On Saturday, January 3, national attention was focused on “Doralzuela” as immigrant Venezuelans in the Miami neighborhood celebrated the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro. Beyond the flash of news cameras, from the campus of a large public research university where I teach, another Miami-based constituency also cheered the attacks: the Adam Smith Center for Economic Freedom (ASC).
Established by the state legislature in 2020 at Florida International University (FIU), the ostensibly “independent” and “non-partisan” ASC has close ties to the Trump administration, the administration of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank advising both. Allegedly created to foster “scholarly studies of the effect of political and economic systems on human prosperity,” the ASC is instead building a network of rightwing politicians and think tanks to support the reassertion of U.S. power in Latin America. In serving as a base for Trump’s imperial venture, FIU is at risk of becoming collateral damage as the university’s independence is compromised by its participation in this deeply partisan project.
A Center Dedicated to U.S. Imperial Power
Established at the university where Cuba hardliner Secretary of State Marco Rubio was part-time faculty for over a decade, the ASC’s rotating cast of fellows and associates includes Heritage Foundation staffers James Carafano and Kiron Skinner. As authors of the Foundation’s “Atlantic Strategy,” Carafano and Skinner call for the United States to assert its interests against a Chinese state that is “aggressively expanding its influence” with the help of left-wing governments in the region. For them, successfully safeguarding U.S. interests means that the strategy must be “more than simply a project dictated from Washington” and entails cultivating “allies in civic society and local government” across Latin America.
The ASC has partnered with the Institute for Freedom in the Americas at nearby Miami-Dade College to engage such allies. As former speaker of the Florida House and ASC Senior Leadership Fellow Paul Renner explained on a right-wing podcast, the purpose of the publicly funded Institute is “to push back on China’s influence in Latin America.” He went on to say that “the center is designed to really harness people from the Center-Right leadership over there…We’ll bring those folks in, help train them, with private resources but also public resources.”
The gatherings aim to build a right-wing counterpart to the São Paulo Forum, a conference of left-wing Latin American parties and organizations.
The ASC hosts annual “Carvalho Dialogues,” conceived by the Heritage Foundation and named after the late Olavo de Carvalho, a Brazilian far-right crusader against “cultural Marxism.” The gatherings aim to build a right-wing counterpart to the São Paulo Forum, a conference of left-wing Latin American parties and organizations. While reportedly closed-door affairs, current Deputy Assistant Secretary of War Joseph Humire revealed some attendees’ identities in videos that he filmed while in attendance at the 2023 and 2024 gatherings. These include Ernesto Araújo, the Trump-acolyte and Former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Brazil, and Ambassador Karla Sands, who now chairs the Foreign Policy Initiative of the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. The inaugural Carvalho Dialogue concluded with “the Miami Statement,” which committed “patriots across our hemisphere to counter the serious threats we are currently facing,” by which they meant the existence of left-wing governments in Latin America.
Other conference series co-hosted by the ASC share this focus of uniting the Right against the authoritarian threat that left-wing governments and China allegedly pose to the hemisphere. In 2024 and 2025, the ASC was a co-host to the “Ibero-América Think Tank Conferences” in partnership with CEU-CFAS, a center at a conservative private Catholic University in Spain, and the Center for Fundamental Rights, a think tank closely associated with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Meeting under the theme of “Building the Ibero-American Alliance,” ASC staffer Frank Zimmerman co-led a workshop on the threat of the São Paulo Forum. One of Zimmerman’s co-facilitators was Eduardo Cader of Vox, the far-right Spanish political party and promulgator of the Madrid Charter, which calls for transnational collaboration on countering “totalitarian regimes inspired by communism…[operating] under the umbrella of Cuba.”
In 2022, the ASC director signed the Tucumán Declaration along with three Latin American former presidents—Colombia’s Álvaro Uribe Vélez, Uruguay’s Luis Lacalle Herrera, and Paraguay’s Federico Franco Gómez—and directors of several think tanks and NGOs, including Miami’s Cuba Archive and Venezuela’s CEDICE-Libertad. Initiated during the 10th anniversary celebration of the Argentine free market think tank Federalismo y Libertad, the declaration committed signatories to “explore the development of a joint action plan in pursuit of hemispheric freedom and prosperity.” But, as one signatory explained, “the importance of the document is the context,” which a proponent of the event illustrated with an image of a bowling ball inscribed with the words “São Paulo Forum” rolling toward a bowling pin labeled “democracy.” To further the collaboration initiated with the Tucumán Declaration, the ASC has hosted the Freedom Matters forum in 2023 and 2024. The purpose of the forum was to emphasize that “Cuba matters…that the São Paulo Forum and other authoritarian governments that seem to take over the continent are nothing more than the metastasis of the Cuban cancer.” Creating “hemispheric unity” against the Cuban “regime of shame” was also a focus of the Atlantic Think Tank Forum, which the ASC co-hosted in 2024 and 2025 with the Union of Latin America Parties (UPLA), an organization of center and center-right political parties.
