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Latin America and Caribbean Solidarity in the Trump Era

Ariela Ruiz Caro

Donald Trump has his sights set on Latin America and the Caribbean and is prepared to use a heavy hand to bring them under his exclusive control. He called a presidential summit in Miami with heads of state he considers his ideological and strategic allies in Miami for March 7. The goal is to form a regional bloc aligned with Washington and strengthen strategic cooperation in security matters.

Trump announced that the group will promote shared development goals and democratic stability. The U.S. president also seeks to contain China’s growing influence in the region. So far, Presidents Javier Milei (Argentina), Santiago Peña (Paraguay), Rodrigo Paz (Bolivia), Daniel Noboa (Ecuador), Nayib Bukele (El Salvador), Nasry Asfura (Honduras), and José Jerí (Peru), whose removal from office for permanent moral incapacity is being debated in Congress four months after Dina Boluarte was removed and with just two months to go before the presidential elections in April.

Also this week, General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, convened a Conference of Defense Chiefs of the Western Hemisphere in Washington to coordinate regional defense and security strategies with senior military officials from 34 countries in the region. At the event, held in Washington, D.C., attendees agreed on the importance of forming strong alliances, ongoing cooperation, and joint efforts to counter transnational criminal and terrorist organizations, and external actors that undermine regional security and stability.

China’s growing presence in the region in terms of trade, investment in infrastructure, technology, and natural resources is a central concern of the U.S. government. The U.S. “National Security Strategy” published in November 2025 explicitly states that the country must play a hegemonic role in the region, for which China’s presence must be displaced.

It’s my hemisphere

The first thing Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, did after Donald Trump took office on January 20, 2025, was to visit Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. On the trip, he made it clear that the United States would continue to provide assistance to nations that aligned themselves with its national interests. It was the first time in more than 100 years that a Secretary of State had visited the Central American and Caribbean region on his first official visit abroad.

Panama´s government was forced to withdraw from the Chinese initiative for the modernization and interconnection of physical and digital infrastructure known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). In April 2025, military exercises carried out since 2006 under the bilateral defense cooperation agreement known as Panamax-Alpha to protect the Panama Canal against transnational threats took on strategic relevance. Not only were they prolonged, but more special forces participated than in recent years. The exercise coincided with the Pentagon’s unprecedented military deployment in the Caribbean, which included the dispatch of warships, nuclear-powered submarines, and the giant aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford, to overthrow the government of Nicolás Maduro and then suffocate the economy and civilian population of Cuba.

Washington has also expressed great concern over the construction of the Chancay megaport in Peru. Then-foreign minister, Elmer Schialer, and defense minister, Walter Astudillo, had to travel to Washington D.C. to meet with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. There, Hegseth warned them about Washington’s growing concern about China: “It represents a potential threat to hemispheric peace and security. We cannot ignore its covert expansion under the guise of development (…). Beijing invests to dominate, not to cooperate.”

In early May 2025, Marco Rubio told the leaders of the Eastern Caribbean (Saint Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Dominica, Grenada, and the Bahamas) to stay away from China because it was a “malign actor.” He claimed that China’s economic and cultural activities in the region are a threat to U.S. security and stated that the Caribbean nations must make “responsible and transparent” decisions about the suppliers and contractors they choose to build infrastructure so as not to be “vulnerable to privacy and security risks.” Rubio urged them to coordinate on security and information sharing through the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative, a security partnership between the United States and Caribbean nations established in 2010.

None of this prevented the Fourth Ministerial Meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States CELAC-China Forum from moving forward in Beijing that same month, where the US government’s threats to drive China out of the continent were not an issue. With the exception of Milei in Argentina, who obsequiously aligns with the Trump administration’s interests on everything, three Latin American presidents (Lula, Petro, Boric), and some 20 foreign ministers and senior representatives from 32 member countries of the region signed the Beijing Declaration and the CELAC-China Joint Action Plan for Cooperation in Key Areas (2025-2027). The plan coordinates actions on issues of interest to the parties involved. Even the slogan under which they gathered, “Planning together for development and revitalization, jointly building a Chinese-Latin American and Caribbean community with a shared future,” was disturbing to U.S. ears.

