The authorities of the United States of America are dropping bombs on small vessels in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean near Latin American shores, while simultaneously banning books in schools and libraries.
This could serve as a brief summary of the news circulating in mid-December 2025.
The country that once co-founded the international rules-based system and championed human rights and civil liberties worldwide now stands out for its blatant violation of those very norms, principles, rights, and freedoms.
Death at Sea
On December 17, U.S. Southern Command announced that, under the direction of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, it had carried out what it described as a “lethal kinetic strike” in international waters against an alleged “narco-boat” operated by a “designated terrorist organization.” Four people reportedly died in the operation.
It is difficult to describe these events as anything other than an extrajudicial execution.
This is yet another episode in a series that has claimed more than 90 lives (according to Washington’s own figures) in the context of a massive military deployment ongoing since August, justified as counter-narcotics operations, despite the absence of data or evidence to substantiate such claims.
Although various UN officials and even prior reports from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) have indicated that neither Venezuela nor the Caribbean Sea constitutes a primary drug trafficking route to the United States, these actions have not only continued but intensified. They now include the blockade of oil tankers and the designation of the current government in Caracas as a “foreign terrorist organization”.
Banned Books
Coinciding with these events, PEN America (the U.S. chapter of PEN International, a nongovernmental organization that has defended freedom of expression for over a century) released its online report The Normalization of Book Banning, documenting an extremely alarming situation.
The report states that never before have so many books been systematically removed from school libraries nationwide, nor have so many regulations been enacted to facilitate book bans, nor have so many politicians attempted to pressure school administrators to censor texts based on ideological preferences.
PEN America records more than 23,000 such incidents since July 2021. Between July 2024 and the end of June 2025 alone, it identified 6,870 censorship cases across 45 states.
This marks the fourth consecutive year of a sustained campaign to ban books within the U.S. education system.
For the 2024–25 school year, the report identifies three categories of banned school books:
“Banned”, referring to titles that are fully prohibited; “banned pending investigation,” which includes books under review to determine potential restrictions; and “restricted bans”, involving grade-level or school-level limitations or requirements for parental consent.
These developments did not emerge overnight; they have deep historical roots.
A large number of conservative individuals and groups have employed consistent and coordinated tactics against public education and democracy, impacting both the literary community and society at large.
For example, since 2022, Florida schools have been prohibited from addressing racist elements in U.S. history —a directive issued by Governor Ron DeSantis, who claimed there is no place in the state for indoctrination or discrimination.
With the federal administration that took office in January 2025, the situation has worsened. Under the pretext of “returning education to parents”, President Trump issued a series of executive orders, including “Ending Radical Indoctrination in Education”, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism” and “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Programs and Preferences.”
Among the withdrawn or banned titles are widely recognized Latin American literary works such as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez; The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende; and Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel.
Nonfiction works have also been targeted, including biographies of Frida Kahlo and Celia Cruz, as well as An African American and Latinx History of the United States by Paul Ortiz.
The report concludes that attacks on students’ rights and educational institutions are symptoms of a much deeper crisis: the dismantling of public education and the erosion of democracy itself.
Promoting Reading
While books are banned in the United States and small boats are bombed —killing their crews— Latin American countries, which have been unable to mount a unified response to the military threat in the Caribbean, have coordinated a remarkable cultural initiative.
On December 17, 2025, the Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE), in coordination with several regional governments, launched an initiative to promote reading among Latin American youth. The campaign, titled “25 for Twenty-Five”, involves the free distribution of 2.5 million books considered foundational to Latin American literature.
The selected titles include works by Juan Gelman, Nona Fernández, Manuel Rojas, Raúl Zurita, Piedad Bonnett, Gabriel García Márquez, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Roque Dalton, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Eduardo Galeano, Mario Benedetti, Juan Carlos Onetti, Andrés Caicedo, and many others, representing a broad spectrum of the continent’s literary and political memory.
Presidents Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico, Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, Gustavo Petro of Colombia, and Bernardo Arévalo of Guatemala, along with Buenos Aires Province Governor Axel Kicillof, presided over events held in Mexico City, Caracas, Bogotá, Quetzaltenango, and La Plata, respectively.
Simultaneously, book distributions took place at FCE offices in Havana, Lima, Santiago de Chile, Montevideo, Quito, and Tegucigalpa.
In Benito Juárez Park in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala’s president emphasized that the initiative forges a cultural bond among the peoples of Latin America that will remain embedded in their collective consciousness.
In Bogotá, President Petro stated that when culture and education retreat, violence intensifies.
In Mexico City, FCE director Paco Ignacio Taibo II declared that in response to violence emanating from the north, Latin American countries respond by giving away books.
According to its organizers, the collection constitutes a profound cultural intervention in Latin America’s collective memory. Each text contributes to a deeper understanding of the continent’s history, social struggles, and the preservation of memory as an act of cultural resistance.
Above all, the initiative seeks to foster a love of reading and a critical understanding of the past among adolescents and young people throughout the region.
Amid internal and external violence, amid the denial of history —which is tantamount to denying the present— literature becomes indispensable against absence and oblivion, as poet Juan Gelman, one of the collection’s featured authors, once wrote:
A este oficio me obligan los dolores ajenos,
las lágrimas, los pañuelos saludadores,
las promesas en medio del otoño o del fuego,
los besos del encuentro, los besos del adiós,
todo me obliga a trabajar con las palabras, con la
sangre.
Nunca fui el dueño de mis cenizas, mis versos,
rostros oscuros los escriben como tirar contra la
muerte.