Latin America’s New Right Ushers in Pan-American Trumpism

Donald Trump has allies in Argentina’s Javier Milei and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. Can they unify despite his volatility?

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Donald Trump leaves the stage after a campaign rally in Reno, Nev., on Oct. 11, 2024. Photo: Jae C. Hong/AP

Donald Trump is a wild card in Latin America. Who will he galvanize more? His natural allies, including leaders who share many of his culture-war obsessions? Or politicians and activists who see in Trump the long history of U.S. conquest made flesh, who bristle at his threats to seize the Panama Canal and bomb fentanyl labs in Mexico?

In trying to answer these questions, it’s helpful to take a moment to recall that Latin America, not too long ago, defied another controversial U.S. president on matters related to war and trade: George W. Bush.

By the time the Bush administration was gearing up for its 2003 invasion of Iraq, Latin America was beginning a remarkable run of elections. Leftists were coming to power in nearly every country south of Panama, many with ambitious agendas and outsized personalities. Among them were Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Néstor Kirchner in Argentina, and Evo Morales in Bolivia.

For a region that had long been under the sway of Washington, a run of dissent to Bush — dated, say, from Lula’s first election to presidency in 2002 to Chávez’s death from intestinal cancer in 2013 — was extraordinary and, for a time, extraordinarily successful. In Latin America, diplomats talked about a new “polycentric world,” while Beltway think tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations pronounced the Monroe Doctrine “obsolete.”

A new generation of reactionaries draw energy from the tactics that animate Trumpism in the U.S.

The tide eventually turned. Where more traditional conservatives had found it hard to compete at the polls against politicians like Lula and Chávez, a new generation of reactionaries began to find their footing, drawing energy from the tactics and issues that animate Trumpism in the U.S. — an obsession with gender orthodoxy, a defense of patriarchy and Christian supremacy, and a love of cryptocurrency. Latin America’s New Right stands opposed to “wokeismo,” used, as it is in the U.S., as a catchall for a range of social policies aimed at lessening class, gender, and racial inequality.

By examining this rollercoaster of a Latin American quarter-century, we might gain some insight into what to expect from Donald Trump’s second term, in Latin America and beyond.

Latin America’s leftist leaders of the aughts were resolute in their rejection of Bush’s “global war on terror,” refusing to let their security forces participate in the CIA’s transnational program of rendition and black-site torture. Brazil rebuffed U.S. demands to revise its legal code to make it easier to convict on terrorism charges; the governing Workers Party feared that such a move could be used, as one U.S. diplomat noted, to target “legitimate social movements fighting for a more just society.”

In 2005, Lula, Kirchner, and Chávez killed the much-anticipated Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, while Kirchner’s take-it-or-leave-it negotiating strategy for restructuring of Argentina’s national debt was held up as a model for lessening the debt burden of poor countries. Lula also worked to fortify the BRICS alliance as a counter to the World Trade Organization and resisted efforts to drive a wedge between Brazil and Venezuela.

Latin American nations pushed for an end to economic sanctions on Cuba, denounced Washington’s support of Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon, and complained that the prison camp the U.S. set up in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was a mockery of international law. Venezuela, Brazil, and Argentina ignored Washington’s sanctions on Iran. Bolivia expelled the Drug Enforcement Administration in 2008 and USAID in 2014. Ecuador shut down a U.S. Air Force base. Most Latin American nations opposed NATO’s 2011 bombing of Libya, which resulted in Muammar Gaddafi’s downfall and execution.

Beyond any single dissent, Brazil advocated for a “Bolivarian” interpretation of international law, organizing nations around alleviating poverty, global warming, food insecurity, and the ills of the drug war. Brazil, Lula’s foreign minister said, has “no enemies” — notable, considering that Bush’s neocons had marked out the entire globe as a battlefield. Venezuela reinforced Brazil’s position, as Caracas worked with Cuba and Nicaragua to build an explicitly anti-imperialist bloc. High commodity prices, including for Chilean copper and Venezuelan oil, allowed governments to pursue ambitious social welfare programs, lifting millions out of poverty.