Then head of the Southern Command, Admiral Alvin Holsey, who resigned because of his disagreement with the bombing of boats in the Caribbean Sea), warned of the risks of China’s deployment in Latin America and the Caribbean and pointed out that its presence in the region involves “potential military programs.” Holsey seems to forget that the United States has military bases in almost the entire region, the oldest of which is located in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

A Chinese mega-port on the American continent

In November 2024, the mega-deepwater port of Chancay was inaugurated by Chinese President Xi Jinping and then-Peruvian President Dina Boluarte. From the outset, it raised alarms in the United States. The Trump administration cast it as part of a Chinese civil-military strategy that could house warships in a potential conflict. Located 70 kilometers north of the Peruvian capital, Chancay is one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects in Latin America, slated to be complemented by a bi-oceanic corridor between Brazil and Peru. This is part of China’s BRI infrastructure connection strategy in the context of China’s growing trade and investment in the region.

To counteract this presence, a few days before the port’s inauguration, Peru’s National Commission for Aerospace Research and Development and the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) signed a Memorandum of Understanding. This memorandum seeks to promote space cooperation, including the launch of sounding rockets from Peru starting 2028. In mid-January 2026, the U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency approved the supply of equipment and services worth $1.5 billion to modernize the new Callao Naval Base, very close to the mega-port. The main contractor would be the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Ecuadorian president Daniel Noboa, another staunch ally of Washington, authorized the installation of a U.S. military base in the Galapagos archipelago in December 2024 to attempt to show his country’s intention to offset Chinese presence. The decision violated Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution, which contains an explicit prohibition on the presence of foreign military forces or bases on Ecuadorian territory. The most military base in that country dates back to 1999 in the coastal city of Manta. in 2009, then-President Rafael Correa did not renew the contract to operate that base. Noboa sent a partial reform of the Constitution to Parliament in March 2025 to eliminate the article prohibiting the presence of military bases. The reform was approved in early June, but in a popular referendum held in November 2025 61% of the population rejected the reform, thus nullifying it.

In recent days, the Chancay mega-port has been the subject of heated exchanges between China and the United States because the Chinese judiciary blocked the powers of the Peruvian regulatory body (Ositrán) over the mega-port and ruled that it should refrain from exercising its powers of supervision, control, and sanction, although it will regulate the setting of tariffs for end users.

Immediately, the U.S. government, through the State Department, said it was “concerned” about the possibility that the Peruvian government would lose its powers to supervise the mega-port: “We support Peru’s sovereign right to supervise critical infrastructure in its own territory. Let this serve as a warning to the region and the world: cheap Chinese money costs sovereignty.” Minutes later, the U.S. ambassador to Peru, Bernie Navarro, echoed the message and added: “Everything has a price, and in the long run, cheap comes at a high cost. There is no higher price than losing sovereignty.”

On Feb. 12, the Chinese Embassy in Peru denounced the U.S. government’s statements on the Chancay port. It noted that Ositrán could note exercise supervision since port operations private and do not affect national sovereignty. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian spoke at a press conference and said that “China firmly opposes the false accusations and misinformation from the United States against China’s cooperation with Peru on the port of Chancay.”

The statements made by U.S. authorities constitute a clear interference in Peru’s internal affairs, especially since teh executive branch has no influence over the court rulings and much less over officials in other countries. The Peruvian regulatory body, Ositran, will appeal the ruling.

Retaking the Panama Canal

Since Donald Trump took office, he has repeatedly expressed his desire for the United States to regain control of the Panama Canal. He has pressured Panamanian authorities to withdraw from the Belt and Road Initiative and to terminate the contracts of Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison, which operates the ports of Balboa and Cristobal at both ends of the canal.

He succeeded. At the end of January, a Panamanian court ruled that the contract with CK Hutchison was unconstitutional, which has angered both CK Hutchison and the Chinese government. CK Hutchison has announced it will take the case to international arbitration and warned that Panama will pay the consequences.

