Call of Duty: Ghosts
The United States of Latin America
FOREWORD
"It was a different time, a different enemy…" — Opening lines of Call of Duty: Ghosts
The Western entertainment industry frequently produces media that relies on the dehumanization of geopolitical adversaries. A specific subgenre has emerged, however, that elevates imagined or emerging geopolitical shifts into existential threats. In Call of Duty: Ghosts (2013), the protagonist battles a united Latin American bloc called the "Federation of the Americas." Viewed from the multipolar reality of 2026, the game functions as a fascinating psychological artifact: an allegory for the deep-seated anxiety the United States experiences regarding Latin American sovereignty, integration, and a potential loss of hemispheric hegemony.
The narrative constructs a scenario that weaponizes demographic anxieties, giving literal shape to domestic fears regarding immigration by visualizing a highly militarized "Liberty Wall" meant to repel an advancing Latin American force. The game's "Federation of the Americas" actually mirrors the real-world United States through its aggressive militarism, expansionism, and deployment of devastating technology. The irony is profound: a narrative that portrays the US as a victimized underdog battling a resource-rich, totalitarian superpower from the Global South. Penned by Hollywood screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, the game reflects a specific mainstream US worldview that capitalizes on fears of hegemonic decline and foreign invasion, mirroring the border wall rhetoric that polarized US political discourse throughout the late 2010s, and utilizing science fiction to validate xenophobic paranoia.
| No Man's Land | The Liberty Wall |
|---|---|
No Man's Land — the demilitarized zone separating what remains of the United States from Federation-occupied territory. A direct analogy to the Korean DMZ.
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The "Liberty Wall" — a semi-destroyed Hollywood sign visible in the background. A literalization of US border anxiety that prefigured Trump's wall rhetoric by three years.
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The premise centers on a united Latin American Federation expanding northward and declaring war on the US for seemingly ambiguous reasons. The historical irony is profound: the region has an extensive history of US-led intervention, repression, and economic warfare — yet the narrative inverts this reality entirely. The game features the Federation hijacking US-made kinetic orbital weapons (mirroring the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative) to devastate the United States, thereby shifting the onus of mass-destructive capability onto the Federation despite the US being the original architect of such space-based platforms.
| Logan Walker | Hesh Walker |
|---|---|
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Logan and Hesh Walker — the game's protagonists, sons of retired Captain Elias Walker, introduced in a quiet pre-war pastoral scene before the Federation's orbital strikes shatter their world. |
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Following the orbital strike, the narrative adheres to a traditional Red Dawn-style insurgency trope. The antagonist faction is headquartered in Caracas, Venezuela, reflecting explicit anti-Chavismo sentiments prevalent during development in 2013. To achieve the necessary dehumanization, Federation soldiers are depicted through culturally reductive tropes: undisciplined (playing cards while on duty), sleazy (abandoning posts to socialize), arrogant (mocking US culture), cowardly (breaking easily during interrogation), and gratuitously cruel toward civilians — sharply contrasted with the stoic, machine-like efficiency of the US "Ghosts."
| Ghost Skull Mask | Elias Walker | Federation Elite | Execution Scene |
|---|---|---|---|
 The iconic Ghosts skull mask — emblem of the US special operations unit. |
 Elias Walker recounts the legend of the Ghosts — framing US operatives as mythic, quasi-messianic defenders from the game's first seconds. |
 A Federation elite trooper — designed to project menace while stripping individual humanity. |
 A Federation soldier about to execute Logan — one of several scenes calibrated to maximize antipathy toward the Latin American bloc. |
An objective analysis of the gameplay reveals a troubling dissonance in the rules of engagement. The US protagonists routinely engage in actions that objectively violate the laws of armed conflict: executing surrendering combatants, shooting enemies point-blank in the face while they beg in Spanish, slashing throats during undercover infiltrations, drowning soldiers beneath ice, hacking combatants with hatchets, and committing mass-casualty attacks on security checkpoints. In one particularly egregious sequence, the player orchestrates a massacre by cutting the lights at a checkpoint, then — disguised as a wounded Federation soldier — fake-limps back through the carnage as surviving troops attempt to comfort the wounded. In a further demonstration of empathy-less behavior, Hesh even caringly speaks in Spanish to a wounded soldier and offers to carry him to a doctor ("venga aquí amigo, enseguida le atiende un médico"), which, he has no authority or knowledge to assume a doctor will come. He has this presumably to blend in, while risking blowing his cover further because of his obvious accent. The mission is rife with moments like these, that serve no purpose other than to show some kind of psychopathic behavior regarding how the Ghosts deal with such situations.
Ultimately, Call of Duty: Ghosts operates as an ideological tool. Released shortly after the death of President Hugo Chávez, at a time when South America was experiencing severe tensions between left-wing integrationists and pro-US factions, the game implicitly encouraged Latin US American youths to reject regional integration and view US military hegemony as an idealized, righteous force.
1. Talk of the Town: Game Reviews
"A man who truly loves his country doesn't just give his own life… he gives his son's."
— Call of Duty: Ghosts Single Player Trailer
Invoking the biblical figure of Abraham and the supreme test of faith represented by his willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac at God's command, this opening line of the Call of Duty: Ghosts single-player trailer establishes the game's unflinching, patriarchal, and zealously nationalist narrative framework from the very outset. The implication is unambiguous: orders are not to be questioned, only followed — a posture of total submission to the military hierarchy and the state that serves it. This particular strain of extremist jingoism and the rigidly vertical command structure that the titular Ghosts embody — echoing, not incidentally, the real-life traditions of the US fundamentalist religious militaristic right for whom this kind of rhetoric carries deep cultural resonance — did not go unnoticed by game reviewers upon the game's release on November 5, 2013.
When conducting a thorough survey of critical responses to Call of Duty: Ghosts, what becomes immediately apparent is that the game's narrative was essentially impossible for reviewers to ignore or set aside as mere background dressing. From mainstream outlets such as GameSpot, IGN, Eurogamer, and Polygon, through to independent critics, political commentators, and academic scholars writing from a range of political and geographical vantage points, a striking and largely unprecedented consensus emerged: the narrative, aesthetics, and ideological message of Ghosts demanded critical attention in a way that eclipsed the game's technical and gameplay achievements. That a first-person military shooter of this commercial scale would generate such an unusual volume of political and cultural criticism — rather than the standard genre-oriented discourse of mechanics, multiplayer balance, and graphical fidelity — is itself a significant datum.
The fact that the game's plot became its most discussed and most uniformly panned element, in a genre where narrative has historically been treated as ornamental, demonstrates the extent to which Ghosts overextended its propagandistic hand. The following survey of reviews is presented not merely as a catalogue of negative opinions but as a body of evidence illustrating how thoroughly the game's jingoistic premise penetrated critical discourse. Even those reviewers who found little to object to on ideological grounds unwittingly reveal, through their very neutrality, the degree to which the game's political assumptions were taken as unremarkable common sense — a naturalisation of ideology that is, in its own way, equally instructive.
(Note: some of the original reviews contained typographical errors, which have been silently corrected in the extracts presented below.)
"In a genre overwrought with antiquated Russian conflicts and ambiguous Middle Eastern terrorist threats, Ghosts takes on a refreshingly unique premise in which the threat comes not from the east, but the south: a federation of oil-rich South American nations rises to take over the hemisphere, pushing north and coming to blows with the U.S."
The IGN review is notable precisely because of its uncritical framing. Scott Lowe describes the substitution of a Latin American antagonist bloc as "refreshingly unique," an assessment that fails to interrogate why the southward geopolitical shift should be read as creative innovation rather than a lateral transposition of the same underlying xenophobic logic onto a different set of racialized targets. The review proceeds on the assumption that novelty of setting is sufficient to justify narrative choices whose ideological premises go entirely unexamined.
"Ghosts is inconsistent elsewhere as well. Its narrative starts strong, with a somewhat new take on an old tale: America attacked and invaded. (…) America has lost control. The country is dying, but a dedicated group of American soldiers and an elite squad known as Ghosts are determined to keep the country alive. The set-up is simple and effective, presenting players with as much motivation as they'd need: Save America."
The Engadget review exemplifies enthusiastic absorption of the game's own ideological premises as legitimate dramatic motivation. "Save America" is presented as a straightforward, unproblematic call to action, with the reviewer accepting the game's inversion of geopolitical reality at face value — a nation whose military expenditure dwarfs every other power on earth rendered as a dying, helpless victim requiring rescue.
"The premise is interesting, albeit faintly ridiculous. (…) Oscar-winner Stephen Gaghan might have had a hand in the script, but it's still the normal mix of sub-Tom Clancy nonsense, and halfway through it seems to drift off target, losing any interest in the personal struggle at the heart of the tale."
The Trusted Reviews piece gestures vaguely at the absurdity of the premise while dismissing its political dimensions under the catch-all of "sub-Tom Clancy nonsense" — conveniently sidestepping the question of why this particular brand of fiction consistently imagines the same set of enemies in the same subordinate geopolitical positions.
"That freedom nonetheless results in one of the sloppiest storylines in Call of Duty history. (…) Ignoring the story, there are a few bright spots throughout the campaign."
The Polygon review's prescription to simply "ignore the story" is itself an ideological gesture — one that naturalises the narrative as inert packaging rather than active political content, implicitly positioning the game's ideological superstructure as separable from the experience of playing it.
"A story, therefore, with familiar touches but which doesn't know how to tell us very well why the South Americans are so bad or why the North Americans so good. In this respect, the chapter is loaded with stereotypes, and supposes that we must accept them."
This Spanish-language review explicitly identifies the game's reliance on unargued stereotypes and its demand that the player simply accept the moral premises on offer without justification. The reviewer also highlights a telling localization failure: in a sequence in which the US characters attempt to pass as Federation soldiers, their Spanish dialogue is delivered with, in the reviewer's words, "an immaculate American accent" — uttering garbled approximations along the lines of "¡nos han ourdenadou de proteger la perimetro!" which the enemy soldiers nonetheless accept without suspicion. This moment of linguistic buffoonery is emblematic of a broader failure of cultural attention to detail.
"It's a good thing, too, because the story is every bit a predictable tribute to American military might. After the collapse of the Middle Eastern oil economy, South America's oil-producing states join together to form an economic and military superpower known as the Federation. Naturally, the Federation decides to hijack a satellite weapon system and turn it against the United States. (…) The whole thing feels like a geopolitical Mad Lib."
GameSpot's characterisation of the game as "a predictable tribute to American military might" and the narrative as "a geopolitical Mad Lib" captures the sense in which the game's political imagination operates through the substitution of interchangeable enemy names into a pre-existing ideological template. The identity of the antagonist is essentially incidental to a narrative architecture that exists to reaffirm the righteousness of US military supremacy.
"Call of Duty: Ghosts' story takes you to a new, near-future era. Modern Warfare's Soap and Price are nowhere to be seen and have been replaced by the young brothers, Logan and Hesh, who are fighting against a fictional superpower called The Federation. Your faceless enemy remains faceless throughout the game, with the story's only antagonist being an uninspired Federation lackey. As a result of the enemy organization's ambiguity, you never really know the motivations behind it hijacking a weaponized space station and bombing the bejeezus out of the United States, so why care? The plot plays out so by-the-numbers that you know what to expect before it even happens, making every dramatic moment less impactful, every clichéd plot twist falls flat, and every line of military jargon that much more cheesy."
Veloria's observation that "your faceless enemy remains faceless throughout the game" takes on additional resonance when read against the cultural politics of the work. An enemy without a face is an enemy without a legitimate grievance, without a history, without a political subjectivity that might complicate the binary moral universe the game requires. The "facelessness" of the Federation is, from this perspective, a structural necessity of the game's propagandistic ambitions.
