Latin America Is About to Become a Priority for U.S. Foreign Policy

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While traveling throughout Latin America in recent years, visitors heard the same refrain: Washington isn’t paying enough attention to the region. Business leaders, academics, and politicians on both the left and the right agreed that the United States lacked a clear strategy for engagement and was losing influence and economic opportunities, especially to China. Such talk is hardly new. A 1973 article in Foreign Affairs warned that “the United States has no Latin American policy, save one of benign neglect.” But these laments seemed to reach a crescendo during the Biden administration, which was seen as too focused on the United States’ growing rivalry with Beijing and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East to devote even minimal bandwidth to its southern neighbors.

As the old adage goes, be careful what you wish for. Donald Trump’s second presidency seems destined to focus more attention on Latin America than any U.S. administration in perhaps 30 years, including the incoming president’s first term. The reason is straightforward: Trump’s top domestic priorities of cracking down on unauthorized immigration, stopping the smuggling of fentanyl and other illicit drugs, and reducing the influx of Chinese goods into the United States all depend heavily on policy toward Latin America. His stronger-than-expected electoral mandate (winning the popular vote plus control of both houses of Congress) coupled with a substantial increase in the flows of migrants and narcotics since he first occupied the White House mean that Trump will be even more emboldened than before to pressure Latin American governments to help achieve his goals. He will resort if necessary to punitive measures including tariffs, sanctions, and perhaps limited military action, such as drone strikes against Mexican cartels, to try to get his way.

Trump’s heightened interest in the region will be welcomed by fellow conservatives, such as Argentine President Javier Milei, El Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele, and others at a time when the ideological right appears to be ascendant throughout much of Latin America. The appointment of U.S. Senator Marco Rubio as secretary of state, if confirmed by the Senate, would not only elevate a son of Cuban immigrants and fluent Spanish speaker but also make him probably the most well-traveled and connected official on Latin American issues to serve at such a high level in Washington since Nelson Rockefeller was vice president under President Gerald Ford in the 1970s. Trump and Rubio’s approach could, over time, bring new and unexpected opportunities for economic integration and investment to Latin American countries the administration perceives as cooperative and friendly.

But especially in the short term, Trump’s policies toward the region are likely to be highly disruptive—and could risk pushing key Latin American countries further away from Washington rather than reversing the drift of recent years. Mexico faces the biggest challenges, including the possibility of severe damage to trade with the United States, the destination of more than 80 percent of its exports, unless it meets Trump’s demands to help secure the countries’ 2,000-mile-long shared border. Trump’s recent threats to implement a 25 percent tariff on Mexico upon taking office were only the start of a protracted and tense negotiation that no one should assume is a bluff. Indeed, Mexico is not alone. Other countries, stretching from Guatemala to Colombia, will also face tariffs or other sanctions unless they are seen to be halting the northward flow of migrants through the Darien Gap and other key transit points and taking back citizens swept up in Trump’s promised mass deportations. A second Trump administration will try to pressure Latin American governments including Brazil, Panama, and Peru to stop accepting Chinese investment for sensitive projects such as ports, electric grids, and 5G telecommunications networks. Many Republicans perceive these linkages, and the growing Chinese presence in Latin America more broadly, as unacceptable violations of the Monroe Doctrine, the 201-year-old edict that the Western Hemisphere should be free of interference from outside powers, an idea that has enjoyed a certain revival among Republicans in today’s era of heightened great-power competition.

Whether Trump’s policies toward the region result in a widespread backlash, a series of quiet accommodations, or an era of stronger U.S.-Latin American ties will depend on several factors. Some of them, such as the crises driving record migration in recent years from several countries across the region, will be largely beyond the president-elect’s control. The biggest question, some Republican officials say, is whether Trump comes to see Latin America as not just a source of the United States’ biggest problems but also a potential solution to them.

HEADING SOUTH It is fair to note that many of the most dire prophecies about Trump’s first term in Latin America failed to come true. After Trump launched his 2016 presidential campaign by accusing Mexico of sending rapists to the United States, threatening to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and promising to make Mexico pay for a new border wall, some predicted that he would take a hostile approach not just to Mexico but also to the entire region.

His policies proved to be more nuanced. Despite clear ideological differences between Trump and former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a leftist, the two leaders managed to forge a relationship that was transactional and ultimately respectful. As long as López Obrador cooperated on migration issues—by ordering Mexican troops to stop northward bound migrants before they reached the U.S. border, for example—Trump left Mexico alone to pursue its domestic agenda without interference or even much commentary. The two countries approved a new trade deal with Canada, known as the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), that even some free-market advocates saw as an improvement on its predecessor NAFTA due to its enhanced protections for intellectual property and labor rights. Elsewhere, Trump established cordial relationships with several like-minded Latin American leaders, helping secure a $57 billion International Monetary Fund loan package—the largest in the history of the Washington-based lender—for his longtime friend President Mauricio Macri of Argentina. Most of Trump’s vitriol and ire was focused on the socialist dictatorships of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, which he targeted with sanctions and other policies that enjoyed broad support elsewhere in the hemisphere at the time.

But the relatively benign outcomes of Trump’s first term in Latin America may now be breeding a certain complacency about his second. U.S.-Mexican ties were salvaged during his first term only after Mexican officials secured repeated last-minute interventions from sympathetic interlocutors in the White House, including Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his former chief of staff John Kelly, who helped convince the president not to unilaterally close the border or withdraw from NAFTA, according to accounts at the time. Those moderating voices may be absent or at least outnumbered in a second term, overshadowed by more hawkish officials such as incoming national security adviser Mike Waltz, a Florida congressman who introduced legislation in 2023 seeking to authorize U.S. military force against Mexican cartels. Waltz has said that the legislation would not include the deployment of U.S. troops on Mexican soil, but it would allow the use of drones, cyberwarfare, “intelligence assets [and] naval assets” to target organized crime groups. The incoming vice president, JD Vance, a Marine Corps veteran, also voiced support during the campaign for sending the U.S. military to “do battle with the Mexican drug cartels,” an idea that has become much more widely accepted in Republican circles since Trump’s first term.

It is unclear whether Trump will come to see Latin America as more of an opportunity than a threat. There is no doubt that the issues of drug trafficking and migration along the border have become more urgent. Although overdose deaths in the United States fell slightly in 2023 to about 107,000 people, that number is still about 70 percent higher than when Trump first took office in 2017. About three-quarters of the fatalities were caused by fentanyl, which U.S. officials say comes mostly from Mexico. The number of unauthorized migrant crossings detected at the U.S.-Mexican border tripled under Biden’s watch, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data, although migration has sharply declined in recent months after Biden implemented more stringent controls prior to the November election. Meanwhile, bilateral trade has also evolved in a way not to Trump’s liking, with the United States running a record trade deficit with Mexico of $152 billion in 2023. Throughout his campaign, Trump described tariffs on Mexico not just as a tool to secure greater cooperation on migration but also as a necessary step to protect U.S. manufacturing, suggesting that he might implement duties of 100 percent or higher on Mexican-made vehicles.

Officials in both countries know that Trump is a dealmaker, and some believe the conduct of his presidency will ultimately be less harsh than his rhetoric. New tariffs on Mexico would damage the U.S. economy as well, given how deeply supply chains have become intertwined over the last 30 years, and they risk a resurgence of the inflation that drove many Americans to vote for Trump this year. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, a protégé of López Obrador who took office in October, will likely be able to satisfy some of Trump’s demands, including receiving migrants from third-party countries as they await entry to the United States. Trump sounded pleased in public remarks regarding a large seizure of fentanyl by authorities in Mexico in early December, days after he made a particularly dramatic tariff threat.

Nevertheless, Mexican officials fear that difficult times are still ahead. Trump has repeatedly cast Mexico as a source of the United States’ biggest problems, and he often sounded during the 2024 campaign as if he believed a fundamental split between the countries would bring jobs back to the United States and other benefits for his working-class base. It’s also unclear whether Mexico has the resources or the political will to fully secure the vast border or to confront organized crime groups that have grown even more powerful in recent years and that by some estimates now control as much as one-third of Mexico’s territory. (Mexico’s government strongly rejects such estimates.) As fate would have it, the USMCA is set for a previously scheduled review by its three members in 2026. Some close to Trump say he never liked the deal in the first place, viewing it as a first-term concession to business interests, whose support will be less critical now that he is not seeking reelection. Mexico’s recent decisions to replace its judiciary through direct elections and move toward abolishing autonomous regulatory agencies may violate the USMCA’s terms, making it even easier for Trump to try to overhaul its provisions—or simply walk away.

TOUGHENING UP Mexico certainly won’t be the only country facing intensified pressure. During Trump’s first term, migrants came largely from Mexico and the so-called Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. More recently, the profile has been much more diverse, with record outflows from Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela, as well as from Ecuador, Peru, and other countries in the region struggling with organized crime and economic stagnation. Just as many Latin American officials complained in recent decades about a narcotización of their relationships with the United States, as narcotics dominated all other subjects, regional ties may see a migratización in coming years, with tariffs and other punishments doled out to governments perceived as failing to stop the flow of migrants northward.

The leftist dictatorships in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela will also receive tougher treatment, although it’s unclear how much attention Trump will devote to them. During his first term, Trump adopted a “maximum pressure” strategy of sanctions against Venezuela and its dictator Nicolás Maduro, recognizing the opposition figure Juan Guaidó as the country’s legitimate president—a decision supported by numerous other Latin American governments, as well as by Canada and the European Union. The strategy ultimately failed to dislodge Maduro, however, and sanctions only deepened Venezuela’s economic crisis, contributing to an even greater exodus of Venezuelan migrants to the United States and elsewhere in the region. The Biden administration tried negotiating with Maduro’s regime, only to see it resort to massive fraud in July presidential elections and lock up yet another round of political opponents. Trump will almost certainly return to a more adversarial approach toward all three dictatorships, which are particularly important causes for Rubio and others among Trump’s Florida-heavy team of advisers. Yet there appears to be a split between those who believe the regimes are “weak and teetering,” as Florida Representative Mario Díaz-Balart recently contended, and other Republicans who, burned by the experience of Trump’s first term, argue that major new sanctions and other pressure tactics would stand little chance of restoring democracy and risk unleashing yet another large wave of outward migration.

Indeed, Trump and his team may save their energy for what they see as the larger threat: China. Latin America’s trade with China has exploded from $18 billion in 2002 to $480 billion in 2023, and Beijing has increasingly become a key investor in infrastructure projects including ports, public transportation, and electric grids. No one on Trump’s team believes the new administration can convince Latin American countries to turn their backs on Beijing entirely, but officials do plan to be more aggressive in trying to keep the Chinese away from the most sensitive civilian and military assets in the region, which they see as a matter of national security.

For example, Trump’s former top Latin America aide, Mauricio Claver-Carone, recently proposed applying a 60 percent tariff on any imports to the United States that have passed through Peru’s massive new port of Chancay, which was built by China at a cost of $1.3 billion. Claver-Carone called his proposal a “shot across the bow” meant to deter any country in Latin America from accepting Chinese investment in critical infrastructure. Trump officials have also deemed Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications provider, and Chinese companies that produce electric vehicles in Mexico to be strategic threats. It’s unclear how governments around the region will react to such pressure, since ties with China often have little to do with ideology—even Milei, the first foreign leader to meet with Trump after his election, is reportedly now considering a visit to Beijing in early 2025. Attempts at pressure could backfire and convince some countries, including Brazil and Colombia, to deepen their ties with Beijing and other nonaligned groups such as BRICS, the partnership whose first members were Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.

THE CHINA FACTOR Perhaps ironically, some Trump backers believe that the United States’ competition with China may ultimately be what compels the president-elect to pursue a more constructive relationship with Latin America. If Trump is truly intent on reducing Chinese imports, the theory goes, he may see allied countries in the Western Hemisphere as alternative sources of cheap labor that would help strengthen the U.S. supply chain. The growth of near-shoring, which accelerated under the Biden administration, could also boost the economies of the region—and, over time, give potential migrants a reason to stay home. In a July essay for Americas Quarterly, Claver-Carone cited “the inextricable link between U.S. national security and mutual economic growth” in the hemisphere and proposed using the Development Finance Corporation and other U.S. agencies to finance investments and “Make the Americas Grow Again.”

It is unclear whether Trump, once in office, will come to see Latin America as more of an opportunity than a threat. But such integration-minded proposals and other parts of the Trump agenda would win considerable support in a region eager for economic growth and greater engagement with Washington. Even Trump’s immigration and deportation policies may find sympathy at a time when the likes of Argentina, Chile, and Costa Rica have themselves struggled to accommodate rising migration from poorer countries. Widespread frustration over organized crime throughout the hemisphere, as well as social changes such as the spread of evangelical Christianity, mean that right-wing leaders may be favored to win upcoming elections in Chile in 2025 and Brazil and Colombia in 2026. It is entirely possible to imagine Trump working with a broad array of like-minded governments in the region to address security and other shared challenges.

But others sound a note of caution. The stagnation that has supposedly plagued U.S. ties with Latin America in recent years may have had less to do with a lack of bandwidth or ambition in Washington than some believe. Competing with China, for example, has been exceedingly difficult now that, for the first time since World War II, both political parties in Washington fundamentally do not believe in the benefits of free trade. Unlike China, the United States cannot order its companies to do business in Latin America and expect them to wait years for a profit—or simply to invest for geopolitical reasons. The past 30 years of U.S.-Latin American relations, seen in a different light, can be interpreted as an unglamorous but methodical construction of trade and other ties that have supported mutual economic growth, favored the strengthening of democracies, helped address challenges such as climate change, and promoted more equal relationships in the wake of the Cold War. Whether “benign neglect” will be replaced with something better during Trump’s second presidency remains to be seen.

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