Securitization of the Tri-Border Area: an analysis of the Country Reports on Terrorism published during Donald Trump’s administration

The main features of the U.S. discourse about the Tri-Border Area between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay are analyzed in the 4 editions of the Country Reports on Terrorism (CRT) regarding events that occurred between 2016 and 2019 and published during the government of Donald Trump (2017-2020). The central hypothesis of this study is that the documents register a shift regarding the Barack Obama administration. The securitization theory is applied to explain the use of speech acts as movements to securitize the region. After a critical reading and employing NVivo to measure the frequency of words, the results suggested a securitization move of the “claim” type. Trump’s reports emphasized measures to improve the three countries’ border security more than Obama’s ones. On the other hand, “money laundering”, which was a constant noun phrase in the previous administrations, was less frequent in Trump’s editions.