"In fact it's not very interested in plot at all, with a thinly told story about South America forming an evil world-dominating 'Federation' (…) Infinity Ward try to temper the faintly racist overtones of the story (why the whole of South America should suddenly become genocidal maniacs doesn't come close to being addressed) by making the main bad guy an ex-Ghost who has been turned evil by ancient Aztec medicines (really). It's all preposterous nonsense of course (…)"
Jenkins' review is among the more candid in directly identifying "faintly racist overtones." The detail of the "ancient Aztec medicines" as the mechanism by which the main villain is corrupted represents a particularly crude deployment of primitivist mythology, invoking the trope of the pre-modern indigenous world as a source of moral contamination. That this narrative device is meant to function as a humanising corrective paradoxically compounds the Orientalist logic it ostensibly attempts to soften.
"To make a long and stupid story short, the ghosts are meant to be the most elite, stealthy, and deadly force in the world. (…) the game's story is terrible. It is implausible, poorly-explained, features several utterly predictable and completely cringe-worthy twists, and ends in the absolute worst possible way, leaving plenty unresolved and setting up the apparently inevitable sequel."
"Oh yes — there's a campaign. And it's sillier than anything produced in this series up until now. (…) CoD: Ghosts tells the story of Logan and Hesh, two jarheads who find themselves part of the last stand of the USA against invaders from the South American Federation after the SAF nukes the US from orbit. (…) Leaving aside the jingoism that's been a staple in the CoD franchise for ages, the campaign flags for the first few missions."
The Guardian's aside — "leaving aside the jingoism that's been a staple in the CoD franchise for ages" — is a remarkable gesture of critical normalisation. To bracket the jingoism as a known, unremarkable constant is to implicitly accept it as genre convention, a background feature so familiar as to require no sustained examination.
"With a story ripped not from the headlines but seemingly from a strategy guide for the Parker Brothers board game Risk — control of a unified South America is the best possible starting point for global military domination — Call of Duty: Ghosts is the silliest entry in an increasingly silly series (…) If you must know — and to be honest, to enjoy the game's fast and fluid action, you don't have to pay attention to why anything is happening — Ghosts begins in the suburbs of San Diego, just before an attack on the United States by 'the Federation,' a villainous alliance of South American countries."
The comparison to Risk is illuminating in a way its author may not have fully intended: Risk is precisely a game of abstract territorial domination in which the political identities of the territories are irrelevant to the mechanics of conquest. To read Ghosts in these terms is to abstract the game's political content into pure structural procedure — to treat "South America" as a game-board territory rather than a representation of actual peoples, nations, and histories.
"South America bands together to create one nation state called The Federation. Why? No one really knows. (…) Then The Federation attacks America. Why? No idea! Ghosts just sort of makes all of South America evil for no good reason. (…) they never address how The Federation manages to push through Mexico, unless Mexico is also part of this randomly evil Hispanic alliance. Sounds a little racist doesn't it?"
Dargenio's review is particularly pointed in observing that Mexico's territorial incorporation into the Federation's campaign goes entirely unaddressed. In the game's political imagination, the distinction between Central American and South American nations is irrelevant; the relevant category is simply "Hispanic" — an undifferentiated mass of cultural and racial otherness moving northward. Notably, this also reflects a linguistic erasure: in the game, even Federation soldiers call their enemies gringos or americanos — using the very term that Latin Americans themselves use for things that are genuinely "American" in the pan-continental sense. The developers appear entirely unaware of this irony, leaving intact a form of self-indictment in their own dialogue.
"'Call of Duty: Ghosts,' the newest version of the highly popular military first person-shooter series, is out this week — and arguably has one of the most right-wing premises in video game history. The background to 'Ghosts' reads like a novel from the minds of domestic oil drilling supporters mixed in with some neo-conservative foreign policy, with a few sprinklings of pro-border security sentiment thrown in for good measure. (…) Despite the U.S.'s best efforts to keep those south of the border at bay by building an enormous wall across the border (sounds like comprehensive immigration reform was a bust in this reality), The Federation manages to hijack an American space weapon and obliterate a handful of major U.S. cities, launching their invasion in the process."
Perhaps the most significant of all the reviews collected here — precisely because of its source — is the Fox News piece. That a publication which serves as a primary ideological instrument of the US right-wing media apparatus should find the game's premise "arguably one of the most right-wing in video game history" is a datum that deserves to be underlined in the strongest possible terms. Fox News identifies the game's narrative as a constellation of neo-conservative foreign policy assumptions, domestic oil lobbying interests, and border security ideology — not as neutral entertainment but as a recognisable articulation of a specific political agenda.
"In one of the game's only surprises, this Federation is composed not of scheming Russians, imperial Chinese or demented Arabs, but of vengeful South American countries which turn a global energy crisis into the touchpaper for their own worldwide revolution. There are many things wrong with the scenario, not least of which is that it's yet another shooter that paints the US as a victimized underdog, caught unawares by evil Third World forces, rather than an 800lb gorilla with a nuclear payload. Unlike Black Ops 2, which at least used its drone warfare storyline to question the wisdom of such weaponry in its own comic-book fashion, Ghosts never once suggests that giant city-crushing space spears are a bad idea — at least until those dastardly Hispanic hordes get their hands on them."
The Eurogamer review by Dan Whitehead is among the most analytically rigorous in the mainstream corpus. His description of the US as "an 800lb gorilla with a nuclear payload" rather than a genuine underdog is precisely the kind of structural observation that the game's ideological mechanics depend on suppressing. The phrase "dastardly Hispanic hordes," deployed with evident sarcasm, crystallises the racial logic underlying the Federation's narrative function.
"The unbridled jingoism. An insistence of the game's story that no matter what horrors the protagonists visit upon the not-white not-Americans, they are undoubtedly The Good Guys. It's old; it's disgusting; and by however many titles into this series we are now, it's just plain dull."
David Byrnes' concise formulation — "the not-white not-Americans" — identifies the racial and national logic of the game's moral framework with analytical precision. The Good Guys are white and US American; the Bad Guys are defined negatively, as the negation of those identities. Byrnes registers the ideological fatigue that sets in when this structure has been deployed across enough instalments to become tediously predictable.
"(…) those fears of the Hispanic invasion, those cruel, exotic lands south of the border and the nightmare possibility that all those smaller countries could one day unify and resist exploitation aren't just inbuilt in COD: Ghosts. Those fears are inbuilt in US policy, economic interests and arguably Anglo-Saxon culture in general. This one game isn't the problem — the real issue is the ideological framework that makes fantasies like COD's story appealing."
The Venezuelanalysis piece correctly situates the game not as an aberrant product but as one expression of a deep and historically continuous fear embedded in United States foreign policy — the fear of a unified, resource-rich, and politically resistant Latin America. His observation that the game's premise reflects anxieties already present in US policy and economic doctrine transforms the analysis from cultural criticism into geopolitical diagnosis. The game is, in this reading, not merely entertainment but symptom.
"I feel that Call of Duty: Ghosts is hateful, that it is potentially damaging to young people's outlook of the world, and is effectively a propaganda tool that glorifies war and slaughter based on nationality and ethnic race. I refuse to cover this game because it depicts a whole nation of people in a cruel and cynical manner that's both discriminatory, and also damaging to young gamers' views of other nations. With South America acting as a leading light on the world stage for representational democracy and an active, engaged political youth, I cannot countenance a game that characterizes those countries as vengeful, imperialistic and expansionist, and a threat to the USA."
Welsh's decision to publish a non-review — an explicit account of his refusal to engage with the game on its own terms — is itself a significant critical gesture. His framing of the game as "a propaganda tool that glorifies war and slaughter based on nationality and ethnic race" is the most direct political indictment in the survey, arrived at by a reviewer working within the mainstream independent gaming press rather than from a position of political advocacy.
"Call of Duty: Ghosts is a game about a great shift of superpowers, from the United States to South America, as if the political poles of the earth were turned upside down. (…) The people of Caracas and The Federation sounded pretty happy and innocent in the streets below, so I wasn't sure how I felt about me and my badass bros wreaking havoc on their city. I thought about my titular squad of Ghosts, elusive and deadly, known for their fanaticism and willingness to die in the name of the cause. We were like a cult, and, while in Caracas, essentially terrorists. (…) Ghosts takes a Call of Duty player, creates a fiction around him where America is put in the position of many of the countries we fight today (weaker than us, defeated from the sky), and allows him to become what we fear."
Emanuel Maiberg's Kill Screen review deserves extended attention as the most philosophically developed piece in the corpus. His account of the mission set in Caracas — in which the player's elite squad descends upon a civilian city whose inhabitants are described as "pretty happy and innocent in the streets below" — produces an almost involuntary critical reversal: in attempting to inhabit the game's subject position, the reviewer finds himself experiencing the moral dissonance of committing precisely the kind of asymmetric urban violence that the US military has historically inflicted upon the cities of sovereign nations. The description of the Ghost squad as operating "like a cult" and "essentially terrorists" is not hyperbolic but descriptively accurate.
"But Ghosts doesn't contain even basic textual complexity or attempt to say anything with its material. It's dead on the screen — or it was, until this campaign season. In the era of Trump, these dog-whistles sound like a foghorn. Revisiting the mission, it sickened me to fire at Latin American troops coming through the wall. (…) What three years ago I dismissed as a tasteless, inept jab at relevance I now interpret through the lens of chanting crowds and banners that call for a real wall."
Robert Rath's 2016 retrospective illustrates the danger of retrospective sanitisation — the critical tendency to dismiss a work's political content as "self-parody" at the moment of release, only to recognise its structural seriousness when the political environment catches up to the fiction. The phrase "these dog-whistles sound like a foghorn" is particularly apt. Rath's observation that Activision "managed to predict the future" with its "most vapid, unambitious, and lowbrow entry" implies that the proximity of the game's political imagination to the eventual reality of Trumpian xenophobia is no coincidence of creative prescience but rather an index of how deeply these fantasies were already embedded in the political unconscious of the US mainstream.
"In what can only be loosely described as a story, the Arabian Peninsula gets devastated by war. This gives South America a monopoly on the world's oil supply. Rather than buying skyscrapers and soccer stadiums like normal wealthy countries, the entire continent decides to unite and declare war against the USA. (…) Fox News was calling this game out for its extreme ideology, and Fox News will devote hours of a broadcast to pretending to love statues in order to defend historical racists. Call of Duty: Ghosts was more right-wing than THAT."
The Cracked.com analysis makes an observation of genuine analytical weight: that Fox News found the game's premise too explicit in its right-wing politics to endorse without qualification is a measure of just how far beyond the outer limit of mainstream conservative comfort Ghosts had ventured.
These critical assessments, taken in aggregate, demonstrate that the ideological manipulation operative in the game was far from subliminal: it was highly visible, broadly legible, and widely remarked upon by observers across the entire range of critical discourse. That observers working for major US outlets so consistently identified the game's narrative as politically objectionable or racially troubling reflects the near-universal legibility of the game's propagandistic structure.
The narrative of Ghosts relies at its core on an inversion of reality with deep roots in US political mythology: the global hegemon is depicted as a victim; the historically subjugated and exploited region is depicted as an aggressive, expansionist power wielding precisely the overwhelming military force that has historically been the exclusive instrument of the United States and its allies.
It is worth reproducing the game's own promotional framing:
"This new chapter in the Call of Duty® franchise features a fresh dynamic where players are on the side of a crippled nation fighting not for freedom, or liberty, but simply to survive."
The language of bare survival — stripped of the ideological content ("freedom," "liberty") that has historically justified US military adventurism — attempts to universalise the player's identification with the protagonist and insulate the game's premise from ideological scrutiny. The irony is that stripping the justificatory rhetoric does not remove the ideology: it merely makes the underlying fantasy of victimhood and vengeance more nakedly visible.
