The Soft Coup Manual and the Fragmentationist Strategy in Latin America

"The United States studies us constantly. We barely study them."

This asymmetry of knowledge is a fatal vulnerability. Recently, the Mexican investigative journalism channel Contralínea aired an indispensable analysis by Dr. Aníbal García on the mechanisms of the "soft coup." His analysis is historically grounded, operationally precise, and urgently relevant. What follows is my attempt to add a complementary analytical layer, drawn from the frameworks I have been developing on Worldlines.

The Playbook: From Operation PBSUCCESS to Today

Dr. García grounds his analysis in the 1954 CIA-backed coup against Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz. During Operation PBSUCCESS, the CIA drafted what is colloquially known as the "Coup Plotter's Manual" (declassified in 1997). It included a literal "Study of Assassination," targeting lists for the elimination of officials, and a blueprint for psychological warfare via "black propaganda."

Today's coup-mongering is similarly as in the mid-20th century, not entirely kinetic. It is the kidnapping of leadership, the de facto capture of the media, and the weaponization of lawfare—judicial spectacles masquerading as justice for geopolitical ends. According to the Contralínea analysis, this modern soft coup unfolds in four distinct phases, which are rooted in that very same 1954 manual. We are watching them play out in Mexico right now:

1. Placement and Evaluation: The central command moves into the territory (placement of personnel). In Mexico, CIA agents have already been detected operating in Chihuahua, invited in by a compliant opposition governor. Additionally, the current US Ambassador, a former Green Beret, is an expert in special operations and psychological warfare.

2. Preliminary Conditions (Internal Tensions and Discrediting): The goal is to demonstrate government incapacity and discredit the target domestically and abroad. We see this in the coordinated international smear campaigns labeling Mexico a "narco-government" which should make others see Mexico as ungovernable, and the strategic revocation of US visas for border-state governors to probe for "weak links" in the chain of command (possibly to detect who could be “captured”).

3. Construction of the Coup (Maximum Antagonism): This phase involves weaponizing legitimate social demands to fracture both the government and society. Elements of both the US and Mexican business sectors are currently inciting the abandonment of peaceful protests in favor of violence. Simultaneously, immense economic pressure is applied via tariffs, debt, and attacks on the stock market and the peso.

4. The Critical Period (Maximum Pressure and Dissent): An intense rumor campaign is launched, designed to generate a psychological "fear of war" and provoke a total internal rupture.

The Two Modalities of the Fragmentationist Grand Strategy

The soft coup blueprint Dr. García describes is, in my terms, one modality of the fragmentationist grand strategy. It is the preferred modality for Latin America and the Caribbean, where the empire operates with a proximity, a density of institutional penetration, and a centuries-deep history of intervention that makes direct cognitive and psychological warfare highly effective. The tools are lawfare, media manipulation, economic strangulation, the weaponization of social divisions, and the cultivation of a comprador business class. I would even add the co-optation of the religious dimension. When it works, a right-wing government is installed, and there is no need for a Memorandum of Understanding, a Minsk agreement, or a Board of Peace. The old order is simply "restored."

However, there is a second modality (such as one could argue has been applied to Venezuela, Iran, and the broader energy war. This second modality activates when the soft coup fails, when the target state is too large, too socially and politically resilient, or too geopolitically critical to be toppled by media campaigns and lawfare alone. At this point, the US-led empire shifts to a different gear: a grinding siege of sanctions, the threat or application of kinetic action, and eventually, the offer of an "integrationist" pact. The sovereign shell is kept intact. A faction of the elite is offered a path to liquidity, legitimacy, and reintegration into the global financial and market architecture. In exchange, structural concessions are extracted—the opening of a strait, the freezing of a nuclear program, the redirection of critical mineral or other resource contracts, or the signing of "agricultural deals." The MoU with Iran and the Venezuela model are the fallback option when the soft coup fails. (Of course, as Dr. García lays out, Latin American governments have historically been overthrown by naked violence. Today’s strategy is a flexible mix of different tools because a too visible coup would activate people in targeted countries as has happened so often in Latin America, and then an actually anti-imperialist or left-wing government gets elected.)

The Multi-Layered Cage

Dr. García’s timeline is flawless, but I would an additional structural layer. The empire’s goal is not merely to create chaos; it is to force the integration of the target nation into Western financial, market, and infrastructural systems. This is the multi-layered cage. This would make it much more difficult for any successor government to set themselves free from the cage the country has been put in (Just imagine: an agricultural “deal,” US-GMO gets imported, the food sovereignty project destroyed, agricultural labor and industry destroyed, and the country now is dependent on the US for its food…., this is not so easy to escape from.)

While the Contralínea report correctly identifies the financial pressure—stock market manipulation, inflation induction—it can be deepened by incorporating the broader "Fragmentationist" logic. Often, the imperialist strategy relies on grinding a country down through sanctions, economic strangulation, and the latent threat of kinetic action until it finds a compliant faction within the progressive ruling party itself. The goal is to hollow out the sovereign leadership from the inside, forcing concessions that are later disguised as pragmatic choices. And they may very well be exactly that.

As Dr. García sharply noted regarding these elite enablers:

"The businessmen—this rentier bourgeoisie that is foreign-oriented and more Yankee than Mexican—are divided. Some show confidence in the Mexican government, while others simply bet on interventionism."

We Must Study the Empire

We cannot afford the luxury of geopolitical romanticism or essentialism. We must study the architecture of our own subjugation if we want to survive it. Dr. García highlights a painful irony regarding the University of Florida, a known hub for the Latin American and international right-wing:

"The University of Florida was actually the first university in the United States to open a Center for Latin American Studies. Over there in the United States, they do study Latin America. Ask yourselves, for example, how many research centers on the United States or North America exist here?"

If we want to dismantle the cage, we must first map its bars. Recognizing the mechanics of the soft coup is a vital step in that larger project. The link to the excellent analysis is here: