Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s May 31 column in the Wall Street Journal is a specimen of the propaganda machinery we operators once built—pick an upcoming Latin American election, frame every left-wing candidate as a Marxist threat and every right-wing candidate as democracy’s last hope, and let the donor-class reader feel like a freedom fighter while their portfolio stays safe. The operation hasn’t changed. The names, the countries, the particular bogeymen—those rotate. The machinery under the hood is the same machinery we built in the Manhattan Institute cubicles and the Journal’s unsigned-board meetings in the 2000s. In the cable years, we called this loading the wire: mapping local anxieties onto a global ideological grid so the donor class never has to defend the grid itself.
The Latin American left has been losing its grip on power for more than two years. Defeats of incumbent socialist parties at the ballot box in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia and Honduras have sent shock waves through collectivist networks across the hemisphere. So too the death rattle coming from the communist Cuban dictatorship.
Frame-engineered relabeling—the technique of collapsing diverse democratic movements into a single menacing category—opens the piece. The left is not a set of parties with distinct platforms facing distinct electoral conditions. It is “the Latin American left,” a unitary “grip on power,” and its ideas are “collectivist,” “socialist,” “Marxist,” “communist.” Winning elections “at the ballot box” is a phrasing reserved for the right—implying the left only held power illegitimately. The Journal’s reader absorbs the vocabulary and, with it, the frame. The frame precedes the facts. The frame is the facts. That’s the relabeling operation’s entire job, and O’Grady’s 25-year run as the paper’s Latin America columnist has been an unbroken demonstration of it.
Despite its reputation for political instability, Peru’s shift over the past 20 years toward policies that support open markets, private initiative and macroeconomic stability has dramatically improved living standards. The share of Peruvians living below the poverty line fell to 25.7% in 2025 from 58.7% in 2004. Mr. Sánchez promises to destroy that model, whereas Ms. Fujimori is expected largely to defend it.
The austerity-thrift archetype and a market-success story operate in tandem here. The operator knows how this brochure is written: take the post-2000 commodity supercycle revenues, attribute them entirely to “macroeconomic stability,” and quietly erase the Chinese infrastructure investment, the cash-transfer programs left-of-center governments deployed, and the informal labor—the street vendors, contraband gasoline traders, unregistered miners—that constitutes the actual safety net when formal wages collapse. The poverty statistic is real; the attribution is a shakedown. The single-cause rewrite picks one variable, calls it the engine, erases the rest, because if you admit that poverty reduction has multiple causes, including state-directed spending, you cannot use Peru as a clean vindication of the market-only model. You need the clean vindication—the column is not written for Peruvians. It is written for the Journal’s investor-class reader, who needs to believe that what’s good for their portfolio is good for the poor. The claim that Sánchez “promises to destroy that model” is a strawman, inflated from a local candidate’s platform into a continental threat.
Other powerful Sánchez allies include the illegal gold-mining interests that threaten the property rights of lawful mining companies, an important engine of growth for Peru.
Multiple-audience-targeting, in a single sentence. The wealthy reader hears “property rights” and “lawful mining companies” and registers threat to a portfolio. The populist reader hears “illegal gold-mining” and registers chaos. The political-class reader hears “allies include” and files the Sánchez-is-criminal talking point. The technocratic reader hears “important engine of growth” and registers economic rationale. All four audiences get what they came for in thirty words. Meanwhile, the “lawful mining companies” O’Grady declines to name—the multinational operators with concessions in Peru’s Andean mining districts—have their own documented record of environmental destruction, community displacement, and tax avoidance. That record is not an engine of growth for the Peruvians it dispossesses. But the Journal’s columnist is not writing for them. She never has been.
There’s also a lot at stake for the likes of Grupo de Puebla, a club of high-profile leftists desperate to avoid another Latin loss to democratic capitalism. Its members include former Bolivian President Evo Morales, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva and former Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Zapatero, who was recently indicted by a Spanish court for money laundering and influence peddling. Mr. Zapatero denies wrongdoing. Grupo de Puebla supports Mr. Sánchez’s far-left ideological prescriptions for Peru.