The broader generic tradition to which Ghosts belongs includes films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and Red Dawn (1984), alongside video games including Freedom Fighters, World in Conflict, Tom Clancy's EndWar, Homefront, and Turning Point: Fall of Liberty. What distinguishes Ghosts from its predecessors is the specificity of its antagonist choice. The substitution of Latin America for the customary Russian or Islamist enemy reflects anxieties specific to the Western hemisphere — anxieties bound up with the Monroe Doctrine, with the fear of resource nationalism, with the spectre of continental integration as political resistance to US economic dominance, and, in the most visceral register, with the long history of US phobias about demographic change.
2. A History of Oppression: Chronology of US Interventionism in Latin America
"Making it much more interesting is you also have the whole colonial history of America's operations down there, and we did stuff that wasn't cool. You can imagine a vendetta-like mentality as well. That's the thinking we had behind the Federation."
— Stephen Gaghan, Call of Duty: Ghosts writer
Stephen Gaghan's candid admission is remarkable for the degree to which it inadvertently undermines the game's own narrative logic. The writer acknowledges, in passing, that the United States conducted itself in Latin America in ways that were, in his understated phrasing, "not cool" — and that a plausible "vendetta-like mentality" might follow from that history. He then uses this acknowledgment not as a foundation for genuine political engagement within the game's fiction, but as a conceptual backstory to be gestured at and then set aside, leaving the Federation's aggression to function within the narrative as essentially irrational and unjustified.
To fully appreciate the historical revisionism at the core of Call of Duty: Ghosts, it is necessary to examine the objective record of United States foreign policy in Latin America. The game presents a scenario in which a unified Latin American superpower launches an unprovoked assault on the United States — without once acknowledging the century and a half of documented military interventions, coups, occupations, economic embargoes, and covert operations through which the United States has repeatedly subverted the political life of the region. This is not merely a narrative omission. It is a structural condition of the game's ideological coherence: the Federation's aggression can only read as irrational and villainous if the historical context that might render it comprehensible is kept entirely out of view.
| Che Guevara — UN, 1964 | Fidel Castro | Hugo Chávez — UN | José "Pepe" Mujica — UN |
|---|---|---|---|
 Ernesto "Che" Guevara — among the most articulate Cold War advocates for Latin American integration and resistance to US hemispheric dominance. |
 Fidel Castro — the Cuban Revolution produced the most enduring example of sustained resistance to US hegemony in the Western hemisphere. |
 Hugo Chávez — the most prominent architect of Bolivarian multipolarity, whose death in March 2013 preceded the game's November release by eight months. The Chavista project of continental integration is the closest real-world analogue to the game's Federation. |
 José "Pepe" Mujica — among the Latin American leaders of the Pink Tide who spoke publicly against US interventionism and in favour of deepened regional integration. |
The United States, operating under the expansionist doctrine of Manifest Destiny, initiates war with Mexico and concludes it with the annexation of approximately one third of Mexico's total territory — a transfer of land comprising the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming.
1850, 1853, 1854, 1857Successive US military interventions in Nicaragua, establishing a pattern of coercive involvement in Central American affairs that would persist for the better part of a century.
1855Tennessee adventurer William Walker and a force of hired mercenaries seize control of Nicaragua, institute forced labour, and legalise slavery. The New York Daily News receives the enterprise enthusiastically: "Los yankis… have burst their way like a fertilizing torrent through the barriers of barbarism." Walker himself offers a complementary formulation: "The enemies of American civilization — for such are the enemies of slavery — seem to be more on the alert than its friends." He is ousted two years later not by any principled international opposition but by a Central American coalition acting largely at the instigation of Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose regional trade Walker had been infringing.
1856The first of five US military interventions in Panama, undertaken to protect the Atlantic-Pacific railroad from Panamanian nationalist resistance.
1898The United States declares war on Spain, citing the destruction of the USS Maine as a casus belli. A US Navy commission would conclude in 1976 that the explosion was in all probability an accident. The war enables the US to occupy Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.
1903The Platt Amendment is inserted into the Cuban constitution, granting the United States a formal legal right to intervene in Cuban affairs at its own discretion. In the same year, after negotiations with Colombia over Canal territory break down, the US deploys ten warships in support of a Panamanian rebellion. Panama's constitution is subsequently written by the Frenchman Philippe Bunau-Varilla.
1904The US sends customs agents to assume control of the Dominican Republic's finances, formally guaranteeing payment of the country's external debt to international creditors — establishing a model of financial protectionism that would be replicated across the region.
1905 – 1912US Marines assist Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz in suppressing a labour strike in Sonora. US troops land in Honduras for the first of five separate deployments. Marines occupy Cuba for two years. Nicaragua is occupied to prop up the Díaz regime; the election called to resolve the crisis produces 4,000 eligible voters and a single candidate. US troops and advisors remain in Nicaragua until 1925.
1914The US bombs and then occupies Vera Cruz in a dispute with Mexico's government. President Victoriano Huerta resigns under the pressure of the intervention.
1915US Marines occupy Haiti, establishing a protectorate that will last until 1934. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, briefed on the Haitian situation, responds: "Think of it — niggers speaking French!"
1916Marines occupy the Dominican Republic, remaining until 1924. Pancho Villa raids Columbus, New Mexico — the sole instance of Latin American armed aggression against US territory in the modern period.
1921President Coolidge strongly suggests the overthrow of Guatemalan President Carlos Herrera, in the interests of the United Fruit Company. The Guatemalans comply.
1929Undersecretary of State Robert Olds articulates the underlying doctrine with unusual candour: "There is no room for any outside influence other than ours in this region. We could not tolerate such a thing without incurring grave risks… Until now Central America has always understood that governments which we recognize and support stay in power, while those which we do not recognize and support fall."
1930Rafael Leonidas Trujillo emerges from the US-trained National Guard to become dictator of the Dominican Republic — one of the more direct instances of the relationship between US military training programs and the subsequent entrenchment of authoritarian governance in the region.
1946The US Army School of the Americas opens in Panama as a hemisphere-wide military academy. Its organising principle — the doctrine of National Security, which identifies internal subversion rather than external invasion as the primary threat to state stability — will serve as the ideological foundation for dictatorships in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and across Central America in the following decades.
1954The CIA organises and executes the overthrow of democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán following his land reform program. The agency broadcasts fabricated accounts of an advancing rebel army and provides aircraft to strafe the capital. The US-installed successor abolishes political parties, restricts the franchise, and establishes the death penalty for strikers. Over 100,000 Guatemalans are killed in the three decades of military rule that follow. Richard Nixon subsequently declares: "This is the first instance in history where a Communist government has been replaced by a free one."
1961The Bay of Pigs invasion. The CIA organises and deploys a force of approximately 1,400 anti-Castro Cuban exiles to Bahía de Cochinos; Castro's forces repel the landing.
1965A coup in the Dominican Republic attempts to restore Juan Bosch to power. The US invades and occupies the country to suppress what it characterises as a "Communist rebellion," with the military cooperation of the dictators of Brazil, Paraguay, Honduras, and Nicaragua.
1967CIA agent Félix Rodríguez, embedded with Bolivian military forces, locates, captures, and orders the execution of Ernesto "Che" Guevara.
1970 – 1973Salvador Allende Gossens is elected in Chile, suspends foreign loans, and nationalises foreign companies. A US-supported military coup kills Allende in 1973 and installs Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, who imprisons well over one hundred thousand Chileans — torture and rape being the routine methods of interrogation. In the same year, a US-supported military regime assumes power in Uruguay; the subsequent repression produces what is reported to be the world's highest proportion of the population imprisoned for political reasons.
1980 – 1989The Reagan administration massively escalates US support for El Salvador's right-wing junta and its associated death squads. The CIA simultaneously organises the Nicaraguan Contras. The CIA mines three Nicaraguan harbours; the World Court issues an $18 billion judgment against the United States, which the US declines to recognise. In 1989, the US invades Panama to depose CIA asset Manuel Noriega — marking the transition of the US's preferred justificatory framework from anti-communism to counter-narcotics.
1999Venezuela elects a constitutional assembly initiating a significant restructuring of the country's political architecture under Hugo Chávez. Panama assumes sole operational control of the Panama Canal under the terms of the 1979 treaty — a development Ronald Reagan had described as Uncle Sam putting his "tail between his legs."
2002A US-supported coup attempt briefly removes Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez from power for 47 hours before he is restored by a combination of loyalist military units and mass popular mobilisation.
2003 – 2015: The Pink TideThe "Pink Tide" consolidates across Latin America, with a succession of left-wing governments coming to power in a wave without modern precedent. The period sees the creation of Telesur (2005), ALBA (2006), UNASUR (2008), the Bank of the South (2009), and CELAC (2010). These institutions represented the most serious attempt at genuine Latin American political and economic integration in the post-colonial era. It is these real-world institutions of integration and nascent sovereignty that Call of Duty: Ghosts fictionally transforms into the founding premise of its villainy: the game was released in November 2013, at the precise height of the Pink Tide's institutional ambitions.
| CELAC Summit, Cuba (2014) | UNASUR HQ, Quito | UNASUR Inauguration | Bank of the South |
|---|---|---|---|
 CELAC Summit, Cuba, 2014 — a genuine assertion of Latin American political autonomy that CoD: Ghosts fictionally refracted into the premise of continental military aggression. |
 UNASUR headquarters, Quito, Ecuador — the institutional architecture of the real-world integration the game renders as menacing fantasy. |
 UNASUR inauguration — a moment of genuine regional sovereignty that Western media largely ignored, transmuted by CoD: Ghosts into the founding myth of its villain state. |
 Bank of the South — founded 2009, its motto reads "sovereignty and integration." The institution embodied the push for Latin American financial independence that the game's narrative fictionally criminalises. |
The Pink Tide enters a period of significant retrenchment. The parliamentary impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 — widely characterised by left-wing observers as a constitutional coup — is followed by right-wing governments returning to power across the continent in rapid succession: Macri in Argentina (2015), Moreno in Ecuador (2017), Bolsonaro in Brazil (2018), the loss of Uruguay's Broad Front (2019), and a political coup dislodging Evo Morales in Bolivia (2019). UNASUR is progressively hollowed out as member states withdraw.
2019: PROSURAs right-wing governments withdrew from UNASUR, the institutional vacuum was filled by PROSUR — the Forum for the Progress and Development of South America — established in Santiago in March 2019. Explicitly conceived as a counter-institution ideologically compatible with Washington, PROSUR illustrates with particular clarity that Latin American integration is a fiercely contested terrain, and that the United States has consistently preferred those integration projects that exclude the possibility of collective resistance to its own hemispheric influence.
2019 – 2022: Second Pink TideThe period also sees a partial reinvention of Latin American left-wing politics: AMLO in Mexico (2018), Fernández in Argentina (2019), Arce restoring Bolivian socialism (2020), Castillo in Peru (2021), Boric in Chile (2022), and — most significantly in regional political weight — Lula da Silva narrowly defeating Bolsonaro in Brazil's October 2022 election. In the same year, Gustavo Petro becomes Colombia's first left-wing president.
2024Venezuela holds presidential elections in July. The incumbent Nicolás Maduro claims victory in a contest that international monitors describe as neither free nor fair. Precinct-level vote tallies covering more than 80 per cent of ballots cast indicate that opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia won the election with approximately 67 per cent of the vote. The Maduro government refuses to release the full electoral records. The result triggers mass protests and an international crisis of legitimacy; Maduro's government responds with a campaign of repression. Maduro begins his third term on January 10, 2025, recognised by a dwindling number of governments.
2025The Trump administration, returning to office in January 2025, immediately revives a "maximum pressure" campaign against Venezuela and Cuba. Venezuela is formally accused of operating as a narco-state and both the Cartel de los Soles and the Tren de Aragua criminal gang are designated as foreign terrorist organisations. Sanctions are substantially tightened. In August 2025, Trump signs a secret directive authorising the Pentagon to use military force against select Latin American drug cartels, extending the legal architecture for potential direct intervention in the region.
