Sept. 27, 2025 The Wall Street Journal
Policy decisions are increasingly based on the personalities and ideologies of regional leaders, with flattery often leading to rewards.
BOGOTÁ, Colombia—President Trump has remade Washington’s role in Latin America with a force not seen in decades, deploying U.S. military and economic weight with abandon and treating the region as an exclusive sphere of influence.
No American president has exerted as much pressure on the region since the height of the Cold War, when Ronald Reagan focused his efforts there on battling left-wing Central American insurgencies and the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.
From the Mexican border to Patagonia, Trump is punishing adversaries with high tariffs, airstrikes and rhetorical broadsides while offering those he considers friends security aid and economic deals. One analyst called it, “The Donroe Doctrine,” a play on the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine guiding U.S. policy toward the region.
The region is crucial to the president’s goals of stopping migration and the flow of drugs into the U.S. while trying to counter China, which has deepened economic and diplomatic ties in Latin America the last two decades.
“We haven’t seen a U.S. president as brazen and as aggressive as Trump has been in Latin America,” said Michael Shifter, a senior scholar at the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington policy group. “His mindset is that the region is the U.S.’s backyard and his strategic prerogative, in the name of protecting the homeland and boosting ‘America First.’ ”
Allies who flatter the president and align with his worldview—from Argentine President Javier Milei to El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele—are scoring deals and a warm embrace. Those who defy him—most notably Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula de Silva, Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro—find themselves in his crosshairs.
The Trump administration’s top diplomats have experience in Latin America, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants who has made numerous visits to the region even as he has juggled peace talks in Ukraine and Gaza. The State Department’s second in command, Christopher Landau, is a former U.S. ambassador to Mexico. The new ambassador to Mexico, Ron Johnson, is a former U.S. intelligence officer with broad experience in Latin America.
Rubio said that previous administrations overlooked the Western Hemisphere and gave adversaries a pass, hurting American interests.
“As a result, we’ve let problems fester, missed opportunities and neglected partners,” he wrote in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal earlier this year. “That ends now.”
Before Trump, the U.S. backed Latin American allies in the region while isolating and sanctioning countries Washington considered autocratic and anti-American, namely Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, under a policy defined by broader, long-term considerations.
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Bill Clinton tried to forge stronger trade ties with the region, George W. Bush promoted democracy and intensified America’s war on drug smugglers in Colombia, and Barack Obama re-established full diplomatic relations with Cuba, temporarily easing the antagonism between the two countries.
From the first day of his administration, Trump and his team reversed course on decades of policies, taking a more confrontational approach that called for a quick response from regional leaders.
The tone was set at his inauguration, when he asserted that China controlled the Panama Canal and said the U.S. would take control of the waterway. Days later, Trump threatened to level 25% tariffs on Colombia if Petro, a leftist and former guerrilla, didn’t permit flights of deported migrants to arrive. Petro quickly caved in.
Trump also took on the U.S.’s biggest trading partner, claiming Mexico allied itself with drug cartels. He pressed Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to let U.S. armed forces take a leading role in battling Mexican cartels, warning his administration would act unilaterally if Mexico didn’t. Sheinbaum rejected any direct U.S. military presence.
Analysts said the president increasingly bases policy on the individual personalities and ideologies of political leaders and the transactional nature of the relationship. Some leaders have learned that flattery—and a healthy dose of lobbying in person—can earn them big rewards.
No president could potentially reap more than Argentina’s Milei, who built close bonds with Elon Musk and had once said Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election “put Western civilization in danger.”
The Trump administration on Wednesday pledged a financial lifeline amid a run on the peso that endangers Milei’s free-market overhaul. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the U.S. could provide a $20 billion swap line, buy Argentina’s dollar bonds or give the country credit via the Treasury’s exchange stabilization fund.
Meanwhile, leftist leaders like Petro and Maduro have fared worse.
Trump this month gave Colombia, long the U.S.’s closest ally in the war on drugs, a failing grade in Washington’s annual report card. And in the Caribbean, the U.S. military has launched at least three airstrikes this month on suspected drug boats leaving Venezuela, with Trump warning that more could come.
It is an approach that risks alienating leaders in a region that has sought closer cooperation with the U.S. on trade and investments but been wary because of their neighbor’s history of meddling and military interventions. U.S. adversaries, China most prominently, are trying to capitalize.
“It’s not the conduct of a power that is attempting to establish itself as the region’s go-to international partner,” said Benjamin Gedan, a fellow at the Latin America Studies Initiative at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “If that is the strategy, then they have concluded the region can be bullied into submission and loyalty.”
He questioned whether the administration has real engagement with the region beyond stopping immigration and drug trafficking, issues that rally Trump’s political base. The U.S. has slashed aid that once won goodwill among the region’s 660 million people, from programs to reduce Amazon deforestation to improving job opportunities for Central Americans and helping Colombian farmers get land titles.
Analysts say the policy can be erratic—the administration one day floating talks with Venezuela, a few later hardening its approach. Those most reliant on the US—like Mexico or Central America—are especially vulnerable.
Tommy Pigott, the State Department’s deputy spokesman, said in a statement that the administration’s foreign policy in the region “is centered towards prioritizing our national interests and standing with regional partners.”
“From combating illegal immigration, designating vicious gangs as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and holding accountable illegitimate regimes in our hemisphere, this administration will not back down in its commitment to make our hemisphere safer, stronger, and more prosperous,” Pigott said.
Brazil, a regional behemoth with growing exports to China, has room to maneuver in its souring relationship with Trump.
Trump, angry that Latin America’s biggest country had convicted a former president who was his ally, accused President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of censorship and repression in a speech that came two months after the U.S. leveled 50% tariffs on the country. The Treasury had previously sanctioned the Brazilian Supreme Court judge who led the criminal trial against the former president, Jair Bolsonaro, and the justice’s wife.
“Brazil is doing poorly,” Trump said Tuesday in a speech at the United Nations General Assembly. “Without us they will fail just as others have failed.”
Speaking at the U.N., da Silva said, “there is no justification for unilateral and arbitrary measures against our institutions and our economy.”
“Before the eyes of the world,” he said, “Brazil sent a message to all would-be autocrats and those who support them. Our democracy and our sovereignty are nonnegotiable.”
Latin American experts admit that they don’t know what turn Trump’s policy will take.
Trump himself sounded conflicted. In the same speech at the U.N. where he took aim at Brazil, he noted bumping into the charismatic da Silva moments before.
“I saw him, he saw me, and we embraced…He seemed like a very nice man actually,” Trump said. “He liked me, I liked him. And I only do business with people I like.”
He later added: “At least for about 39 seconds, we had excellent chemistry.”
Write to Juan Forero at juan.forero@wsj.com and Ryan Dubé at ryan.dube@wsj.com
President Trump has adopted a forceful approach in Latin America, using military and economic power to treat the region as an exclusive sphere of influence.
The administration rewards allies with security aid and economic deals, while punishing adversaries with tariffs and airstrikes.