Intel Report: Shield of the Americas rewrites US-LatAm relations
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Date: 12/03/2026
Executive Summary
On 7 March 2026, twelve Latin American leaders gathered at Trump National Doral, a golf course in Miami, and signed a document. This document, named the Doral Charter, creates a new US-led regional security framework called the Shield of the Americas. And within this is the Counter-Cartel Coalition, a seventeen-nation military alliance chaired by President Trump and committed to using lethal force against transnational criminal organisations.
However, membership in the Shield of the Americas appears to be based on a paramount governing logic: Washington will protect you if you side with the United States economically and kick China out. The U.S. offers security guarantees, financial assistance, and trade access to governments that remove Chinese telecommunications infrastructure, replace Chinese port scanning technology, and cancel subsea cable projects connecting the region to Chinese networks.
The administration frames this as the Donroe Doctrine (a pun on Donald Trump and the Monroe Doctrine) that asserts the U.S. right to remove opponents already present in the hemisphere.
We’ve already seen it in action with the January capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in Caracas.
But the summit was also significant for who was not there. Canada, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, four of the hemisphere's largest economies and three of the primary drivers of the drug trafficking supply chain, were absent. All have left-leaning governments. All have stood up in some way to Trump. None of them were invited.
An alliance seeking to fight cocaine without the main cocaine producer and two critical drug through-points has a problem.
Context
The Donroe Doctrine: The Trump administration has formalised a policy it calls the Donroe Doctrine, a portmanteau of Donald Trump and the Monroe Doctrine, asserting the U.S. right to intervene militarily anywhere in the Western Hemisphere to remove foreign rivals. On 3 January 2026, U.S. forces raided Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro's compound in Caracas, captured him, and flew him to New York to face drug charges. It was the first time the United States had forcibly removed a sitting head of state in the region in the modern era. Last year, it renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.
The Counter-Cartel Coalition. This is a seventeen-nation military alliance whose members have committed to lethal force against drug trafficking organisations. In the week before the Miami summit, US and Ecuadorian forces conducted joint strikes against the Comandos de la Frontera in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Since September 2025, U.S. naval and air assets have carried out 45 strikes against drug vessels in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, killing over 150 people, including in the territorial waters of St. Vincent and the Grenadines without that government's authorisation.
Project Vault. The Shield also announced the creation of Project Vault, a U.S. Export-Import Bank programme that offers governments financing and tariff reductions in exchange for exclusive U.S. access to critical mineral reserves and the removal of Chinese technology from their infrastructure. In practice, this means systematically ejecting Chinese companies from contracts about telecommunications, transport, infrastructure, and mineral rights. 5G networks, replacing Nuctech port scanners with U.S.-approved alternatives, and cancelling cable projects that connect to Chinese network infrastructure. Argentina's $20 billion bailout is conditional on U.S. lithium extraction rights. Bolivia entered Shield membership through lithium negotiations that displaced an existing Chinese joint venture. Panama has already completed the technology overhaul and serves as the template other signatories are expected to follow.
The Americas Energy Compact. Before Maduro's capture, Venezuela's oil moved through Chinese and Russian trading infrastructure. That has now changed. The U.S. Treasury has issued licences for Venezuelan oil exports to private companies operating outside Chinese supply chains, and state gold producer Minerven is now shipping up to 1,000kg of gold doré per consignment to U.S. refineries via Trafigura. Across the rest of the region, U.S. LNG and nuclear technology are being offered as replacements for Chinese-financed dams, grids, and generation capacity in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Central America.
The Shield of the Americas: What Happened?
The summit at Trump National Doral was a signing ceremony for an architecture that had already been built, deal by deal, base by base, over more than a year.
Paraguay
On 15 December 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Foreign Minister Rubén Ramírez Lezcano signed a Status of Forces Agreement in Washington that grants U.S. military and civilian personnel operating in Paraguay full immunity from local prosecution -- legal status equivalent to diplomatic staff. Any use of force during joint operations falls exclusively under U.S. criminal jurisdiction. Critics in the region have called it a formalisation of impunity. The administration calls it interoperability.
