➡ This Judicial Watch podcast episode features Chris Farrell and his guest, Joseph Humeyer, discussing the role of the Center for Secure Free Society, a national security think tank. They highlight the importance of promoting both economic liberty and security, and express concern about the growing influence of China in Latin America. They also discuss the need for a strategic approach from the U.S. towards Latin America, rather than a transactional one, and the potential for President Trump’s administration to prioritize this region in U.S. foreign policy.

➡ The article discusses a meeting between President Trump and President Malaysia, where the latter wanted to celebrate Trump’s victory rather than discuss political matters. It then shifts to a discussion about a Venezuelan prison-based criminal gang, the Train de Aragua, which has been expanding rapidly in the U.S. The gang, which originated from Venezuela’s prison system, has spread to at least 10 countries in a short span of time, making it a significant transnational criminal organization. The article also highlights how the gang’s expansion has been facilitated by the Venezuelan state and the Biden administration’s immigration policies.

➡ The TDA, a group with socialist ideologies, uses aggressive tactics to seize control of territories, similar to a military force. They target private property to assert control over populations. This group is training South American crime syndicates, who commit crimes in the U.S. and then return to their home countries. The TDA’s tactics are spreading due to a criminal justice approach that favors rehabilitation over punishment, creating environments that incentivize criminal behavior.

➡ Tereka Alasami and Hezbollah have been influential in Venezuela’s mining industry, previously controlled by the ELN. Hezbollah, a proxy of the Iranian regime, has been active in Latin America since 1982, carrying out bombings in the 1990s. Recently, there have been alerts and arrests related to Hezbollah’s activities in South America, with a new element of contracting local criminal networks for their operations. Hezbollah is now as much a criminal organization as it is a terrorist one, involved in money laundering for cartels and other illegal activities to fund their operations. They have also penetrated most criminal organizations in Latin America. The concept of ‘convergence’, the symbiosis between criminal and terrorist organizations, has been observed in their operations.

➡ The article discusses the increasing violence in Mexico and the rise of cartels, with a focus on their ability to shoot down military helicopters. It also highlights the importance of the Panama Canal to the United States, with 70% of US traffic and 40% of container traffic passing through it. The article warns of potential threats to the canal from countries like China, Iran, and North Korea. Lastly, it mentions the Bolivarian Alliance, an anti-American group in Latin America, and the need for the US to take it seriously.

➡ The Canal Zone’s condition has declined and its management has been given to Hutchinson Whampoa, a company linked to China. This has raised concerns about China’s control over the canal’s terminal ports and the strategic implications for the U.S. The situation reflects a lack of strategic foresight by the U.S. and a misunderstanding of the canal’s importance. Additionally, China’s increasing influence in Latin America, often through business deals, has led to negative impacts on countries like Panama, raising further concerns about China’s global intentions.

➡ The speaker discusses the Monroe Doctrine, a U.S. policy that aimed to keep European powers out of the Americas, and its relevance today. They argue that the doctrine was not imperialistic but liberating, and that it has been misunderstood over time. They suggest that the U.S. needs to reestablish strong relationships with Central and South American countries, and that this will be beneficial for U.S. foreign policy and national security. They also touch on the challenges and potential changes in U.S.-Mexico relations, including border control and trade agreements.

➡ Mexico is trying to gain more power in its relationships with other countries, including the United States. However, the U.S. wants a fair and honest relationship, especially when it comes to trade and security. The U.S. doesn’t benefit from Mexico’s problems and is willing to help, but won’t be tricked by Mexico. Joseph Hewe, from the Secure Free Society, discusses these issues and more on their social media and website.

Chris. I’m Chris Farrell and this is Judicial Watch. Welcome to On Watch everybody. The Judicial Watch podcast where we go behind the headlines to cover news and information that the mainstream old legacy media really doesn’t want you to know about. We try to recover some lost history and explain the inexplicable. Today I have the great benefit, the great honor of having my friend and colleague Joseph Humeyer, the executive director of the center for Secure Free Society, joining us. Welcome Joseph. Pleasure to be here. Honored to be on the first, my first time on the Judicial Watch podcast.

That’s great. Thank you. So, center for Secure Free Society, great title. What does that mean? What do you guys do? Well, the mission’s in the name, so it’s kind of self evident, but really we’re a think tank, a national security think tank created about 10 years ago here in Washington D.C. and I’m not the founder, actually the founder is a good mutual friend, Alejandro Chafuen, who actually had this vision after 9 11, because Alex is Alex, we call him Alex. He’s most known for helping sow the seeds of economic liberty throughout the world, working in Europe, Africa, Latin America.

But he, after 911 realized that you can’t promote economic liberty if you don’t promote security as well. That the two go hand in hand. And he realized that a lot of the security discussions in other countries and in this country, we’re moving more towards a kind of communist Marxist direction with generals being indoctrinated on Marxism. So he decided to create the center for Security Society as kind of a counterbalance. So I started to pick it up. It actually belonged to a foundation before called the Atlas Economic Research foundation, now called the Atlas Network. So I picked up on around 2012 13, made it independent, raised a little bit of money and we started doing things.

So my focus has been giving on making sfs, as the acronym is the premier national security think tank focused almost exclusively on the Western hemisphere, focused on Latin America. And as you know, Chris, you focus on Latin America, but very few people in Washington actually take the region very seriously. And I believe with the reelection of President, well, President Trump’s new term, that we’re actually coming into a moment where I think the Western hemisphere could be the top policy priority for U.S. foreign policy. Back in 2013, John Kerry at the OAS, the Organization of American States, very famously declared that the Monroe Doctrine was dead.

And that sent a horrible signal. In general, the United States has a very schizophrenic kind of relationship with its friends in Central and South America. Where we, we love you, we love you, we embrace you, and then we completely ignore you and abandon you and then we come back and we’ll threaten you. It’s really, it ping pongs around. It sends a lot of mixed signals to a lot of countries that otherwise should be our very great friends. It’s true. That’s a theme that I think we need to fix. There’s this kind of analogy that once someone told me that I think is kind of apropos for the situation.

How the United States has transactionally dealt with Latin America, for lack of a strategy, really for lack of having a strategic kind of a grand strategy approach, is very transactional at some level. But it’s the equivalent of friend that comes to your house, drinks all the beer and then leaves. Right. And so the United States has had this kind of reputation as being like, when we come, you know, we need everything, we need it now, we need it yesterday, and then we leave. And you don’t hear from us for another few years until the Chinese show up.

Exactly. And so that created this vacuum and the vacuum is starting to get filled. You mentioned the Monroe Doctrine. Let me talk a little bit about that. And John Kerry, then Secretary of State. You could draw a direct line from John Kerry saying that at the OAS, I believe in 2013, to the rapid expansion of China and Latin America. I mean, China has been around in Latin America for a little bit longer than that. But from 2013 to today, that’s been their growth period. That’s where they really started to move, not just from the commercial, but go into the political and then eventually to the military.

