory catastrophe. If or when Mexican cartels’ recent terror designation is taken to its logical conclusion, the resulting torrent of actual refugees would undo decades of declining illegal immigration from Mexico. Trump could, instead, aid Sheinbaum’s proposal to expand the recently inaugurated Maya Train into Central America, a prospect certain to deter migration by creating jobs and fueling development.

Finally, if Trump is truly serious about deterrence and American workers, he should support the passage and aggressive enforcement of mandatory E-verify. Forcing employers to confirm the immigration status of workers — and making an example of those that don’t — would go a long way in curtailing migrant exploitation and raising wages for native workers.

Progressives should back these efforts. As it is, their simultaneous defense of unrestricted low-skilled immigration and opposition to H1B visas serves the class interest of their professional constituents. After all, the exploitation of H1B workers directly undercuts the bargaining power of high-skilled college graduates—the same group that benefit from a ready supply of undocumented maids and landscapers. But this policy mix has proved deeply unpopular with the non-college majority that decides US elections.

In the same vein, it’s telling that the immigration rhetoric of populist Republicans — such as Vice President JD Vance — echoes that of pre-Trump labor Democrats. This isn’t to say that the comparably oligarchic Republican Party is truly representative of working-class interests. It does, however, speak to the changing nature of both parties’ coalitions.

Progressives can continue dismissing the impact of illegal immigration on wages — relying, ironically, on the same neoliberal economists they would otherwise condemn. The reality, however, is that working-class voters will continue to believe that their wages will be undercut by foreign workers willing to work harder and for less than they would.

Democrats should recall the counsel of the civil-rights icon Barbara Jordan: “For the system to be credible, people actually have to be deported at the end of the process”. For their part, Republicans should avoid an overestimation of their mandate that has and likely will once more empower their progressive enemies.