Even though he knows that the canal is controlled by a Panamanian public entity, Trump has cynically accused China of controlling the canal. The pressure led CK Hutchison to initially propose selling the two Panamanian ports to a consortium of investors led by BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager. The announcement thrilled Trump, who, with his characteristic humility, linked the decision to his efforts to return control of the Panama Canal to the United States:

“My administration will take back the Panama Canal, and we have already begun to do so (…) Just today, a great American company announced that it is going to buy the two ports surrounding the Panama Canal,” he crowed. But the Chinese government opposed the deal, and CK Hutchison announced that it was considering inviting another investor, likely COSCO, the Chinese state-owned shipping giant, to participate in the operation, which revived Trump’s anger.

The US president has falsely accused Panama of allowing Chinese soldiers to control the sea route and of overcharging U.S. ships, which is absolutely untrue. “There are no Chinese soldiers in the canal, for God’s sake,” said a frustrated President Mulino in December of 2024.

Trump has said that if fees fir U.S. vessels are not reduced, he will demand that the United States be given control of the canal “in its entirety, quickly and without question.” French historian David Marcilhacy and others have argued that Trump’s accusations that Panama is not respecting neutrality due to alleged Chinese influence have no legal basis.

Recent acts of interference by the U.S. government in Peru and Panama come on the heels of the interference in Brazil, in connection with the 27-year prison sentence handed down to former President Jair Bolsonaro for leading a coup attempt after being defeated at the polls in 2022 elections. On that occasion, Trump openly criticized judicial leaders and imposed tariffs of up to 50% on a significant portion of Brazilian exports to the U.S. market.

Shortly thereafter, the trial of former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe for procedural fraud and witness tampering that resulted in a sentence of 12 years under house arrest sparked angry protests from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who railed against the Colombian justice system ad defended Uribe, who was also accused of having close ties to paramilitary groups. Add Trump’s blatant interference in the midterm legislative elections in Argentina last October by asserting that Argentines should vote for the ruling party’s candidates if they wanted to continue receiving loans, and in the presidential elections in Honduras on November 30, when Donald Trump threatened cutoffs in aid if Hondurans did not vote for Nasry Asfura, now president of Honduras. That election was accompanied by Trump’s pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, sentenced to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking in the United States, who belongs to the same party as Asfura–the conservative National Party.

With an interventionist government like Trump’s, and with the region in the spotlight, the right to self-determination and defense of sovereignty in the countries of the region are being seriously violated.

[Ariela Ruiz Caro is an economist from Humboldt University of Berlin and holds a Master’s Degree in Economic Integration Processes from the University of Buenos Aires. She is an analyst of the Americas Program for the Andean/Southern Cone region. Courtesy: Mira, a feminist research and communication centre that produces analysis and builds networks to support social movements across Latin America working for democracy, equality, justice and peace.]

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The Trump Corollary: Imperialist Offensive and the Assault on Venezuela

William Camacaro & Frederick B. Mills

The “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine is a central feature of U.S. strategy designed to secure hegemony and limit Chinese and Russian influence in Latin America and the Caribbean. It does not, however, represent a decisive shift in Washington’s relations with the region. Although the corollary does not make this explicit in its formal statement, in practice it makes more evident what liberal rhetoric has long sought to mask: military and covert interventions aimed at preserving U.S. domination in the Western Hemisphere, undermining progressive movements and governments, and backing right-wing regimes. In this sense, it abandons even the pretense of respect for international law and human rights. In what follows we argue that the Trump Corollary constitutes not only an ideological and imperialist offensive against decolonial currents and multipolar tendencies in Latin America, but also a strategic project whose assault on Venezuela has broader geopolitical implications.