Well, I mean, when the Secretary of State signals, hey, we quit, they’d be idiots not to jump in. Yeah, yeah, that’s true. An invitation, basically. Yeah. And they’ve come in in a very, very aggress. I don’t think most Americans truly appreciate not just their efforts, but really like the volume, the scope, the size of where they’ve inserted themselves, all through what I think of may sound arrogant. It’s our hemisphere, right. It’s always been the position, it’s our near abroad for sure. And natural allies have been alienated. People that we share an awful lot with feel like they’re on the outs.

And the Chinese come in with sweetheart deals and make offers that it’s kind of like a mafia deal. They make you an offer you can’t refuse. That’s a position we put some of our long term allies in. Do you think that Marco Rubio and company that they’re looking at this, they’re thinking about this. They’ve got a strategy to combat it. Yeah, I think, for sure. I think Senator Rubio, now Secretary of State designate Marco Rubio, I think, is number two. Christopher Landau, former ambassador to Mexico, son of diplomats, grew up in South America. I think Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, I think even places like Attorney General Pam Bondi, I think there’s actually a wealth of knowledge in the cabinet and beyond the cabinet of the new Trump administration with a very keen eye for Latin America.

But I think the vision is coming from the president himself. And if you look at the statements he’s made over the last, well, essentially since getting elected, since November 5, whether it’s talk about the Panama Canal, tariffs on Canada, Mexico, Greenland, or even the Gulf of America, as it’s now called, you could say all those things in one breath because it all has to do with two things. It has to do with national security and creating a security perimeter around the United States that protects the homeland. And it has to do with deterring China, because China is involved, along with Russia and Iran, but mainly China’s debate actor in acquiring specific strategic sites from the Arctic down to the Panama Canal to be able to outflank the United States from our northern and southern flank.

And you know, as you know, from military, like, if you get outflanked, that’s checkmate moves. And so to me, I think President Trump has this vision of a grand strategy in the US near abroad that he’s starting to lay the precepts for. And it’s up to his team and all of us to essentially start to pave that road, to be able to come up with it. I also think there’s some very smart Central and South American leaders who see the opportunity. Correct. They see an opportunity to turn the corner and make a lot of good corrections that build a lot of bridges.

I will note that the very first foreign leader to come and visit President Trump was Javier Milei, Argentina. You were there. Tell me about your experience there. No, it was good. I mean, he was very excited. He was. You know, I see President Milei on probably a handful of occasions. I don’t think I saw him in the United States when he came to speak at cpac, but also in Argentina. And he always comes with a ball of energy. I think it radiates in his personality. But in fact, when he came, it was interesting because I think that he came with his sister.

He had a foreign minister delegation, and they came thinking that this was going to be like a Small, intimate thing right after the election. Election. And there was upwards of about a thousand people there. And then I didn’t think he realized the magnitude of the celebrities that could have been there. Right, right. And I think he was just as impressed by President Trump as he was by Sylvester Stallone. And he was like, oh, it’s Rocky. He’s like, rocky knows my name. And he was very excited about that. And so I think President only had a great time.

He is the first foreign leader to engage and think in person. I mean, congratulate in person President Trump after the election. And I know President Trump well enough to know that that meant something to him. I’m sure he values that. To him, a lot of it has to do, in my opinion, with respect and acknowledgement and courtesy. It means a lot to him. And the fact that Milei really made a beeline to Mar a Lago and, you know, Argentina has a lot of problems that they need to work on and fix that, need our help. But they’re a very significant, you know, South American power.

Even with their problems, they still have a lot to offer. And so I just think it was very significant. It is not to be just sort of, oh, well, that was just a demonstration. I think there’s more to it than that. No, absolutely. And I think you hit on something. I think that’s key, that many presidents would want to basically come to Mar a Lago or wherever to. To have a meeting with President Trump. They want to have a sit down, they want to talk. President Trump was not there to have meetings yet. He had just won the election.

It was actually more of a celebration. President Malaysia’s like, I don’t need a meeting. I just want to celebrate with him. This is a victory for us. We think this is a positive thing. And so I think the fact that he came with that little intention of actually trying to drive an agenda. Yeah, he’s not trying to broker a deal. He’s not trying to broker a deal like the day after. He just wants to hang out with him. He wanted to hang out. He wanted to show what you mentioned, kind of a gratitude to say that, you know, you didn’t just win for the United States, you won for all of us.

And I think when President Milei won a year prior to that in Argentina, a lot of people had the same feeling, like, he didn’t just win for Argentina, he won for the entire hemisphere, not the world, Western civilization. That was a huge victory. President Trump’s victory was a huge victory. And I think that they have A meeting of the minds to some level, it’s almost compounding during the day. Exactly, yeah. Momentum, it’s like reinforcing and it resonates. So there’s repercussions, reverberations, I think, all through the hemisphere, which is tremendously positive. It is, it is. I was very happy with it.

So I’m going to go from a very happy positive thing to sort of a negative thing. Not even sort of a negative thing, a horrific thing. And you are the guy on this, you’re the smart guy. And that’s why we’re happy to have you on this podcast. In the very recent past, the last few weeks, you published a paper, I guess it was the Via Heritage. Correct? Yeah. On this Venezuelan, really jail, prison based criminal gang that is having rapid growth in the US People hear the name, but they don’t. I don’t know that there’s a good level of sort of comprehension, not just of what they’re doing, but how they’re different from other criminal gangs, cartels, criminal enterprises.

So I know it’s a lot, but can you give us like a little tutorial? Sure. What’s going on, what’s the group and what are they doing? Yeah, so they’re called the Train de Aragua, which is Spanish for train from Aragua. Aragua is a state in Venezuela. And I’ll explain what the concept of train is because it’s basically inferring to the prison systems. So in Venezuela, and this goes back to decades when Hugo Chavez was in power, the criminal system inside a prison was called cars. And then the criminal system that was exported from the prison to the surrounding communities was called trains.

So the train from Aragua and there were other trains. There was the train from Llanos, the train from Pacifico, the train from Guyana, where prisons that were in geographic territories that were controlling criminal systems around that prison. Right. So the systems, right, they call it Pranato as well. That’s like an acronym for basically a prison killer. And so that was a whole system that was developed during the Hugo Chavez era, empowered during his era, and started to take over during the Nicolas Maduro regime. And so what that is is basically Trinidad was the most powerful of that system that was able to consolidate power in Venezuela, then exported in around 2017 when the mass migration of Venezuela began to take fold.

And people I think should know Venezuela is the largest mass migration in the world today. It’s over 8 million Venezuelans that fled that country since 2014. It’s the largest in the history of Latin America. And up until about 2021, most of that was in South America. And then when the Biden administration came in and drew kind of like the magnets to steer migration north, they came with it. And so the Venezuelan migration exponentially grew into the United States, particularly through the southern border. And Trinidad followed Trent follows all the way. All the migrant pathways and migrant routes that take place.

I mean, before terrorizing many states in the United States, they were terrorizing all of South America, Colombia, Peru. So because of the horrific conditions in Venezuela, people were fleeing Venezuela initially. Maybe they move one, two countries away, they end up in Colombia, where, I mean, you can just go to the capital. Whichever way they go, they want to get out. But as they get out, tda, right, Is moving with them in a sense, following the same migratory paths. 2021, Biden comes in and they say, look at this, the door is wide open. Why wouldn’t they go to the United States? Right? And so that surge goes north, they get into the United States.

What’s different about them? Yeah. So TDA is the biggest and largest transnational criminal organization in Latin America today. Not in terms of memberships, but in terms of countries of influence. They’re present in at least 10 countries throughout the hemisphere, and they’ve accomplished that in a matter of six, seven years. So what took the MS.13 or the cartel, Mexican cartels, to do in like, multiple decades? They did it in a fraction of the time. So they’re very, very aggressive. That’s the first big, I think, distinction. All of these transnational criminal groups are aggressive, but not at the speed at which TDA tends to operate.

The second, I think the most significant difference is they’re state sponsored. And then that’s the real caveat there, because as opposed to the Mexican cartels who have all connections to corrupt government officials, this is the state institutions of Venezuela providing basically services or capabilities to this transnational criminal organization to be able to expand further and faster than they would otherwise. I’ll give you an example. We talked about the migration. So obviously the Biden administration policies was the kind of the open door that allowed them to come in. However, the infrastructure to be able to move north was provided by the Maduro regime.

And I’ll expand on that. One of the reasons that they didn’t come south was just terrain is difficult. There’s only two ways to get there. You got to go either by plane into one of the countries in Central America or Mexico, or you got to go by land, which is essentially a large, treacherous route that goes through A very dangerous jungle on the border of Colombia, Panama, known as the Darien Gap. So 10 years ago, when this really started to bubble up, the Darien Gap did not have a lot of infrastructure to be able to traverse mass migration.

And there was no real logistical infrastructure between Venezuela and Mexico other than select flights. So what the regime did, the Maduro regime did, was it financed NGOs on the Colombian side of the border and maybe even some of the Panamanian side to start to incentivize migrant care networks that allow to increase the infrastructure so the Venezuela can start pushing through the gap and then also increase the number of flights from Venezuela to Mexico through a state owned airline which is known as Cambiasa, which is sanctioned by the United States for being facilitating terrorism narcotrafficies. So on the ground they literally built up subsidized finance, the NGOs and sort of the process of moving people.

Yeah, as they say, build it and they will come. Right. They built it and they came, sure enough. And then they use a state sponsored airline to put an air bridge in. Right. So why schlep through the jungle when you can fly in in a couple hours? Right. And so the state sponsored airline. Give me the name again. So like during the pandemic. Yeah, you know, all air traffic pretty much at a halt. That airline continued to fly to five countries. Turkey, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Mexico, with the most flights going to Mexico. So that air bridge they really developed during the pandemic, when everything shut down, they were able to increase that.

And initially we would go to the military airport, the second airport that’s in Mexico City, then expand to Cancun, then it spread to other parts of Mexico. So theyyeah, they developed an air bridge, a land bridge, and they basically created the infrastructure coupled by the Biden administration’s kind of pull factors. And that’s the recipe for this disaster of TDA infiltrating the United States. They’re a different kind of criminal enterprise. They’re organized differently, they’re directed and controlled differently. If you’re going to go after a Mexican cartel with a certain set of techniques or applications to break a cartel, those same techniques and applications wouldn’t necessarily work against tda.

Is that true? To some level. Because there’s two things I think that is important for law enforcement to kind of wrap around. One is the aggressiveness and the speed at which TDA operates. See, the Mexican cartels have kind of a stealth strategy. They try to infiltrate, they try to corrupt, they try to, they play the long game really to essentially capture territory and basically sway it to their control. TDA does this almost like a military, like a paramilitary force. They strike, they strike, they grab you. Aggressive violence on action, almost like a strike team of any military, law enforcement.

And that’s why, you know, apartment complexes, residences, even luxury goods. Attacking property rights is part of an ideological structure that they have. The ideology that the TDA bases on is an extension of the socialist ideology of the Maduro regime, which is called invasions. And in Venezuela, they call it invaciones, which is a tax directly on private property. If they can weaken private property, if they can threaten private property, everything from as big as an apartment complex to as small as, like, a car, they can actually assert their control and a social control over the population. So TDA has this kind of known tactic, and it’s something that they’ve been building and perfecting upon.

And we’re starting to see it even in not just the Venezuelans, they call them here, South American crime syndicates, they call them criminal tourists, mostly Chileans that essentially come to the United States on a tourist visa, engage in a criminal spree of basically theft of all kinds and even some war crimes, and then they go back to their countries and put that money back into the gang. So TDA is the one that’s training them on how to do all this, right? TDA is the one that’s training them. So you always see these Chileans that will show up in California, steal from NFL players, leave, come back, and then they’re thinking, okay, this is just a random occurrence.

This is systematic. It’s actually what TDA does and has done in other countries and importing that into the United States, that is incredibly important. I mean, to look at that as, you know, from a law enforcement perspective, when you’re trying to analyze patterns and activities, it’s very asymmetrical, right? It is. This is not something you just lay out. You say, well, here’s the structure. Here are the head guys, here’s the guy, here’s the individual group leaders, and they’re running operations based on neighborhoods. That’s kind of old school. It’s like a franchise, really. Yeah. This is a very different approach.

And like I said, it’s kind of like a strike. So they go in, they do their mission, they hit the target, they get what they need, and bang, they’re out again. And they might not even stay in that apartment complex. Right? Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. They made a message, they hit it, they take what they need, and bang, they’re gone and they’re out, and they’re out to the next community, do it in the next community, and rinse and repeat until they. Until they create, like, a. A zone in which they feel that they can actually achieve territorial control.

And so the zones that they’re focused on are the ones that were most obvious, which are sanctuary cities because of the conditions of those zones that allow kind of permissive environment for this type of activity. In Venezuela, they had the same thing in Venezuela. They call them peace zones. And so let me back up a little bit and say why this spread in Venezuela, and that might help explain why it’s spreading here in Venezuela. I think it was done by design, which was fundamentally the regime’s approach to criminal justice. So their approach to criminal justice was rehabilitation over punishment in terms of criminals that go to prison, and also community organizations that control neighborhoods more than police.

And so they created peace zones and handed it over to NGOs. And then they created basically early release, early parole programs in the prisons to have prisoners that were, you know, in there for homicide or horrible crimes released in a fraction of the time that their sentences were mandated. And so what you had is you had a system that was created that incentivized criminal behavior and empowered it. And then, as you can expect, that criminal behavior rose to the top, and it started to take over all these peace zones. And the peace zones were like, the police in Venezuela did not go in there.

Even if they’re tied to the regime, they know that criminality rules and criminality can shoot in any direction. So that created basically a system that allowed the regime to have kind of, like, tentacles into all these places where they can even threat their own government. Like, if they have a rebellion or anything happens, they can be able to stifle it and shut it down pretty quickly. And I think that the term that we’ve used in the paper and I’ve used in my research is called hybrid criminal government system. Right? So it’s a hybrid because it’s both state and non state.

It’s criminal, and it’s a governing mechanism because it’s basically taking over the mayor, taking over the police, taking over that area. And the thing that I think reflects that the most in the US Is the sanctuary of cities. That’s the kind of same concept that, you know, we need to be more migrant friendly. We need to be more open to undocumented people. And what that does is it allows criminals to empower themselves. And so it’s no coincidence to me that, you know, we Had Aurora, Colorado. Well, next door is Denver, Colorado. Denver’s a sanctuary city, so I guarantee that there’s migrant shelters there that are probably mostly legitimate, except for the TTA members that are there.

Yeah, but I mean, this is a basic law of economics, and the law is you get more of what you subsidize. Yeah, that’s true. Well, there’s also the moral hazard. Right. If you don’t penalize bad behavior, you get more bad behavior. Right. And so you’re getting more bad behavior and you’re actually pouring money into it. Now it’s wrapped up in all sorts of lovely intentions and heartfelt desires. I mean, it’s all wonderful, the idea, but the practicality, the reality, the physicality of what is going on is that you are creating the environment and then pouring money into an environment and arranging the laws, the conditions, the circumstances for exactly this kind of stuff to not just be or to have an advantage or to succeed, but to, like, thrive.

Yeah. Right. To go beyond just being able to do it, but actually turning over, control, capture territory eventually. Right. That’s really. Every transnational criminal organization in the world wants to control and capture territory. And what I argue is that today, in kind of the modern threat environment and asymmetric warfare, like transnational criminal organizations are almost like soldiers in a military. Like, you deploy them to be able to capture more territory so that these regimes that don’t have strong militaries can use that as a way to threaten their adversaries. That’s exactly what it is. Yeah. So TDA is a proxy of the Maduro regiment, and same the way that Hezbollah is a proxy of the Iranian regime, and it’s a tool that’s being used for greater strategic ends.

So you say Hezbollah, which makes me think of Hezbollah in Central and South America. Of course, we’ve been talking about Venezuela. You can talk about Hezbollah there. I don’t think a lot of Americans associate. They think of Hezbollah, they think of, okay, Lebanon. They think of northern Israel and the combat conditions there. With Hezbollah, you think about Iranian sponsorship. They don’t necessarily say, oh, yeah, of course, South America. Yeah. It just. It doesn’t compute. Yeah. Give our viewers and our listeners a little bit of an insight into how. How can you say Hezbollah and Venezuela or Bolivia in the same sentence? How does that work? So I will actually tie this directly to what we’re talking about for.

With tda. It’s actually something I haven’t said in the paper or in public yet, but I think it’s worth that our law enforcement Community actually starts to look into this. So the question is, who is the head of the trend Aragua? Who is the head of the ta? So the way the kind of reporting is done by journalists, they talk about this guy named Nino Guerrero, Hector Russell Ford Guerrero, right? This young kid that basically was in the prison of Tocoron in Aragua State, and he rose up to be this major gang leader. I think that’s a cover story.

I think the head of the trend Aragua was the former Minister of Interior that then became the governor of Aragua, that then became the vice president of Venezuela. His name is Tarek El Aysami. Now, why is Tarek Elaisami so relevant? Because Tarek El Aissami was also the individual that was responsible for facilitating all those documents to Hezbollah and other foreign terrorist organizations to get Venezuelan documentation to spread throughout the world. Tarek Alassami is of Syrian Lebanese descent. He’s very well connected to the Middle Eastern networks. And the people that he placed around himself when he was the governor of Aragua, who also were the people that helped enable the trend at Agua, are very closely aligning within these networks.

And so I’m basically saying all that to say that we need to start looking at the alignment of Hezbollah with the tda. It’s a very serious alignment. Tereka Alasami is a critical node within that network, but not the only node within that network. And in Venezuela, the serious researchers on TDA are starting to look at how TDA has been able to capture some of the mining industry, which was once controlled by the eln, and they think that they did it through Hezbollah networks. So that’s an extension of the TDA thing. Hezbollah in Latin America is a broader conversation which has been around pretty much since the birth of Hezbollah in 1982.

When they, you know, burn in Lebanon, they immediately were exported as a proxy of the Iranian regime into South America, carried out multiple bombings in the 1990s. I mean, if you think about the 92 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, 94 attack on the AMIA culture center, same city at that time in the early 90s, there was no realthat I know about the real counterterrorism expert that thought that that was possible, that Hezbollah could carry out a kinetic attack, it was out of the blue. It was out of the blue. It was very shock.

But it showed you that they were building capabilities from the beginning to be able to carry out these type of things if they needed to. So if they did that in the early 90s, you can only imagine what they could do today, because that hasn’t gone away. And the fact that they haven’t done a big, major terrorist attack like that doesn’t mean that they are capable of it. Matter of fact, in the last year, since the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas, we’ve seen little alerts in Latin America starting to bubble up. There’s been at least three major arrests in South America of terrorist operations, mostly targeted assassinations that were thwarted by local police of Hezbollah targeting Israeli or Jewish businessmen.

And there was one in Brazil, there was one in Colombia, there was one in Peru. And there’s always kind of these little alerts throughout there. The interesting thing of those cases, and this is all just within the last year, the interesting thing of those cases is they all have a new element of what we hadn’t seen before with Hezbollah, even when they carried out the 90s bombings. Because when they carried out those bombings in Argentina, it was all through their own networks. It was very insulated. They worked with the Iranian embassies, they worked with the Lebanese diaspora, but they had like the insulate.

The Argentines were very limitedly involved or any country, Latin American country. This time. They were contracting Latin American criminal networks. They were contracting prisoners from prisons. They were contracting sicarios or hitmen. And that you can argue that that’s probably why they got caught, because they were basically extending a little bit beyond their trusted circle. There’s a security vulnerability when you step outside. On the flip side, it may draw. The question is how far has Hezbollah penetrated the criminal underworld of Latin America to the point that they could actually contract some of them for kinetic operations? And the answer to that is Hezbollah is as much.

Much a transnational criminal organization today as it is a terrorist organization. They’re involved in massive amounts of money laundering for all the cartels. Yeah, well, I mean, they’ve always. They’ve always wanted to raise money through contraband, some kind of illegal activity in order to finance their operations. There’s a counterfeiting operation in Juarez, Mexico, where they’re churning out $100 bills because they make money. And they turn around and say, well, you know, we’re in this. We can still do what we’re doing and make money in the process. So that’s another aspect of how Hezbollah is different. And I think it’s also another aspect of how they can exploit that unlawful contraband activity in criminal networks to establish those relationships, to develop that influence so that they can, like you said, they go outside of their.

