Bleak outlook for Latin America with Trump and Rubio

Aram Aharonian

A few weeks before Donald Trump returns to the White House, Latin America presents a bleak outlook in which most countries are governed by political forces that, while not openly aligned with Washington, also show no signs of being interested in protecting their citizens from the onslaught that will come from the North.

The right-wing extremism that Trump personifies has repeaters in Latin America, such as the former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, the current Argentinean president Javier Milei, the Salvadoran Nayib Bukele or the Ecuadorian Daniel Noboa, who hastened to congratulate him.

It is evident that they see themselves in Trump’s mirror, they identify with him, as the nemesis of the Latin American left. That connection, cultivated for years by the so-called Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), is bearing fruit and casts doubt on the cliché of Trumpist isolationism. A foreign policy that is based on a renewed transnational conservative identity, reviving the old anti-communism of the Cold War, is not isolationist.

And this balance of the right-wing, which accentuates the cracks or internal fissures in each Latin American country, will not be favorable to the battered system of regional or sub-regional integration, including CELAC, Unasur, and everything suggests that with Trump will come a recovery of the inter-American framework, the strengthening of the OAS as the executing arm of its policies, and the Summits of the Americas.

Bolsonaro, Milei, Noboa, Bukele continue to celebrate Trump’s triumph as their own. With Trump in the White House, they speculate, it will be possible to seal a continental alliance against all leftists, those of Gabriel Boric and Lula da Silva, and those of Nicolás Maduro and Daniel Ortega.

Trump’s triumph is assimilated as a banner in their respective culture wars. The whole macho, homophobic and racist agenda, that inveterate discomfort with multicultural progress, will be cathartic with Trump’s return to the White House.

In the Trumpist hosts in Florida, the greatest pressure is concentrated against the governments of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and Miguel Díaz-Canel in Cuba. Trump reciprocated the support of those bases with the appointment of Cuban-American Marcos Rubio as Secretary of State, which he will accompany with a reinforcement of economic sanctions and greater international hostility against those governments.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, we will achieve peace through force and will always put the interests of Americans and the U.S. above all else,” Rubio himself made his intentions explicit. Rubio has been characterized in his 13 years as a U.S. senator for taking tough positions towards countries governed by progressives, and for cultivating ties with right-wing leaders in the region.

However, Rubio’s choice for the State Department appears to be “largely because he’s a hawk on non-Latin American issues like China and Iran,” says Alan McPherson, a Temple University expert on Washington’s relations with Latin America. “I don’t think much more attention will be paid to Latin America simply because of his presence in the cabinet.”

Before leaving the White House, the Democratic administration in the United States continues to play ahead of the curve. In Ukraine, it brought Europe (and the whole world) to the brink of a confrontation, even a nuclear one, by authorizing Zelensky to use U.S. missiles on Russian territory. And on the same day, Secretary of State Antony Bliken tweeted about Venezuela, calling former far-right candidate Edmundo Gonzalez “president-elect.” Something he had been very careful to do. Until now.

And everything gets more complicated for the sovereignty of Latin American countries with the appointment of the Cuban-American Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. He called the Venezuelan government “Maduro’s narco-dictatorship”. He called Cuba a “criminal regime” that is “an enemy of the United States”. And he defined Nicaragua as “a center of massive illegal migration”.

Rubio has been characterized in his 13 years as a U.S. senator for taking tough positions towards these and other countries governed by leftists, and for cultivating ties with right-wing leaders in the region. Some fear that he is looking for excuses to invade “rogue” countries in the region, seizing natural resources to secure business for the U.S. super-rich. Back to Monroe: America for Americans.

Alan McPherson, a Temple University expert on Washington’s relations with Latin America opines that “I don’t think much more attention is paid to Latin America simply because of its presence in the cabinet.” As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations and Intelligence committees, Rubio was also an active opponent of China’s growing influence in America. He is a staunch supporter of sanctions on Venezuela and Cuba, which were tightened under Trump’s first term.

Since entering the upper House in 2011, Rubio championed conservative causes such as opposition to the normalization of relations with Havana pushed by the administration of Democrat Barack Obama (2009-2017). He was an architect of the failed strategy to recognize in 2019 Venezuelan opposition deputy Juan Guaidó as “president in charge” of his country in place of Nicolás Maduro, who – despite Rubio and the US – remains in power.

