The Americas' loudest threat is rarely the foreign one
A small international press agency quietly republished an essay this week that cuts against the prevailing mood in many of the hemisphere's capitals. "The most dangerous noise," Pressenza wrote, "does not always come from outside." The argument is unfashionable in a year when electoral campaigns from Brasília to Washington have built their closing weeks around the threat of the other — the migrant, the cartel, the rival power, the foreign ideology. The agency's broader point, drawn from its standing coverage of nonviolence, is that the loudest and most lethal sources of harm are usually closer to home: woven into the routines of policing, debt, labour discipline, and the ordinary distribution of risk, rather than smuggled across a border.
That inversion is worth taking seriously in the Americas, where external-threat politics has, for the better part of two centuries, served as the justifying language for the expansion of internal coercive power. The continent's wars of the nineteenth century were largely fought in the name of resisting European recolonisation. The cold war produced its long list of internal security regimes. The drug war of the past half-century has been sold, repeatedly, as a defence against an outside poison. Each framing has been useful to someone; none of them, on inspection, has measurably reduced the underlying body count.
The external threat as governing instrument
There is a recognisable template. A government names an external enemy — a foreign power, a foreign ideology, a foreign substance, a foreign population — and builds a policy architecture around containing it. The architecture almost always includes a permanent expansion of internal state capacity: more police, more prisons, more surveillance, more discretion for the security forces. The enemy rarely materialises in the form advertised, but the architecture remains, and is then turned, quite naturally, on domestic targets — organisers, indigenous communities, journalists, the poor.
The U.S. national-security state built itself on this template, but it is not the only one in the hemisphere. Brazil's military dictatorship of 1964–85 formally presented itself as a defence against an external communist threat, even as its principal victims were Brazilian. Colombia's security arrangements for decades cited insurgencies financed from across the border, even as the overwhelming majority of killings were internal. Mexico's contemporary militarisation is sold as a response to the cartel threat; the cartels themselves are, in significant part, products of a prohibition regime that the United States designed and Mexico internalised.
The Pressenza essay's claim is not that these external threats are entirely fictional. It is that the framing is consistently selective — and that the costs of the framing are paid inside the country, by people who are not the named enemy.
The violence the framing can't accommodate
It is striking, in this context, how little airtime the hemisphere's routine internal violence receives relative to its scale. By most comparative measures, the Americas are an outlier among regions for lethal violence per capita. The United States, uniquely among wealthy countries, combines very high civilian firearm ownership with very high firearm death rates. Canada's much smaller totals still sit above the European norm. Latin American capitals from Tegucigalpa to Caracas to São Paulo regularly post homicide figures that would be treated as national emergencies in most of the OECD. The pattern, across the hemisphere, is that the proximate cause of death is overwhelmingly internal: a domestic firearm, a partner, a security-force encounter, a road, a workplace.
Pressenza's framing helps explain why these deaths are not at the centre of policy attention. They are diffuse. They do not produce the political capital that a border-crossing story produces. A government that quietly reduces the homicide rate by a few percentage points is unlikely to win an election on it; a government that detains a few thousand migrants and broadcasts the footage almost certainly will. The institutional incentives point outward.
There is also a deeper point about who is dying. The internal violence of the Americas is not distributed evenly. It falls disproportionately on young men of colour in U.S. cities, on indigenous and Afro-descendant communities in Central and South America, on poor Brazilians in the northeast, on poor Mexicans in the west. The political constituency for ending it is, in the language of campaign professionals, weakly organised. The constituency for the external-threat framing — older, whiter, more rural in some settings, more urban in others — is heavily organised and reliably mobilised at the ballot box.
The Americas as laboratory
The hemisphere is in some ways the world's longest-running laboratory for the external-threat framing. It is also, on a long enough view, where the limits of the framing have become most visible. The 1990s escalation of the drug war did not end the drug trade; it produced mass incarceration in the United States and mass disappearances in Mexico and Central America. The cold-war "defence against communism" did not prevent left-of-centre governments from being elected across the region; it produced a generation of military officers who, on retiring, founded political parties of their own. The current anti-cartel posture in Mexico has not disarmed the cartels; it has placed the Mexican army in the unfamiliar position of running ports, customs houses, and civilian construction projects.
Pressenza, a multilingual press agency founded in 2009 and now operating across several Latin American and European cities, has spent its existence arguing that this pattern is not an accident. The agency's preferred vocabulary is nonviolence in the Gandhian tradition — a discipline of means as well as ends. Whether or not one accepts that tradition, the descriptive claim is hard to dispute: the apparatus built to fight an external threat has, in the Americas, repeatedly become the principal internal threat.
What changes if the framing changes
If Pressenza is right, the policy question becomes: what would it take to govern as if the principal source of harm were internal? The honest answer is that the political economy of the external-threat frame is strong. Military budgets rise faster than health budgets in nearly every country in the region. Prison construction outpaces school construction. The lobbying and campaign-finance infrastructure of the security sector is more developed than that of the public-health sector almost everywhere in the hemisphere.
But there are signs of change. Brazil's uneven experience with the pacification of favelas is one data point. Colombia's 2016 peace accord, however battered in implementation, is another. Uruguay's regulated cannabis market, Chile's pension reforms, Costa Rica's 1948 abolition of its army — these are not solutions, but they are reminders that the external-threat frame is a choice rather than a law of nature. The Pressenza essay, in the end, asks its readers to do something modest: to notice where the most lethal sound is actually coming from. In a hemisphere that has spent a generation listening for threats over the horizon, that is a more radical act than it sounds.
Desk note: Monexus has framed this piece around Pressenza's own argument, foregrounding the editorial point about internal vs. external threat rather than the wire's usual emphasis on the foreign-enemy narrative. The agency is treated as a primary source for the framing claim, with structural context drawn from well-established historical reference material.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_violence
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolence
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressenza
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Colombian_peace_agreement