Just their Little insular. Yeah. You know, Lebanese guys, Syrian guys, Hezbollah. And now they’re dealing with a local criminal chieftain or some other bad guy that they want to involve in a bombing, a killing. Whatever it is. It takes it to a different dimension. It does. And I think so. There’s a concept in the defense community that over the last 10 years, we’ve been kind of wrestling with. It’s not much doctrine now, but it was a debate at the time, which is called convergence. And what convergence is is the symbiosis between transnational criminal organizations and foreign terrorist organizations or international terrorist organizations.

And there was a time, you know, post 9, 11, that many intelligence analysts and academics and others thought that this was impossible. They wouldn’t have a strategic alignment. You may have, like, a tactical thing, but you’re not going to have terrorists and criminals operating in a symbiotic manner continually and persistently over time. Well, the reality is that’s how it happened. And what we found out in this, what convergence is about is we found out it wasn’t necessarily like there was criminals that were becoming terrorists or terrorists that were banning their political grievances and going for criminality.

It was more logistics. Like the service providers, what we know in the counterterrorism community as the three Fs, the Fixers, the financiers, the facilitators that are providing services to criminals, but at the same time can provide those same services to terrorists. Like, if you’re an accountant for the Jalisco cartel in Mexico and the, you know, Hezbollah needs to do a financial operation in Mexico, well, you’re a good candidate to be an accountant for Hezbollah as well. You’re not a member of either. You’re a service provider, but you’re creating an ecosystem of logistical networks that are really taking over countries.

So Hezbollah has been able to be very adept at building these logistical networks, empowering them and using them through service. The Mexican cartels, before the Chinese got involved because of fentanyl, they were the main service providers for the money laundering for the Mexican cartels. I mean, they were the main money launderers of the Mexican cartels. There’s a case in Colombia, this is actually one of the earlier cases in 2008 of a guy named Ayman Juma, who was a major, major money launderer. He then became a drug trafficker, trafficking 200 kilos of cocaine through the Lebanese Canadian bank through a used car scheme where they would basically fictitiously sell cars in the United States that were coming from Africa.

And then basically it was all just a scheme, money laundering scheme. Well, this individual, when they caught him, they found out that he was tied to the highest echelons of Hezbollah’s command. Like he was talking to the Secretary generalnow deceased Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah himself about these operations. So Hezbollah tried to draw plausible deniability because in their kind of narrative they say, we don’t get involved in drug trafficking. It’s against, you know, the ethos of Shia Islam and the Lebanese populations. We’re not involved in anything in Latin America because we care about Lebanon. It broke that narrative and that’s why they fought back against it so hard.

But the reality is they’ve been doing that and I think they penetrated most criminal organizations in Latin America. Like if you any cartel trained at Agua Mexicans, Los Choneros in Ecuador, Cocaleros in Bolivia, they probably all have ties to these group Hezbollah. There was a great disservice done in the American intelligence community because they bought into that false narrative. They said, oh well, terrorists would never cooperate or the cartels would never cooperate with terrorists because it would ruin their business. Yeah, I remember that. And I can’t tell you, I mean, decades I was screaming, no, that isn’t true and giving examples.

And it’s nice to hear that there’s now sort of a rethinking. Well, you know, it’s funny, that’s great you mentioned that, because the evidence was always there, always there, empirical, but they didn’t have a conceptual framework to explain it. So that’s where convergence comes from. Because convergence isn’t like that new. It’s just, it’s just very practical. And it’s also like it created a framework work for these like very smart analysts to sort of say, okay, I get the theory now, like you see the evidence, but they didn’t think it was actually a thing that was sustainable.

Right. But once you start thinking about the theory and the practical application of it’s like it makes sense. See, at this point it’s much of the debate and it’s threat convergence is pretty much taking over most countries in Latin America. And it’s not just criminals and terrorists now. It’s also what I call criminalized states. It’s also countries now governments, regimes that are essentially look at these different networks as kind of proxies and tools for their methods of asymmetric war. You back up 10 years, there was an effort to increase the size and the scope, the volume of poppy production in Mexico.

And guess who they brought over to help them out with poppy production? Afghanis yeah. Taliban, why not? Who’s the world’s leading producer of opium from poppy production? Why wouldn’t you bring over Afghanis to. Actually, the Haqqani network in Afghanistan was one of the first case studies for this convergence theory. They have a special knowledge and technique and skill. And you know, you saw this rapid increase in violence in Mexico with cartels and guess what? Oh, you know what? Mexican cartels, Jalisco, new generation cartels, started shooting down Mexican army helicopters. Who taught them how to shoot down Mexican army helicopters? Or who emboldened them to do that? How about the people that spent the last 10, 15 years fighting Americans and shooting at helicopters? Right.

Or the tunnels. Right. And so all these things, and it was crazy to me because if you back up 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago. Oh, no, no, they would never do that. Of course they would. Why wouldn’t they? You know, it’s just. Anyway, we talked about Venezuela. There’s a couple of other. You and I have talked about it as a ticking time bomb, but there’s a couple of other places like Bolivia. Oh, yeah. That Americans should at least have some sense of. Because I think there’s an enormous ignorance. I don’t mean that in the pejorative.

I just mean it’s a sense that if you haven’t thought about it, you’re not up to speed on it. You think about it all the time, you do it for a living. Right? Correct. Yeah. So I mean, if you’re an average concerned American who hasn’t thought about Central and South America, what are some other geographic hotspots that people should say, wow, we need to pay attention to that Because a problem. There can be an even bigger problem for us a year down the road or however many. Yeah, I think. Well, there’s two answers to that question.

I’ll start with the one. I think that’s the most obvious and I think President Trump has made it increasingly obvious, which is the Panama Canal. Right. And I think that when President Trump mentioned the Panama Canal, many people got a little shocked because they didn’t even know that was even in the conversation or on the national security agenda. But anyone that’s been there, panel Canal, that’s a no brainer. Like that’s obviously got to be part of the conversation because that’s one of the most strategic, important waterways in the world and definitely the most important for the United States.

70% of our traffic that goes to and from ports, 40% of our container traffic, 8% of global shipping. That’s a major waterway so if anything happens to Panama or any Colombia and Ecuador that can either disrupt, deter or just destroy the Panama Canal, it’s a potential for armed conflict by the United States. Like we want to permit that. So I think that that’s a part and we could talk a little about what’s been happening with the Panama Canal. The Chinese encroachment. Iranians said that they were going to transit warships. North Korea smuggled weapons that threw it about a decade ago.

So there’s been a concern about this for a long time. And I think what President Trump did is he elevated that concern to the top of the agenda. So now everybody is talking about the Panama Canal. But if I take a step back, I think it’s less geographic, but it’s. There’s an alliance in Latin America that doesn’t get a lot of media attention and I think it should because it’s beyond the non state networks that you see about, like the Foro Sao Paulo, which is a communist network from the 90s that basically promotes Marxist criminal leaders, or like the Grupo de Puebla, which is a leftist progressive political alliance tied to kind of the woke ideologies.

