This book investigates the trajectory of the Council of the Americas (COA), founded in 1965, revealing how it became the leading private orchestrator of the United States' unofficial political actions in Latin America. Drawing on a Marxian and Gramscian perspective, the work analyzes the ties between this transnational hegemonic private apparatus and the South American dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s, later shaping their democracies through neoliberalism. By exposing the role of the COA as an organic “collective intellectual” of fractions of international capital, the study offers a vital contribution to understanding the inner workings of U.S. hegemony.