U.S. ponders military options in Panama

Latin America Daily Briefing

Jordana Timerman
March 14, 2025

The U.S. administration has asked the military for “credible military options” to ensure U.S. access to the Panama Canal, according to a memo from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. (CNN)

U.S. President Donald Trump has said repeatedly he wants to “take back” the Panama Canal, considered one of the world’s most strategically important waterways. He has not offered specifics about how he would do so, or if military action might be required, notes Reuters.

The focus is on countering alleged Chinese influence on the waterway. Hegseth is expected to visit Panama next month.

“U.S. Southern Command is developing potential plans from partnering more closely with Panamanian security forces to the less likely option of U.S. troops’ seizing the Panama Canal by force, the officials said. Whether military force is used, the officials added, depends on how much Panamanian security forces agree to partner with the United States,” reports NBC.

More Panama

• China criticized a Hong Kong-based company’s decision to sell its shares of Panama port concessions to a U.S. based consortium: saying CK Hutchinson should “think twice” and that the $22.8 billion n deal is “power politics” that is not in the country’s national interest, reports the Guardian.
  
• “The criticism marks an abrupt shift in Chinese policy toward Panama and the control of seaports around the world,” reports the New York Times. “When President Trump raised concerns soon after taking office that China had too much power in the Panama Canal, his comments were initially ridiculed by Beijing.”

Regional

• “More than 50 years into the “war on drugs”, trade in illicit narcotics continues to flourish in Latin America, often leaving mayhem in its wake. Experience suggests that a mix of approaches, including smarter policing and enhanced social policy, is the best remedy,” according to a new International Crisis Group report.
  
• “In Latin American elections, big debates about the left-right ideological divide and the geopolitics of U.S. and Chinese influence often take a back seat to simple concerns about day-to-day living, such as whether the light goes on when you hit the switch,” writes James Bosworth in World Politics Review, looking at how blackouts in Chile, Ecuador, Argentina and Honduras could affect major elections scheduled this year.

Migration

• The U.S. focus on extending its migration border control further south, into Central America, has put pressure on Guatemala to step up its own border enforcement, reports the Associated Press. When U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited Guatemala in February, President Bernardo Arévalo announced that Guatemala would form a new border security force to patrol its borders with Honduras and El Salvador as well.
  
• Cancelling U.S. foreign aid in Latin America will likely push people “from impoverished and violence-plagued places like Honduras” to migrate to the U.S., writes Tim Padgett in WLRN.

Regional Relations

• Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro accused Guyanese President Irfaan Ali of seeking to provoke an armed conflict, and compared him to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whom Maduro claims caused the war with Russia. (Miami Herald)

Mexico

• Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has defied expectations in her negotiations with Trump, who has voiced admiration for her. “Her calm demeanor and the results she’s delivered on migration and fentanyl seem to have won his respect,” reports the New York Times.
  
• A mass gravesite uncovered by civilian activists in Mexico’s Jalisco state — with ovens for burning cadavers and over 200 pairs of shoes that evoked Nazi extermination camps — has provoked particular outrage as the site had been raided by security forces, reports the Washington Post. (See also Associated Press.)
  
• “The discovery of a cartel training and extermination camp in Teuchitlan, Jalisco, comes as Mexicans have been rallying to face a foreign super-power that has threatened tariffs that could tank the economy and military strikes into their territory. But the horrors uncovered in Jalisco state were inflicted by Mexicans on Mexicans. As people process how this terror was allowed to take place, an anger swells up across the country,” writes Ioan Grillo at Crashout.

Colombia

• AFP reports from Micay Canyon, in southwest Colombia, where the Estado Mayor Central armed group has created a virtual martial microstate.

Brazil

• Brazil’s Supreme Court said it would consider on March 25 whether to try far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro on charges of masterminding an attempted coup, reports AFP.
  
• A new four-lane highway cutting through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest is being built for the COP30 climate summit in the Brazilian city of Belém, reports the BBC.

Chile

• “To many who saw leftist President Gabriel Boric as embodying the ideals of Chile’s “awakening,” hopes now feel unfulfilled — foreshadowing the potential return of a right-wing leader in this year’s elections,” writes Lucia Cholakian Herrera in Courthouse News.

Argentina

• Some people are calling on Argentina’s security minister, Patricia Bullrich, to resign after security forces violently repressed a pensioners protest on Wednesday — a photojournalist hit with a teargas canister is in coma, reports the Guardian. (See yesterday’s post.)
  
• Argentina’s largest union confederation promised a 24-hour strike sometime within the next month. (Mercopress)
  
• An Argentine prosecutor asked a judge to issue an Interpol “Red Notice”—a sweeping arrest request—for Hayden Davis, who claims to be behind the launch of a memecoin that has ensnared Argentine president Javier Milei in a political scandal, and another coin tied to First Lady Melania Trump, reports Fortune.
  
• The Argentine military is now ramping up efforts to combat illegal squid fishing operations — many carried out by Chinese-flagged vessels — in southern area of the country’s coast that experts warn is on the brink of environmental collapse. (CNN)

Peru

• Peruvian human rights groups say a controversial anti-NGO law that prevents civil society organizations from taking legal action against the state for human rights abuses will prevent the vulnerable from accessing justice, reports the Guardian.
  
• Former Peruvian President Pedro Castillo was taken from prison to a hospital on yesterday, three days after he began a hunger strike in protest of his ongoing rebellion trial, reports the Associated Press.

Paraguay

• An estimated 150 Indigenous Ayoreo people remain “uncontacted” in Paraguay’s Chaco region. “They are one of the world’s last cultures living in voluntary isolation outside the Amazon. But representatives from a dozen Indigenous communities and organisations say a fresh wave of deforestation poses an “imminent risk” to their forest-dwelling relatives,” reports the Guardian.

EnergiesNet.com 03 14 2025