January 3, 2026In the early morning hours of January 3, 2026, more than 200 US Special Operations Forces surge through Caracas in an operation codenamed Operation Absolute Resolve. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, are captured and transported to New York, where Maduro is arraigned on charges of narco-terrorism. Trump announces: "We are reasserting American power." Approximately 75 people are killed in the operation, including, according to the Cuban government, 32 Cuban military and security personnel who had been serving as Maduro's personal protective detail. Havana declares two days of national mourning. The operation — the largest US military incursion into Latin America since the 1989 invasion of Panama — is widely described by international legal scholars as a violation of Venezuelan sovereignty.
Early 2026: Cuba's CollapseThe capture of Maduro and the subsequent political vacuum in Venezuela have immediate and severe consequences for Cuba, whose energy infrastructure had depended on Venezuelan oil deliveries — running at approximately 35,000 barrels per day — for a substantial portion of its fuel supply. Those deliveries cease entirely. The United States simultaneously escalates its oil blockade of Cuba, intercepting tankers and intensifying pressure on third-party suppliers. On March 16, 2026, Cuba's electrical grid collapses entirely, leaving approximately 11 million people in darkness. According to UN reports, approximately one million Cubans lack reliable access to drinking water because delivery trucks cannot obtain sufficient diesel to operate. Whether the Cuban government will survive the combination of economic strangulation and the loss of its Venezuelan patron is, at the time of this writing in mid-2026, genuinely uncertain.
The events of 2025 and 2026 lend the historical chronology above a quality of ironic completion. The scenario that Call of Duty: Ghosts imagined in 2013 — a United States weakened, confronted by a powerful and unified Latin America wielding energy leverage — bears no resemblance to the actual trajectory of hemispheric relations in the years that followed. What has in fact occurred is a continuation of the pattern the chronology documents: the United States conducting a military operation to remove and detain a sitting head of government in a sovereign Latin American nation, leveraging energy strangulation to bring a second Latin American government to its knees. The fantasy of Latin American military aggression against the United States is structurally available as a narrative premise precisely because its inversion — US military aggression against Latin America — is so thoroughly normalised as to require no dramatic justification at all.
The game does gesture, at a single point, toward the historical reality that Gaghan acknowledges in interview. Gabriel T. Rorke delivers the following address:
"I am Gabriel Rorke. I have been trained by your Government to be a weapon. Trained to kill and destroy. All in the name of Liberty and Justice. Even surrender my very life in service to your country. But I am not one of you. The 'Just' have turned their backs and become deaf to your cries. Who, then, will show them justice? Who will show you the Liberty they have promised? The weapon they have created will be their undoing. But do not fear this. Do not fear me. It is only natural. Like the collapse of Rome, your cities will crumble and there will be great sorrow. But from the ashes of this diseased metropolis, a rebirth will occur."
Rorke's speech is, in isolation, the game's most politically coherent moment — an articulation of the anti-imperialist critique that the history documented above makes available. The problem is structural: the game deploys this critique only to immediately discredit it. Rorke is framed as a brainwashed antagonist, his ideological position rendered suspect by the circumstances of its formation. According to a short story published for Amazon Kindle titled Devil's Breath — subsequently withdrawn from sale with no surviving copies — Rorke had been subjected to advanced CIA-derived torture techniques perfected by the Federation. The implication is that his critique of the United States is the product of psychological coercion rather than rational analysis. His elimination is thus coded as therapeutic as much as tactical.
The anxiety about imperial decline that Rorke's speech articulates — the suggestion that the United States, like Rome, Greece, Persia, and Spain before it, is subject to the ordinary historical laws of rise and fall — finds a notable literary parallel in Joseph Heller's Catch-22:
Old man: You see, Italy is a very poor, weak country and that is what makes us so strong, strong enough to survive this war and still be in existence, long after your country has been destroyed.
Capt. Nately: What are you talking about? America is not going to be destroyed.
Old man: Never?
Capt. Nately: Well…
Old man: Rome was destroyed. Greece was destroyed. Persia was destroyed. Spain was destroyed. All great countries are destroyed. Why not yours? How much longer do you think your country will last? Forever?
Capt. Nately: Well, forever is a long time.
Old man: Very long.
Heller's exchange, written in 1961, presents the historical argument for imperial impermanence as the provocation of a morally ambiguous old man in a context designed to resist easy resolution. Call of Duty: Ghosts, produced more than half a century later, encounters the same argument — in Rorke's mouth — and resolves it with a headshot. Where Heller allows the uncomfortable question to stand unanswered, the game's narrative demands that it be extinguished along with the character who poses it.
3. THE FEDERATION OF THE AMERICAS: AN ANALYSIS
3.1. An American War
| World Factions Map |
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Map of the world in Call of Duty: Ghosts. The green zone is the energy disaster area in the Middle East, whose collapse drives the rise of the Federation. Note the distinction between "United States of America" and "Federation of the Americas" — in Spanish, América includes the entire continent, and Latin American organizations like ALBA refer to it officially as "América," never "Américas."
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| Americas Map |
Map of the American continent in Call of Duty: Ghosts. By the time the first mission properly starts, the Federation formally encompasses all of South America plus the southern part of Central America and Cuba, and has begun to expand through the southern United States, penetrating through California, Arizona, and New Mexico.
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Analyzing the Federation requires addressing the semantic hegemony embedded in the game's dialogue. The conflict depicted is an inter-American war — between North and South. However, the game consistently has US protagonists refer to the enemy simply as "Feds." This is presented as a reflection of real-world linguistic imperialism, wherein the US exclusively appropriates the term "America." This linguistic choice actively strips the Federation of its "American" identity, reinforcing the geopolitical reality where the United States monopolizes the term. The Royal Spanish Academy (R.A.E.) explicitly dictates that the term americano applies to all inhabitants of the continent, advising against its exclusive application to US citizens.
The irony is deepened by the game's own dialogue. Federation soldiers call their US enemies americanos — the very same word that Latin Americans themselves use for things continental or self-referential. Música americana, fútbol americano, el sueño americano: all of these phrases in everyday Latin American usage refer either to the continent as a whole or — in a telling internalisation of US cultural dominance — specifically to the United States. The game unwittingly captures this real linguistic tension: even the Latin American soldiers, in the game's fiction, have absorbed the convention that americanos means US citizens. The Unitedstatian monopoly on "America" goes unmarked within the game's own fictional universe, naturalized even among its supposed antagonists.
By utilizing the dismissive moniker "Feds," the developers bypass the uncomfortable reality of fighting fellow Americans. Ironically, the United States is itself a federation, yet the narrative ensures that if Latin America were to integrate, they would be relegated to "Federationists," ensuring the US remains the sole, undisputed "America."
Another recurring theme in the game is the inversion of power, from North to South. Organizations promoting Latin American integration often use mottos such as "Nuestro Norte es el Sur" (Our North is the South — Mercosur/TeleSur). Poets like the Uruguayan Mario Benedetti and the Cuban José Martí popularized notions of this inversion. One of the most famous Uruguayan painters, Joaquín Torres García, visualized this paradigm shift with his famous 1943 drawing, "América Invertida."
| Joaquín Torres García — América Invertida, 1943 | Mercosur Summit — "Nuestro Norte es el Sur" |
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América Invertida, 1943. Tinta sobre papel, 22×16 cm. Fundación Joaquín Torres García, Montevideo. The concept of an inverted America, held dear in Latin America as an expression of justice and aspiration, is twisted by Call of Duty: Ghosts into a genocidal totalitarian nightmare.
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Mercosur summit, with the "Our North is the South" motto prominently displayed. From left to right: Evo Morales, Nicanor Duarte, Hugo Chávez, Néstor Kirchner, Lula da Silva and Tabaré Vásquez.
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3.2. Historical Roots of the Federation
| General Diego Almagro (in-game) | Simón Bolívar | Che Guevara | Hugo Chávez |
|---|---|---|---|
 General Diego Almagro — depicted as a xenophobic military dictator, in a direct inversion of the Bolivarian legacy he visually echoes. |
 Simón Bolívar — El Libertador, the first to attempt continental unity in real life. Almagro is aesthetically based on both Bolívar and Chávez. |
 Ernesto "Che" Guevara — the enduring symbol of pan-American revolutionary solidarity. |
 Hugo Chávez — the architect of Bolivarian multipolarity whose passing in early 2013 gave the game's release its most pointed political context. |
Caudillos and Caciques
| Artigas en la Ciudadela | Simón Bolívar | Hugo Chávez | Fidel Castro |
|---|---|---|---|
 Juan Manuel Blanes — Artigas en la Ciudadela. José Gervasio Artigas, founder and national hero of Uruguay, inspired by the US constitution yet an early forerunner of Latin American sovereignty. |
 Simón Bolívar — personal hero of Hugo Chávez and undeniable hero of Latin America, whose portrait features in UNASUR and CELAC summits. |
 Hugo Chávez — caudillo portrait. |
 Fidel Castro — caudillo portrait. |
| Evita Perón | Juan Perón | Che Guevara mural (Havana) | Evita mural (Buenos Aires) |
|---|---|---|---|
 Evita Perón — official state portrait. |
 Juan Perón — caudillo portrait. |
 Che Guevara mural — Havana, Cuba. |
 Evita Perón mural — Buenos Aires, Argentina. |
| Che (Official, Argentina) | Evita (Official, Argentina) | Perón (Official, Argentina) | Chávez (Official, Argentina) | Kirchner (Official, Argentina) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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Gallery of Latin American patriots — official portraits, Argentina. |
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The official Call of Duty: Ghosts promotional materials describe the antagonist bloc as follows:
"The resource-rich promise of South America has been fulfilled under the Federation. Fully consolidated energy production combined with a rich factory infrastructure arising from First World outsourcing… That said, the aggressive government and constant military spending make this region a dictatorship, not a democracy. The average, compliant citizen enjoys a wealth of resources that most inhabitants of the former first world would envy."
This description operates as direct psychological projection. The adjectives used to condemn the Federation — an "aggressive government" with "constant military spending" — are objectively the defining characteristics of modern US foreign and fiscal policy. By attributing these traits to a sovereign Latin American bloc, the narrative inverts reality, casting the region's hypothetical economic independence as inherent totalitarianism.
3.3. Political Structure, Culture, Language and Ideological Inversion
| Rorke File 06 — Federation Rise to Power | Federation State Emblem |
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Rorke File number 6 — "Federation Rise to Power." The only time we see the Federation's leader is in this file, showing a man in a huge Big Brother-like poster at a 1984-esque political rally in Caracas. The man has a toothbrush "Hitler" moustache — a deliberate design choice to code the Federation as fascist.
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State emblem of the Federation — the diamond badge with twelve stars, mirroring the flag's EU-derived geometry.
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The Federation's flag mirrors the structural design of the European Union. It utilizes red and black — colors historically associated with anarcho-syndicalism and anti-imperialist movements such as Nicaragua's FSLN and Cuba's 26 de Julio movement — and features twelve stars corresponding to the twelve sovereign nations of South America. This aesthetic framing is designed to make Latin American integration appear inherently totalitarian to a US American audience.
| Federation Flag | European Union Flag |
|---|---|
Flag of the Federation of the Americas — twelve stars, red and black, an unmistakable inversion of the EU flag.
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Flag of the European Union — the structural template the Federation flag directly mirrors.
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| FSLN Flag | FSLN (Sandino variant) | FAR (Cuba) Emblem | 26 de Julio / Fidel Castro |
|---|---|---|---|
Flag of the FSLN (Nicaragua) — the red-and-black foundational anti-imperialist palette the Federation inherits.
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FSLN flag variant bearing the silhouette of Augusto César Sandino. Inscription: "Patria Libre o Morir."
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Emblem of FAR (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias) — the Cuban Army, which inherited the colors of the 26 de Julio movement.
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Fidel Castro depicted as part of the Movimiento 26 de Julio. The red-and-black palette was subsequently adopted by FAR, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias — the official Cuban Army.
