One of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s most lasting slogans of governance is that “personnel is policy.” Judged using Reagan’s mantra, it appears as though the incoming Trump team could be rightly described as the United States’ first Latin America-focused administration in at least a century—and perhaps ever.
Starting with Sen. Marco Rubio, who would become the first Latino secretary of state if confirmed, President-elect Donald Trump has named key Latin Americanists to top positions on his national security team. Beyond Rubio, Trump has nominated a former U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Christopher Landau, to serve as the deputy secretary of state. Rep. Mike Waltz, slated to become his national security advisor, has taken a keen interest in countries such as Mexico and Venezuela while working as a member of Congress. Mauricio Claver-Carone, the former National Security Council senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs as well as an Inter-American Development Bank president, will serve as Trump’s special envoy for Latin America.
Trump has also already nominated ambassadors to many of the neighborhood’s countries, an important signal in a region where top capitals have often been left without a U.S. ambassador for years. Arguably, there has rarely—if ever—been such a concentration of Latin America knowledge in key foreign-policy positions, especially at the State Department. Most often, secretaries of state and national security advisors are Europe or Asia experts.
With this arsenal of experts on hand, the second Trump administration has the opportunity to fulfill the broken foreign-policy pledge of several previous administrations: to focus U.S. policy more intently on the Western Hemisphere—and in so doing, also shore up its own security and prosperity at home.
For decades, U.S. policy toward Latin America was described as one of “benign neglect.” To reverse this neglect, President George W. Bush, formerly a border state governor, declared that he wanted to focus more foreign-policy attention on Latin America, but following 9/11, the United States instead became mired in decadeslong campaigns in the Middle East.
Likewise, President Barack Obama declared his intent to focus more on the Americas, but instead, his foreign-policy legacy is associated with the U.S. “pivot to Asia.” Despite handling the Western Hemisphere portfolio as vice president, President Joe Biden largely ignored the region, and his foreign policy was dominated by the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, followed by the outbreak of conflict between Israel and Hamas.
As a result, U.S. efforts to combat transnational criminal organizations, shore up faltering democratic institutions, and ward off strategic competitors have come up short. And taking the region for granted as a sphere of U.S. influence has come at a high cost, creating a strategic vacuum in which China and lesser great power rivals have advanced their geopolitical aims with minimal pushback.
As the first Trump administration reexamined and recalibrated U.S. global commitments, a prioritization of the Western Hemisphere began to emerge. (The emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic prevented this from becoming fully realized.) The biggest difference in the incoming second Trump administration is that it is poised to pair its Western Hemisphere focus with key personnel decisions at the top echelons of policymaking.
This is exactly what will be needed if Trump is to achieve his goals of stemming migration, halting the flow of narcotics, and competing effectively with China in the region.
On the all-important issue of migration, the Trump administration has a strong mandate—including from Latino voters—to solve the growing border crisis. While the details and nuances of asylum law and border policy are often complex, American voters grasped that the numbers are simply staggering.
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, there have been roughly 9 million attempts to enter the United States illegally at the southern border since the start of fiscal year 2022. A recent Goldman Sach’s study analyzing government data estimated that nearly 60 percent of migrants who had successfully entered the country since 2021 were undocumented, equal to about 5 million people.
The sheer scale of migration through the Americas will require forging close, cooperative relationships with several countries in the region.
The Trump administration is likely to see Mexico, Guatemala, Panama, and Colombia as key partners in the endeavor to stem the flow, as geographically, they occupy important bottlenecks on the route to the U.S. southern border.
Some countries may bristle at the increased attention placed on inducing migration cooperation, especially regarding the role that Mexico will likely be asked to play in reinstating the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which required asylum applicants to wait in that country until their U.S. court date. Mexico will also be asked to shoulder the acceptance of deportees with orders of removal from the United States (more than 600,000 of whom have either a criminal record or pending criminal charges).
Yet the truth is that it is in much of Latin America’s interest to arrest the flow of migrants northward as well, because many countries in the region have stretched their social safety nets and are buckling under the weight of migratory flows.
For instance, Mexico’s own asylum process has been overwhelmed, and there is mounting evidence that migration is fueling the growth of criminal organizations that severely challenge the state’s territorial control. To assert greater control over migration flows, these countries will have to avoid the impulse to politicize migration cooperation.
Another central agenda item that will feature in the reprioritization of Latin America is dealing with the scourge of transnational criminal organizations, mostly Mexican but also Central American and Colombian, that are trafficking drugs over the southern U.S. border, jockeying to control greater amounts of territory, and driving record homicides in Mexico.
Former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s six-year term, which ended in late 2024, coincided with the country’s greatest number of homicides on record. In 2022, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration seized enough lethal doses of fentanyl to kill every American. In 2023, overdose deaths again eclipsed 100,000 people.
