The US Proposes a Global Campaign of Political Persecution

Under the pretext of terrorism, the US government is promoting political persecution on a global scale.

On July16, US secretary of state Marco Rubio hosted representatives from 66 countries around the world at a conference focusing on the “resurgence of far-left terrorism” – a threat that Rubio hoped to “crush” through cooperation between the countries’ intelligence agencies and security forces. While many governments sent low-level representatives to the meeting, Argentina was represented by foreign minister Pablo Quirno.

As the meeting took place, the State Department released a document on the same topic, which refers to transnational left-wing terrorism as something that attacks “private citizens, government officials, police and law enforcement, businesses, and critical infrastructure across the world”.

Using extremely vague data, the Trump administration drew parallels between the armed movements of the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America and very different situations in Europe and the US to demonstrate that “left-wing terrorism” exists.

Rubio said that “We can – and we must – identify and map this threat and rebuild our counterterrorism architecture to defeat it. Just as we have done together before, now we must do it together again”. In Latin America, these words amount to an open endorsement of the 20th-century military dictatorships and repressive coordination mechanisms on a regional level such as Plan Condor.

Using the same rationale, that “counterterrorism architecture” unleashed waves of state terrorism and genocide throughout Latin America. Rubio’s threat is quite explicit: Washington appears willing to repeat that extreme state violence and the egregious human rights violations that resulted from it.

Given that no armed movements like those of the 20th century mentioned by Rubio actually exist today in our region, we must examine which groups or individuals are being labeled as “left-wing terrorists” by the U.S. government in order to understand the pattern of political persecution it seeks to promote throughout the rest of the world. Among them are “antifa”—decentralized groups that confront the far right, racism, and colonialism through street tactics and digital activism. The U.S. has repeatedly referred to these groups as a kind of highly organized international conspiracy. In September 2025, President Donald Trump designated them as a terrorist organization, even though they are clearly not an organization.

Some of the groups that oppose the systematic persecution of migrants carried out by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have also been labeled as “domestic terrorists.” The most famous case is the protest outside the Prairieland detention facility in Texas. The violent police intervention led to riots in which 11 people were arrested.

In this case, both “antifa” and “anti ICE” were intertwined: the government determined that the protesters were part of the “antifa cell” in North Texas, and—since the organization had been designated as a terrorist group— last June six of those individuals were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 30 to 70 years for participating in a protest where riots broke out. One of the protesters, who shot a police officer, received a 100-year sentence.

It is clear that the primary target of this political persecution is protest and social organization, especially those associated with various forms of direct action. In both the United States and Europe, there has been a trend in recent years to classify protesters or activists who employ direct-action tactics—which, in some cases, result in property damage—as terrorists or violent extremists. These incidents are framed, prosecuted, and tried as “national security” cases.

However, given the content of Rubio’s speech—with its anti-Marxist and anti-left rhetoric—everything suggests that the persecution could extend to all kinds of progressive opposition groups and not just to direct-action groups. In fact, Trump administration officials have repeatedly referred to the Democratic Party itself (which is hardly suspected of Marxism) as an “extremist organization.”

The shift toward the far right and the resulting political instrumentalization of the definition of terrorism is a hallmark of the current U.S. administration and several of its allies in the region.

In May of this year, the new U.S. counterterrorism strategy was released, identifying three major sources of terrorist activities: “narco-terrorists and transnational gangs,” “historical Islamist terrorists,” and “violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists.” Far-right terrorism is not listed as a concern, even though the most serious acts of violence in the U.S.—aside from the attacks of September 11, 2001—were carried out by white supremacists or other far-right groups.

The concept of “far-left terrorism” has not been part of Argentina’s security agenda since the 1990s. But last year, this concept had already found its way into the National Intelligence Plan, which listed “anarchist terrorism” as one of the risk scenarios that Argentine intelligence agencies must monitor—without any clarification of what it actually refers to.

The Argentine government must explain what role it played in the meeting convened by Rubio and what it considers “left-wing terrorism.” It is crucial that the entire political spectrum put a stop to these encroachments, which use counterterrorism policies as an excuse for political persecution, the curtailment of freedoms, and the legitimization of state violence.

You can find a Spanish version of this op-ed article written by the Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS) at opendemocracy. CELS is an Argentine human rights organization founded during the last military dictatorship. It promotes the protection of rights, their effective exercise, justice, and social inclusion, both nationally and internationally.