Those are important, but there’s a center of gravity which is called the Bolivarian Alliance. And so the Bolivarian alliance is actual multilateral. It’s in fact the only multilateral that has a member in all the 16 multilateral organizations of Latin America. They corrupted the multilateral system. It consists of Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Bolivia, and at one time Ecuador, when it was under the control of Rafael Correa. And there’s a handful of Caribbean satellite countries that are involved in it. Iran and Syria are observing members of the alliance. China is the biggest enabler of the alliance. And this alliance is the most anti American, the most anti Western, the most hostile authoritarian and criminal alliance that exists in the history of Latin America.

They’re literally toppling countries. You know, whether it’s Argentina under Christina Kirchner, Brazil under now again Lula da Silva, Mexico under Lopez Obrador, or even before that, they create networks using criminal means and also just kind of asymmetric war to essentially dominate, influence the region. And I think that alliance has not really been been taken very seriously by the United States. And I think that’s been to our detriment. China, Russia, Iran depend on that alliance to be able to increase their tentacles throughout the region. I call this the three quarter standard because three quarters of Chinese credits and loans, not its trade or investments, those go everywhere.

But the credits that they’re using to basically prop up regimes go to those four countries. 75% of credit unlockable countries. How physically real is it? I mean, do theyis there a place where they exist, meet, confer openly, or is this all subrosound? No, they’re a multilateral, so they’ll have multilateral meetings. Their headquarters is in Caracas. The Secretary General was Bolivian, I think is now back to be in Venezuelan. So they just had their, I think their 25th or something anniversary meeting in Venezuela. They talked about the Panama Canal because it happened after the statement from President Trump.

So they function like a multilateral, but because they don’t have the legitimacy in the west, like for example, the Organization of American States, they’re not covered much. But if you follow their summits and you read their declarations, they’re very aggressive in what they say. In fact, at the last one, at the Caracas, at the multilateral ALBA meeting that they had in the summit in Caracas, they talked about making a motion to have the Palestinian authorities become now a member of the Bolivarian Alliance. Right. So they’re very ahead of the game, right? They’re looking at all these networks and they’re saying we need to add the Palestinians, which today’s day and age effectively means Hamas as an official signatory and member of a multilateral.

I know, I know absolutely zero about that. So, you know, I’d like to, I like to think that I’m at least halfway aware of what’s going on, but I’m completely flat on my flat foot on that one. I had no idea. You probably heard of Foro Sao Paulo, which is. Is the words a lot of people talk about. That’s an extension of this. So if you get down to brass tacks, is that like a smiley face pr? It’s like a disinformation campaign with networks and Twitter accounts and trolls. But if you get to that tangible center of gravity, it’s countries with governments that are aligned and coordinated and meeting and meeting to tackle the United States, to attack the United States.

And it’s those four specifically. And that doesn’t mean that they are aligned 100% and agree on everything that they do together. But they work as a network. It’s like you would call it five eyes for the United States or the four eyes for the bad guys in Latin America. So in 1999, I was down in Panama at the turnover of the Canal. Oh, were you there? I was there. Sad day. Actually, my first visit to Panama was all the way back in 92. At the time, I was an army intelligence officer. We were looking at A Colombian target that was transiting and at the time, the Panamanian armed forces, thanks to prior military activities.

You know, it was like two guys in a jeep with a rifle. And that was. Makes sense. That was who was patrolling the Darien Gap. Literally, it was that. There weren’t any people crossing back then, I imagine. No, there was not. It was true. Jungle, jungle. But you had essentially like company size elements of Colombian drug traffickers out of farc, you know, moving weight of drugs. And he had two Panamanians in a jeep drive up and go, you know, turn around and run. Right. So there was a. There was an interest in what was going on back then.

This is like again, 92. This is Dark Ages. Right. 99. I’m there. And I watched Jimmy Carter make a disgraceful speech attacking the United States and saying how bad we were and, you know, turning over the Canal. And at the time there were some American business interests that were thinking about, well, the Panamanians are interested in either leasing or selling some of the former U.S. facilities. Because you talk about what we used to have there in the old Canal zone, the southcom. Right. But I mean, even like the air base, the facilities related to the ports on either end, rail lines.

I mean, it could have been an incredible sort of telecoms, the whole thing. Today they’ll call it a multimodal. You know, you could and could not get American investors to bite on looking at it or. I wasn’t involved in the financial part of it, but it was just sort of a. Why would we just give this away? It made no sense and very peculiar. And of course, sadly, I mean, Panamanian people are great, but the Canal Zone, what was the Canal Zone really deteriorated. I mean, it just was not what it was. Right, yeah. And the other huge contentious issue at that point was that Lee Ka Shing.

Yeah. Hutchinson and Hutchinson Whampoa were given control of management of the port facilities at each terminal end of the canal. And when it was pointed out that that was probably not a great idea and not in the US interests, then you were called every name and you’re paranoid. And I think it’s a completely legitimate critique then and it is now that essentially the Communist Chinese directly or indirectly have control of the two terminal ports and they decide what goes in and out and on what schedule. Yeah. So I think what you’re pointing to is kind of this, kind of this.

A kind of lack of strategic foresight by the United States and an erroneous foreign policy and vision at that point in history where we thought China was going to end up becoming some great ally to the United States. You know, we also ascended them to the wto, and we thought that this was going to be this Cold War kind of thinking that, well, they’re not the Soviets, so we could somehow work with them and found out, you know, the hard way, that they’ve been playing this the whole time. Marco Rubio touched on this. He yesterday in his confirmation statement, his opening remarks lightly, he touched on exactly what we’re talking about.

92, 99, that was the whole end of history period. Right? We won the Cold War, everything’s great. Liberal democracy is going to flourish. China is going to become a liberal democracy. So why don’t we just the biggest economy, trade partner. So we had a faulty thinking, but I think there’s a little bit more to it, and not just the lack of foresight and lack of vision of what that could actually mean, but I think it’s also kind of, in essence, to some level, like maybe a lack of understanding of the strategic nature of the canal. Right.

Like, why is the canal so important? It’s just geography, really. I mean, it’s positioned as the only efficient interoceanic point inside the hemisphere. Correct. You could try to build it out through the Drake Passage or the Straits of Magalanes. Today, they’re looking at the Arctic. All that’s in the future today is the canal. Right here, right now. It’s the one and only place, one and only place In World War II, both the. In World War I, the Japanese and World War II, the Nazis all tried to attack the canal. They all had plans to attack the canal because it was a choke point.

They know that. They do that. You know, you’re going to basically deter the United States from being able to respond to anything that’s going on throughout the Pacific. And so it’s kind of like common sense. And I think that once people started to realize that, then whatever President Trump said, you start to understand the merit of what he’s saying and the logic. And I even say the strategy of what he’s saying because I think he’s drawing critical importance to a topic that has been abandoned by the foreign policy, national security establishment that we’re just basically comfortable to say, just let it go.

