In September 2025, a joint NGO investigation into the expansion of fossil fuels in Latin America had one unequivocal finding: aggressive fossil fuel expansion in the region is driven almost entirely by international banks and investment companies.
According to the study, between 2022-2024, foreign banks based primarily in the Global North provided over 190 companies with funds to drive fossil fuel extraction in Latin America and the Caribbean. From U.S. oil companies operating in Latin America, like Chevron in Argentina and Colombia, to national, state-owned companies like Pemex in Mexico and Petrobras in Brazil, money from the Global North is sewn into the chemistry of fossil fuels throughout the region.
The investigation also found that as of June 2025, $425 billion in shares and bonds of fossil fuel companies active in Latin America were held by 6,400 investors, a staggering 96 percent of which were based outside the region. Over half of all investment came from just 20 of these investors, 13 of which are based in the United States.
U.S. investment firms and banks thus provided the lion’s share of finance for multinational and national oil companies to push fossil fuel extraction in the region, which fuels violence, pollutes natural habitats, and destroys Indigenous lands. “Multinational corporations take control of our resources, harvest the profits and offload the costs on local populations,” write the authors of the study.
Fossil fuels are the lifeblood of many regional economies, making decoupling from them an economically risky and politically unpopular move for governments. Profits from extraction constitute a significant part of state revenue and many of these economies also depend heavily on imports of refined fuels, such as petrol and diesel, to power critical sectors like transport, industry and energy generation. Energy analysts have called this a “double energy dependence.”
U.S. investment firms and banks thus provided the lion’s share of finance for multinational and national oil companies to push fossil fuel extraction in the region, which fuels violence, pollutes natural habitats, and destroys Indigenous lands.
But calling this “dependence” depoliticizes relationships that are deliberately exploitative. Oil is extracted in Latin America, refined by oil companies in the United States, and sold as fuels, often to the countries from which the oil was initially extracted. The system keeps countries in the region locked in, enabling extraction in Latin America to generate long-term profits for U.S.-based shareholders. Vanguard and Blackrock, the two largest firms financing fossil fuel extraction, are also the two largest shareholders in the U.S.’s largest oil company ExxonMobil, with 10.2 percent and 7.3 percent respectively. These are key players in an exploitative system that forms the foundation of U.S. imperial power in the region.
The extent to which countries in the region are locked into this system is striking. Current data from Comtrade, the United Nations global trade data platform, shows that half of all countries in Latin America and the Caribbean for which data is available sourced more than 75 percent of their imported petroleum fuels from the U.S. in 2024. For Paraguay and Mexico, this figure was close to 100 percent.
The effects of this extractive system run far deeper than trade; societies and politics in the region are also deeply shaped by fossil fuel dynamics. Weakened institutions, a blending of political and economic power, emboldened autocratic political currents, disempowered citizens, and some of the world’s greatest levels of inequality are all social characteristics in part associated with state dependence on fossil extraction.
This is not to say that oil determines politics in its entirety but rather that the way in which energy is produced and distributed profoundly shapes social and political realities. For Latin America and the Caribbean, this point has empowering consequences: if fossil fuel dependencies could be broken in the region, political realities could change too. That’s not just an academic hypothetical, it’s an emerging reality.
Powerful shifts in Latin America
Renewable energy in Latin America is growing fast, building on an existing base of widespread hydroelectric capacity. Solar and wind now account for over two-thirds of new electricity generation installed in the region and, according to a report by the Latin American and Caribbean Energy Organization, electricity generated by solar and wind increased by 19 percent in a single year from 2024 to 2025. Estimates by the International Energy Association predict a total increase of over 165GW in renewable capacity by 2028 –roughly equivalent in output to 165 nuclear power plants.
Though clean energy advances do not guarantee just transitions, bright predictions like these are nonetheless emerging escape routes for a region constrained by economic subordination through fossil fuels. A 2025 report published by energy think tank Ember suggests that latent solar potential in Mexico could transform it into a “solar superpower,” producing up to 90 percent of its electricity demand from solar alone to “secure long-term energy independence.” For a country that currently relies on imports of U.S.natural gas for over half of its electricity generation, solar powered energy independence is an empowering prospect.
On far smaller scales, energy independence is already a tangible reality made possible by solar technologies. Projects across the region are training people to run their own micro solar systems, fostering new “energy communities” that eradicate dependence on diesel generators or crumbling grid systems and achieve energy self-sufficiency and extra income from the sale of excess power. Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Colombia all have programs in place to support these initiatives.
In these communities, clean energy independence erodes systems of exploitation brought by fossil fuels, creating space for alternative social and political realities. In a sense, energy is politics by other means, and renewable technologies are a vehicle for broader political ends.
