I have often compared Latin America and Eastern Europe as competing spheres of influence: one associated with the United States, the other with Russia. Although the logic of power may appear similar, the outcomes can be radically different.

In Eastern Europe, Russia’s opposition is composed of states and institutions: several Eastern European countries and a “white-collar” European Union — bureaucratic, legalistic, predictable. The conflict is hard-edged, but it remains within classical state-based parameters.

On the American continent, however, the calculation has been different — and this is where the vulnerability emerges.

Personalised alliances are fragile when partners possess independent sources of power.

Support extended to certain leaders in Honduras, El Salvador, Brazil or Bolivia has created a sphere of influence built in a personalised manner. The problem is that some of these actors are structurally connected to criminal economies that far exceed the capacity of any political leader to control.

Cartels are not allies. They are autonomous actors of power, which cannot be managed through sanctions, diplomatic pressure or traditional economic leverage. It appears that the United States has altered the typology of its adversary without adapting its instruments accordingly.

The difference? In Eastern Europe, the United States confronts states; in Latin America, it risks confronting structures that no longer answer to either the state or politics.

Under these conditions, what can prevent the transformation of the US sphere of influence into a space of autonomous, opaque power that may, over time, become hostile even to the interests that enabled it?