As long as they’re waiting for, like, the balloon to go up, as they say, Right. They’re waiting for the actual kinetic threat to develop, and then they’ll. And then they’ll react and they’ll say, we gotta do something. And I think, well, how could this have happened. Yeah. And I think that that’s too late. And then the other thing too, I think is. And it’s kind of a bigger topic, but is the encroachment on Latin America by China using business. Right. So back in that day when you were in Panama on the Canal Zone, I remember there was hearings at the Senate and things talking about the Panama Canal, the transfer.

And most every senator, Republican and Democrat were in favor of it. They’re like, oh, this is a great deal. We have this great ally. And I think there was this kind of impetus to think, well, these aren’t Chinese military, these are companies. Right. These are business, commercial relations, which is incredibly naive. Naive. And I think the Latin Americans at some level bought it at the beginning, I don’t think today. But back then they actually thought that China was just a commercial actor. Has a bigone of the biggest consumer markets. It’s looking to look at commodities and there was a commodity super cycle and they wanted to really capitalize on it.

But what they found out through the hard way is what Africa found out the hard way is there is no real success story of Chinese investment. There’s no Chinese investment that took a developing country into the developed world. All it does is exacerbates the same problems that you had, the corruption, the insecurity. And you make a few of the high ranking political figures very rich. But the rest of the country continues to fall. Or you come out with a thing, whatever this thing is you’re looking for, but it’s always crippled. Correct. It’s never fully functional. And think about the canal.

Right. It’s great example, the canal. So after the 90s, stuff like the real big growth period for China and Panama was 2017. 2017, they signed contracts to build the. Well, they signed them earlier in 2014, but they started to really ratchet it up in 2017. For the expansion of the Canal. Correct. To make it wider. To make it wider. Because of the size of the vessels going through, they created the logistical services for the canal, whether it’s water treatment facilities or developing a bridge or even telecommunications. And then on top of that, they also started to take Panama into its geopolitical orbit, having them sign the bri, the Belt and Road Initiative and all that.

So you look at what they did, and that was under President Varela at the time in Panama. And then you look at the situation in Panama 2017 to today, Panama looks like a fraction of what it used to look like. It was like the Miami of Latin America was going 10% a year. It was booming. Hollywood actors were buying property. Now you have, you know, I was just there last year. You have, what do you call it? What do you call it? In the potholes. Yeah, that haven’t been fixed in seven years, eight years. You have infrastructure that’s going out, you have electricity that’s turning off.

This is to me an extension of what China actually does through its investments. Right. It weakens your country so you can steal your sovereignty. That’s exactly correct. I mean, there’s an instance of. And you can fill in the blanks on this. But you know, the Chinese, some Central and South American countries are very excited to get 5G, right? They wanted to have Internet, they want to have cellular coverage. They wanted to make sure that they were wired right, or wireless in the sense being able to communicate. And then I realized that when the Chinese said, yeah, we’re going to come in, we’re going to hook you up, no problem.

That’s not a Chinese company, that’s a People’s Liberation army signals unit that shows up, Right. It’s like if we send a signal brigade to go put up communications across a corps, right? That’s what the Chinese show up with. And it’s like, well, all these Chinese young men between 18 and 50 are marching around putting up. It literally is a Chinese military unit establishing the infrastructure for 5G and wireless across the country. And here’s the other thing that I have communicated this to some of our mutual friends. When the contract goes bad or when you’re frustrated and upset because the terms of service aren’t being met, where do you go? What court do you go to for enforcement of the contract? No, if you tell that, you know, Americans are stupid, if you tell us we don’t want you anymore, go home.

I mean, there may be some pushing and shoving, but in the end, if you tell us to go home, we actually pack up and we go home. You tell the Chinese to go home, good luck and make me good luck. Right? That’s a good point. And so these are facets of Chinese investment or Chinese involvement that some, I think, even some well meaning folks don’t appreciate. You’re not getting a Chinese company, you’re getting a signal brigade from the People’s Liberation army putting in your wireless. And if it doesn’t turn out right, what court are you going to go to to get a judgment against them? And even if you did, how are you going to collect? And there’s no if.

It’s Americans, you know what you do? You go to American court, you sue, you’ll get a judgment, you’ll get your money. There’s a vehicle, there’s a way to get justice. There’s nothing of that with the Chinese. Zero. Yeah. I think that’s also kind of short term thinking on behalf of many of the Latin American countries that think, well, we’re going to get the benefits and if you present that problem, well, that’s the next guy’s problem. Talk to me in five years I’ll be in my condo in Miami. So I think that that’s a bit of like.

And I think everything’s encapsulated on this idea of we’ve been missing this kind of grand strategy for the region. Right. We haven’t had it. Everything’s been very transactional. Everything’s been very kind of in and out and without a real kind of impetus to look at the region from what’s the most important thing for US national interest and every country in the region to make that same conversation. And so one of the things that I’ve been doing recently over the last year is really kind of wrapping my head around this renewed Monroe Doctrine. Right? Yeah. And one of the things that, you know, being in academic circles and presenting this in different places, the pushback you get is, I believe, a misperception of the Monroe Doctrine.

They view it as an imperialist or interventionist foreign policy. And when I did the work at studying the Monroe Doctrine, I realized it’s the exact opposite. In 1823, one, the United States was not a world power. Two, it was written and James Monroe was, you know, credit. He’s the one that projected it as a doctrine, but it was written by John Quincy Adams, who if there was anyone that was not an interventionist in US foreign policy, it was then Secretary of State John Kuzyazen, who was famously known for not going abroad for monsters to destroy. It was written as a defense posture.

It was saying this is a part of a new world that needs to be off limits from colonial powers. And that’s the seed that planted the sovereignty for many countries in Latin America. Panama is born extension of that conversation. And many countries, it created the conditions that allowed that to happen. Correct? Correct. And I think that, that. So if anything, it wasn’t the opposite of imperialistic. It was liberating for the entire region. And then I think what happened over time is it got a little bit bastardized at some level of people looking at the intervention in the 20th century and things that happen with the key that’s changed everything.

Thing is the Spanish American War in 1880, that even changed who we were as a country. Puerto Rico, suddenly we have colonies. It changed the nature of who the United States was. Right. I mean when we go from liberating and then walking away, now we liberate and now we’ve got the Philippines, Cuba, Guam. And that was a character change for the country. And that’s sort of the worst aspects of what you’re talking about. That’s a sort of paternalistic, arm twisting routine. And that’s frankly where Central and South American countries don’t always trust us because like, hey, we’re your buddy, we’re your friend, we’re brothers here in the Western hemisphere.