In exchange, Paraguay received an $11 million military modernisation package: fast patrol boats for river border control, advanced night-vision and tactical equipment, and an accelerated contract with Northrop Grumman for a radar system providing 100% national airspace coverage. That last element matters. The Paraguayan Chaco has historically been one of the hemisphere's most active corridors for narco-flights operating below radar coverage. It no longer is. U.S. Navy SEALs are already conducting special forces training in-country. The $11 million buys Washington a permanent forward presence in the Tri-Border Area -- the hemisphere's primary node for illicit finance, Hezbollah-linked money flows, and First Capital Command cartel logistics -- without the political cost of a formal base.
The deal was ratified by Paraguay's Chamber of Deputies on 10 March 2026, just three days after the Doral summit, by a vote of 53 to 8. The Senate debate was contentious -- sovereignty concerns were raised and largely ignored. What settled it was the promise of Project Vault financing and inclusion in the U.S. technology replacement programme. Paraguay is the first country to legislatively codify the Doral Charter's lethal force mandate into domestic law.
Ecuador
Ecuador's transformation over the past fourteen months has been the most dramatic of any signatory state. President Daniel Noboa declared an internal armed conflict in January 2024 after a wave of cartel violence that included a live television studio takeover and mass prison massacres that killed over 450 inmates since 2021.
Washington responded with hundreds of millions of dollars in security assistance across Navy and Air Force modernisation and the establishment of vetted counter-trafficking units trained by Homeland Security Investigations. In November 2024, Ecuador adopted the U.S. DARTTS AI and machine learning customs profiling system, integrating its port screening infrastructure directly into American intelligence architecture. In December 2025, U.S. military personnel and intelligence were deployed to the former U.S. base in Manta, weeks after Ecuadorian voters rejected a referendum that would have formally permitted foreign military bases on national soil.
By 3 March 2026, US SOUTHCOM was announcing joint operations publicly. U.S. and Ecuadorian forces struck Comandos de la Frontera positions in the Amazon. The same day, a coordinated U.S.-Ecuador-Europol operation dismantled a Los Lobos trafficking network operating into Belgium and the Netherlands. Noboa imposed nightly curfews across four provinces -- Guayas, Los Ríos, El Oro, and Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas -- running from 15 to 31 March, covering the near-entirety of Ecuador's cocaine supply chain from the Colombian border to the container port.
At the Miami summit, Noboa expelled the Cuban ambassador as a public demonstration of alignment, pledged to serve as the Coalition's operational vanguard, and formalised U.S. access to Eloy Alfaro Air Base and Galapagos facilities for regional power projection.
Argentina
No government in the hemisphere has moved faster toward Washington than Javier Milei's Argentina. Since taking office, Milei has visited the United States sixteen times, withdrawn Argentina from BRICS, and welcomed US SOUTCOM officials to Ushuaia, a strategic port the administration has designated as an access point for Antarctic operations.
The ideological alignment is genuine: Milei is a radical libertarian who frames his relationship with Washington as an existential geopolitical necessity rather than a transactional calculation.
The transaction is substantial nonetheless. Argentina received a $20 billion bailout backed by the U.S. and multilateral partners, explicitly linked to securing lithium extraction rights under Project Vault. At the Miami summit, Milei was a featured speaker and announced Argentina Week 2026, a major investment roadshow in New York targeting American capital for the country's energy and mining sectors. Argentina's lithium reserves, among the largest in the world, are now effectively committed to the U.S. supply chain decoupling programme.
Chile
Chile presents the most complex transition of any signatory state, because it is mid-handover. The outgoing Gabriel Boric government was excluded from the summit and has spent its final weeks resisting U.S. pressure to abandon the proposed Valparaíso-to-Hong Kong subsea cable, a project the administration has designated a red line on data sovereignty grounds. That resistance ended on 11 March. President José Antonio Kast and his nominated Defence Minister Fernando Barros attended all major sessions at Doral despite Kast not yet holding office, pledged Counter-Cartel Coalition membership as a first act of government, and signalled that cancellation of the subsea cable will follow inauguration. The transition from one of the region's most vocal critics of US interventionism to a full Shield signatory took less than a week.
