America Needs to Leverage its Power to Stabilize Latin America and Stop Chinese Influence in the Region

Excerpt

In the aftermath of 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) could count on and leverage the primacy of U.S. global leadership and economic influence to address a range of foreign threats to the U.S. homeland. Two decades later, our economic, trading, and monetary systems are being weaponized against us by foreign adversaries and competitors, and in the process, escalating the erosion of democratic rules and norms. The traditional terrorist threats persist, but now we face additional and fundamentally different sets of threats to the homeland that require new strategies and tactics — threats that are attacking not only our physical borders but our financial, digital, and trade borders as well.

Since 2008, Latin America has seen a greater decline of democratic indicators than any other region globally. Authoritarian regimes are driving migration to the southern border in tremendous numbers, with migrants from Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua now outnumbering migrants from the “Northern Triangle” countries of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

This post drew from testimony given by Elaine K. Dezenski on June 21, 2023, during a House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Law Enforcement, and Intelligence hearing titled “Countering Threats Posed by Nation-State Actors in Latin America to U.S. Homeland Security.” Elaine Dezenski is senior director and head of the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.