“The most likely scenario is that the Trump administration will re-implement general oil sanctions against Venezuela, including secondary sanctions on companies such as Repsol and Eni and countries such as India that do business with [state oil company] PdVSA,” noted Cynthia Arnson, a distinguished fellow at the Wilson Center. She also believes it is possible that an attempt will be made to expel Nicaragua from the Central American Free Trade Agreement (Cafta), in order to deny the government of Daniel Ortega access to the US market, the main destination of the country’s exports.

“The secondary consequences of that are significant: putting hundreds of thousands of people out of work in the textile and other sectors, increasing migration pressures in neighboring Costa Rica, as well as on the U.S. southern border,” says Arnson, who is a professor of international studies at Johns Hopkins University.

When Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced in May that he would break relations with Israel over the genocidal war in Gaza, Rubio labeled him on the social network X as a “terrorist sympathizer who wants to be Colombia’s version of Hugo Chávez.” And when Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva indicated that he would seek closer ties with both the U.S. and China, Rubio also came out against him.

“President Biden should take a firm line, holding Lula accountable for his friendship with the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), as well as with other bloodthirsty dictatorships such as those in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela,” he wrote in The Epoch Times. In 2022 that Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador had “handed over sections of his country to drug cartels and is an apologist for tyranny in Cuba, a murderous dictator in Nicaragua and a drug trafficker in Venezuela.”

The misconception that the Republican’s isolationism is preferable to any Democratic leadership because it is less interventionist will soon be contradicted. This misunderstanding originates in a sublimation of Mexico’s peculiarity as a country economically integrated to North America and linked to a permanent negotiation of its interests in security, migration, drugs and border issues.

But Latin America is not only Mexico and Central America and the Caribbean, the Andes, the Southern Cone or Brazil appear, where Trumpism has already left a negative balance.

For Trump, the main concern in Latin America is Mexico. With a 3,000-kilometer border and trade between the two countries exceeding 800 billion dollars annually, commercial exchange is going through its best moment. The main interest of the United States lies in reducing China’s economic influence in Mexican territory, which would be achieved by raising tariffs.

According to the think tank Capital Economics, a 10% tariff on products exported from Mexico to the United States means a 1.5% reduction of the Latin American country’s GDP. Likewise, Trump could tend to delay the negotiation of the T-MEC, the trade agreement inherited from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which is due to renew its terms in 2026.

At the economic and trade level, the protectionist and isolationist stance will materialize with the increase in tariffs and tariffs in the region, which could have an impact on the rise of the dollar and generate inflationary pressures. At the geopolitical level, the United States, in its “trade war” with China, will try to convince the different governments of the region of the virtues of the economic and trade alliance with them. Washington continues to consider Latin America and the Caribbean as its backyard.

Another important element is related to immigration and border protection. During his campaign, Trump has said that his administration would hire 10,000 new agents to patrol the border. This is also mixed in with the threat of mass deportations, which could affect many of the estimated eleven million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, with all the humanitarian and economic impact that would entail.

With one of the most ultra-right-wing cabinets in recent history, and in particular with such a sinister character as Marco Rubio at the helm of the foreign ministry, the tycoon has made it clear that his administration will deepen the most harmful practices that his country deploys in the region.

If we add to this the draconian restrictions on the movement of people and the sui generis trade protectionism with which he interprets his America First slogan, it is clear that turbulent times are ahead in Latin America.

More than 2000 years ago, Aristotle said “the only truth is reality”, which was a truism known to all Greeks and their slaves. Juan Domingo Perón spread that phrase as a justification for the confrontation of the poor against the rich.

And Donald Trump has already given more than ample proof of his lack of regard for the laws, ethics or minimum decency, as well as the absence of any concern for the consequences of his actions, while Rubio, as well as most of the cadres and rank and file of his party accompany him in absurdities that not long ago would have been unthinkable.

On Monday he confirmed that he will declare a state of emergency over the situation on the border with Mexico, and will use the armed forces to carry out the massive deportations of undocumented immigrants that he promised during his campaign.

For more than a year, Stephen Miller, advisor and architect of Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, appointed as deputy chief of staff for policy, insists that he is developing plans to request that Republican governors in several states deploy National Guard troops to arrest, establish detention centers and eventually deport many of the 11 million irregular immigrants living in the country…

*Uruguayan journalist and communicologist. Master in Integration. Founder of Telesur. He presides the Foundation for Latin American Integration (FILA) and directs the Latin American Center for Strategic Analysis (CLAE, www.estrategia.la).