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TRUMP AND THE LATIN AMERICAN LEFT  
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Ociel Ali López
December 6, 2024
NACLA Reports [[link removed]]

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_ Progressive governments in Latin America are not as united today as
they were a decade ago. How prepared are they to navigate the
onslaught of a second Trump administration? _

Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who has been nominated by
president-elect Donald Trump to be Secretary of State, speaks at the
Conservative Political Action Conference on March 14, 2013, in
National Harbor, Maryland, (Flickr/Gage Skidmore/CC BY-SA 2.0).

 

In mid-November, during a trip to participate in the APEC and G20
leaders’ summits in Latin America, Chinese President Xi Jinping
attended the inauguration of a mega port in Chancay, Peru. The huge
deep-water infrastructure project, built with $1.3 billion in Chinese
investment, is set to be complemented by a bi-oceanic railway
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will connect Chancay to Brazil’s Atlantic coast. According to a
Chinese government spokesperson, the completion of the mega port
solidifies “Peru’s role as a gateway linking shipping between Asia
and Latin America.”

Back in 2018, when Donald Trump started a trade war with China during
his first term as president, few imagined this degree of expansion of
Chinese investments in Latin America, the often-cited “backyard”
of the United States.

At that time, the Peruvian government was a loyal ally of
Washington—in theory, it still is. In 2017, less than 100 kilometers
south of the recently inaugurated mega port, Peru hosted the founding
of the Lima Group, a forum created by 12 countries that sought to
intervene in Venezuela’s domestic politics. The Group rejected
Venezuela’s 2018 presidential elections and pushed for President
Nicolás Maduro’s de facto removal from office, as dictated by
Trump's officials. During a Latin American tour in early 2018, then
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson made clear his objective of
overthrowing the Venezuelan government and generated support for what
later crystallized as the “Guaidó project” in January 2019, when
Juan Guaidó declared himself the country’s interim president.

The juxtaposition of the imposing new mega port and the now-defunct
Lima Group only serves to underscore how much things have changed in
recent years in Latin America, even among the governments closest to
the hardliners in Washington. When Trump returns to the White House
in a few weeks, he will face a map of the Americas occupied
predominantly by progressive forces. Meanwhile, on the commercial
front, China is making overwhelming progress in almost all the
countries of the region.

Trump's first administration from 2017 to 2021 presented a golden
opportunity for the Latin American right, which had been in retreat
for more than a decade amid the advance of progressive governments in
the region. Right-wing forces had shrewdly created “conservative
populisms,” represented by Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Mauricio
Macri in Argentina, that served a blow to left-wing forces and won
political power in several countries.

But by the end of Trump’s administration, the right-wing governments
that made up the Lima Group—expanded from the original 12 member
countries to 17—were dissolving. Right-wing forces that had made
electoral gains were unable to secure reelection and stabilize their
footholds in their respective countries. By the end of 2018, Andrés
Manuel López Obrador was in power in Mexico. In 2019, Macri lost his
reelection bid in Argentina. In 2020, Luis Arce won in Bolivia after a
stint under the coup government of Jeanine Áñez. In 2021, Pedro
Castillo, Gabriel Boric, and Xiomara Castro won power in Peru, Chile,
and Honduras.

During this same period, from 2019 to 2021, several unusually intense
episodes of protests rocked Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Puerto Rico, and
Haiti. These uprisings all came as a consequence of the implementation
of neoliberal measures designed with the blessings of a
Republican-occupied Washington. In 2022 Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
defeated Bolsonaro, the same year Gustavo Petro won a historic victory
against right-wing populism in Colombia. These progressive gains were
bolstered by the rise of Bernardo Arévalo in Guatemala in 2023 and
Yamandú Orsi in Uruguay in 2024.

Weeks away from the transfer of power in the United States, many are
concerned about how progressive heads of state will face Trump and his
Republican officialdom and to what extent the region’s leftist
governments are prepared to handle another Trump presidency.

