A war led by the United States against China, is predicted to have a devastating economic effect on Latin America. Countries including Peru, Brazil and Argentina, depend economically on their exports to China, on investments by Chinese firms, particularly in mining and logistics, and on Chinese loans to their governments (especially in Argentina).
In Argentina, the fascistic government of Javier Milei has subordinated the country to these war preparations to a degree without precedent in Argentine history, ceding control over Argentine territory and waters to the Pentagon on the fraudulent basis of defending national sovereignty against China. A self-described “anarcho-capitalist” who has built his foreign policy persona around denunciations of China, Milei now presents Argentina as a “strategic ally” of the fascistic Trump administration in its confrontation with Beijing, even as he tries to avoid a full break with the Chinese economy upon which Argentina’s export sector depends.
When he took office in December 2023, Milei chained Argentine foreign policy to that of the Trump administration. This has included support for both Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, and Trump’s war on Iran.
Trump is pressing Milei to break with China, despite the huge economic cost this will mean to Argentina’s agricultural and extractive industries, and its farmers and workers, whose livelihoods depend on Argentina’s exports to China.
However, beyond economic considerations, Trump’s war preparations extend to the use of the Pentagon’s Southern Command to align Latin America with US imperial interests and its control of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
On May 20, 2026, the Milei and Trump administrations signed an agreement authorizing the US Navy to patrol Argentine waters during the next five years. The agreement declared the Southern Atlantic a global common commodity (”Protecting Global Commons Program”) This agreement allows the US Fourth Fleet to patrol the South Atlantic coast of Latin America at will, militarizing the South Atlantic, including Cape Horn, which connects with the Pacific Ocean, and allowing the Fourth Fleet to block Chinese fishing and naval vessels.
On June 12, the last of 42 days of military exercises involving US and Argentine soldiers and sailors took place on the fields and mountains of the Cordoba Garrison, in the Argentine province by the same name. Some 400 troops from both nations participated in these war games using helicopters, tanks and other heavy war vehicles and airplanes. The series of military was code named “Atlantic Dagger 2026” (Daga Atlántica 2026).
War games also took place in the Port of Belgrano, and in the VII Airbase in Moron, both in Buenos Aires Province. This was the first joint military land exercise on Argentine territory.
The Cordoba military maneuvers elicited strong protests from human rights organizations over their being held on land that is currently being searched for the remains of people who were disappeared, victims of state terrorism, under the US-enabled Videla dictatorship (1976-1981).
“They are practicing war, where we should be planting memories,” Cordoba’s Human Rights Working Table declared. It was an “intolerable provocation.” The CIA and Pentagon played a key role in installing and backing the murderous dictatorships that ruled over Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay in that historical period.
In Argentina alone, it is estimated that 30,000 workers and youth were disappeared by the military dictatorship. The Human Rights Working Table appealed to the citizenry to support the search for the disappeared and to oppose the presence of US military forces in the country.
Argentina’s “Atlantic Dagger” maneuvers took place in preparation for the Argentine armed forces’ participation in the PANAMAX 2026 War Games, sponsored by Panama and the US Southern Command. This war games will bring together troops of 12 nations allegedly to practice how to protect the Panama Canal and to steer Latin America away from China. The list of participants includes Canada, Mexico, Peru, Panama, Paraguay, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Costa Rica, Colombia, Chile, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador and Argentina. The Panamax War Games will involve 1,500 troops and will take place between July 1 and August 31 of this year. Brazil has declined to participate.
In April and June of this year Argentina and the United States also carried out naval war games in the South Atlantic (Passex 2026), which included the US nuclear aircraft carrier USS Nimitz, and its escort ships, together with Argentine destroyers, corvettes and helicopters. The joint war maneuvers took place 60 miles off the Coast of Mar del Plata, in Buenos Aires Province.
The Milei administration also paid $33 million dollars to a US firm Top Aces Corp. to train pilots for its recently acquired F-16 warplane fleet.
