Media reports in the Miami Herald and other outlets suggest that Carlos Trujillo, a Cuban-American who served as ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS) in the first Trump administration, may soon be nominated for “assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs or a similar position,” alongside Senator Marco Rubio as secretary of state, in the new Trump administration. This should concern anyone who supports the sovereignty and self-determination of Latin American and Caribbean countries, and who opposes the various US interventions and regime change efforts in the region.
Trujillo not only is a hard-line supporter of lethal economic sanctions against countries like Cuba, he also reportedly played a key role in providing and reaffirming the pretext for the 2019 coup d’etat in Bolivia.
Trujillo promoted false claims of electoral fraud in Evo Morales’s favor in the 2019 elections, despite a lack of evidence and debunking of the claims by The New York Times, professors at Tulane and University of Pennsylvania, researchers at MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab (and their post at the Washington Post site), 133 economists and statisticians, a study by a University of Michigan statistician, and several CEPR reports. But as the Los Angeles Times reported, “Carlos Trujillo, the U.S. ambassador to the OAS, had steered the group’s election-monitoring team to report widespread fraud and pushed the Trump administration to support the ouster of Morales.”
Just days after angry opponents of Morales attacked the homes and relatives of Morales and his cabinet members, torched electoral tribunal offices, and humiliated and dragged a female MAS mayor through the streets — and just two days after Morales was forced to step down and flee — Trujillo praised the mobs’ actions in a speech at the OAS. “We salute the courage and strength of the Bolivian people who protested against a government trying to steal an election,” Trujillo said, before going on to also commend the police and military for their actions; the police had mutinied, and the military had pressured Morales to step down.
The OAS, which receives about 60 percent of its budget from the US government, aggressively perpetuated the election fraud narrative, beginning the day after the vote. As the New York Times reported, this “fueled a chain of events that changed the South American nation’s history. The opposition seized on the claim to escalate protests, gather international support, and push Mr. Morales from power with military support weeks later.”
OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro even defended the violent coup — which was followed in short succession by massacres of Indigenous coup opponents — by Tweeting that the “real coup” had been carried out by the Morales campaign. Almagro also attacked the New York Times for its reporting that debunked the election fraud narrative.
As OAS ambassador, Trujillo supported other antidemocratic leaders, including the since-assassinated right-wing Haitian president Jovenel Moïse; the unelected, briefly self-proclaimed “president” of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó; and Honduras’s Juan Orlando Hernández, who is now serving a 45-year US prison sentence for drug trafficking and weapons charges.
Trujillo is also a hard-line hawk on immigration, which he has signaled may be the focus of the next Trump administration’s Latin America policy. As the New Yorker reported last month:
Trujillo had sponsored a bill to make it a felony for immigrants who had been deported to reënter the state of Florida, and he supported a bill sponsored by another Republican state legislator which would have allowed the governor to use the military to keep certain immigrants out of the state. (Neither bill became law, and Trujillo later distanced himself from a revised version of the bill that was more expansive than he intended it to be.)
Trujillo reportedly wound up in the first Trump administration due at least in part to the urgings of Rubio and Susan Wiles, Trump’s 2024 campaign cochair and Florida political operative whom Trump has picked to be chief of staff in his new administration.
Rubio’s nomination to be the next secretary of state is now official, despite pushback from some in Trump World. Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein has published a dossier on Rubio, reportedly compiled by the Trump campaign and obtained by an Iranian hacker who leaked it to media. Klippenstein reports that numerous passages in the dossier detail areas where Rubio’s neoconservative positions have been at odds with Trump, including in Rubio’s support for the now-dead Trans-Pacific Partnership and other “free trade” deals, for the Iraq War, and for a robust NATO. Klippenstein also reports that the dossier notes various criticisms that Rubio had leveled against Trump since 2016, including Rubio’s suggestion that Putin had interfered in the 2016 election in support of Trump.
The Miami Herald notes that with Rubio’s nomination, the Trump administration’s top officials overseeing Latin America policy are likely to be hard-line proponents of economic sanctions and of other regime change efforts aimed at left-wing governments in the region, especially Venezuela and Nicaragua, as well as Cuba. Cuba is currently facing a humanitarian and economic crisis, with reports that some hungry Cubans are resorting to drinking sugar water for sustenance, and the island has suffered several major power outages in recent months following hurricanes.
As CEPR has shown in multiple reports, US unilateral economic sanctions against countries such as Cuba target the civilian population as a form of collective punishment, leading to many thousands of excess deaths, illness, and hunger. They are also illegal under international law. And numerous scholars, policymakers, and current and former US government officials have noted that US sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela have helped to fuel out-migration — ironically contributing to an immigration wave that Trump has signaled will be a major priority, and that he has vowed to meet with the deportation of some 11 million or more people.
Dan Beeton is Communications Director for the International Program at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) was established in 1999 to promote democratic debate on the most important economic and social issues that affect people’s lives. In order for citizens to effectively exercise their voices in a democracy, they should be informed about the problems and choices that they face. CEPR is committed to presenting issues in an accurate and understandable manner, so that the public is better prepared to choose among the various policy options.
