🇺🇸❌🇲🇽 — NEW: The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control imposed sanctions on the Mexican criminal group Cartel de Santa Rosa de Lima and its leader, José Antonio Yepez Ortiz.

➡️ The Treasury says the cartel generates most of its illicit income through large-scale fuel and oil theft in the Mexican state of Guanajuato.

— Twenty-six continuous years of plundering the wealth not only of Venezuela, but of all of South America, by the Chavista regime and its regional allies through the São Paulo Forum, are on the verge of coming to an end.

TACO memes aside

It is well known that the shift in US foreign policy towards a more Western Hemisphere-oriented stance will accelerate a process that is now undeniable:

— 🌹📉 The Anti-American Pink Tide in Central and South America is dying.

🐍 We have been talking about this for a long time, since 2023, with Milei's rise to power.

➡️ With the predictable fall of Petro in Colombia and the growing possibility of Bolsonaro's eldest son, in coalition with the traditional Brazilian elites, taking power from the Workers' Party, which is by far the most sinister and kleptocratic force in the region, only the Communist regime in Cuba and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua remain in the hands of the anti-American Left in the region.

We are witnessing a generational event, even if an intervention in Venezuela does not happen.

📝 Parties foreign to the American continent must understand this as soon as possible or they will be caught by surprise.

⚰️ Should the latter happen and the Chavistas are consigned to the dustbin of history (where they belong), it can be said that the Old Guard of the Left, which includes these foreign parties, will be dead. Permanently. Like the dragon mortally wounded by Saint George.

The La Patria Grande Project and the São Paulo Forum are witnessing their final moments.

The only questions that should be asked at this moment are:

When will they breathe their last?

When La Guaira see the 🇺🇸 "The Star-Spangled Banner" on its coast alongside 🇻🇪 7-Stars, or when Brasilia sees a counter-revolution of its own?

Only time shall tell.

🇪🇨❌🇻🇪🇻🇪 — Ecuador’s National Assembly approved a resolution to support the detention of Nicolás Maduro.

With 80 votes in favor, the full National Assembly approved a resolution endorsing international actions aimed at restoring democracy in Venezuela and the detention of the drug-running dictator.

🇻🇪📞🇨🇴❌🇺🇸 — Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro calls on Colombia and its military to join together in arms against foreign military intervention:

I make my call. Reaffirmed, with the deep love of a great Colombian that I feel myself to be, to the ordinary people of Colombia, to its social movements, to its political forces, and to the Colombian military, whom I know very well, for perfect union with Venezuela.

So that no one dares to touch the sovereignty of our countries and to fulfill Bolívar's decree of permanent union and shared happiness.

🇺🇸❌🚤💊 — NEW: SOUTHCOM has released footage from Wednesday of a “lethal kinetic strike” on a suspected drug vessel that was traveling along “a known narco-trafficking route” in the eastern Pacific, killing all four people onboard.

#BREAKING

🇭🇳🗳❗️ — After the Socialist LIBRE Party called for Revolution, the CNE, Honduras' election committee, suggests there is an imminent threat to the electoral process of the country and calls on Honduran Armed Forces to secure a government site where election materials are stored!

The CNE also makes a request for the international community to "document what may occur"

🇺🇸📞🇭🇳 — US State Department's Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs on X:

In Honduras, the National Electoral Council (CNE) needs to begin immediately the special scrutiny process to finalize official results. Any call to disrupt public order or the CNE’s work will be met with consequences. The voices of 3.4 million Hondurans must be respected and upheld.

🇨🇳 This is an incredible story by Reuters: they reveal that China now has a working EUV lithography machine prototype, which makes China the only country in the world to have succeeded at replicating the ASML technology, years earlier than anticipated.

The machine apparently "fills nearly an entire factory floor". It's operational and successfully generates extreme ultraviolet light (what "EUV" stands for), but has not yet produced working chips.

The objective for the latter is 2028, which is a crazy fast timeline: ASML took 18 years to go from prototype to machines that could produce commercially-available chips, China aims to do it in 3.

The security measures around the project look insane. The employees work under fake identities so they don't know each other's real names. They work inside secure facilities where "no one outside the compound could know what they were building - or that they were there at all". They're divided in "teams who are kept isolated from each other to protect the confidentiality of the project," where "they don't know what the other teams work on."

For foreign employees, China exceptionally gave them Chinese passports and allowed them to maintain dual citizenship, which is normally forbidden under Chinese law.

This seems to be because some of the employees are former ASML workers such as Lin Nan, ASML's former head of light source technology

who would be less vulnerable to Western sanctions under Chinese citizenship.

The salaries offered are apparently "uncapped" with "signing bonuses that started at 3 million to 5 million yuan" and "home-purchase subsidies".

This all means that we're looking, within a few years, at yet another self-inflicted wound by the West: the development, because of sanctions, of a serious competitor for Europe's most successful technology company (one of our very rare ones!).

And the worst part, for Europe, is that these sanctions weren't even initiated by us nor serve our interests: we just followed Washington's lead as usual, suffering the costs while getting no obvious benefit out of it. Quite the contrary in fact as all its doing is replacing a massive customer with a massive future competitor.

We, again, let ourselves be the chessboard on which others play. We just absorb the damage from both sides and have no voice in the game.

📎 Arnaud Bertrand