While elected on an America-first, isolationist platform, freshly reinstalled U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration have quickly homed in on Latin America.
The interactions hitting the headlines have not been positive. Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, turned back U.S. military aircraft carrying deported citizens from the country, before Trump hit back in a very public threat to level tariffs against Bogotá.
Colombia then backed down, agreeing to “all” of Trump’s terms “without limitation or delay,” the White House said.
Closer to home, Trump’s threats to reclaim the Panama Canal, a major maritime trade hub, over what the president called excessive charges on the U.S. sparked backlash from the country that has controled the canal for more than a quarter of a century.
“We reject in its entirety everything that Mr. Trump has said,” said Panama’s President, José Raúl Mulino. “First, because it is false, and second because the Panama Canal belongs to Panama and will continue to belong to Panama.”
These incidents, just days into the Republican‘s second term in office, complicate the new administration’s task of beating back Russian, Chinese and Iranian roots taking hold in Latin America.
Many Latin American and Western officials involved in the region say it is an increasingly important battleground for world powers, and that the new U.S. administration knows it.
Freshly-installed Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the highest-ranking Hispanic American official in U.S. history, picked Central America and the Caribbean for his first tour in his new post and has pushed Latin America towards the front of the new administration’s foreign policy agenda.
“Our allies in the U.S. are considering their approach,” said Baroness Jennifer Chapman, the U.K. government’s Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Latin America and Caribbean during a speech at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank in London on Thursday.
The first few days of the administration quickly ushered in a crackdown on immigration and thousands of arrests by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. Many of those targeted in the administration’s immigration focus are undocumented citizens hailing from Latin American countries.
“I think that is going to affect the relationship between the United States and the [Latin America] region,” said Brian Fonseca, the director of the Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy at Florida International University, during a panel discussion on Thursday.
The president also signed an executive order as he returned to the Oval Office this month labeling Mexican drug cartels and other criminal gangs operating out of Latin America as terrorist organizations.
Chapman said that while British officials “will not always agree on the specifics” of Trump’s new agenda, “we believe that we must continue to be in close dialogue with the region and the US, to work towards common goals.”
Countries like the U.K. and U.S. “must understand” why so many Latin American countries are drawn in by relationships, particularly economic ones, with China, Chapman said.
“But our job—where we can—is to provide Latin America with a choice,” she added. “An alternative that many say that they want.”
China has been pouring resources into cultivating its influence—not least its economic hold—in Latin America. Russia has been expanding its cultural footprint in different parts of the region, and Iran is tightening its grip where it can, officials and experts say. Many feel that the U.S. has somewhat neglected Latin America in recent years, making the case for some for drawing towards China.
“The bar has been set so low by the U.S. that China only has to be a little bit better to get through the door,” Álvaro Méndez, who heads up of the Global South Unit at the London School of Economics, told the BBC in November.
The region is not homogenous. Broadly speaking, several countries are wrestling with the damage wrought by the drug trade, fragile public institutions, human trafficking and organized crime.
Some, like Venezuela, are criticized by the U.S. as undemocratic and embraced by Washington’s enemies, while others such as Mexico and Chile are labeled by the U.S. as close allies.
But while the State Department deemed Santiago “one of the United States’ strongest partners in Latin America and a leader in promoting respect for the rule of law,” Chilean defense minister, Maya Fernández, floated the idea of closer defense ties with China during a recent visit to Beijing.
Latin America is increasingly becoming a “chess board” for global powers, said Juan Carlos Pinzón, a former Colombian defense minister who also served as Bogotá’s ambassador to Washington.
Moscow is building up its cultural influence in major hubs like Mexico City, Chapman said.
“They’re doing it because they want to provide an alternative set of values to the ones that we want to share,” she added. “They do it because it works, and they’re good at it. We’ve got to compete with that.”
Countries like Russia are “playing the long game” in Latin America, said Juan Battaleme, the secretary for international defense affairs in Argentina’s defense ministry.
Iran is very active in nations like Venezuela and Bolivia to spread “political turmoil,” Battaleme said. Tehran is trying to make countries across the region sweat, he said.
Iran has invested in its diplomatic presence in Latin America, as well as supporting culture centers in the region, namely in Bolivia, said Marcelo Masalleras, a senior researcher at Chilean organization AthenaLab and former Chilean military officer.
“We don’t really know what they are doing,” he said during a discussion at RUSI on Thursday. “It’s a huge question for us: What are they doing?”
Bolivia, which shares hundreds of miles of border with Chile, inked a security agreement with Iran back in 2023.
Some don’t see the region’s options for global links as a binary choice. Most countries from the Southern Cone to just south of America’s land border “don’t see themselves as having to make a choice between the U.S. and China,” said Sarah Martinez, a national intelligence officer focusing on the Western Hemisphere at the U.S.’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
“Different international partners can help them on different pressing needs,” such as on welfare or security, said Martinez. “Countries in the region are really looking to have a range of partnerships, beyond the great powers.”
The U.S. understands this, Martinez said, but caveated that this does not cancel out concerns about how China’s strong economic ties with the region could influence government decision-making. China overtook the U.S. as South America’s biggest trade partner in recent years.
A huge new port at Chancay, just north of Lima, late last year cemented China’s shadow in Latin America. The port was steered by China’s state-owned Cosco Shipping company and is expected to be followed by further Chinese infrastructure popping up in the South American continent.
Trump has claimed China is in control of the Panama Canal, which Panama and China denied.
“Panama over the last five years has inched closer and closer to China and away from the United States,” Trump’s new pick for the head of the Federal Maritime Commission, Louis Sola, told CNBC on Tuesday. Panama dropped its recognition of Taiwan, which is self-governing but Beijing considers a part of China, in 2017.
General Laura Richardson, who retired as the head of the U.S.’s Southern Command covering Latin America in November 2024, told lawmakers earlier in the year that Beijing “knows that economic power is a prerequisite for global military power.”
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