Trump's new bloc sanctions Brazil's biggest gangs without Brazil - critical summary review

Until this week, most people outside diplomatic circles had never heard of the Shield of the Americas. It is a coalition launched in March 2026 by US President Donald Trump, at a meeting of regional leaders held in Florida, at a resort Trump himself owns. Its stated purpose is to fight drug trafficking and organised crime across the hemisphere. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was not invited to the founding meeting, and neither were other left-wing leaders of the region, including Mexico's Claudia Sheinbaum.

It is not a treaty. Chile's government, which joined this week, was careful to stress the point: "There is no treaty here, so that nobody thinks we are overriding Chile's sovereignty and national institutions. This is a coordination, an adherence to certain lines of action against organised crime," President José Antonio Kast told reporters in New York. In practice, according to the Chilean foreign ministry, membership delivers access to intelligence, data-analysis tools and training for police forces. According to Brazilian broadcaster CNN Brasil, the alliance also works through joint military operations, and three countries (Colombia, Ecuador and Paraguay) have already agreed to host US troops.

That is the backdrop against which this week's announcement arrived.

What the 14 countries signed on Tuesday

On Tuesday, 22 September, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, the bloc's leaders met and released a joint declaration through the US State Department. It announces what the text calls "the first joint action" against "the scourge of narcoterrorism", targeting 24 criminal organisations.

Two of them are Brazilian: the Comando Vermelho and the Primeiro Comando da Capital, the country's two largest prison-born gangs. The list also includes the Mara Salvatrucha, Venezuela's Tren de Aragua, the main Mexican cartels, Colombia's ELN and Clan del Golfo, Ecuador's Los Lobos and Los Choneros, and Peru's Shining Path.

The signatories declare their intention to impose asset freezes, immigration and visa restrictions on members, associates and supporters of these groups, and criminal liability for anyone who knowingly provides material or logistical support to them. Every one of those measures is conditioned on each country's own domestic and international legal obligations, which is why the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo described the document as closer to a memorandum of intent than a binding instrument.

The signatories are the United States, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guyana, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and Trinidad and Tobago. All 24 groups had already been sanctioned by Washington. What is new, according to Folha, is that this is the first time a group of Latin American governments has collectively signed a broad terrorism designation alongside the United States.

The declaration also contains an economic chapter (safeguarding critical-mineral supply chains, screening investments) and one procedural move with real weight: the members intend to file a formal request with the president of the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States, asking for a consultation meeting under Articles 6 and 13 of the Rio Treaty, the 1947 inter-American mutual defence pact. Created at the start of the Cold War to counter communism, the treaty allows members to set up a consultation body and coordinate a joint response. Whether it can be applied to criminal organisations is, as news agency AFP noted, still unclear. Brazil is a party to the Rio Treaty but not to the Shield.

Brazil was caught off guard

Brazilian diplomats did not know the document was coming. According to Folha, the foreign service was taken by surprise by the communiqué, which landed in the afternoon, after both Lula and Trump had addressed the General Assembly. The government said it was still assessing the text.

Brazil has objected to this framing since May, when Washington designated the two gangs as foreign terrorist organisations. The Itamaraty, Brazil's foreign ministry, argues that the two groups are profit-driven criminal enterprises rather than ideologically motivated ones, and that the terrorist label could open space for broader US action in Latin America. Brazilian law defines terrorism narrowly, around acts committed out of xenophobia or racial, ethnic or religious discrimination.

Of South America's 11 countries, seven signed the declaration. Brazil, Uruguay, Suriname and Venezuela did not. Carol Pedroso, a professor of international relations at the Federal University of São Paulo, told BBC News Brasil that the move is "a bad sign for Brazil", a country that since March was already "surrounded by potential US military allies and is now practically cornered with Peru and Colombia joining".

Not everyone in Brasília reads it that way. One sector of the government, speaking anonymously to Folha, said it was unsurprised and considered the side effects limited, noting that Argentina's Javier Milei already used the narcoterrorist label. Their stated concern is the use of force in the region, which does not depend on this declaration.

Force on the table

Hours before the declaration, Trump told the General Assembly that the United States "will no longer allow threats against America to gain ground anywhere in the Western Hemisphere" and that "if necessary, we will use our unmatched military power". He called the cartels "the Islamic State of the Western Hemisphere" and said their members should be killed, exiled or detained.

At the Shield meeting itself, according to Spanish news agency EFE, he went further with the assembled presidents: "Let us know and we eliminate them, or you eliminate them yourselves. I like that even better. If you can't, we'll do it for you."

This is not abstract. For a year the Pentagon has run strikes on boats it says carry drugs in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Folha reports that the monitoring platform Airwars counts 234 people killed in 67 strikes on 71 vessels. More than 70 legislators from 13 countries in the Americas, including two Brazilian federal deputies, signed a joint statement calling the deaths "extrajudicial executions" and asking for the strikes to stop.

Lula spoke shortly before Trump. "Brazil does not fit in anyone's backyard," he said, adding that the country would not "outsource the responsibility of defending our borders". He also said: "We don't need aircraft carriers watching our waters. We need cooperation to stop the flow of weapons and money that feeds crime."

It lands in the middle of a campaign

Brazil votes on 4 October, and public security is central to the campaign. Bolsonarista messaging already frames the international story through crime: in 31.7% of anti-Lula messages tracked by the analytics firm Palver between 13 and 20 September, the topic turned into public security, with the two gangs called "narcoterrorists" and the Shield of the Americas invoked by name.

On the other side, the sovereignty theme has been polling well for the government. The same survey found 62.5% positive mentions of the government on messaging apps in that debate. Meanwhile, a leaked report by Abin, Brazil's intelligence agency, raised the risk of US interference in the election to a "criticality" level, according to Folha.

The pattern that worries Lula's aides is one of timing. The May terrorist designation came days after Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the right-wing presidential candidate, visited Trump and his cabinet in Washington; the senator said he had asked for it. Last week the State Department said Brazil had "failed to confront" the two gangs. Political scientist Guilherme Casarões, of Florida International University, told Folha that each decision has been tied "in some way to a point on Flávio's campaign agenda", while also noting that polling suggests Trump's support is not clearly helping him: a Pew Research Center survey released in June found 64% of Brazilians do not trust Trump to do the right thing on global affairs.

What is known, and what is still unknown

What is established: 15 governments signed a statement of intent, the measures depend on each country's own laws to take effect, and nothing in the document by itself authorises military action.

Three things will show which way this goes. First, whether the OAS actually convenes the Rio Treaty consultation meeting the Shield requested, and what a ministerial-level resolution would authorise in practice. Some Shield members, such as Belize and Bolivia, are not currently parties to the treaty, and Brazil and Mexico have historically objected to Washington's initiatives inside the OAS.

Second, the 4 October result. Candidates aligned with Trump are using the Shield as campaign material, and a change in Brasília would be the fastest route to a change in Brazil's position on the bloc.

Third, the military signals. US media reported that the Pentagon is preparing to move MQ-9 Reaper drones, used for both surveillance and precision strikes, from Africa operations to Southern Command, which covers Latin America and the Caribbean. The number of aircraft, their basing and the timing have not been announced. Together with any new strikes on vessels, that is the clearest available indicator of whether the Shield remains diplomatic pressure or becomes the antechamber to armed action on Latin American soil.