The Kast government's broader posture, described by the incoming administration itself as Trumpista on crime and immigration, suggests Chile will move quickly toward full technology compliance.
Venezuela
Venezuela was not invited to the Doral Summit but it is feeling its weight. The 3 January 2026 raid on Maduro's compound in Caracas and his transfer to New York to face drug conspiracy charges established the Donroe Doctrine's outer boundary: the United States will remove a sitting head of state by military force if it judges him sufficiently adversarial. The country is now governed by an interim administration under Delcy Rodríguez, which has agreed to re-establish diplomatic and consular relations with Washington and accepted the commercial arrangements that followed.
Those arrangements are substantial. The Treasury Department has issued licences for Venezuelan oil exports to designated private companies, reintegrating Venezuelan production, which represents approximately 17% of global reserves, into US-accessible supply chains. Minerven, Venezuela's state gold producer, has agreed to ship up to 1,000kg of gold doré bars per consignment to U.S. refineries via Trafigura. Venezuela did not attend the Miami summit officially, but its energy and security planning is fully integrated into the Shield framework.
Panama
Panama's alignment with the Shield predates the summit and established the operational template for technology compliance that every other signatory is now measured against. President José Raúl Mulino has committed to removing Chinese-linked companies from Canal operations and replacing Chinese-manufactured port infrastructure with U.S. and allied alternatives. The Nuctech port scanning systems that Washington designated as potential espionage infrastructure have been removed. The Canal itself is being commercially reoriented away from Chinese logistics operators.
At the Miami summit, Mulino formalised these commitments and secured expanded U.S. security assistance in return. Panama's importance to the Shield extends beyond symbolism. Control of the Canal's technology and scanning infrastructure gives the United States visibility over one of the world's most critical maritime chokepoints.
That visibility was previously shared with Chinese-manufactured systems. It no longer is.
Bolivia
Bolivia's shift under President Rodrigo Paz has been striking. For years, Bolivia's foreign policy was explicitly anti-imperialist, aligned with Venezuela and hostile to Washington. Paz has abandoned that posture in favour of a pragmatic calculation: Bolivia holds some of the world's largest lithium reserves, and Washington is offering money for access to them.
A signal of alignment was Bolivia's withdrawal from the Hague Group, a coalition focused on opposing Israeli military operations in Gaza, a foreign policy adjustment made specifically to bring Bolivian positions into closer alignment with the Trump administration's regional preferences. Lithium negotiations with Washington are now underway under the Project Vault framework.
Bolivia is the signatory most exposed to Chinese economic decoupling risk: Chinese infrastructure investment is deeply embedded across the country's energy and transport sectors, and the financial benefits of the U.S. partnership have not yet materialised to offset what severance of those relationships will cost.
The Absent Three
The governments of Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia were not absent from the Shield of the Americas by oversight.
Each absence carries distinct implications.
Mexico, under President Claudia Sheinbaum, has been publicly characterised by the Trump administration as a state where the cartels are functionally in control. Trump has threatened massive import tariffs and raised the prospect of unilateral military operations on Mexican soil. Sheinbaum has responded by extraditing dozens of senior traffickers to the United States and taking U.S. intelligence to kill the most dangerous drug trafficker in the country, CJNG boss El Mencho. But the tariff threat is unresolved and active.
Brazil, under President Lula, has condemned the Maduro capture as a violation of the UN Charter and positioned itself as the hemisphere's primary institutional resistance to the Donroe Doctrine. Brazil's deep commercial integration with China makes the Shield's decoupling logic existentially threatening to its economic model.
And Colombia, under President Petro, has carried out joint operations with Ecuador, while being heavily critical of Trump and refusing the premises of the Shield.
The three governments collectively represent the majority of regional GDP, the primary narcotics production zones, and the most significant trade corridors on the continent.