Brazil waged a multifront campaign in the United Nations, WTO, and World Health Organization to break the monopoly on intellectual property held by pharmaceutical companies, insisting on its right to produce generic HIV/AIDS drugs and other “essential medicines.” Brazil won that fight, changing global norms and widening access to lifesaving treatment.

Latin America’s progressives began to lose their advantage, however, with the 2008 election of Barack Obama. Where Bush’s braggadocio hardened hemispheric opposition, Obama’s diplomats played a patient long game that brought the region back into the fold.

Obama stepped up domestic oil drilling and gas fracking, while encouraging Canada to increase its fuel and electricity exports into the United States. This was all done to greatly lower the cost of energy and to “constrain” Chávez, which it did.

Coups in Honduras in 2009 and Paraguay in 2012 ousted moderate social democrats. Washington didn’t orchestrate the overthrows, but Hillary Clinton’s State Department did legitimate them and armed the men who carried them out.

Those two small countries were low-hanging fruit. Brazil, with Venezuela contained, was the whole game.

There, Obama’s Justice Department provided critical assistance to corrupt investigators leading a legal witch hunt against the governing Workers Party, resulting in Lula’s imprisonment and the impeachment of his successor Dilma Rousseff. This “lawfare” campaign ultimately set the stage for the rise of the hard-right Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally in style and substance, who was elected president in 2018.

Then, a federal judge in New York ruled that Kirchner’s debt deal was invalid, obligating Argentina to pay its external debt in full. The judgment set loose the bond vultures on the country, sending its politics into a tailspin. Eventually, the pressure contributed to the 2023 election of Javier Milei, a self-declared anarcho-capitalist who never tires of shouting “Viva la libertad, carajo” — which roughly translates as “Liberty, motherfucker.”

Bolsonaro and Milei, along with El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, represent Trump’s potential base of support in Latin America.

Daniel Noboa, heir to a banana fortune, wouldn’t have had a shot at Ecuador’s presidency in, say, 2006, when Noboa’s father ran and lost to Rafael Correa, a left economist. But the culture wars have given the oligarchy a new luster. Young Noboa has adopted a Trump-like persona, skilled at social media, selling himself as simultaneously pro-business and anti-establishment, pro-Israel and anti-woke. Having plastered the country with posters of his image alongside those of Trump, Marco Rubio, and Elon Musk, Noboa is running close behind the leftist Luisa González in a presidential election that will go to a runoff in April.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro sits next to Donald Trump during a dinner at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., on March 7, 2020. Photo: Alex Brandon/AP

Musk is a culture hero to men like Noboa, Milei, and Bukele; his fight against Brazil’s efforts to regulate social media — carried out through legislation aimed at muting disinformation and limiting right-wing extremism — became a rallying cause for the region’s conservatives. (Brazil so far has held Musk off, though Rumble and Trump’s Truth Social have just filed a lawsuit in a U.S. court alleging illegal censorship.

In El Salvador, Bukele, a hip, baseball cap-wearing self-styled libertarian, presides over Dantesque displays of dehumanization: assemblies of hundreds of supposed gang members, their heads shaved, massed together naked and shackled. Held up as a model for not just for conservatives in Latin America, but up north, too, Bukele dispensed with due process, sparking the highest rate of incarceration in the Americas, higher even than the U.S. itself.

Psychological campaigns to destabilize elected leftist and centrist governments by amplifying lies and manipulating the institutions of democracy — the press, the ballot box, and the law — are nothing new in Latin America. The CIA ran dozens of such operations in the region. What is novel about the New Right is the appearance of grassrootedness, the sense that pressure is building spontaneously from a multitude of sources, that the right represents not a defense of the status hierarchy but a desire for anti-systemic change.

What is novel about the New Right is the appearance of grassrootedness.