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Venezuelan Heraldry and the Term "Federation"
The word "Federation" carries deep Venezuelan constitutional resonance — it has been included in Venezuela's coat of arms since 1863 and remains in use today, making the game's naming historically and geopolitically pointed.
| Venezuela Flag (1905–1930) | Venezuela Flag (2006 redesign) |
|---|---|
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The 2006 redesign — adding an eighth star and reorienting the horse to face left, symbolizing forward motion.
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| CoA 1905–1930 (Dios y Federación) | CoA 1905–1930 (EE.UU. de Venezuela) | CoA 1954–2006 | CoA 2006–present |
|---|---|---|---|
Motto: "Dios y Federación" (God and Federation).
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Bearing "Estados Unidos de Venezuela" (EE.UU.) — Venezuela is one of the few American nations to have formally used "United States," alongside Brazil, Colombia, and the USA.
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1954–2006 coat of arms — motto: "Independence and Federation."
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2006–present Bolivarian redesign — "Bolivarian Republic" replaces the previous simple "Republic."
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Real-World Unity Flags
There have been genuine attempts to grant Latin America a unified flag. The APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana) proposed a design that was eventually used at UNASUR's inauguration ceremony, and which the Federation's own flag clearly echoes.
| APRA Flag | South American Unity Proposal | Alternate Unity Flag | García → Bachelet ceremony |
|---|---|---|---|
APRA flag — red field with the full American continent outlined in yellow.
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South America-only variant — presented to Chilean President Bachelet at the UNASUR inauguration.
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An alternate version of the proposed South American flag.
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Alan García presenting the flag to Michelle Bachelet. Brazilian President Lula da Silva can be seen seated, applauding — three heads of state embodying the integration CoD: Ghosts transforms into genocidal aggression.
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| UNASUR Flag | UNASUR (with name) | Mercosur Flag | South American Union (2002) |
|---|---|---|---|
UNASUR (2008)
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UNASUR with full name inscription.
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Mercosur (1991) — star symbolism likely influenced the Federation flag's twelve-star design.
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South American Union (2002) — strikingly similar to the Federation flag in structure.
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| CELAC Flag | Parlatino Flag | PROSUR Flag |
|---|---|---|
CELAC (2010) — Community of Latin American and Caribbean States.
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Parlatino (Latin American Parliament, 2005) — the continental-shape motif also seen on Federation soldier berets.
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PROSUR (2019) — the US-aligned counter-institution established by right-wing governments as a direct replacement for UNASUR. Its existence illustrates that Latin American integration is a fiercely contested terrain; CoD: Ghosts elides this internal fracture entirely.
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| Consejo de Defensa Sudamericano | CDS with UNASUR | CDS in Session |
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Flag of the Consejo de Defensa Sudamericano (South American Defence Council) — UNASUR's defense cooperation arm, first proposed by Venezuela and Brazil.
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The CDS in session. The body explicitly stated it had no intention of forming a NATO-like offensive alliance.
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Federation Visual Identity
The militarization of Federation society is pervasive, utilizing sharp geometric shapes, eagles, and lightning bolts — classic aesthetic tropes used by Western media to subliminally equate socialist integration with fascism. Paradoxically, the ubiquitous presence of Federation flags in civilian sectors merely mirrors the exhaustive domestic deployment of the US flag in real life.
| National Emblems & Badges |
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Wreathes, lightning bolts, and eagles connote fascism/Nazism in the Western eye — yet red, white and black alongside yellow stars are equally associated with Cuban and Nicaraguan guerrilla movements.
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| Embroidered Patch | White Eagle Patch | Pentagon Patch | Pentagon Emblem (Metal) |
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White eagle motif — a deliberate visual echo of fascist heraldry applied to a sovereign Latin American bloc.
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FedOil Environmental Propaganda
In-game propaganda posters for "FedOil" contain messages warning citizens about global warming ("The reality of global warming is already here… We are the future"). Because Latin America has an exemplary real-world record on biodiversity protection while the US remains one of the planet's primary polluters, this detail operates as a conservative critique — attempting to villainize the Federation as an oppressive "big government" forcing environmentalism upon its populace. The attempt to villainize a nation for siding with climate science is a distinctly US conservative attitude, reflected precisely here.
| FedOil — "The future is brilliant" | FedOil — "The protection of our future" | FedOil — "Green environment" |
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"The future is brilliant. Energy is more important than ever. The reality of global warming is already here. Nonetheless, we're taking better decisions for our planet."
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"The protection of our future" — painted by the game as sinister "big government" overreach.
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"Green environment" — note the error: "ambiente" alone can mean ambience or mood; the correct term is "medio ambiente."
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3.3.1. Localization Failures in Environmental Signage
The military propaganda posters visible throughout Federation-controlled environments present instructive examples of deficient Spanish localization, operating as unintentional evidence of the production's superficial engagement with the culture it depicts.
| "Demostración de Aire" Posters | Federation Day Poster | "Federación de Siberia" Poster |
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Close-up of the "Demostración de Aire" poster pair — confirming broken Spanish text.
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Federation Day promotional poster — "Día de la Federación, el 15 de Junio." The yellow, blue, red and white colors directly reference Venezuelan, Colombian, Ecuadorian, Peruvian, Uruguayan and Chilean national flags.
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"Military power… Federation of Siberia" — with the word "join" printed in English. Implies the Federation has extended its reach to Russia, or maintains mercenary recruitment there — lending indirect support to the theory that the Federation traded oil wealth for Russian military hardware.
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The left-hand poster reads "Demostración de aire — Saludamos a los veteranos empresa," approximating "Air Demonstration — We Salute the Veterans [of the] Enterprise." The phrase "demostración de aire" produces an unintended literal reading — a proof of the substance's existence — owing to the omission of the required contracted preposition del (a fusion of de + el). The appended "veteranos empresa" violates standard nominal syntax and agreement entirely. The right-hand poster reads "Reclutamiento de la Guardia Nacional — Aplicar ahora." The phrase "aplicar ahora" is a well-documented Spanglism — a direct calque of the English "apply now" that is nonstandard across all formal registers. The normative imperatives would be "inscríbase," "alístese," or "enlístese ahora." Both posters display the hallmarks of unsupervised machine translation.
3.3.2. Ideological Vocabulary and the Bolivarian Tradition
Beyond the textual errors, the Federation's nomenclature draws on a recognizable pan-Latin American anti-imperialist tradition. The multiplayer map Industrias Soberanas ("Sovereign Industries") employs a term — soberano / soberanía — with deep resonance across Latin American political discourse. The founding hero of Uruguay, José Gervasio Artigas, articulated this conception in one of the most-cited passages in Río de la Plata political thought:
[The people are sovereign, and they will know how to investigate the operations of their representatives.]
— José Gervasio Artigas, founder and national hero of Uruguay
The visual language of real-world institutions such as the Banco del Sur — whose logo bears the legend "soberanía e integración" ("sovereignty and integration") — further confirms that the game's designers drew, whether deliberately or unconsciously, on an established iconographic vocabulary of South-South solidarity. The cumulative effect is a Federation whose aesthetic markers are legible within a specific historical tradition, lending the antagonist faction an ideological coherence that the game's narrative never adequately develops.
3.3.3. Linguistic Geography: The Absence of Portuguese
The exclusive use of Spanish across all Federation territories — including missions explicitly set in Brazil — constitutes a significant geographical and linguistic oversight. Portuguese, the native language of approximately 215 million people in Brazil alone, is entirely absent from in-game signage, ambient dialogue, and environmental text in Brazilian settings. The Rorke Files additionally situate Porto Alegre within Uruguayan rather than Brazilian territory, an error that either reflects inadequate geographic research or implies a post-Federation redrawing of national borders that goes entirely uncommented upon within the narrative.
One interpretive frame the game implicitly invites, though never articulates, is that the Federation has standardized Spanish as its operational lingua franca owing to Venezuelan political dominance within the bloc — a dynamic with historical precedent in multilateral military organizations that operate under a single working language. Whether this was the intended reading or simply an oversight remains unclear; the game offers no diegetic explanation either way.
3.3.4. Voice Cast and Dialectal Composition
The voice cast for Federation soldiers comprises performers from several Latin American national varieties:
| Actor | Nationality / Background | Role(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Christian Lanz | Mexican | Federation soldiers |
| Zeus Mendoza | Mexican | Federation soldiers |
| Mauricio Mendoza | US-Colombian | Federation soldiers |
| Ricard Herranz | Venezuelan | Federation soldiers |
| Sevy Di Cione | Venezuelan | Federation soldiers |
| Brenda Canela | Mexican | Non-Federation (likely US-side) |
| Loreni Delgado | Panamanian | Non-Federation (likely US-side) |
| Steve Wilcox | United States | Víctor Ramos (English VO, performed with a phony Hispanic accent) |
3.3.5. Phonological and Sociolinguistic Analysis
Sibilant realization. The prominent realization of syllable-final /s/ — rather than the aspiration or deletion that characterizes most South American coastal, Caribbean, and Rioplatense varieties — lends many Federation soldiers a phonological profile more consistent with Mexican or educated prestige-register speech. This sits incongruously alongside the Venezuelan slang simultaneously employed: jeva (girl/chick), arrecho (cool/awesome), lechuo (lucky).
Pronominal address: ustedeo. The use of ustedeo — the pragmatic deployment of the formal second-person usted in informal peer-to-peer address — is pervasive in soldier-to-soldier dialogue. While highly naturalistic in Colombian usage and common along the Venezuelan-Colombian border, this feature is sociolinguistically marked in most Venezuelan and Mexican contexts, where tuteo or voseo would be expected.
Documented pronunciation errors.
- artillería — rendered as "artelería" with English-influenced vowel quality
- lechuo (stress on first syllable: LE-chuo) — produced as le-CHÚO
- cantidad (penultimate stress: can-ti-DAD) — rendered as CÁN-ti-dad
- abatidos — produced as "abatados", incorrect vowel substitution in the unstressed medial syllable
The overall dialectal picture suggests that the game's Spanish is primarily the product of Mexican gaming voiceover talent — a well-established industry pipeline in Los Angeles — overlaid with Venezuelan slang terms, without the benefit of a unified dialect brief or a supervising phonetics consultant.
3.3.6. Dialogue Quality: The Uneven Register
The quality of the Spanish-language dialogue is notably inconsistent. Certain exchanges achieve an authenticity of register that contrasts sharply with surrounding material:
These lines reflect a competence in colloquial Latin American register that is notably absent from much of the surrounding dialogue, which tends toward stilted construction consistent with back-translation from an English source script. The unevenness suggests that multiple writers or translators contributed to the Spanish text, with varying degrees of familiarity with spoken Latin American discourse.
3.3.7. The Rules Don't Apply: War Crimes, Cruelty, and the Moral Double Standard — A Case Study in Clockwork and Beyond
One of the most revealing structural features of Call of Duty: Ghosts is the asymmetry with which it applies moral judgement to acts of violence. The Federation is coded as uniquely, irredeemably cruel — and certain in-game moments are clearly designed to provoke outrage against it. Yet the Ghosts, over the course of the same eighteen missions, commit acts that would meet any reasonable legal definition of war crimes. The game never acknowledges this.
Before cataloguing specific incidents, a pattern worth naming runs through the entire campaign: the majority of the Ghosts' kills are intimate, deceptive, and frequently prolonged. The camera does not cut away. The player is brought close enough to see the faces of Federation soldiers — expressions of confusion, pain, or fear — in the moments before and during their deaths. Throats are slashed at close range. Soldiers are stabbed repeatedly at arm's length. Enemies are drowned, dropped from heights, shot while attempting to flee. Most Federation soldiers are killed not in open combat but through trickery, betrayal, or stealth — methods that communicate not killing efficiency but something closer to deep-seated contempt. The framing evokes the aesthetic tradition of 1980s US action cinema — Rambo, Commando, Missing in Action — in which the enemy is not merely killed but grievously, intimately disposed of: beaten, stabbed, humiliated. The difference is that those films were broadly understood, even at the time, as power fantasies. Call of Duty: Ghosts presents the same conduct as heroism.