A Public University with Partisan Aims
ASC director Carlos Díaz-Rosillo, a Cuban American who served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense during the first Trump administration, called Maduro’s kidnapping “an act of legitimate self-defense.” He announced that the ASC has “been working on a transition plan” and has “a network of experienced hemispheric leaders from diverse political traditions ready to contribute to this historic process.” This network includes FIU’s Democracy Innovation Lab, led by former self-declared president of Venezuela Juan Guaidó, who was at one time backed by the Trump administration and now works at the ASC. The network also includes opposition leaders Maria Corina Machado and Leopoldo López—both of whom have participated in events at the Center—and CEDICE-Liberad, the Venezuelan free market think tank and proponent of oil privatization that has partnered with the ASC in the production of an annual report measuring the adoption of anti-statist policies in the region.
U.S. allies abroad have called the capture of Maduro a breach of international law. Here in Miami, FIU faculty and students must reckon with the role of the ASC on our campus.
U.S. allies abroad have called the capture of Maduro a breach of international law. Here in Miami, FIU faculty and students must reckon with the role of the ASC on our campus. The public funding dedicated to the ASC, around $39 million dollars to date, would be better spent on activities that further the university’s educational mission. But, it is also problematic for the ASC to become more involved in education as it is poised to do with its new degree program in Business & Government Leadership. The bachelor’s degree is interdisciplinary and will combine courses offered through the ASC with those in departments such as Communications, Economics, and Politics & International Relations. New faculty hires affiliated with the ASC will be based in these established departments.
As the ASC is slated to become more fully integrated into the university, we must ask, can universities be seen as producers of trustworthy knowledge when they are simultaneously producing propaganda? A recently re-broadcast episode of the ASC’s weekly YouTube show Contracorriente stated that 40 percent of cocaine trafficked to the United States is of Venezuelan origin. This claim has been widely refuted. In his op-ed on the capture, ASC Director Díaz-Rosillo refers to Maduro as a leader of the Cartel de los Soles, purportedly a drug cartel, but actually a popular slang term for systemic corruption. Carvalho Dialogue attendee and former ASC affiliate Joseph Humire has long alleged that Maduro’s government deploys illicit drugs as a form of anti-U.S. warfare. He formerly led a foundation that promoted fake news about the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang.
The ASC’s professed involvement in a transition plan for Venezuela also raises issues of transparency and ethics. The construction of a transnational right-wing political network is clearly central to the aims of the ASC. Yet its stated mission of offering “a better understanding of government and free-market economies…in the United States and around the world” shows little hint of its programmatic focus on countering the São Paulo Forum. Students or researchers could affiliate with the Center without understanding its partisan project or its interest in Cuba, on which point Díaz-Rosillo recently proclaimed that the days of the “dictatorial regime” numbered “with or without direct U.S. intervention.” Moreover, while researchers are required to subject their academic studies to scrutiny by the Institutional Review Board to ensure that research participants are not harmed, there are no ethical guardrails in place to mitigate any harms resulting from the implementation of a transition plan.
A Call to Action
FIU faculty should refuse all collaborations with the ASC on degree programs and hires and, ultimately, demand the ASC’s closure.
ASC-affiliated personnel are the beneficiaries of the credibility established by the rest of the university through serious academic research. As the ASC becomes more integrated into the university through its degree programs and with joint hires, it will become difficult for FIU students and the public to distinguish where rigorous research ends and propaganda begins. Integrating such a generator of partisan disinformation into our university imperils the credibility of the legitimate academic enterprise. FIU faculty should refuse all collaborations with the ASC on degree programs and hires and, ultimately, demand the ASC’s closure.
Earlier generations of faculty leaders understood how partisan interests could compromise the university’s capacity to serve the public good. In 1989, when the powerful exile lobby, the Cuban American National Foundation procured state funding to establish a research center under its control at FIU, faculty led the fight to reject it knowing the reputation of the university was at stake. The Adam Smith Center is a particularly troubling manifestation of an emerging tendency of Red State legislatures to direct public universities to serve partisan ends. It should be of concern to faculty, students, and the broader public who maintain an interest in a higher education sector that serves the common good instead of partisan interests.
Katie Rainwater teaches sociology at Florida International University. Her research examines how the National Conservative movement is reshaping education in Florida.