U.S. President Donald Trump must be feeling confident about his ability to bend Latin America to his will. It is not just because he recently decapitated the government of Venezuela, which he claimed the United States will now “run,” but it is also because a broad electoral wave across the region has brought a new set of right-wing leaders to power who are happy to praise him and are eager for his favor.
Washington should curb its enthusiasm over Latin America’s political realignment, however, regardless of whether it is the result of elections or the abduction of leaders by U.S. special forces.
U.S. President Donald Trump must be feeling confident about his ability to bend Latin America to his will. It is not just because he recently decapitated the government of Venezuela, which he claimed the United States will now “run,” but it is also because a broad electoral wave across the region has brought a new set of right-wing leaders to power who are happy to praise him and are eager for his favor.
Washington should curb its enthusiasm over Latin America’s political realignment, however, regardless of whether it is the result of elections or the abduction of leaders by U.S. special forces.
Some wins for the right in the region followed similar trends as those that gave the U.S. presidency to Trump: A growing hostility toward migrants—which many countries in South America had not seen before in such numbers—and the related fear of rampant crime helped right-wing politicians who campaigned on hard-line policies to restore public safety.
These parallels, however, will not necessarily align Latin America’s right with Trump and his wish list. Critically, not even the most right-wing of right-wing governments, the most lavish in praise for the U.S. president, or the most grateful for Washington’s helping hand will be ready to deliver what the Trump administration claims to want: a continent that is disengaged from China and tied to his will.
In the U.S. National Security Strategy released in December, Latin America featured largely as a source of energy and critical minerals. Other than access to those resources, what Washington wants from countries in the region is to stamp out migration, curb the drug trade, and fend off China.
The United States will largely get its way in some countries—mainly those around the Caribbean rim that are already mostly aligned with it and extremely vulnerable to its policy swings. But Trump’s ask will be a very hard sell in countries further south, which have been building close economic relations with China for the past three decades.
Consider the contrast. At Washington’s behest, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s left-wing government imposed tariffs of up to 50 percent on Chinese imports, despite the cost to Mexican consumers and businesses. Under pressure from the United States, Mexico has also taken a much more skeptical approach to Chinese investment, notably fending off plans by the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer, BYD, to establish a manufacturing facility in the country.
In Brazil, former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro was so aligned with Trump’s MAGA agenda that Trump imposed punitive tariffs on the country after its judiciary ruled against Bolsonaro for planning a military coup in 2022. But even this close ideological and personal connection did nothing to keep Bolsonaro from growing Brazil’s economic ties with China, whose shares of Brazil’s exports and imports increased during his presidency.
According to former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda, the southern half of the Western Hemisphere is already largely in China’s orbit. This is not motivated by ideological alignment or a common worldview. It is about economic self-interest. The vast ideological gulf between Trump and Sheinbaum, for example, is of scant relevance when the United States absorbs around 80 percent of Mexican exports or about 30 percent of Mexico’s GDP.
China, by contrast, is now the largest trading partner of most South American countries, far eclipsing the United States. It is also one of South America’s largest investors, providing $222 billion to the region from 2005 to 2024. In 2000, less than 2 percent of Brazilian exports went to China, according to World Bank data. By 2023, more than 30 percent did. For Chile, those numbers rose from around 5 percent to more than 39 percent during the same period. The U.S. share of South American exports, by contrast, declined dramatically. “Reality on the ground is already well-defined,” Castañeda said. Chile’s right-wing president-elect, José Antonio Kast, “will not change the destination of Chile’s copper.”
This is not the first U.S. administration to get worked up over China’s growing footprint in Latin America. In 2021, Chile annulled a contract with a Chinese company to manufacture Chilean passports and national identification cards after Biden administration officials warned that it would be tough for it to remain in the U.S. visa waiver program if China had access to Chileans’ passport data.
The first Trump administration also leaned on Chile to reject proposals from Huawei to build a trans-Pacific undersea cable connecting Valparaíso to Shanghai. Laura Richardson, a former U.S. Army general who headed U.S. Southern Command from 2021 to 2024, raised the alarm that the Chancay port in Peru, built by Chinese shipping company Cosco, could “absolutely” host Chinese warships.
In some cases, ideological bonds could make it easier for Trump to push back against Chinese influence. Argentine President Javier Milei is probably Washington’s most vocal supporter among Latin American leaders. He owes Trump a substantial debt after the White House offered a $20 billion swap line to Argentina in the run-up to the country’s 2025 parliamentary elections, which helped avert a massive currency devaluation that would have sunk Milei’s movement at the polls.
In exchange, Milei nixed plans from the previous Argentine government to buy Chinese-Pakistani fighter jets and instead bought several secondhand American F-16s from Denmark. He also halted a plan to build a Chinese radio telescope, and a project to build a Chinese nuclear reactor is in limbo. Last December, a Chinese company was blocked from bidding on a project to deepen the Paraná River waterway, a crucial route for shipping Argentina’s agricultural exports across the world.
But even Milei has not evicted China from its space facility in Patagonia, which produces untold heartburn in Washington. The Argentine central bank still maintains a currency swap line with the People’s Bank of China, which the United States would like Argentina to disengage from. And Milei’s zero-tariff policy is turbocharging trade. Exports to China increased 57 percent between November 2024 and November 2025, much faster than exports to the United States. Indeed, Washington was bent out of shape when—shortly after it offered Buenos Aires the $20 billion lifeline—Argentina removed its export tax on soybeans, cut a huge deal with China, and angered U.S. farmers in the process.
Beyond Argentina, Trump has other ideological allies in Latin America. Chile and Bolivia have flipped from left to right since his first term, Trump allies won in Ecuador and Honduras, and the right is also expected to win in upcoming elections in Peru and Colombia. But this doesn’t change the fact that these countries are all hungry for investment and growing markets for their exports of raw materials, both of which China offers. Focused on cutting the United States off from world trade, Trump offers mostly threats and pressure.
Given the U.S. raid in Venezuela and Washington’s threats against Greenland, it would not be surprising for Trump to believe that threats—whether military or economic—could push Latin American governments to kiss China goodbye. And yet, evidence suggests that leaders in the region will not easily give away their motor of economic development, whether or not they are otherwise aligned with Trump.
