U.S. Interventions and Regime Repression in Latin America: The Political Epidemiology of Fatal and Non-Fatal Injuries, 1846–2026

This paper applies a political-epidemiological framework to analyse the long-term human consequences of U.S. interventions in Latin America from 1846 to 2026. Using historical documentation, political analysis, and epidemiological aggregation, the study identifies a cumulative burden exceeding 500,000 estimated fatal and non-fatal victims, including deaths, injuries, and enforced disappearances. The figures are derived from national truth commissions, international human rights bodies, and established historical syntheses. The results show that the majority of casualties occur not during direct military interventions but through post-intervention authoritarian governance, regime repression, and institutionalised violence. Interventions are thus conceptualised not as isolated military events but as regime-transforming processes that restructure state power and generate temporally distributed patterns of harm. The study formalises political epidemiology as a population-health framework and introduces political injury epidemiology as a specialised analytical domain for the study of fatal and non-fatal injuries produced by political power systems. Together, the findings support a unified causal model linking intervention, regime formation, repression, and population-level injury and mortality, reframing foreign intervention as a structural determinant of health.