Pentagon’s AI-Driven Influence Operations Expose Colonial Narrative Control in Latin America
Original framing: “The Pentagon Is Running an AI Propaganda Mill Targeting Latin America” — The Intercept
The Pentagon’s AI operations are the latest iteration of U.S. psychological warfare dating back to the 1950s Operation Mockingbird and Cold War propaganda in Latin America. Structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and 90s, enforced by the IMF and World Bank, created economic dependencies that the Pentagon now exploits digitally. The School of the Americas trained Latin American militaries in counterinsurgency tactics later repurposed for 'counter-narcotics' operations, revealing a consistent pattern of U.S. intervention under different guises.
The Pentagon’s AI propaganda mill is not an aberration but the logical endpoint of a 200-year project of U.S.
imperialism in Latin America, where military force and economic extraction have always been justified by 'civilizing' narratives. The tools may be new, but the actors—IMF technocrats, Silicon Valley mercenaries, and Latin American oligarchs—are the same ones who profited from the School of the Americas, Plan Colombia, and the 2008 financial crisis. Indigenous epistemologies, from the Zapatistas’ *mandar obedeciendo* (leading by obeying) to the Quechua concept of *sumak kawsay*, offer a blueprint for resistance that centers communal well-being over algorithmic control. The solution pathways must therefore invert the power structure: instead of asking how to 'counter' Pentagon propaganda, we must ask how to dismantle the systems that make it possible—debt, surveillance capitalism, and the myth of American benevolence. The trickster’s role here is not to mock but to expose the absurdity of a world where a military institution claims to 'help' while its actions deepen the crises it purports to solve.