As fossil fuel revenues shrink,, the influence of national oil companies could also diminish, leading to a weakening of the exploitative social and political structures they engender. Further down the line, it’s possible to imagine a scenario in which distributed energy production tethered to the natural cycles of sun and wind may enable decentralized political power and disrupt the fundamental logic of unlimited growth upon which capitalist forms of extraction and consumption are premised.
Ideas for what could replace this logic are plentiful in a region rich in meaningful experiments in socialism and democracy. Campaigns for an eco-social pact across Latin America have gained momentum in recent years, pushing for a just transition towards a society based on “social and ecological care.” Since 2022, Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s national development plans have prioritized the protection of nature and indigenous rights, objectives born from a clear understanding of the inseparability of clean energy from Colombian and Latin American self-determination.
While these movements represent powerful shifts in the region, they don’t yet fundamentally challenge the fossil fuel dependencies upon which U.S. imperial power rests. This is the case across the region, where clean energy advances coexist in a complex web with entrenched fossil fuel dependencies and interests. The region’s endowment of critical minerals however, could force a more decisive shift.
For Latin America and the Caribbean, this point has empowering consequences: if fossil fuel dependencies could be broken in the region, political realities could change too.
Sun, wind, water, lithium, copper, silver. All are vital ingredients for clean energy production, and Latin America’s vast territory has them in abundance. 40 percent of the world’s known copper deposits are confined to Chile, Peru and Mexico, and the region holds over half of all global lithium reserves.
These minerals are also integral to clean energy technologies and invaluable components in products from washing machines to AI,and their accelerated demand is rapidly shaping geopolitics in Latin America’s favor. Geopolitical commentator Huma Siddiqui argues that “AI and green technology are converging into a single geopolitical system–and Latin America, endowed with both resources and renewable potential, sits at its center.”
Significant Chinese investment in these sectors over the past two decades has sought to cultivate this inherent strategic potential in the region, and a developmental roadmap published in December 2025 by the Chinese government aims to further catalyze clean energy transitions in 22 regional countries that count themselves as members of its Belt and Road Initiative.
Turbocharged imperialism
The U.S. intervention in Venezuela in early 2026 was both audacious and unprecedented. It reflects a turbocharged imperialism driven by a violent Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, and ties into the broader U.S. project in the region.
In the context of a tremendous potential for clean energy independence bolstered by a growing geopolitical strength and Chinese strategic finance, and in light of falling fossil fuel investments in the region and shortages of thick crude in U.S. refineries, intervention for the control of Venezuelan oil production likely appeared as a logical next step for the Trump administration to reinforce the fossil fuel dependencies on which U.S. hegemony is built. Maintaining these dependencies is one of the aims of the U.S. intervention; its consequential effect will be to suppress the emerging shifts towards clean energy independence and the social and political change this is fostering.
Ramping up production in Venezuela will further entrench fossil fuel dependencies in the region and suppress the development of clean energy into the coming decades. Once markets are forced open, the expansion of fossil fuel extraction is self-propelling. Companies aggressively seek further drilling projects to pay back loans withdrawn to build the infrastructure required to make projects possible in the first place. Analysts call this creeping entrenchment “path dependency”—once the tanker is moving in one direction, it’s almost impossible to turn it around. Clean and just alternatives to energy production, transport and industry, will struggle to compete under this forced prolongation of fossil fuel dominance.
Since U.S. imperial power depends on it, oil production in Venezuela does not have to make economic sense to proceed. U.S. oil CEOs have called the revamping of oil production in the country economically “unfeasible.” Nevertheless, Trump’s assertion that the United States will control Venezuelan oil and politics “indefinitely,” and even reimburse U.S. oil companies for resuscitating Venezuela’s oil industry, shows the state will nonetheless make the conditions for investment possible at any cost.
Such a brazen display of willingness by the Trump administration to set new imperial precedents with extortionate military force will likely also have a profound disciplinary effect on political leaders across Latin America and the Caribbean for years to come. The latent threat of U.S. intervention will frustrate the efforts of any political leader seeking to dismantle U.S. fossil fuel dependencies, resist extraction, empower clean energy developments, and spur social and political change.
In this era of turbocharged U.S. imperialism, sovereignty and self-determination are even more conditional than they have been, permitted reluctantly by Washington only if it is guaranteed that Latin American and Caribbean states will remain subservient economies of extraction and dependence. Movements for clean energy independence will have to work even harder to ensure their promising beginnings are not suffocated by the protracted ubiquity of fossil fuels.
Adam Termote is a freelance investigative journalist working in Mexico. His work blends on-the-ground information gathering with open source intelligence to interrogate issues of environmental and social justice in the context of extractive industries, energy transitions and big tech in Latin America.