And they kind of go, well yeah, but like in three years you’re not going to know who I am. And that we have got to get past or we have got to create the conditions or the, the relationships where our Central and South American neighbors have a belief, have an understanding that we’re for real. We’re not going to walk away or forget them or like you said before, drink all the beer and then leave. That’s a big hurdle. I think that’s a big part of it. That’s a big hurdle. No, it is the biggest challenge. I would say the argument that I was making is that that’s not the Monroe Doctrine.

Right. That’s what happened in the 20th century for other reasons. The Monroe direction was designed to not be interfering in all your relationships unless a foreign power tries to come up and capture it. An outside power. An outside power. In that case it was the European monarchies. Today’s case it would be China. We nearly went to war with England over. Correct, correct. I think it was part of Venezuela too. Yeah, it was, it was when they were trying to annex Guyana, you know, and so we’re at this point today where we’ve abandoned that posture, that defensive posture and letting everything permeate in our near abroad.

And the argument that I’ve made to a lot of our foreign policy and national security folks is that if you want to deal with the Middle east, if you want to deal with the South China Sea, if you want to deal with the war in Ukraine, you’re going to have to deal with our near abroad. Because if we do not deal with this, all those problems become exponentially worse and harder to solve. Like Russia, if you try to negotiate with them, will say, OK, fine, we’re going to solve the Ukraine thing and just increase our presence in Nicaragua, Mexico and Venezuela.

Right. Well that’s going to be a non starter for us. That’s a no go for U.S. national security. So I think that what actually, to be honest with you, to my pleasant surprise, President Trump, even before he was inaugurated, starts to begin this conversation, which I think is going to take us down a road that’s going to be not just tremendously beneficial for our foreign policy, but allow us to finally protect the homeland. And you need that security ring, you need that kind of perimeter from, you know, Arctic down to Panama. And you need it to be based on something real, not on something that’s kind of artificial.

And I think that we’re moving down that path. And I think that this is why I’m excited more than anything. I think we’re moving down a path where we can have a real conversation with our partners in Latin America. Because to be honest with you, as you do, I travel down there quite a bit and I talk to a lot of them and they like us, they are us in many respects demographically, but they don’t necessarily think we’re serious. Exactly. And they think, okay, you’re telling me today, but tomorrow it’ll change. And I think that if we could show them we’re serious, that you’re going to see a different reaction.

The State Department has had this kind of thinking for a long time that we have to just listen to what they say. Actually, when I presented this about the Monroe Doctrine in a meeting with some diplomats, they said, well, our Latin American friends, they don’t like the term Monroe Doctrine. They think it’s, I’m not here to like, say what they like. You know, I have to say what’s accurate, what’s factual and what’s good for America, but do it with confidence and respect. And my experience is Latin Americans will understand and will come to the table like once you do it that way, as soon as they realize that it’s not a one sided deal and that you’re going to be here not just next week, but you’re going to be here as a legitimate, as an authentic friend next year, five years, 15 years from now.

What undermines it is their feeling that we have the attention span of a 4 year old. Right? They think that our attention span is so short, so transient that they have no ability to say, oh, wait a minute, the Americans say they got our back, it’s ironclad. They say what they mean and they mean what they say and we’re good, but they don’t get that feeling. So naturally they have reservations as we, I know we gotta roll towards an end here, but I want to get I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least have you touch on Mexico for a second.

Yeah, sure. Give me your feeling. New president in Mexico, arguably even more left than amlo. Give me your fast review on Mexico. What do you think’s going on? I think there’s a couple things, things that the Mexican president is going to have to pretty much quickly adjust with President Trump. I think they know this, but I think that it’s going to happen. One is the shutting down of our border. I think that’s not just a campaign pledge. I think that’s a reality. It is, and I think that’s going to happen quickly. And if the president of Mexico was smart, she would have prepared for this.

If she’s not smart, we’ll see. But nonetheless, it’s going to happen either way. And what people don’t realize about the remaining Mexico policy, the migration protection protocol, it wasn’t an agreement, it was a policy on the United States. And we said the Mexican would be great for us, to help us, but if you don’t help us, we’re doing it anyway. Right. And so I think that that’s going to be the beginning of basically reinforcing things that have to do with protecting our national sovereignty, the border, drugs, all that stuff. And then that couples into the renegotiation of the trade agreement.

Right. Which will happen in 2026, I believe. Right. And expires this year. And I think that Mexico is going to try to, perhaps you do a position of basically hard negotiations using the region. The region today is in a more disadvantageous position for the United States than it was when President Trump first entered in 2017. Right. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to stay that way. There’s a lot of elections happening in 26, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re not going to be able to play that, play, you know, our geopolitical cards towards our favor.

But I think Mexico under President Lopez Obrador, began to align the country closer and closer to our adversaries, even though had a good relationship with President Trump, but also was trying to position Mexico in a greater sense of leverage. And I think that today Mexico will try to do some of the same. Doesn’t mean it’s going to work. It doesn’t mean it’s going to go far. I think if the Mexican government plays in good faith and tries to do something that’s more honest in terms of our trade relationship, our security relationship, I think they’ll have. They’ll Find a friend in the United States.

Because our relationship with Mexico transcends the presidents or the politics. It goes into basically a good neighbor policy. We don’t benefit from you guys having problems at all. If you guys have economic problems, if you guys have security problems. Like people think that we benefit from the cartels in Mexico, we don’t. That’s just a big headache for us. If we could do anything to help that solve that problem, we will. But if Mexico thinks that they’ll be able to pull the wool over America’s eyes and trick us into doing, I don’t think that that’s going to happen.

Second or flight. Yeah, exactly. Joseph Hewe, our executive director of the center for Secure Free Society. How can folks follow your work and see what you’re up to and what SFS is up to? Well, Think Tank has, you know, available on all social media. I’ll plug our podcast, which has been a little silent for recent months, but we’re going to bring it back in 2025. It’s called the Border Wars Podcast. We hope to have Chris on at some point. Love to come on, have that conversation. And that’s on YouTube. You can find us on Secure Free Society on YouTube and all social media.

Me personally, I’m less prolific on social media, but I do tweet from time to time or post or what it’s called now on X. It’s Mhumeyer. Just my two initials and my last name pretty much on all social media is that way. And then our website, securefreesociety.org, which you could find a lot of the reports and the writings and things that we do on Latin America. Joseph, this has been great. I think it’s fascinating talk. I know our viewers and listeners really appreciate your expertise. You are the guy when it comes to this hemisphere and we appreciate all of your hard work to really bring the truth out to the American public.

Thank you, Chris. It’s a pleasure. I’m a big fan of Judicial Watch. I think the work that you guys are doing is an essential function for not just national security, but be able to position the United States with more transparency. I think. You know, I always tell this to our Latin American friends. The vanguard of a healthy democracy is civil society. If your civil society crumbles, your democracy will crumble with it. And I think Judicial Watch helps keep the US Civil society healthy and strong. Thank you, Joseph. Really appreciate it. Thanks for joining us. I’m Chris Farrell on.
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