The Ideological Backdrop

Although Washington’s unrestrained militarism, which enjoys bipartisan support, is indeed cause for alarm, the erosion of the pretense of commitment to liberal-democratic values, human rights, and international law did not begin with the Trump administration. The live-streamed Israeli genocide in Gaza, enabled and backed by the Biden administration, has made this difficult to deny. Moreover, the assault on Gaza highlights how the U.S.-European axis has normalized impunity for systematic violence against non-combatants. This erosion of professed liberal values within that axis has helped consolidate a political climate in which the Trump administration could intensify its offensives against Venezuela and Cuba and pursue a war of aggression against Iran.

This normalization of necropolitics can be better understood through the ideological logic used to justify it. We can make sense of this logic by distinguishing between two different tendencies within Western Eurocentric modernity. On the one hand is the myth of European supremacy, what Enrique Dussel calls the “developmentalist fallacy,” which has been used to justify colonization, with its racial hierarchy, since the invasion of Amerindia in 1492. On the other is a rational, emancipatory current rooted in ideas of community, equality, and liberty. As critical historians have shown, these emancipatory traditions did not originate solely in Europe; they were also present among some Indigenous peoples, such as the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, whose Great Law of Peace established participatory forms of government centuries before European contact. Historically, these ideals were never extended fully to colonized peoples, nor to people of color within the metropole. This contradiction persists. Washington’s recent rhetoric justifying attacks on Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran expresses the colonial, violent side of modernity while discarding its emancipatory, humanist dimensions.

Civilizational Rhetoric and the Objectives of the Trump Corollary

It is this myth of European supremacy, often expressed with religious fervor even when stripped of its humanist facade, that serves as the ideological justification for the offensives launched this year. This worldview was crystallized in a speech delivered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the 62nd Munich Security Conference on February 14, 2026. That speech anticipated the inauguration in Miami, on March 7, of Shield of the Americas, a new U.S. partnership with right-wing allies in Latin America and the Caribbean, to be led by former Secretary of DHS Kristi Noem. Rubio, in effect, called for a rejection of historical accountability, stating:

We do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame. We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it. . . . The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.

This rhetoric illustrates Rubio’s disdain for anti-colonial struggles that commenced not with the Cold War and communism, but at the very start of the European invasions of Amerindia. Indeed, the “guilt and shame” surrounding the subjugation and exploitation of Indigenous peoples was expressed as early as the sixteenth century, when Bartolomé de Las Casas documented and denounced the tortures inflicted upon them in the name of a European civilizing mission. The same civilizational appeal surfaced again at the Miami summit, where Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called upon members of the Shield to defend their shared cultures and, in particular, “Western Christian civilization.” By casting anti-colonialism as an insidious force, Rubio’s rhetoric functions to blunt decolonial critiques of the Trump Corollary.

Despite Washington’s zeal for exporting Western ideals, decolonizing currents in Latin America’s political, economic, social, and cultural life have taken deep root. Since the 1960s, Marxism, along with liberation theology, liberation philosophy, and Indigenous struggles for self-governance, have helped articulate ethical and political critiques of colonial domination, racial hierarchy, and dependent forms of development from the perspective of the Global South. Indigenous cosmovisions and the philosophy of buen vivir have influenced constitutional and political life in the region and beyond. For example, the United Nations now recognizes the concept of the rights of nature as central to sustainable development. The recognition of the rights of Mother Earth has also been incorporated into the constitutions of both Bolivia and Ecuador, and the plurality of Indigenous and Afro-descendent nationalities is recognized in several Latin American constitutions.

The Trump Corollary emerges in direct opposition to these decolonial currents. It seeks to restore U.S. primacy over the hemisphere’s governance and resources by curtailing the region’s expanding commercial and diplomatic ties with China, Russia, and other non-Western partners. To advance this agenda, Washington has worked to destabilize or overthrow progressive governments while favoring right-wing administrations more aligned with its interests, in some cases through intimidation, electoral interference, or direct military intervention. Much like the Alliance for Progress, Operation Condor, and the invasion of Panama before it, this latest evolution of the Monroe Doctrine invokes the pretext of security to reassert Washington’s influence over hemispheric political and economic life while limiting the region’s turn toward greater autonomy. Yet that effort confronts a regional reality that Washington cannot easily reverse. Trade relations transcend political divisions in Latin America and the Caribbean. And in South America, China has become the principal trading partner for much of the subregion. This complicates Washington’s efforts to rein in Latin America’s turn toward multipolarity. China’s Third Policy Paper on Latin America and the Caribbean presents the region as an “essential force” in the move toward a multipolar world and economic globalization, and describes the bilateral relationship in terms of equality, mutual benefit, openness, and shared well-being. This stated approach stands in clear contrast to the Trump Corollary’s posture of coercion, Western supremacy, and geopolitical subordination. It is, in part, this regional turn toward multipolarity that the assault on Venezuela seeks to counter.