Ghost Stories (Mission 1). The game opens with an act of orbital mass destruction. Federation troops storm the US ODIN space station, massacre its crew in zero gravity, and seize control of the kinetic bombardment system — a platform designed and built by the United States — turning it against US civilian and military infrastructure. San Diego is obliterated in the opening minutes. What the game never acknowledges is that the weapon used was a US invention, built on the logic that mass destruction from space is acceptable so long as Washington controls the trigger.
Brave New World (Mission 2). As Logan and Hesh move through the ruins of coastal California, Federation soldiers are heard casually executing civilians, accompanied by the line: "Your country will fall as easily as its people." The cruelty is gratuitous — no tactical logic is offered for shooting unarmed survivors. The moment is designed to dehumanize the Federation before the player has had any opportunity to wonder what history might inform its conduct.
No Man's Land (Mission 3). A Federation scientist is observed in a contaminated zone, audibly protesting his working conditions to his superiors — inserted as environmental world-building, evidence of the Federation's callous disregard for its own personnel. The irony that this observation is made by soldiers operating for a government with its own extensive record of deploying personnel into hazardous environments without adequate protection goes, predictably, unexamined.
Struck Down (Mission 4). Ajax, a Ghost captured by Federation forces, is found being tortured and interrogated — generating personal motivation for the Walkers' subsequent escalation. However, earlier in the same mission, the Ghosts conduct their own field interrogation of a terrified Federation soldier: cornered, face-to-face with Riley the dog snarling inches from him, visibly shaking. The soldier provides nothing of operational value. His reward is a quick slash to the throat. Later in the mission, the Ghosts twice employ tear gas to flush entrenched Federation soldiers out of cover, forcing them into the open coughing, choking and disoriented, only to be systematically cut down as they stumble from the gas. The sequence lasts seconds. The game stages the Federation's torture of Ajax as an outrage requiring vengeance; it stages the Ghosts' execution of a frightened, cooperative prisoner and the use of chemical agents to expose and eliminate distressed enemy troops as routine fieldcraft. The distinction the game draws between these acts is entirely one of which flag the perpetrators serve.
Legends Never Die (Mission 6). General Almagro chooses to flood an entire section of his own fortifications — including troops still stationed within — to cover his escape, staged as a revelation of his monstrous character. Almagro's willingness to spend his soldiers' lives for tactical advantage is depicted as unique villainy, while the Ghosts' own commanders make equivalent decisions regarding expendable assets throughout the campaign with no comparable moral framing.
Federation Day (Mission 7). During the Federation's national holiday celebrations in Caracas—a city shown at peace, its streets crowded with civilians beneath fireworks—the Ghosts infiltrate the capital to locate and extract Victor Ramos, the Federation's lead scientist. The operation unfolds through a sustained sequence of stealth assassinations: Federation soldiers are strangled, stabbed, and silently executed one by one while the festivities continue around them. Keegan's whispered line as he dons his skull mask—"Time to earn the mask"—casts the violence in the language of ritual initiation rather than reluctant necessity. The mission culminates in the collapse of the building housing Ramos, the result of a trap orchestrated by Rorke. Regardless of who triggers the destruction, the game offers no acknowledgment of its likely human cost. The busy highway visible below, the surrounding urban district, and the crowds celebrating outside simply disappear from consideration once the objective is complete. As Emanuel Maiberg observed in his Kill Screen review, the Ghosts at this point are operating "essentially as terrorists."
Ramos himself, once located, is subjected to a brutal close-quarters assault and interrogation — beaten and coerced for information in a sequence the game presents without moral comment. He is last seen cowering in a corner of a collapsing building, praying. Earlier in the same mission, in a rare moment of permitted personality, Federation soldiers are overheard making disparaging comments about US culture, including a line about Yankee beer tasting like cheap dishwater — one of the very few instances in the campaign where Federation soldiers are allowed to exhibit anything resembling a human characteristic before being killed.
Clockwork (Mission 10). Set at a Federation research facility in the Andes of Patagonia, Argentina, Clockwork is the campaign's most morally concentrated mission — and the one the game is most comprehensively blind to. It is worth examining in detail.
| Ghosts Disguised | Andes Facility Exterior | Moving Through the Installation |
|---|---|---|
 US protagonists dressed as Federation soldiers, infiltrating a base by speaking amateurish Spanish with a conspicuous Anglophone accent. |
 The Clockwork Andes facility exterior — the Federation's high-altitude mountain stronghold in Patagonia. |
 Ghosts moving through the Andes installation — the mission frames the dismantling of a sovereign Latin American military asset as righteous special operations. |
The mission begins with a massacre at a Federation security checkpoint: the Ghosts cut the power and slaughter the guards in complete darkness using night vision. In the ambient dialogue audible immediately before the assault, Federation soldiers discuss quotidian personal matters, including a daughter's birthday. Several Spanish-speaking players have noted in online commentary that this detail alone shifted their sympathies toward the Federation soldiers, inverting the intended emotional architecture of the scene before a single shot is fired.
The Ghosts then disguise themselves as wounded Federation soldiers and walk back through the carnage as surviving troops rush to help the injured. What follows is a sustained exercise in deception, betrayal, and intimate violence. Two Federation soldiers approach to verify the infiltrators' identities; Hesh, speaking broken Spanish with a conspicuous Anglophone accent, redirects them — "Captain González? He's right over there" — then proceeds to beat both men unconscious. A Federation soldier who moves to challenge from a gantry railing is grabbed, struggled with, and thrown from a significant height. The squad moves through the facility stabbing Federation personnel at arm's length inside a commandeered LMV, the victims' faces visible throughout.
The mission's most revealing moment comes when Hesh approaches a wounded Federation soldier lying in the aftermath of the checkpoint massacre. He helps the man to his feet, speaks to him gently, and offers to take him to a medic:
"Venga aquí, amigou" ("Come here, friend")
"Enseguidah lo atiendeh un médicoh" ("A medic will see you shortly")
He is using the soldier's trust and physical vulnerability as operational cover. The man is bleeding out; Hesh's expressed concern is a tactical tool. Extending false comfort to a wounded enemy in order to facilitate a military deception constitutes perfidy under Article 37 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits feigning protected status — wounded combatant, medic, civilian — in order to kill or injure. The game calls it heroism. The broader phonological texture of the infiltration, analysed in section 3.3.5, is reproduced here for its dramatic context:
"¡No dispahRRen! ¡Tehnemous heRRidous!! ¡Tehnemous a seis o sieteh acol-la-lados en ell laboRRatoRRio! NeSHesitamous más hombRRehs!"
("Don't shoot! We have wounded! We have six or seven men cornered in the laboratory! We need more men!")
"¡Debemos aseguRRar el peRRimetRROU!"
("We have to secure the perimeter!")
"¿Qué pasa ahí? ¡El mando nos asignó al perimetRRou! ¡No tenemous tiempo paRRa estoh!"
("What's going on there? Command has assigned us to the perimeter! We don't have time for this!")
Reviewers at the Spanish outlet Eurogamer cited the infiltration specifically as a credibility-undermining moment — a distinction indicating that the effect rises to the level of a documentable production flaw, not merely a detail perceptible to native speakers. At a structural level the sequence functions less as a plausible operational scenario than as a power fantasy about linguistic imperialism: the assumption that one can half-assimilate another culture's language and still pass undetected, simply because that culture is assumed to be less discerning. The mission concludes with a high-speed escape during which the player deploys a grenade launcher to blow holes through frozen lake ice directly beneath Federation vehicles, dropping their crews into the freezing water.
Atlas Falls (Mission 11). During the sabotage of the Atlas oil platform, the Ghosts encounter a civilian worker — a foreman or technician — who pleads with them not to destroy the facility. His appeal is not to his own safety but to the infrastructure and those dependent on it. The Ghosts proceed without hesitation. Later in the same mission, the player detonates charges beneath the ice sheet above a group of submerged Federation soldiers attempting to swim to the surface. The ice collapses onto them; the camera holds on the soldiers flailing in the water below, trapped, unable to reach air, their hands visible through the ice. They are entirely defenseless. The sequence is framed as a satisfying puzzle solution.
End of the Line (Mission 13). Two Federation soldiers are overheard arguing — one lecturing the other, the other snapping back: "¡No hace falta que me sermonée!" / "Cállate la boca." One of the more naturalistically written exchanges in the game, deployed to underscore a lack of unit cohesion — and, inadvertently, one of the few moments in the campaign where Federation soldiers feel like actual human beings rather than dehumanized targets.
Sin City (Mission 14). Hesh and Merrick are captured and brought before Federation forces preparing to execute them — mirroring the earlier Ajax interrogation in its function of generating personal stakes and righteous anger. Structural symmetry with the Ghosts' own conduct throughout the campaign is, again, nowhere acknowledged.
Taken as a whole, the catalogue above illustrates a principle the game applies with remarkable consistency: identical acts carry different moral weight depending on which flag the person performing them serves. The Federation executes civilians and this is evidence of its essential evil. The Ghosts slash throats, manipulate the wounded, drown trapped soldiers, beat scientists for information, and massacre security forces in the dark — and this is the price of freedom. The moral architecture of Call of Duty: Ghosts is not simply jingoistic. It is, in the precise technical sense, propagandistic: it systematically trains its audience to apply one standard of judgement to one group and an entirely different standard to another, on the basis of national identity alone.
3.3.8. Representational Structure: Hispanic Identity and the Antagonist Monoculture
The game's antagonist faction is exclusively Spanish-speaking. The protagonists include no confirmed Hispanic team members beyond anonymous auxiliary figures bearing Hispanic surnames who function as expendable background allies without dialogue or characterization. The absence of Hispanic voices within the player-aligned cast forecloses what would have been a structurally straightforward counter-narrative device: a Federation defector, a resistance fighter, or a Hispanic protagonist would have introduced the possibility that the Federation does not represent a monolithic Hispanic political will. Without such a figure, the game's Hispanic characterization is concentrated entirely within the antagonist space.
The question of Rorke's role within the Federation further illuminates this structural gap. That a US citizen would rise to operational authority within Federation forces raises questions the narrative does not resolve. The game establishes that the Federation has committed documented atrocities against US civilians; the mechanisms by which a US national would not only survive within Federation structures but command Federation personnel are never addressed.
3.3.9. The Cinematic Machine: Set Pieces Before Story
There is another dimension to the game's ideological incoherence that becomes visible when its narrative is considered alongside its production form. In his retrospective analysis of Call of Duty: Ghosts, Folding Ideas argues that the campaign bears the characteristic fingerprints of a cinematic-shooter production pipeline in which spectacle can precede narrative logic: large set pieces are conceived first, while writers subsequently construct connective tissue explaining why the player has arrived at each spectacle. This is particularly useful for understanding why the game's geopolitical premise is simultaneously so elaborate and so strangely underdeveloped. The Federation is given maps, flags, weapons, propaganda, economic statistics, orbital infrastructure and an entire continental political mythology, yet individual missions so frequently fail to establish causal relationships with one another that the geopolitical framework often feels like scenery surrounding a sequence of action-movie tableaux.
The most revealing example is the wreckage of ODIN in San Diego. The player is explicitly sent to investigate what the Federation is salvaging, yet the enormous remains of the orbital weapon are treated almost as incidental scenery. Characters do not meaningfully connect the wreckage to the missile launches they subsequently encounter, and the significance of the discovery is postponed until much later, when the Federation's LOKI production is finally revealed. Folding Ideas points out that the game's level design actively discourages the kind of exploration that might allow the player to notice this information: cinematic shooters guide attention through scripted corridors, enemy fire, checkpoints and predetermined interactions. The result is a peculiar contradiction. Ghosts wants the player to inhabit an intricate geopolitical thriller while structurally discouraging the curiosity and agency that would allow that world to cohere.
