Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
Brash, uncouth and unpredictable. Ignores the law, quoting the will of the people. Prefers quick deals through trusted intermediaries to government policies.
President Donald Trump’s iconoclastic politics and his willingness to upend long-held alliances have alarmed Europeans and shocked many Americans, but Latin Americans find the US leader easier to fathom. They recognise a familiar figure — the caudillo or strongman, a hardy perennial in the region for two centuries.
“Trump is unpredictable, capricious and vengeful like the Latin American caudillos,” says Enrique Krauze, a Mexican historian and writer. He compares the US leader with Tyrant Banderas, a fictional South American despot in a novel by the Spanish writer Ramón del Valle-Inclán.
The early caudillos in the decades after independence from Spain were often military leaders who imposed order on chaotic young nations. But in the 20th century, the type evolved to include elected figures such as Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina or Brazil’s Getúlio Vargas.
Perón, a general turned populist politician, once gave a big speech on how “we want this fight to be for the greatness of Argentina” — or, in other words, make Argentina great again.
Trump’s penchant for renaming landmarks such as Mount McKinley in Alaska echoes past caudillo moves: the highest peak in the Caribbean was renamed Pico Trujillo to honour president Rafael Trujillo during the generalíssimo’s long rule of the Dominican Republic.
Like the US leader, modern caudillos such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro have been masters of social media who shun traditional mainstream outlets and wrongfoot opponents with outlandish and deliberately provocative statements.
Donald Trump’s penchant for renaming landmarks such as Mount McKinley in Alaska echoes past caudillo moves © Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Hailing from the left or the right, they rally the masses behind the national flag and a “saviour” president who will rescue the nation and restore it to greatness.
The post-election script follows a familiar arc: in office, the “saviour” turns authoritarian, fires or imprisons opponents, lashes out at the media and rewrites laws to remove constraints.
“The institutions were no longer able to contain them,” said former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castañeda of the caudillos. “The best example is Chávez . . . and it’s very similar to what Trump is doing, which is to get elected, and then little by little whittle away at the institutions around him that are meant to contain him. He’s clearly doing that with the justice system and clearly doing it with the bureaucracy.”
When a caudillo is in power, family members acquire outsized importance, both as go-betweens and as dealmakers in their own right. “Like it or not, the most influential Brazilian right now in the United States is not the Brazilian ambassador,” argues Marcos Troyjo, former president of the Brics bank. “It is Eduardo Bolsonaro [son of former president Jair Bolsonaro] because of his close relationship with Trump’s entourage.”
A familiarity with caudillismo also helps Latin American presidents deal with Trump. Some of the region’s leaders, such as El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele or Argentina’s Javier Milei, are unabashed fans.
But even those who are not, such as Mexico’s leftwing President Claudia Sheinbaum, have mostly found a way to negotiate. The exception is Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro, who attempted to challenge Trump but quickly folded after being threatened with crippling sanctions.
Sheinbaum secured Trump’s agreement to postpone draconian tariffs for a month after a private call that followed some of the unspoken rules for handling caudillos: ignore provocative rhetoric and avoid personal attacks or public grovelling; talk in private.
Critics have suggested that Sheinbaum had the ideal training: her political sponsor and predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador himself displayed many trademark caudillo qualities (and developed a strikingly good relationship with Trump, who reportedly nicknamed him “Juan Trump” as a sign of affection).
Unfortunately for the US, the rule of Latin American caudillos rarely ends well.
Premature death in office, whether from illness (Perón and Chávez), suicide (Vargas) or assassination (Trujillo) is common. Prison (Peru’s Alberto Fujimori and soon Bolsonaro, if prosecutors have their way) is another fate. Happy retirement is rare, reflecting the fact that, sooner or later, the people tire of their caudillo.
Krause concludes: “All caudillos are detestable, but they are detestable in different ways.”
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Publish date : 2025-03-02 14:30:00
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