Andean Group - October 2026

President Donald Trump has made no secret that “making America great again”, for him, involves dominating the western hemisphere so as to ensure US national and economic security. Nowhere has the Trump administration come closer to asserting full control over a sovereign nation in the western hemisphere than in Venezuela. More than nine months after the military raid to seize former president Nicolás Maduro (2013-2026) on drug trafficking charges, Washington is still closely managing Venezuela and has now gone a step further by taking a direct role in its oil production, as we discuss in the first article of this October 2026 edition of the Latin American Regional Report: Andean Group.

We then turn to neighbouring Colombia, where new President Abelardo de la Espriella suffered an early setback to one of the key pillars of his security strategy in September, when a court blocked a pilot scheme seeking to revive the practice of fumigating coca crops from the air using herbicides. Aerial fumigation has not been carried out since 2015, when the constitutional court suspended the policy due to concerns about its impact on human health and the environment.

Moving south to Bolivia, the following article examines the financial benefits and political headaches that will accompany a US$1.9bn loan agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Bolivia received the first instalment on 6 October, ameliorating a difficult fiscal situation, but the conditions of the IMF agreement are likely to cause further problems.

The next article looks at the tightening security partnership between Ecuador and the US. Questioned on 9 September about whether the expanding US security partnership with Ecuador poses human rights concerns, amid concerns that fishing vessels may have been targeted in air strikes, Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued that criminal organisations were “the real human rights violator”. His comments came in the wake of a Washington Post report which stated that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was conducting secretive counternarcotics operations in the Pacific with the support of the governments of Ecuador and El Salvador.

This issue ends in Peru, where President Keiko Fujimori has begun moving on her promise of a hardline security strategy by demanding the power to legislate by decree on security matters. This could facilitate a faster response to the growing threat of organised crime, but also raises the risk of democratic backsliding if Fujimori is able to implement major security changes without consulting congress.