The same production logic helps explain the campaign's notorious collection of disconnected spectacles: the sinking aircraft carrier, the Antarctic oil-rig assault, the underwater sequence, the tank mission, the orbital combat, and the final train confrontation. These moments are individually legible as blockbuster set pieces, but their narrative necessity is frequently retroactive. The question becomes not "what would this conflict logically require?" but "what sequence of spectacular military scenarios can be assembled around the available mechanics and assets?" This is important to the political reading because it means the game's ideological content is not necessarily the product of a single coherent political thesis. It can emerge from the accumulation of familiar cinematic conventions, enemy stereotypes and production shortcuts.
Folding Ideas makes the same point about the campaign's mechanics. Ghosts repeatedly introduces equipment — Riley, thermal optics, night vision, motion tracking, gas, strobe systems and other specialist tools — not as durable systems the player learns to employ creatively, but as scene-specific gimmicks that exist for precisely as long as the predetermined sequence requires them. The player is therefore given the simulation of military versatility rather than meaningful military agency. This is significant to the ideological structure of the game: the Ghosts appear extraordinarily competent not because the player is empowered to develop sophisticated tactics, but because the game continuously arranges the environment so that their predetermined actions look sophisticated. The player is less a commander making decisions than an actor hitting marks in a military action film.
This also sheds light on the Ghosts themselves. Their elaborate mythology — the blood-and-sand initiation, the sacred treatment of the dead, the skull masks, the insistence on ritual, sacrifice and absolute obedience — is far more developed than the ordinary institutional history of the unit would justify. The game presents a recently created special-operations formation of fourteen survivors as though it were an ancient warrior order with generations of inherited customs. Folding Ideas describes this as a quasi-religious or cultic presentation. The effect is to transform US military violence from ordinary state violence into something spiritually elevated: the Ghosts do not merely fight; they are anointed, initiated, sacrificed and reborn. The trailer's Abraham-and-Isaac rhetoric — that a man proves his love of country by giving his son's life — therefore fits into a larger symbolic system of militarised paternal sacrifice.
The irony is that the game's supposedly dehumanised enemy receives almost none of this mythic interiority. Federation soldiers are overwhelmingly interchangeable targets, while the Ghosts acquire names, rituals, masks, family histories and sacred funerary customs. Even Riley, heavily promoted as a genuine squad member, functions mechanically for only a small number of encounters before effectively disappearing from the campaign. The contrast reinforces the asymmetry already documented throughout this essay: one side is granted mythology and subjectivity, while the other is reduced to bodies through which the player's spectacular military fantasies can be expressed.
3.4. Foreign Relations
| In-Game Magazines (English) | "Just War for the New World Order" |
|---|---|
Magazines reading: "When a superpower tumbles," "America's New Border," and "The Cost of Freedom?" — paranoid US fears of decline reflected through the Federation's own in-world media.
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Additional in-game Federation magazines written in Spanish. The messages are pointed precisely at US preoccupations: "News: are they foreigners among us? Just war for the new World Order."
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The game posits that despite being the world's undisputed superpower, the Federation is globally despised, while NATO strictly aligns with the United States. This narrative construct is highly detached from geopolitical pragmatism. In a multipolar reality where a unified Latin America controls global energy reserves, international alliances — including those in Europe — would naturally pivot toward the new economic center. Call of Duty: Ghosts elides the internal fracture between Bolivarian and US-aligned integrationist projects entirely, presenting Latin America as a monolithic and uniformly hostile force.
3.5. Economy
From the Call of Duty wiki: "By 2027 the Federation undisputedly had the World's largest economy. The rest of the world remained dependent on the Western Hemisphere's resources and products. Additionally, cities like Caracas, Rio de Janeiro, and Santiago completely rebuilt themselves."
| Keegan watches Caracas | Federation Day — Neo-Caracas | Federation Flags on Balcony | Scaling the High-Rise |
|---|---|---|---|
 Keegan stands watch over Caracas as the city brims with firework displays during Federation Day — a gleaming, prosperous metropolis the game immediately tasks the player with violently infiltrating. |
 The Federation Day opening cinematic — an ultra-lavish neo-Caracas in 2027. |
 Federation flags on the balcony — prosperity, unity, stability and peace on full display, seconds before the Ghosts begin their massacre. |
 "Time to earn the mask," Keegan whispers — emphasizing the cult-like vibe, as if the Ghosts were a terrorist organization rather than a military outfit. |
3.6. Equipment and Arsenal: A Multipolar Doctrine
From the Call of Duty wiki: "Their arsenal of weaponry came from weapon manufacturers of Russia, NATO, South Korea, Israel, and even the United States, as well as from two of their member states, Brazil (.44 Magnum) and Peru (SC-2010, FAD)."
The Federation's arsenal is, on paper, the most realistic element of its depiction. Latin American militaries have historically sourced their equipment from a wide variety of suppliers — North American, European, Russian, and increasingly Chinese — and the game reflects this with a degree of authenticity that stands in contrast to the laziness of its narrative. The inclusion of indigenous Latin American weapons is particularly noteworthy: the Peruvian FAD (Fusil Automático Doble) and SC-2010 are real prototype designs, and their presence gives the Federation a degree of genuine regional identity that the rest of the game largely fails to provide.
That said, the predominance of Russian and Eastern European hardware — the AK-12 assault rifle, the T-90 tank, the BTR-80 armored personnel carrier, the MiG-29, the GAZ-2975 Tigr, and the Zubr-class hovercraft — works to visually and ideologically align the Federation with the traditional Cold War adversaries of the United States. For a US American audience conditioned by decades of popular culture to associate Russian military hardware with the enemy, the sight of Federation soldiers carrying Kalashnikov derivatives and riding T-90s accomplishes something the game's plot conspicuously fails to do through dialogue: it signals, at a purely visual level, that these are the bad guys. This Russian hardware alignment is consistent with real-life Venezuelan military procurement under Chávez, who purchased AK-103 rifles, Mi-35M2 Caribe attack helicopters, T-72 tanks, and Su-30 fighter jets from Russia.
Small Arms
| Weapon | Origin | Category | Real Life | In-Game |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AK-12 | 🇷🇺 Russia | AR |  |
 Inclusion of this rifle, only just released in 2012, signals deliberate alignment with Russian military modernization. |
| SC-2010 | 🇵🇪 Peru | AR |  |
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| FAD | 🇵🇪 Peru | AR |  |
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| ARX-160 | 🇮🇹 Italy | AR | Image pending |
Image pending |
| APS Underwater Rifle | 🇷🇺 Russia | AR | Image pending |
Image pending |
| Honey Badger | 🇺🇸 USA | AR | Image pending |
Image pending |
| MSBS | 🇵🇱 Poland | AR | Image pending |
Image pending |
| SA-805 | 🇨🇿 Czech Republic | AR | Image pending |
Image pending |
| Bizon | 🇷🇺 Russia | SMG | Image pending |
Image pending |
| CBJ-MS | 🇸🇪 Sweden | SMG | Image pending |
Image pending |
| K7 | 🇰🇷 South Korea | SMG | Image pending |
Image pending |
| MTAR-X / MTAR-X2 | 🇮🇱 Israel | SMG | Image pending |
Image pending |
| Vector CRB | 🇺🇸 USA | SMG | Image pending |
Image pending |
| Vepr | 🇷🇺 Russia | SMG | Image pending |
Image pending |
| Ameli | 🇪🇸 Spain | LMG | Image pending |
Image pending |
| LSAT | 🇺🇸 USA | LMG | Image pending |
Image pending |
| M27-IAR | 🇩🇪 Germany | LMG | Image pending |
Image pending |
| SVU | 🇷🇺 Russia | Marksman | Image pending |
Image pending |
| Lynx | 🇭🇺 Hungary | Sniper | Image pending |
Image pending |
| L115 | 🇬🇧 UK | Sniper | Image pending |
Image pending |
| Bulldog | 🇦🇺 Australia | Shotgun | Image pending |
Image pending |
| MTS-255 | 🇷🇺 Russia | Shotgun | Image pending |
Image pending |
| .44 Magnum | 🇧🇷 Brazil | Handgun | Image pending |
Image pending |
| M9A1 | 🇺🇸 USA | Handgun | Image pending |
Image pending |
| MP-443 Grach | 🇷🇺 Russia | Handgun | Image pending |
Image pending |
| P226 | 🇩🇪 Germany | Handgun | Image pending |
Image pending |
| PDW | 🇧🇪 Belgium | Handgun | Image pending |
Image pending |
| Panzerfaust | 🇩🇪 Germany | Launcher | Image pending |
Image pending |
| RPG-7 | 🇷🇺 Russia | Launcher | Image pending |
Image pending |
Armored and Aerospace Assets
| Vehicle | Origin | Type | Real Life | In-Game |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| T-90MS | 🇷🇺 Russia | Tank | Image pending |
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| BTR-80 | 🇷🇺 Russia | APC | Image pending |
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| GAZ-2975 Tigr | 🇷🇺 Russia | Light Vehicle | Image pending |
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| Iveco LMV | 🇮🇹 Italy | Light Vehicle | Image pending |
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| BAW BJ 2022 | 🇨🇳 China | Light Vehicle | Image pending |
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| X08 Selva Tigre | 🌎 Federation | Light Vehicle | Image pending |
Image pending |
| M880 | 🇺🇸 USA | Light Vehicle | Image pending |
Image pending |
| Snowmobile | — | Light Vehicle | Image pending |
Image pending |
| Zubr Hovercraft | 🇷🇺 Russia | Naval | Image pending |
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| Austral 21 Patrol Boat | 🌎 Federation | Naval | Image pending |
Image pending |
| Aegis-class Combat Ship | 🇺🇸 USA | Naval | Image pending |
Image pending |
| Arleigh Burke-class Destroyer | 🇺🇸 USA | Naval | Image pending |
Image pending |
| Minisub | — | Naval | Image pending |
Image pending |
| Zodiac | 🇫🇷 France | Naval | Image pending |
Image pending |
| Stormbreaker | 🌎 Federation | Naval / Space | Image pending |
Image pending |
| MiG-29 | 🇷🇺 Russia | Fighter Jet | Image pending |
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| F-15 Eagle | 🇺🇸 USA | Fighter Jet | Image pending |
Image pending |
| Y-8 Gunship | 🇨🇳 China | Gunship | Image pending |
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| Eurocopter EC-635 | 🇪🇺 Europe | Helicopter | Image pending |
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| NH90 | 🇪🇺 Europe | Helicopter | Image pending |
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| Mi-24 Hind | 🇷🇺 Russia | Helicopter | Image pending |
Image pending |
| Mi-28 | 🇷🇺 Russia | Helicopter | Image pending |
Image pending |
The "Battle Hind" — Rotary Wing
The game's signature Federation attack helicopter, the so-called "Battle Hind," is a hybrid design drawing on the Mi-24D Soviet gunship as its conceptual base, upgraded with elements borrowed from the Kamov Ka-25 and Ka-50/52 — most notably the coaxial rotor system and distinctive lateral tail fins. The real-world basis for the Federation's Mi-35 fleet is equally grounded: the Venezuelan Army operates a fleet of Mi-35M2 Caribes purchased directly from Russia.
| Kamov Ka-25 | Kamov Ka-52 | Kamov Ka-50 "Black Shark" | Ka-50/Hind hybrid (model) | South African ATE Super Hind Mk.3 | Super Hind Mk.4 model | Mi-35M2 Caribe (Venezuela) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Kamov Ka-25 — note the coaxial rotor and tail design, both directly used in the Battle Hind. |
 Kamov Ka-52 — featuring a coaxial rotor system with lateral tail fins. Will replace the Mi-24 in Russian service. |
 Kamov Ka-50 "Black Shark" — coaxial rotor heritage underpins the Battle Hind lineage. |
 Model kit depicting the Kamov-Hind hybrid concept — closely mirroring the Battle Hind's in-game silhouette. |
 South African ATE Super Hind Mk.3 — the real-world upgrade concept chosen by many films and games when trying to modernise the Mi-24's silhouette. |
 Super Hind Mk.4 model with Pall Vortex Engine Air Particle Separator System. |
 Mi-35M2 'Caribe' of the Venezuelan Army — the real-world precedent for including an upgraded Mi-35 as the Federation's main attack helicopter. |
Space Dominance
The Federation operates a centralized space agency capable of orbital combat, deploying astronauts in brown-colored suits heavily inspired by the Russian Orlan ("sea eagle") designs utilized by Roscosmos. They successfully reverse-engineer the US ODIN kinetic orbital weapon to create the LOKI platform. The brown color of the suits adds a layer of racial coding given the perception — itself a myth, as the Southern Cone is majority white-European — that South Americans are perceived by white US Americans as "brown" in comparison. Making the Federation a space-faring superpower is in sync with the reality of Latin American space achievements: Cuba's Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez (first person of African descent from the Western Hemisphere in space), Brazil's Marcos Cesar Pontes (first Brazilian in space), Venezuela's Venesat-1 (Simón Bolívar satellite, 2008), and Argentina's ARSAT-1.
