Latin America Watches U.S. Diplomacy Turn Hashtags into Online Weapons
On Instagram accounts run by U.S. Embassies in Venezuela, Mexico, and Brazil, a new Prism investigation finds anti‑immigrant memes, threats, and “self‑deportation” pitches turning official diplomacy into a border wall built from hashtags, nostalgia, and digitally exported fear and resentment.
Embassy Timelines Become Warning Posters
Open Instagram in Caracas, Rio de Janeiro, or Mexico City and the first U.S. voice many Latin Americans encounter is not a diplomat at a podium, but a caption in Spanish or Portuguese warning them not to come. “Crossing the border illegally has consequences,” declared a July 30, 2025 post from the U.S. Embassy in Venezuela, shared in Spanish. The message went on to cite newly defined “National Defense Areas” along the border: “Whoever enters through these zones will face fines, detention, legal charges and prison. Don’t risk your life or your family’s.” For people in a country battered by hyperinflation and sanctions, the tone is less consular service and more digital billboard at the edge of a militarized frontier.
According to data collected and analyzed by Prism, from January to August 2025 the U.S. Embassy in Venezuela posted 348 times on Instagram. Roughly 45% of those posts contained anti‑immigrant rhetoric, including language aimed at undocumented people urging them to “self‑deport” under Donald Trump’s new self‑deportation policy. Rolled out in July by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the program reportedly offers $1,000 to migrants who use the CBP Home app to return to their country of origin. Another Venezuelan embassy post, dated August 18, warned in Spanish, “The immigration laws are now stricter than ever. If you try to enter illegally, you will be arrested, deported, and you will never be able to return. Don’t risk it. Share this information with your friends and family.”
As Prism reports, the rhetoric fits neatly into the second Trump administration’s broader foreign‑policy line: treat migration as an individual moral failing instead of the predictable outcome of poverty, sanctions, and political instability in which the United States itself is deeply implicated. Scholars writing in Latin American Politics and Society and International Migration Review have long tracked how U.S. economic and security policies shape migration routes; none of that structural context appears in the embassy’s Instagram tiles. Instead, a state that spent decades projecting democratic ideals now speaks in the punitive grammar of a border patrol.
This is not an isolated Venezuelan experiment. Prism’s investigation examined more than 900 Instagram posts from the U.S. Embassies in Venezuela, Mexico, and Brazil between January and August 2025. The three countries all have tense relations with Trump, fueled by tariffs, threats to invade Venezuela and Mexico, and aggressive deportation campaigns against their citizens. Experts on fascism and digital politics told Prism that the embassy feeds now work against the traditional goal of diplomacy—building bridges—and instead mirror the administration’s isolationist, openly xenophobic turn.
Research fellow Jacob Ware of the Council on Foreign Relations, who studies terrorism and counterterrorism, told Prism that the rhetoric represents a break with long‑standing diplomatic practice. “The U.S. diplomatic core has always served to build bridges, build resilience, build connections and expand the image and influence and power of the United States abroad,” he said. “If this is the main narrative the embassy is trafficking in, it indicates a shift away from building bridges towards tearing down bridges… And that’s a real shift.” For Latin Americans who grew up hearing Washington’s language of “partnership” even amid coups and structural adjustment, the bluntness feels familiar—but now it is delivered as a Story, a Reel, an algorithmic nudge.
Memes, Nostalgia and The Far‑Right Playbook
Some of the most jarring elements uncovered by Prism are not the threats themselves but the tone: playful, meme‑driven, steeped in pop culture. On July 23, 2025, the U.S. Embassy in Brazil posted an image based on the 1982 film “E.T.”—the alien silhouetted on a bicycle in front of the moon—alongside a Portuguese caption: “Even E.T. knew when it was time to go home.” Brazilian outlets from Veja to CNN Brasil and O Globo reported on the backlash; after that coverage, the post quietly disappeared from the embassy’s grid. Asked by Prism to explain how such content is developed, the embassy answered only, “As a matter of internal policy, the U.S. Embassy does not comment on institutional deliberations.”
For Ilana Hartikainen, a political science researcher at the University of Helsinki interviewed by Prism, that E.T. meme is a textbook case of what she calls “banana populism”: “[They are] using this kind of whimsy and absurdity to mainstream far-right ideas, like doing cutesy things and attaching a far-right messaging into it,” she explained. Her critique echoes findings in journals like New Media & Society, where scholars have traced how far‑right movements use humor and kitsch to smuggle extremist narratives into everyday timelines.
The embassy accounts appear to borrow heavily from DHS’s own social media tactics. As Prism documents, the federal agency has used X to share drawings of Uncle Sam for ICE recruitment, ASMR‑style videos of deportations, images of heavily armed police, and Pokémon memes declaring “gotta catch ’em all” in reference to immigrants. On Instagram, DHS frequently posts scenes of an imagined America without people of color, paired with appeals for “protection.” Across the embassy accounts Prism reviewed, hashtags like #AmericaSafer and #AmericaFirst appeared in at least half a dozen posts between January and August. Historians have noted that “America first” once served as a slogan for the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist fascist currents.