The ties binding Latin America’s New Right and its American counterparts are thickening, the result not of viral memes and social media posts but the organizing efforts of billionaire funders, conservative church leaders, libertarian activists, right-wing influencers like Steve Bannon, and political parties, such as Spain’s Vox. Anti-vaccine predators target poor communities in Mexico the way they target poor communities in the U.S. Libertarians make common cause with anti-abortion and anti-trans activists, ultraorthodox Catholics, evangelical dominionists, Christian Zionists, and the Latin American branch of New Apostolic Reformation — recently highlighted as key to understanding Christian support for Trump.

Trump could run the table in Latin America.

With former Florida Sen. Marco Rubio as his secretary of state and hard-liner Mauricio Claver-Carone his “special envoy” to Latin America, one could imagine a scenario where the U.S. takes Nicolás Maduro out; squeezes Cuba until it breaks; ousts Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua; keeps the Argentine peso artificially inflated to help Milei win congressional elections in October; and drives a deeper wedge between an already split left in Boliva, finally bringing about a rightist restoration in that lithium-rich nation. Both Chile and Colombia are governed by leftists with bad poll numbers. Who knows what conversations are being had to influence their upcoming elections.

Then there is Brazil, where the charges against Lula have been thrown out, the investigation that led to his conviction shown to have been corrupt and politically motivated. Released from prison, Lula ran against and beat Bolsonaro in 2022, winning a third term as president. Bolsonaro responded to defeat by encouraging a putsch that would have kept him in power, including a plot to poison Lula. He’s currently banned from running in Brazil’s next presidential election, though his supporters have been lobbying Rubio to pressure Lula to find a way to to lift the ban and to let Nazis and antisemites post on Brazilian X. 

This scenario — which includes not just a rollback of the left but a nurturing of a pan-American Trumpism — assumes coherence and patience that might be beyond Trump’s capacity. Trump hasn’t yet appointed ambassadors to Brazil and Colombia, nor an assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere. And the freezing of foreign aid to the region, including money earmarked for the security forces, limits Washington’s room to maneuver.

Trump will most likely, at least at first, pursue spasmodic action in the hemisphere. He’s already flip-flopped twice on Venezuela. First Trump said Maduro had to go. Then it appeared that his administration made a deal where he could stay, and let Chevron pump oil. Most recently, however, he surprised Chevron by announcing he was revoking the company’s waiver to work in Venezuela, apparently as part of a deal to keep Republican members of Congress in line during budget negotiations.

As his presidency moves ahead, Trump will pick — according to his own impulses — fights with Latin America over China, migration, tariffs, deportation flights, and drug policy, and as he does, he’ll blow the chance of building a unified hemispheric movement in his image. His repeated threats that he’ll coerce Canada into becoming part of the U.S. has alienated him from Canadian conservatives. Colombians, according to one poll, mostly like Trump — but not if his continuing threats against Panama, which once was a Colombian province until the U.S. split it off in 1903 to build the canal.

Trump’s fickleness prevents him from putting forth a coherent foreign policy and building a durable international coalition. Yet this disadvantage is offset by the fragility of the Latin American left.

For now, activists continue to mobilize a wide variety of social movements aimed at making a fairer world and progressives continue to win elections. A rough regional count has more than 470,000,000 people, out of a total population of about 620,000,000, living in countries governed by presidents who call themselves socialists or social democrats.

Yet left politicians tread treacherous ground, unable to command the kind of rhetorical hegemony their comrades did two decades ago. Where Chávez energized the hemisphere’s left, his hard-to-defend successor, Maduro, exhausts it, forcing Brazil, Colombia, and Chile to waste energy debating what to do about Venezuela.

The unity that existed when the region pushed back against Bush no longer exists.

The unity that existed when the region pushed back against Bush no longer exists. Each center-left country seems an island unto itself, their governments unable to pass their reform agenda and incapable of building stabilizing coalitions. Lula still works with the BRICS on efforts to find a currency other than the dollar to do business. “Trump’s tariff threats won’t stop our determination,” he said recently, to find a way to do business that “doesn’t depend on the dollar.”

