Is Trump making Latin America great again?

The calamitous war on Iran and continuing failure to rein in Israel have brought United States President Donald Trump collapsing approval ratings and growing public animosity at home. Yet there is one area of his foreign policy that is perhaps serving as a consolation: Latin America. Over the past year and a half, a slew of right-wing leaders has taken power in the region through electoral victories for which Trump has more or less taken personal credit.

These leaders appear eager to facilitate the resurgence of US power projection in what Trump has, with characteristic pompousness, called the “Donroe Doctrine”. This, to put it mildly, is not great news for the average Latin American. One need only glance at the extensive history of US collaboration with right-wing Latin American regimes in the ostensible fight against leftist politics and “narco-terror” to assume that what is coming will entail a whole lot of civilian casualties.

In Colombia, for example, where far-right millionaire businessman and former criminal defence lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella was just sworn in, the US track record of funnelling heaps of money to a homicidal army joined at the hip with right-wing paramilitary outfits produced a good deal of bloodshed. And what do you know: De la Espriella amassed a portion of his lawyerly fortune defending paramilitary leaders. In addition to having charmingly pledged to “disembowel” the left, de la Espriella is obsessed with jumpstarting fracking and pursuing other environmentally destructive projects.

Trump’s posse of Latin American acolytes also includes the likes of Argentina’s Javier Milei, the uniquely coiffed chainsaw-wielding character whose party did smashingly in October midterm elections after Trump conditioned a $40bn bailout of the country on just such an outcome at the polls. Milei’s decision to wipe out welfare provisions has sent millions of Argentinians into poverty and flooded the streets of Buenos Aires with homeless people. Meanwhile in January, right-wing businessman Nasry Asfura assumed the presidency of Honduras following Trump’s threat to cut off aid to the small Central American nation in the event that Asfura lost the elections – another fine example of democracy at work.

Predictably, Asfura’s so-called crackdown on crime has merely spurred violence in the country. Trump’s regional winning streak has also extended to Chile, where in 2025 he endorsed the ultimately triumphant presidential candidate Jose Antonio Kast, an admirer of notorious Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. In one of his first moves as president, Kast personally inspected the start of a campaign to dig trenches along Chile’s borders.

Then there are Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and Peru’s Keiko Fujimori – herself the daughter of another deceased dictator – all of whom have adopted, to varying degrees, the sort of iron-fist strategy on crime that does absolutely nothing to address its root causes. The US president, for his part, has good reason to be pleased with the gaggle of like-minded leaders in Washington’s self-declared “backyard”. For one thing, they are all in agreement that government should be by the rich and for the rich – a foundational principle of Trumpism.