3.6.1. ODIN, LOKI, and the "Smaller, but More Numerous" Rods
One of the strangest lines in the entire campaign deserves considerably more attention than it normally receives. When the Ghosts discover the Federation's orbital weapons program, the difference between the US ODIN platform and the Federation's LOKI system is explained in unusually blunt terms: the Federation's weapons are "smaller, but there's a lot more of them." Folding Ideas independently singled out this line as potentially symbolic, and within the context of the game's broader racial and geopolitical imagery it is difficult not to notice how conspicuous the formulation is.
At the literal level, the distinction is straightforward. LOKI is a derivative of ODIN: its individual kinetic projectiles are less powerful, but the Federation compensates by deploying a larger number of them. The gameplay and plot require precisely this difference because the Federation is supposed to possess a technologically inferior copy of the US weapon while nevertheless presenting a serious strategic threat. Yet the writers did not have to describe the distinction in comparative terms of size and quantity. The decision to make "smaller, but more numerous" the memorable verbal formulation creates an obvious symbolic opening.
One possible reading is demographic. The game repeatedly constructs Latin America as a threatening mass: a huge population moving northward, a continent unified into a single bloc, an apparently inexhaustible supply of soldiers, migrants and resources pressing against a comparatively smaller United States. In that context, the contrast between the large, individually powerful US projectile and the smaller but more numerous Federation projectiles can be read as a miniature version of the game's larger fantasy of North American technological superiority confronting southern demographic abundance. This should not be presented as proof of authorial intent, nor as a factual statement about the physical characteristics of Latin Americans. It is instead a reading of the representational logic the game repeatedly constructs: the US is coded as individually powerful and technologically sophisticated, while the Latin American other is coded as multitudinous and threatening precisely through its numbers.
There is also a more juvenile, phallic reading that is difficult to ignore given the conspicuous emphasis on comparative size. ODIN's orbital "rods" are already a famously phallic piece of science-fiction weaponry — the popular expression "rods from God" makes the imagery almost impossible to miss. LOKI then arrives as the Federation's inferior copy: smaller rods, but more of them. A deliberately sexual reading could therefore interpret the joke as a crude fantasy of Latin American masculine inferiority — the supposedly lesser South American weapon compensating for reduced individual size through numerical abundance. This is substantially more speculative than the demographic reading, and there is no evidence in the available material that the writers consciously intended a penis joke. Its analytical value lies instead in showing how the game's repeated language of size, potency, abundance and threat can acquire meanings beyond the literal military specifications.
The naming makes the inversion even more suggestive. The US system is ODIN, invoking the Norse chief god and therefore a familiar Northern European mythological register; the Federation system is LOKI, the trickster and destabilising figure within the same mythology. Thus the US possesses the "god" weapon, while the Latin American imitation is associated with the treacherous, deceptive and chaotic god. The Federation does not merely steal American technology; it becomes the morally corrupted version of it. The weapon itself becomes a miniature ideological allegory: US technological power is treated as legitimate possession, while the same technology in Federation hands becomes an instrument of illegitimate subversion.
Folding Ideas' observation is therefore useful precisely because the line is so easy to dismiss as a throwaway technical explanation. In a campaign already obsessed with the contrast between the supposedly superior United States and the supposedly dangerous Latin American mass, the formulation gives the hierarchy an almost cartoonishly physical expression: ours is bigger; theirs is smaller; they compensate by having more. Whether intentional symbolism or simply an unfortunate choice of wording, it fits remarkably well with the game's wider representational economy.
Spacesuit Evolution & Federation Aesthetic
| Soviet-Era Orlan Suit | Russian Roscosmos Orlan | ISS — US & Russian Astronauts | Federation Astronaut (MTAR-X) |
|---|---|---|---|
Soviet-era Orlan suit.
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Modern Roscosmos Orlan suit — directly inspiring the Federation cosmonaut aesthetic.
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US and Russian astronauts aboard the ISS — the cooperative context the game narratively reframes as a threat.
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Federation astronaut armed with an MTAR-X aboard the LOKI orbital platform.
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Space Combat Scenes
| Space Combat 1 | Space Combat 2 | Space Combat 3 |
|---|---|---|
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Space Stations
| ODIN Station (US) | US Astronaut with ODIN | LOKI Station (Federation) |
|---|---|---|
US ODIN space station — a kinetic bombardment platform. Odin = good, Loki = evil (deliberate naming).
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Federation LOKI station — reverse-engineered from ODIN.
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Latin American Space Achievements
| Venesat-1 (Venezuela) | ARSAT-1 (Argentina) |
|---|---|
Venesat-1 ("Simón Bolívar"), 2008. Cost: $406 million USD.
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ARSAT-1 — first geostationary satellite built entirely in Latin America. Cost: $270 million USD.
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4. CONCLUSIONS
| Rorke File — David "Hesh" Walker | Rorke File — Logan Walker |
|---|---|
 Rorke File — David "Hesh" Walker interview dossier. The Rorke Files reveal that the Walker family were turned into fanatical, emotionless killing machines due to their father's pressure since childhood — the game's idealization of military family culture. |
 Rorke File — Logan Walker dossier. The game ends with Logan being dragged away by a surviving Rorke, to be broken and brainwashed as Rorke was — a sequel hook that never materialized. |
Viewed retrospectively, Call of Duty: Ghosts transcends mere entertainment; it is a potent instrument of ideological conditioning. Its narrative, despite being dismissed by most reviewers as incoherent and derivative, carries a remarkably coherent ideological subtext — one that, viewed through a Latin American lens, proves impossible to ignore. As this analysis has demonstrated at length, the Federation of the Americas is not simply a fictional antagonist born of creative convenience; it is the product of specific anxieties rooted in US geopolitical culture, anxieties that the Pink Tide, Venezuelan Bolivarianism, and the rise of Latin American supranational organisms such as UNASUR and CELAC had made suddenly tangible in the years preceding the game's development.
What makes the game's narrative particularly troubling is not its jingoism per se — the Call of Duty franchise has never been shy about its ideological commitments — but rather the specific target of that jingoism, and the historical context surrounding it. Writer Stephen Gaghan himself acknowledged in interviews that the game is grounded in an awareness of US interventionism in Latin America. That awareness is entirely absent from the finished product. Operation Condor goes unmentioned. The history of US-backed coups, death squads, and economic destabilization across the subcontinent is never invoked. In its place, the Federation is presented as an aggressive, expansionist dictatorship that attacks the United States for reasons the game never adequately explains — a narrative vacuum that reviewers across the political spectrum, from Fox News to Kill Screen, identified as the game's most glaring weakness, and which this essay has argued is not a weakness at all, but a structural necessity. To explain the Federation's motivations with any historical honesty would be to undermine the entire moral architecture of the game.
The inversion of reality that permeates Ghosts — positioning the world's most powerful military nation as a victimized underdog beset by darker-skinned southern aggressors — belongs to a broader tradition of US popular culture that projects the US's own imperial record onto its designated enemies. The Federation, as this analysis has shown, mirrors the United States in virtually every meaningful respect: in its military expansionism, its use of overwhelming force, its propaganda apparatus, its suppression of dissent, and its displacement of civilian populations. The game presents this mirror image as an object of fear and loathing, seemingly unaware of — or indifferent to — the irony.
The reception of the game is equally instructive. That Ghosts was consumed by millions of Latin American players without widespread protest speaks not to an absence of harm but to the effectiveness of the cultural conditioning the game itself exemplifies. The fact that even Fox News identified it as ideologically extreme should give some measure of just how far the game's rhetoric extended beyond the already considerable norms of the genre.
None of this is to argue that fiction must be geopolitically neutral, nor that entertainment cannot engage with speculative conflict. Done with intelligence and genuine ambition, the scenario Ghosts envisions — an inter-American war, a united Latin American superpower, the inversion of hemispheric power — could have made for genuinely thought-provoking speculative fiction. The raw material was there. What Infinity Ward produced instead was a lazy repackaging of Red Dawn with Hispanic faces, designed not to provoke reflection but to forestall it.
The aspiration of a united Latin America, invoked by figures from Bolívar and Artigas to Chávez and Mujica, is not a fantasy of aggression or revenge. It is, at its core, a project of dignity — the desire of peoples long subjected to external interference and economic exploitation to govern themselves collectively, on their own terms, and in their own interests. That Call of Duty: Ghosts should transform this aspiration into a genocidal nightmare says rather more about the fears of those who produced it than about the peoples it chose to vilify. History, as this essay has attempted to demonstrate, does not support the game's premise. It refutes it.
Folding Ideas' production-focused reading adds an important qualification to the ideological interpretation advanced here. Ghosts need not have been conceived as a carefully coordinated piece of anti-Latin American propaganda in order to reproduce the anxieties this essay has identified. Its political meaning can emerge from the interaction between industrial production, genre conventions and inherited stereotypes. A campaign built around predetermined blockbuster spectacles, a compressed development cycle, a thin connective script and a corporate mandate for escalation has little incentive to pause over the political subjectivity of the Federation. The result is not necessarily a conspiracy to communicate a single message, but something in certain respects more revealing: a set of cultural assumptions so normalised that they can be reproduced without anyone involved needing to articulate them.
This helps explain why the game's most politically revealing moments are often the least deliberate-looking ones. The Federation's soldiers are allowed fragments of ordinary life only in passing; Caracas is shown as a functioning, prosperous city immediately before the player is instructed to massacre its defenders; the Ghosts' rituals are rendered in reverential language; and the Federation's technological achievements are repeatedly described as inferior copies of US achievements. Even the line about LOKI being "smaller, but there's a lot more of them" can be read as an accidental condensation of the entire geopolitical fantasy. Ghosts does not need to announce that Latin America is inferior. It repeatedly constructs a world in which the North is individually superior while the South is collectively threatening.
Conversely, the Russian Federation has successfully navigated this cultural battlefield. By actively developing domestic gaming industries that produce titles like The Truth about the Ninth Company and the Smert Shpionam series, Russia provides a balanced, patriotic counter-narrative to Western media hegemony. Initiatives like Cuba's Gesta Final — a game honoring the Cuban Revolution — further demonstrate the potential for the global South to reclaim its historical agency in the digital realm.
Ultimately, the neoconservative fears visualized in Call of Duty: Ghosts reflect an unavoidable truth: the unipolar era has ended. The integration of Latin America — echoing the visions of Simón Bolívar, José Gervasio Artigas, Che Guevara, and Hugo Chávez — is not a prelude to unprovoked warfare or the invasion of the North. It is a necessary evolution toward ensuring economic prosperity, social stability, and absolute sovereignty. When that integration is fully realized, Latin America will stand alongside its multipolar allies, unthreatened by interventionism, and devoid of the imperial anxieties that plague the fading hegemon.
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