TRUMP IS BACK. WILL THE RIGHT RETURN WITH HIM?

Rómulo Betancourt, Venezuelan president from 1945 to 1948 and 1959 to
1964, used to say that “when the United States sneezes, Latin
America gets bronchitis.” That sentiment may no longer be such a
given. Still, Trump’s return is not so much a simple sneeze, but
rather something more worrisome that will surely have a strong impact
on Latin America.

It is to be expected that the region’s right will once again take
advantage of Trump's victory to reposition itself and implement
designs to regain political power. However, there is not a
unidirectional line between what happens in the north and what happens
in the south of the continent. The recent victory of the Frente
Amplio [[link removed]] in
Uruguay is a case in point.

The protectionist policies that Trump has promoted against Mexico and
Canada, as well as his xenophobic way of dealing with immigration,
make for a bellicose outlook, which is consistent with Trump’s
nomination of Senator Marco Rubio for secretary of state. Rubio, an
ultra-conservative Cuban American, has emerged as the linchpin of the
Republican campaign against leftist governments, especially in Latin
America. To be sure, Washington will generously pump up right-wing
forces in the region, which are already preparing to return to power
and reduce leftist contenders to a minimum. 

Protectionism, persecution of migrants (which affects the remittances
that millions of families in Latin America rely on to live), highly
ideological rhetoric from the nominee for secretary of state, and
competition with China to co-opt markets together represent a cocktail
that could deliver a hard blow to political stability throughout the
continent, including the United States itself, which already saw a
kind of uprising (“_estallido_”) against Trump in 2020.

During Trump's recent election campaign, the issue of Latin America
was rather absent, taking a backseat to the criminalization of
Venezuelans and Haitians
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issues of migration and insecurity. Since being elected, Trump has
focused on criticizing Mexico's performance on curtailing migration
and the flow of fentanyl, threatening to increase tariffs on Mexican
imports. At the end of November, he had his first skirmish
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Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, who replied
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warning against a trade war, saying: “One tariff will be followed by
another in response.” In other words, as soon as he was elected,
rather than broaching possible negotiations, Trump began to fire his
batteries against his closest Latin American neighbor, using language
very reminiscent of the bellicose tone of his first administration.

LATIN AMERICA: UNITED OR DIVIDED?

Despite having so many progressive governments in office, Latin
America does not have the same degree of cohesion as it had in the
previous decade, when there were fewer leftist leaders in power but
with greater shared political force.

At the beginning of the 2010s, formidable regional integration
mechanisms were beginning to solidify, such as the Union of South
American Nations (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and
Caribbean States (CELAC). These intergovernmental organizations sought
to create spaces for political, economic, and cultural articulation
and succeeded in unifying governments of the right and left, even as
progressive leaders carried the founding baton. The main feature that
differentiated CELAC and UNASUR from the existing Organization of
American States (OAS) was their exclusion of the United States and
Canada, which created the conditions for Latin American and Caribbean
states to make autonomous decisions.

Today, both entities are languishing. The cycle of right-wing
governments that followed the first wave of leftist presidents left
these bodies tremendously impacted, and the recent second progressive
cycle [[link removed]] has not managed to boost their
supranational articulation. The next CELAC summit will be held in
Bogotá in 2025.

At the same time, the mechanisms of the right are either defunct, such
as the Lima Group, or weakened, such as the OAS. This lack of cohesion
one way or another may imply an open door for the kinds of
unconscionable actions that Trump (or Rubio) may try to take toward
any Latin American country.

Part of the issue is that the leftist governments have not taken a
coherent position on certain issues and have even been divided in some
cases. Brazil's recent veto of Venezuela and Nicaragua’s
petitions to join the BRICS
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perhaps the most indicative sign of the depth of the rupture between
these forces. However, it is not the only one.