Hartikainen linked #AmericaSafer to the GOP narrative that constructs a constant security crisis to justify expanded policing and military force. She told Prism that DHS’s visuals evoke a “mythological time” when white Americans felt safer precisely because they were surrounded by people who looked like them. Ware agreed, pointing to a fentanyl public service announcement that largely blamed Mexico for U.S. overdose deaths, and to a Norman Rockwell painting, shared by DHS, showing white children saluting the U.S. flag with the caption, “Protect our American way of life.” “On the DHS account, you see a lot of pseudo-white supremacists memeification, often AI-generated pictures of some kind of Halcyon days of old America,” he told Prism, warning that such official imagery circulates globally and cannot be dismissed as mere “internet content.”
One embassy video, highlighted by Prism, shows a pregnant woman cradling her stomach in front of a U.S. flag, accompanied by a warning in Portuguese: “We will deny your visa if we believe that your primary purpose for traveling is to give birth in the United States or obtain U.S. citizenship for your child.” Hartikainen noted that, stripped of the caption, the image resembles pro‑life, “have more white babies” messaging common in right‑wing circles. Instead, the post targets pregnant women in Brazil, threatening visa denials and deportation if they are suspected of “birth tourism.” “Don’t even try to come,” she told Prism, is the real message.
From Instagram Captions to Airstrikes and New Terror Laws
If the Brazilian feed weaponizes whimsy, the Venezuela account mixes migration warnings with a sustained campaign to degrade the country itself. Out of 348 posts, Prism found that 12% explicitly claimed to defend “free speech” and “democracy” while accusing the Venezuelan government of corruption, dictatorship, and censorship. One July 28 post in Spanish declared, “Since the end of 2024, inflation has risen and the Venezuelan bolívar continues to fall in value. Prices rise weekly, and wages are not enough to buy food. The Venezuelan regime is solely responsible for the devaluation of its currency, and Venezuelans are paying the price.” Missing from these posts is the conclusion of the U.S. Government Accountability Office that U.S. oil sanctions contributed to the country’s economic collapse beginning in 2019.
The tone fits a longer trajectory. The first Trump administration refused to recognize Nicolás Maduro as president in 2019, while the Biden administration later offered limited sanctions relief in November 2022. Even under Biden, the Venezuelan embassy sometimes posted warnings that crossing the U.S. border “illegally” would block future asylum. But as Venezuelan American activist and digital strategist Juan Escalante told Prism, the current administration has taken the rhetoric “to new heights,” including on the campaign trail ahead of the 2024 election, when Trump described Venezuelan migrants as “drug dealers, criminals, murderers, and rapists.”
Escalante pointed in particular to what he called “modern‑day strikes on boats off the Caribbean,” airstrikes the administration claims are aimed at drug trafficking or human smuggling. Since September, Trump officials have carried out 21 such strikes in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific, killing at least 83 people, without publicly presenting evidence of smuggling, Prism reports. One bombing was featured on the U.S. Embassy in Venezuela Instagram account. In late October, the Pentagon acknowledged that the boats were attacked “because they could not satisfy the evidentiary burden” to prosecute alleged traffickers in court.
In the months before those strikes, Prism found an uptick in embassy posts about drug cartels, including an executive order classifying cartels as “terrorist organizations” and messages accusing Maduro of leading the Cartel de Los Soles, a Trump‑designated “narco‑terrorist” group that U.S. authorities have long claimed exists, even as its contours remain murky. Ware told Prism by email that the allegations look “dubious, at best,” warning they may fuel “clamors for war” within the MAGA movement: if a South American leader is framed as a drug‑running criminal, violent regime change begins to look like an obligation.
The narrative is not confined to Washington. In Brazil, the label “narcoterrorism” has been invoked to justify deadly police raids in favelas. On October 28, military police in Rio de Janeiro killed at least 121 people during an operation in Complexo do Alemão and Complexo da Penha. Right‑wing governor Cláudio Castro hailed the operation as a “decisive strike against crime” and vowed to continue the “war against narcoterrorist gangs.” Amnesty International has called for an investigation, and local residents are protesting the killings. Reporting by Agência Pública uncovered a draft “narcoterrorism” bill that would allow militias, gangs, paramilitary organizations, and criminal groups to be prosecuted as “terrorists,” explicitly citing the Trump administration as a model.
In that report, judge Marcelo Semer, former president of the Association of Judges for Democracy, warned the bill “does not help in combating organized crime” and argued that treating everyone as terrorists “will make the United States’ job easier,” cementing its role as “universal police.” His concerns echo Ware’s fear, voiced to Prism, of “abuses in the homeland” if migrants from Mexico and Venezuela can be charged with providing “material support” to newly designated foreign terrorist organizations.
Perhaps the clearest sign of the double standard comes from what Prism did not find. On the Instagram pages of U.S. Embassies in Spain, France, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland, there were no calls for self‑deportation, no memes about criminals “caught” by immigration agents, no threats aimed at pregnant women. For European migrants, U.S. diplomacy still speaks the language of scholarships, culture and partnership. For much of Latin America, it now appears on screen as a stream of warnings, airstrike images, and nostalgic pictures of an America in which they never had a place.
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