In the Progressive International’s twenty-fifth Briefing of 2026, we trace Washington’s renewed assault on the sovereignty of the Americas — and the hemispheric forces assembling an alternative in Montevideo.
“We’re dead serious about the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,” declared self-styled US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth from the Panamanian jungle last week. He was inspecting the US-led PANAMAX military exercise, rehearsing operations to “secure key terrain”. Hegseth promised to achieve “the same effect on land” as the bombing campaign that has killed more than 200 people aboard boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific over the past year.
The revived doctrine was given its more colloquial name — the Donroe Doctrine — by Donald Trump in January after US forces attacked Venezuela and kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro. Seven months later, the United States controls the sale of Venezuelan oil and the accounts into which its proceeds flow. By late July, more than $13 billion had passed through those accounts; in July alone, 786,000 barrels a day were shipped to the United States. Trump has dispensed with the language of democratic transition. “We paid for the war with what we’ve taken out many, many, many times,” he told a crowd in Las Vegas earlier this month. “To the victor belong the spoils.”
Elsewhere, the pressure takes other forms. Panama has been pressed to curb Chinese involvement around the canal while US troops return in greater numbers. Brazil has been hit with new tariffs after Washington ruled that its policies on digital trade and electronic payments unfairly burden US commerce. Among the offending policies is Pix, the public instant-payments system that allows Brazilians to move money without passing through the American card networks.
In March, the presidents of Argentina, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras and other governments of the regional right joined Trump in Miami to launch the US-led Shield of the Americas. “The heart of our agreement,” the US President told them,“ is a commitment to using lethal military force.” Chile’s José Antonio Kast joined before taking office; Colombia entered the coalition days after Trump ally Abelardo de la Espriella was sworn in this month. Washington’s strategy for the hemisphere has willing recruits in Latin America’s elites.
The Trump administration has published the blueprint connecting these events. Its National Security Strategy promises to “restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere”: expanding US military access, wielding tariffs as commercial leverage and using US dominance in finance and technology to pull governments away from Washington’s rivals.
Two hundred and three years ago, President James Monroe also drew a line around the Americas. His doctrine warned the European powers against further intervention in the newly independent republics of the hemisphere. Three years after Monroe spoke, Simón Bolívar convened another gathering. In June 1826, delegates from the young American republics met at the Congress of Panama. Their independence was scarcely secured. Bolívar had not originally intended to invite the United States. His project was to bring the new republics together so that independence from the old empires did not simply leave them dependent on new powers. Two centuries later, the Congress of Panama remains an unfinished project.
This weekend, that anniversary will be marked 3,000 miles south of Panama City. More than 150 parliamentarians, ministers, presidents and political leaders from 15 countries and territories across the Americas will gather in Montevideo for the third Panamerican Congress. Founded in Bogotá in 2024 and expanded in Mexico City last year, the Congress brings legislators and political forces from across the hemisphere — including a US congressional delegation — together to develop a common programme for the future of “América”.
Delegates will debate how countries can retain economic sovereignty when access to the US market can be withdrawn as punishment; build digital infrastructure without submitting to the corporations that dominate American finance and technology; confront organised crime without surrendering their territory to another country’s military; and turn the hemisphere’s extraordinary reserves of energy, minerals, land and human capacity towards the needs of its peoples. Whether it’s the Democratic Socialists of America, Libre Honduras, Pacto Historico or Chile’s Frente Amplio, Progressive International members will be at the heart of the exchange. From industrial integration and digital sovereignty to common approaches on peace and social protection, the proposals begin to answer the question Bolívar left unfinished two centuries ago: what institutions and capacities can make sovereignty real?
Two centuries after Monroe and Bolívar, the rival projects are once again unusually explicit. Washington promises “American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.” Montevideo offers another principle: “Solidarity between peoples. Sovereignty among nations.”
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For the Silenced Uruguayans by Manuel Espínola Gómez (1921-2003) was made in 1974, a time of intense social unrest, with protests being systematically silenced and many disappeared during the violent Military Dictatorship, which lasted 12 years.
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