In 2024 under the Milei administration, the naval base in the southern port of Ushuia, on the tip of the American Continent, and a gate-way to the Pacific Ocean via Cape Horn (Ships like the USS Nimitz are too big to use the Panama Canal and must use Cape Horn) was opened up to the Southern Command.
These series of military maneuvers between the US, Argentina and other nations, are in line with the Trump administrations reinterpretation of the Monroe Doctrine—as of late also referred to as the “Donroe” Doctrine—and the recolonization of Latin America by US imperialism.
Milei did not create this trajectory. The groundwork was laid by Peronism.
In 1990 and 1991, during the Peronist presidency of Carlos Menem, naval exercises involving US aircraft carriers and Argentine destroyers, also took place, despite popular opposition, such as the mass youth protests in the city of Mar del Plata in 1993. Since then, there have several other joint naval exercises involving the US and one with France.
Under Milei’s Peronist predecessor, Alberto Fernández, the Argentine Congress voted almost unanimously to authorize the entry of US troops and Argentine participation in Pentagon-organized exercises, including the Unitas and Gringo-Gaucho operations involving US aircraft carriers.
Trade union officials who present themselves as “left” Peronists—Hugo Yasky, Facundo Moyano, Vanesa Siley—voted yes. This was not an aberration but a continuation: Gringo-Gaucho exercises were held under the Kirchners in 2004, 2008 and 2010, while Cristina Fernández de Kirchner signed the “anti-terrorist” legislation demanded by Washington and hosted Pentagon training programs for Argentina’s Defense Ministry.
Milei’s own election was itself a protest vote against Peronism: its candidate, Peronist Economy Minister Sergio Massa, presided over IMF austerity, hyperinflation and the devaluation of the peso.
This recolonization is being imposed domestically with the active collaboration of the Peronist-led trade union bureaucracy. In April 2026, the General Confederation of Workers (CGT) General Secretary Jorge Sola addressed the AmCham summit in Buenos Aires alongside Milei, his cabinet, and US corporate executives, proposing what he called a “strategic partnership” between “productive investment” and “labor”—insisting this alliance “has always existed in Argentina and goes far beyond the ideological affinities of the government in power.”
The CGT had declared a “truce” with Milei in November 2024, canceling strikes and protests, and later refused to mobilize against the Labor Modernization Law in exchange for preserving its automatic dues checkoff and health plan funding. The Biden administration’s Labor Department held multiple meetings with CGT leaders and Milei officials, calling the Peronist union apparatus a “model” for collaboration; after meeting US Ambassador Marc Stanley, Pablo Moyano remarked that he was “much more Peronist than many of our own.”
Officially presented as protecting the Atlantic Ocean and the Panama Canal, the vast scale of these operations are evidence that what is being prepared is an imperialist war, targeting China, Washington’s biggest economic competitor.
There is no organized working class opposition to this war drive, not because workers are passive, but because the pseudo-left channels opposition back behind Peronism and the CGT-CTA bureaucracy rather than mobilizing the working class independently.
The coalition FIT-U (Partido Obrero, PTS, Izquierda Socialista, MST) does not oppose the war drive from a class standpoint. When SOUTHCOM commander Gen. Laura Richardson visited in April 2024 to secure basing agreements, the FIT-U denounced Milei as a “traitor to the Fatherland” and called for “defense of national sovereignty”; the Partido Obrero’s Gabriel Solano branded any agreement with the UK over the Malvinas “an act of treason against the fatherland”—the language of right-wing Peronist chauvinism, not Marxism.
This is the same method that subordinated the working class upsurge of the 1960s and 70s to Peronism and helped pave the way for the 1976 dictatorship. The pseudo-left’s “anti-imperialism” is nationalist, not internationalist: Izquierda Socialista and the MST openly backed the US-NATO war in Ukraine, while the PTS in 2015 voted against the Chinese space station in Neuquén as a “sellout of Argentine sovereignty.”