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Secretary Rubio Signs a Status of Forces Agreement with Paraguay, Dec. 15, 2025

December 15, 2025 · U.S. Department of State · 0:09:15

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What happened

Secretary of State Marco Rubio signed a Status of Forces Agreement with Paraguayan Foreign Minister Rubén Ramírez Lezcano at the Department of State on December 15, 2025, according to the State Department broadcast. “This is a historic step in our partnership between our two countries,” Rubio said. “This status of forces agreement, it demonstrates our shared commitment to security, regional security.” He named “the biggest threat in the Western hemisphere that we face” as “transnational criminal networks, transnational terrorist networks” — organizations that are “not ideologically terrorists, in many cases, but are financial and economic in their basis, but nonetheless are operating as terrorist organizations.”

The agreement, Rubio said, formalizes and builds on the existing partnership: it “allows us to train together, that allows us to advance the transfer of equipment that they need for their own security, that allow us to share intelligence in real time, that allow us to operate together when necessary,” including rapid joint humanitarian response to natural disasters — all, he stressed, “in a way that also respects the sovereignty of our partner nations.” He called Paraguay “among our strongest allies in the world, but certainly in the region,” and said the two countries also intend to expand economic cooperation. Ramírez Lezcano cited 160 years of diplomatic relations and Paraguay’s commitment “to fight against the terrorist organization, the international, or transnational crime organizations.”

Why it matters

The signing is a concrete, dated deliverable of the administration’s hemisphere security doctrine — a SOFA that converts the cartels-as-terrorists framing of the national security strategy into standing bilateral machinery with a named partner.

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Sources: U.S. Department of State, “Secretary Rubio Signs a Status of Forces Agreement with Paraguay” (official upload, embedded above); remarks as delivered 2025-12-15; transcript via state.gov as linked in the upload description and reviewed in the site’s private research store.