Inner-Ring Societies: Latin America in the Bunker’s Command Zone

The Bunker State does not act uniformly across the globe. Its methods and intensity vary with geographic proximity, chokepoint value, and resource density. Latin America and the Caribbean sit in what might be called the inner ring of the Bunker’s command space: the hemisphere that US planners explicitly treat as rear theater in great‑power competition (according to a RAND paper on Latin America in the Great Power Competition). In this zone, the combination of distance (very short), projection capacity (maximal), and historical entitlement (“our” hemisphere) produces a specific pattern of pressure that, for example, Iran or even Russia never experience in quite the same way over time.

A recent Code Pink conversation between José Luis Granados Ceja and Kurt Hackbarth makes this painfully clear from a Mexican vantage point. Their starting assumption is stark: the real existential threat to Mexico’s Fourth Transformation (and by extension, to any progressive or leftist-leaning government in the region) is not the domestic opposition, but US imperialism. The internal right (the one that is US-aligned) is hapless; the primary contradiction is the empire sitting directly to the north. Under those conditions, the Sheinbaum government’s strategy is triage under siege: hold off “the US beast” just long enough to consolidate a basic welfare state, public infrastructure, and universal healthcare before the next interventionary cycle hits. That’s indeed the calculus. And it’s the calculus for every country in the region.

This produces what they describe as a race to “beat the clock.” The government pushes projects like the El Insurgente commuter train from Toluca to Mexico City, new rail links to the Felipe Ángeles International Airport, and two long‑distance lines toward the US border; it rushes through universal health credentialization so that any Mexican can access universal public care across fragmented systems. These are attempts to embed social and infrastructural gains deeply and rapidly enough that they become costly to dismantle. In Bunker terms, this is what reform looks like inside the perimeter of the hegemon’s inner ring: improvising islands of welfare, infrastructure, and connectivity while assuming that the surrounding water will at some point rise.

The same conversation exposes another illusion: that Mexico can purchase safety through commercial concessions. The so‑called “mineral agreement” on rare earths—still in MOU form—is a case in point. Its logic is about setting price floors and guaranteeing flows of Mexican rare earths to the US as part of a broader strategy to “localize” supply chains in the hemisphere, reducing dependence on China and preparing for a war that Washington China‑hawks openly timetable for around 2030. Mexico’s lithium, nationalized under AMLO but sitting in Sonora uncomfortably close to the US border, becomes a node in this contest: technically harder to process than Andean brines, yes, but strategically invaluable for batteries, chips, and high‑tech manufacturing. The pressure is, thus, to align national development with US rearmament needs.

Within the Mexican foreign‑policy apparatus there are those who believe that such deals will buy reprieve: outsource parts of the supply chain, show reliability as a partner, and Washington will “leave Mexico alone.” The historical record, and the Bunker State lens, suggest the opposite. In a securitocratic logic where Latin America is coded as rear area, commercial dependency does not reduce vulnerability; it deepens it. The more central Mexico’s minerals, logistics, and manufacturing become to US war planning, the more justified future interventions will appear whenever Mexico’s choices deviate from Washington’s expectations.

RAND’s work on Latin America in great‑power competition already treats the region as a resource and basing hinterland to be secured against Chinese and Russian presence. Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, and the “Lithium Triangle” are geographically privileged and therefore strategically over‑determined nodes:

• Cuba at the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico, controlling approaches to the US industrial heartland.

• Venezuela as a Caribbean energy platform with Atlantic projection potential.

• Mexico as both land bridge and industrial annex, sitting atop critical minerals and border‑adjacent lithium.

Because these states are inside the Bunker’s commanding core, they face a qualitatively different environment than, say, Indonesia or South Africa: sanctions, covert interference, and military threats can be escalated rapidly and at relatively low risk. Their “mismanagement” or “failure” cannot be understood outside that geography. This is the tragic temporality of Latin America and the Caribbean: build, hold off, get crushed, start over. And this is the inner‑ring experience of anti‑entropic management.

By contrast, Iran’s position on the outer rim, farther from US bases, credibly backed by Russia and China and much better linked to them, sitting at the Strait of Hormuz and on continental corridors, gives it more deterrent leverage and more time to construct alternative arrangements before the full weight of the Bunker comes down. That difference is positional. Mexico’s predicament (and that of all of Latin America and the Caribbean) is thus the mirror image of Iran’s: both are trying to build welfare and connectivity, but Mexico must do so under the guns of the core itself, while Iran fights from a more distant, though still besieged, edge of the system.

Now, please watch this timely discussion on the Code Pink podcast: