A big bet on Donald Trump
By Jack Nicas
It’s not unusual for politics in Latin America to swing back and forth between left and right.
Just a few years ago, left-wing candidates were on a winning streak, claiming countries like Brazil and Colombia. Since President Trump returned to office, though, the last seven presidential elections in Latin America — in Colombia, Chile, Honduras, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Costa Rica — have all been won by right-wing candidates.
The swing is normal. But this lurch to the right has come at a particularly consequential moment.
The Trump administration is bent on exerting new levels of control over the region with tariffs, sanctions, airstrikes, election interventions, an oil blockade on Cuba and the capture of Venezuela’s leader.
It’s Trump’s more aggressive version of the Monroe Doctrine, the 1823 claim of U.S. primacy in Latin America. And its pairing with the right’s ascendance has set up a potentially fundamental shift.
Many of the right-wing governments that took power in the last year won on promises to hit cartels harder, and the Trump administration is eager to help.
In effect, these governments are betting that cooperating with the Trump administration will help them address the issue most important to voters: security. Should that bet pay off, it could tighten the right’s grip on the continent.
A counter-cartel coalition
A new war on drugs has been central to Trump’s Latin America strategy. The administration has compared fighting cartels to the war on terror in the Middle East, and has acted accordingly. The U.S. military has carried out 70 strikes on boats in the waters around Latin America, killing more than 230 people it claimed were drug traffickers. (Many legal experts consider the strikes illegal.) Last week, American soldiers joined a police operation in Ecuador against a cartel.
That is the sort of cooperation the Trump administration wants to expand. Eighteen Latin American nations have joined a new U.S.-led coalition against cartels, and at least three of them — Colombia, Guatemala and Ecuador — have already agreed to joint military operations with the Pentagon.
It’s not the first time the U.S. and Latin America have tried to fight drug gangs together. But the degree of ideological alignment across the region, as well as the Trump administration’s willingness to intervene militarily, has made this an exceptional moment.
Security experts say the coordination could aid intelligence, especially in tracking criminal financial networks — long a weak spot in Latin America.
In August, the Pentagon announced a new task force for the Western Hemisphere designed to act as a hub for intelligence and operations among allied countries. And last week, 14 of the nations in the counter-cartel coalition followed the Trump administration’s lead and designated various cartels as terrorist organizations. The largest cartels are effectively multinational corporations, trafficking drugs and laundering money across borders, and so the designations could enable governments to better attack their finances with sanctions.
“You were on your own,” Trump told his Latin American allies at the United Nations last week. “You’re not on your own anymore.”
At the same time, the administration has signaled that it’s less eager to help leftist governments. That was the case in Colombia before voters there elected Abelardo De La Espriella, a lawyer who has vowed to take an especially hard-line approach to cartels. The White House has withheld visas for federal police agents from Brazil, which has a left-wing government.
(Mexico, the other big Latin American democracy still run by a leftist government, has actually expanded its cooperation with the administration, but the U.S.-Mexico relationship is unique in the region.)
The big test
Latin America’s rightward shift now faces its biggest test.
Voters head to the polls on Sunday in Brazil, the region’s largest nation and economy, and the left has reasons to be worried. Polling shows that Lula is neck and neck with Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of Jair Bolsonaro, who has promised to join the U.S.-led coalition against cartels if elected.
If Bolsonaro is elected, it would fill in the biggest missing piece on Latin America’s right-wing map.
There are still questions about whether the counter-cartel coalition can make a difference. Experts say the Pentagon’s boat strikes have hardly slowed the flow of cocaine. And there are few specifics on how countries will actually work together, and what becomes of it once Trump is out of power.
But if it succeeds in loosening the cartels’ grip on Latin America, and improving security for citizens, even a bit, it could have lasting political consequences.
Consider Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador. He’s used authoritarian tactics, like locking up tens of thousands of young men with little due process, to drastically lower crime rates in his nation of 6 million.
That approach has drawn an outcry from human-rights groups, but voters love it. Bukele calls himself the world’s coolest dictator, but polls show he is also one of the world’s most popular presidents.
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Yesterday marked the first birthday of this newsletter! Our inaugural issue focused on the specter of regime change in Venezuela. An aggressive focus on the Western Hemisphere “may soon be official U.S. doctrine,” I wrote at the time. No kidding.
Donald Trump has deepened Washington’s influence and increased its military presence across Latin America. And one way he has done that is by offering to work with like-minded right-wing leaders to fight drug cartels.
This weekend, Brazil, one of the few countries on the continent run by a left-wing government, goes to the polls. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is up against the son of the former president Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally. Today my colleague Jack Nicas writes about why this is a pivotal moment.