Venezuela: The Central Case

The violent reality of the Trump Corollary has been most clearly revealed in Venezuela. Washington’s campaign of deadly strikes against maritime vessels in the Caribbean, a series of extrajudicial killings that claimed the lives of more than 145 people, served as a prelude to the January 3 surprise aerial assault on Caracas, named Operation Absolute Resolve. The maritime victims included people from nations such as Colombia, Saint Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago, and Venezuela who were targeted without public evidence of narco-trafficking or due process. Operation Absolute Resolve itself claimed the lives of more than 120 people, including civilians and security forces, and culminated in the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores. In Venezuela, the Trump Corollary deploys military force, coercive diplomacy, and control over strategic resources. It also deals a blow to the Bolivarian cause by making an example of a state that has stood as the leading force of regional independence and integration for more than two decades.

Rather than moving, in the short term, to dismantle Chavista institutions, as many Venezuelan opposition hard-liners in Miami and Madrid expected, the Trump administration in the aftermath of Operation Absolute Resolve instead has resorted to “deal-making” with Acting President Delcy Rodríguez. The recognition of interim president Delcy Rodríguez as president of Venezuela is an effort by the Trump administration to strip President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores of the presidential immunity to which they are entitled. Despite Trump’s praise for a supposedly mutually beneficial relationship with the Chavista government, this is not a win-win situation. Washington’s recognition of the government of Venezuela is not evidence of respect for sovereignty, given the continued detention of its President and First Lady in New York, but rather a tactical measure imposed on a besieged state acting under duress and seeking to endure. If Washington truly recognized the government of Venezuela, it would have freed its President and First Lady. Acting President Rodríguez is attempting to balance Washington’s demands for unfettered access to the country’s natural resources with Venezuela’s own economic interests and the long-term survival of the Bolivarian Revolution. That coercive political context also affects the economic arrangements now taking shape in Venezuela.

As new economic agreements are being “negotiated,” major Venezuelan state assets previously frozen, seized, or placed beyond Caracas’s control remain unrecovered. Prior to Operation Absolute Resolve, the U.S. seized Venezuelan aircraft and targeted ships carrying Venezuelan oil that U.S. authorities said were involved in sanctions evasion. The most egregious case is that of Citgo, Venezuela’s most valuable foreign asset. Caracas has already lost real control over it, and U.S. courts are now overseeing proceedings that could permanently strip Venezuela of ownership to pay creditors.

More recently, a series of Trump administration officials have gone to Caracas to press for greater U.S. influence over Venezuela’s oil industry. They have also “negotiated” with the Chavista government to bring about legal reforms that will facilitate U.S. investment in the extraction of critical minerals and other natural resources. According to Venezuela Analysis (02/20/26), “The Trump administration is forcing all royalty, tax, and dividend payments from Venezuelan oil production [to] be paid into accounts managed by Washington.” For Venezuelan critics of U.S. intervention, these arrangements may result in a significant transfer of national wealth under pressure. Other observers argue that renewed investment could bring Venezuela badly needed revenues. In any case, there is no doubt that these economic arrangements are being carried out in a coercive context.