Another example is the differing positions on the removal from office
of Peru’s Castillo and the subsequent presidency of Dina Boluarte.
Boluarte has been in office since 2022 and refused to call for early
elections, keeping herself in power through fierce repression that
resulted in dozens of deaths. Various leftist leaders’ rejection of
the results of this year’s presidential elections in Venezuela
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Venezuelan state to release the vote tally sheets, has also deepened
the rift.

In addition, the enthusiasm generated by the first cycle of leftist
governments is no longer the same, for different reasons. The smaller
margins of their victories, divisions between internal factions,
authoritarian drift, reduced importance of regional integration, and
institutional weaknesses are all aspects of a lack of consistency with
which to face the complex situations to come.

Trumpism could accentuate these handicaps, although there is also a
possibility that, if he intends to clash head-on, ignoring the power
accumulated by the left, he could end up pragmatically bringing
dissimilar sectors of Latin America together again. Such a scenario
could also give commercial advantages to China and other countries.

Currently, leftist political forces do not exhibit the same vigor as
they once did, and in a few months or years they will have to navigate
electoral processes amid the rise of the radical right. First, they
will have to contend with fashioning successful, popular electoral
formulations that will be able to defeat a right wing that is
increasingly radicalizing its degree of populism. In the meantime,
existing political models seem to be exhausted, from Cuba and
Venezuela, to Chile and Brazil.

Latin America could be turning to the right again, or at least pushing
several leftist governments out of the way. But that might not be the
end of the story.

REINVIGORATING THE LEFT

Even if the Republicans impose their agenda of promoting right-wing
forces, they could end up unintentionally reviving social movements
and generating new leftist proposals in the region. Understanding the
level of threat, governments may decide to reestablish integration
mechanisms. On national stages, new initiatives may emerge, both at
the grassroots and electoral levels, propelled as always by the
intensification of neoliberal radicalism.

If we recall how Trump's first term ended in the United States—with
Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 amid Covid-19 denialism that
enabled the deaths of more than a million people, and with the assault
on the Capitol in January 2021—and in Latin America with revolts and
leftist triumphs throughout the region, then we can see Trumpism as a
challenge of which progressive sectors can once again take advantage.

The situation in Argentina under the government of President Javier
Milei will be vital. His success or defeat, which will be measured in
the 2025 midterm elections, will indicate in which direction part of
Latin America is moving vis-à-vis its ally in the White House.

It is possible that every Trump sneeze will turn into pneumonia. But
it is also possible that Latin American countries no longer have the
same level of dependence on the United States. This new reality is
both because of new levels of political autonomy and because of new
allies, such as China, which is pulling ahead in trade and whose
investment plans are gaining steam and making an impact in Latin
American countries ruled by both the left and right alike.  

It may be, then, that the new U.S. political model, politically
incorrect and “savage” as it may be, will not have such a strong
impact on Latin America's designs and that the current governments,
regardless of their political orientations, will successfully navigate
the geopolitical storm, shielded against any sneezing or more serious
illness coming from the North.

_OCIEL ALÍ LÓPEZ is a sociologist and winner of the CLACS-SIDA
award for young researchers and the Caracas municipal literature
award. He is a professor at the Central University of Venezuela and
writes about Latin America._

_The North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) is an
independent, nonprofit organization founded in 1966 to examine and
critique U.S. imperialism and political, economic, and military
intervention in the Western hemisphere. In an evolving political and
media landscape, we continue to work toward a world in which the
nations and peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean are free from
oppression, injustice, and economic and political subordination._

_For more than 50 years, NACLA has been a leading source of
English-language research and analysis on Latin America and the
Caribbean. Our mission has always been to publish historically and
politically informed research and analysis on the region and its
complex and changing relationships with the United States. We use
the NACLA Report on the Americas
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for education, advocacy, dialogue, and solidarity. Our work aims to
assist readers in interpreting the most pressing issues in Latin
America and the Caribbean, and their connections with U.S. policy, to
help further movement struggles throughout the hemisphere._

* Latin American Left
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