He is, however, boxed in at home, his popularity still frustratingly just a point or two above Bolsonaro, despite all of the latter’s crimes. Lula may have to run again in 2026. If he does, it will be a sign of the center-left’s weakness, not strength — an indication of Bolsonarismo’s vitality and of its opponents’ failure to offer an alternative, other than turning again to Lula, who will be 80 years old. Over the last few decades, a humane pope, raised in Peronist Argentina, has renewed progressive Christianity. The 88-year-old Pope Francis, though, is ill and weak, and ascendent Catholic reactionaries are giddy thinking he might not be long for the world.

Only Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum operates from a position of authority. Her expansion of the welfare state is enormously popular with Mexicans, with polls showing that a vast majority of the country backs her in her contretemps against Trump. Even as she delicately handles the U.S., she remains bold in putting forth a post neoliberal vision of social citizenship.

Elon Musk shake hands with Argentina’s President Javier Milei after getting a chainsaw from him at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Md., on Feb. 20, 2025. Photo: Jose Luis Magana/AP

Elections are fought on a knife’s edge, for the votes of citizens tired of crime, corruption, and inflation. In their weariness, the allure of being called to a fight is tempting. But it’s mostly the New Right doing the mustering, filling the void created by the left’s disorientation with politicized meaning. Left-wing hegemony has given way to an expansive right-wing conspiricism, a project of crypto-worldmaking ever more baroque in its details.

As in the U.S., Latin America’s New Right composes its own demonology as it grows: globalists, Judith Butler, George Soros, climate scientists, reporters, government workers, especially teachers and public university professors, migrants, and imagined pedophiles. “Con mis hijos no te metas” — “Don’t Mess With My Kids” — is the name of a Peruvian movement that has gained influence in the government, which last May decreed that intersex and transgender people were “mentally ill.” The phrase “gender equality” has been struck from Peru’s school textbooks.

Milei’s support for Israel is as “unwavering” as is his backing of Trump, even if, for Milei, Trump’s tariff policy poses a greater moral dilemma than Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The Argentine president’s defense of “freedom” — by which he means market freedom — requires constant mobilization in support of causes at odds, at least in principle, with libertarianism, including laws restricting abortion; the persecution of transgender people; collective mass incarceration; and attacks on free speech, the right to protest and assembly, journalism, public education, and teachers. The point is to dominate public discussion, Milei says, to constantly expand the conservative imagination. Otherwise, the advantage will slip back to “social justice” activists.

Milei, beloved by the editors of The Economist, has been recently implicated in cryptocurrency swindle. Argentine prosecutors have launched an investigation into the scam, and the evidence seems damning. The organizers of the con — apparently the same people who ran Melania Trump’s coin sale — had channeled money to Milei’s chief of staff, his sister Karina Milei. “I control that n****,” one of the accused in the scam texted, referring to the president. “I send $$ to his sister and he signs whatever I say and does what I want.”

The fragile imbalance between right and left power manifests in Latin America’s stance toward Europe: As he did with Bush’s earlier militarism, Lula has criticized the U.S. backing of Ukraine in its defense against Russia, insisting that only diplomacy can resolve a conflict decades in the making. For his part, Milei, when Joe Biden occupied the White House, pledged his undying support to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “I was the first to defend Ukraine against Russia,” he said; “You will always find me on the right side of history.” 

Milei even announced that Argentina intended to join NATO, extending the North Atlantic military alliance to the South Atlantic, but then history changed sides. Now, courting Trump and needing Washington to approve a loan from the International Monetary Fund, Argentina has backed away from Zelenskyy, with Milei instructing his ambassador to the United Nations to abstain in a vote condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Milei seems unfazed by his faithlessness, holding himself up as a model for his own followers: “Every day I relentlessly wage the culture war.”

Viva la libertad, carajo.

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