Although it is early in her administration, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum appears to be quietly backing away from her predecessor’s more hands-off approach to organized crime. The Trump administration may find a more willing partner in Sheinbaum, though the diplomacy around cooperation will remain highly sensitive owing to her nationalist voter base and Mexico’s general wariness of the United States.
Allowing Sheinbaum to claim wins for her domestic audience, such as renewed efforts to combat deadly arms trafficking, could induce more security cooperation. This could include potential joint interdiction operations against criminal cartels, so long as they are executed without much fanfare.
The Trump administration will also confront Latin America’s enduring authoritarian regimes. Throughout his time in the U.S. Senate, Rubio has been an implacable foe to the dictatorships that rule Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba, frequently inveighing against their human rights abuses and crafting tough legislation aimed at penalizing their leaders. And not only are the governments in Caracas, Managua, and Havana weaponizing migration, but they also afford Beijing and Moscow key beachheads in the Americas.
Of the three dictatorships, Venezuela may present the biggest challenge—but also the biggest opportunity—for Washington under a reprioritization of Latin America. In the wake of the opposition’s evidence of Nicolás Maduro’s brazen election theft in July 2024, a change in strategy, moving away from the Biden administration’s approach of sanctions relief for unfulfilled concessions on human rights and democracy, is warranted.
To be sure, the first Trump administration’s recognition of the interim presidency of opposition leader Juan Guaidó—at its apex, nearly 60 countries recognized the same—failed to dislodge Maduro, but the dictatorship in Caracas is now far too comfortably ensconced in power following sham elections and one of the most brutal crackdowns on dissidents ever witnessed in the Americas. Current oil licenses issued by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control have provided Maduro a lifeline and could be netting his regime upwards of $500 million monthly. Renewed forms of pressure on the oil industry and efforts to push forward the existing case investigating the regime in the International Criminal Court could form the foundation of any recalibrated approach.
The incoming administration will be chock-full of knowledgeable Latin Americanists in the most important diplomatic and national security positions, which could make all the difference to achieving these outcomes. At the very least, the breadth of Latin America coverage in the second Trump administration should ensure that only the most serious proposals to solve some of the region’s challenges are on the table.
On China, the Trump administration should also prioritize placing the United States on a more competitive footing in its neighborhood.
By 2022, the China’s two-way trade had expanded to make it the No. 2 trade partner of the region. Overall, trade has jumped from $18 billion in 2002 to $450 billion in 2022, according to the Economist. Moreover, 22 countries in Latin America have acceded to China’s Belt and Road Initiative since 2018, and China has forged its investment partnerships in sensitive, dual-use areas such as space infrastructure, deep water port construction, and telecommunications.
China’s burgeoning influence is apparent even in Mexico, the top U.S. trade partner. Lamentably, Beijing’s offer has often been the best offer for Washington’s partners in the Americas because many times, it is the only offer. The Trump administration will have to put attractive alternatives on the table. This requires catalyzing private sector investment, multilateral financial institutions, and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation—as well as existing U.S. free trade architecture—to change the calculus for Latin American countries.
Plenty of Latin American countries would welcome U.S. cooperation on migration, transnational crime, and other issues, and coming elections in key countries such as Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Ecuador could bring to power even more leaders eager to cooperate with the United States as the region’s political pendulum swings to the right.
Meanwhile, to induce greater regional cooperation, the Trump administration could make its prioritization of Latin America all the more appealing with a hopeful vision of the region’s potential—especially its economic potential.
The Biden administration launched the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity, a framework meant to engage Latin America on economic issues. But the program is languishing and underdeveloped, and it saw its first meeting occur only in November 2023. The Trump administration should harness its Western Hemisphere talent to quickly launch a positive and sustained economic agenda aimed at helping Latin America escape the middle-income trap, establish a firmer role in supply chain security, and achieve more robust and inclusive economic growth. Speaking to the hopes and aspirations of the roughly 1 billion people who call the Western Hemisphere home would also boost competition with China.
For decades, Latin American and Caribbean countries have bemoaned the lack of attention and even indifference from Washington. Personnel decisions in the second Trump administration have brought the prospect of the first Latin America-centered administration in nearly a century.
This may be jarring to countries well accustomed to scant attention from the United States. It may even be uncomfortable for regional governments that depend on U.S. indifference and business as usual to avoid scrutiny. But governments in the Americas should take advantage of the myriad opportunities that this regional reprioritization presents, understanding that this moment must involve working proactively to shape the agenda and arrive at cooperative solutions with the United States to the region’s many challenges. A moment like this may not come again.
The post This Trump Administration Is Shaping Up to Be Latin America-First appeared first on Foreign Policy.