Regional Extensions of the Corollary

The offensive against Venezuela did not occur in isolation. It was soon followed by a strangling energy embargo on Cuba designed to provoke a humanitarian crisis to bring about “regime change.” After more than sixty-six years of U.S. embargo against Cuba, this latest escalation is intended not only to destabilize and isolate the island but also to shatter the morale of the forces of resistance throughout the region. At the same time, it has galvanized worldwide solidarity, despite the betrayals of governments that have succumbed to U.S. pressure to expel Cuban doctors and dismantle other forms of Cuban internationalist assistance. Meanwhile, the administration has been pressuring Mexico with the specter of unilateral military strikes against drug cartels, signaling a disregard for Mexico’s repeated insistence on its own sovereignty. In Colombia, Washington antagonized President Gustavo Petro with politically charged drug-trafficking allegations and threats of military intervention, a confrontational posture that later gave way to rapprochement after Petro met with Trump at the White House. In Honduras, the U.S. intervened to back the presidency of the right-wing candidate Nasry “Tito” Asfura who won the presidential election in December 2025 and took office on January 27.

The latest example of this interventionist regional posture was the U.S.-Ecuadorian military operation launched on March 3, which conducted bombings near the Colombian border in northeastern Ecuador, ostensibly aimed at narco-terrorists and illegal mining. In Ecuador, as in Peru, small-scale artisanal mining is often practiced within Indigenous communities living near mineral deposits and employs methods with a far lighter environmental impact than industrial-scale extraction. Whatever its stated purpose, the operation may have the effect of displacing artisanal mining and opening mineral-rich territory to large North American transnational corporations. In brief, by convening twelve compliant right-wing regional leaders in Miami, the Shield of the Americas summit serves to institutionalize Washington’s renewed drive toward regional hegemony. But the significance of this offensive is not only regional.

Geopolitical Implications

The Trump Corollary has geopolitical importance because the recent offensive to consolidate U.S. hegemony in the Americas has served as a strategic prelude to the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. The offensive in Venezuela not only stops Venezuelan crude from reaching Cuba, thereby sharpening the knife of the subsequent energy embargo, but also secures strategic leverage over the largest oil reserves in the world ahead of Iran’s restrictions on passage through the Strait of Hormuz. In this sense, Venezuela is not peripheral to the wider conflict, but central to it. This does not, however, mean that the Trump administration ever had a clear, coherent rationale for starting this war of aggression against Iran.

The ever-shifting rationale for the war was at first framed in terms of protecting demonstrators in Iran, then became an effort to overthrow the government, and has now dissolved into incoherence, with no consistent justification offered at all. In any case, the war may also carry broader geopolitical implications, insofar as prolonged disruption in Gulf oil exports would place pressure on China, whose energy needs depend heavily on Middle Eastern crude shipments. It is also beginning to generate visible political strains within NATO, as doubts about the direction of the war grow in Europe, with Spain as the clearest example. It has likewise raised concerns among some U.S. allies in the Gulf about the wisdom of continuing to host major U.S. bases.

Taken together, the shifting rationale for the war, the U.S.-Israeli callous disregard for civilian life and infrastructure, its mounting economic costs, and the danger that the conflict could spiral out of control and raise the specter of the possible deployment of nuclear weapons suggest that the decision to wage war on Iran was a profound miscalculation, one harmful not only to Iran and the wider region, but also to the people of the U.S. and the global economy. It also exhibits in stark relief the same colonial ideology that underlies the Trump Corollary. For these reasons, opposition to the war, as well as to the Trump Corollary, is growing both at home and abroad.

[William Camacaro is a Venezuelan-American National Co-Coordinator in the Alliance for Global Justice. He was a co-founder of the Bolivarian Circle of New York “Alberto Lovera” and Senior Analyst for the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA). He has been a long-time activist for social justice in the United States. He has also been a leader in defense of progressive governments and social movements in Latin America. Frederick B. Mills is professor of philosophy and a member of the Philosophy of Liberation Association and the American Philosophical Association. Mills has published articles on philosophy of mind, ethics and public policy, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Mario Bencastro, Enrique Dussel as well as political analysis on contemporary Latin American politics. Courtesy: Orinoco Tribune, an independent news outlet created in 2018 and specially designed to provide relevant progressive information about Venezuela or related to Venezuela.]