Guilt-by-association, deployed via the shadowy-network frame—what we used to call loading the wire. Connect a local ballot choice to a global ideological conspiracy to inflate the stakes, then pivot immediately to an indictment to contaminate the entire group. The reader is not asked to evaluate Sánchez’s policy prescriptions for Peru. The reader is asked to fear Zapatero’s alleged money laundering, Lula’s return, and Morales’s exile, all compressed into a single paragraph. The cui-bono is straightforward: if the local election is actually about local mineral rights, the international conspiracy frame is the necessary smokescreen.
In Bolivia, the left is trying to topple centrist President Rodrigo Paz. His election victory last year stunned Grupo de Puebla member Evo Morales, his Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party and the coca-growers’ union that he heads. Now anti-Paz agents are clashing with police, blocking highways and paralyzing the economy.
This is attribution of blame, Bandura-style, with a dose of selective moral outrage. O’Grady’s “anti-Paz agents” and “clashing with police” rewrite the 2003 gas-war protests—an indigenous-led, labor-backed uprising against natural-gas privatization—as a Marxist conspiracy. Morales’s subsequent tenure had authoritarian features; that’s true. What’s missing is why the protests erupted in the first place: because the Journal’s preferred model—privatize everything, open the extractive sector to foreign capital, cut social spending—immiserated exactly the communities that took to the streets. Frame the consequence as the cause. Blame the reaction, not the provocation. And note the vocabulary: when it’s the left blocking highways, the press reaches for “clashing” and “paralyzing the economy”—a coded phrase that means labor and indigenous mobilization are successfully disrupting the extractive supply chain. When the same disruption comes from donor-backed actors, the label shifts to “constitutional defense.”
Mr. Petro raised the minimum wage by 23% in January, and he’s been good for coca growers. Those are both pluses for Mr. Cepeda. On the other hand, it may be that Colombians want their country back.
Threat-inflation closer, plus pre-emptive legitimacy-withdrawal. The violence that has marred Colombia’s campaign—the assassination of a candidate and campaign staff—is a genuine atrocity, and O’Grady reports it. But she frames it as systemic evidence that the left is a criminal enterprise, that Cepeda’s support is manufactured by armed groups at polling stations. That is the withdrawal of legitimacy before any vote has been cast. If Cepeda wins, the Journal’s reader has already been told why: the vote was stolen by narco-guerrillas. It is the international version of the “election integrity” frame. Then the column pivots to the dog whistle: raising the minimum wage is a bribe, supporting coca growers is narco-coddling, and “Colombians want their country back.” Back from whom? From the democratically elected government that raised wages for the poor? The line is the “Great Again” nostalgia frame, applied to a foreign country, casting leftist governance as foreign occupation and O’Grady’s preferred coalition as the true nation—a permission structure for intervention delivered in a single sentence. And unmentioned—of course—is the Andean Community’s May 2026 declaration that Colombia’s tariff measures were illegal, a ruling that reveals “open markets” as a supranational enforcement mechanism, not an organic outgrowth of private initiative, and complicates the columnist’s tidy morality tale.
So here is what the column actually is. It is a property-rights defense for multinational extractors, priced in the language of democracy advocacy. It calls criminal any group that threatens the mining concession, and calls freedom any candidate who guarantees it. It tells the investor that their portfolio is a moral good. It tells the populist that their culture-war enemies are running the polls in rural Colombia. It tells the political class that the left is a continental conspiracy. It tells the technocrat that the numbers vindicate the model. The machinery extracts political reality and processes it into donor-class certainty. I recognize the output because I calibrated the gauges. The column doesn’t report a crisis; it manufactures one. It is the extraction operation it accuses the left of running—a panic sold as policy, and the buyer is always the same. That is the confession. The rest is the documented record.
— Phukher Tarlson