By Prof Dr Fernando Esteche, Buenos Aires / Argentina
The non-consecutive re-election of Donald Trump as the president of the United States of America invites us to reflect on what Latin America and the Caribbean should expect in its historical relationship of dependence and colonialism with the decadent imperial metropolis.
Trade, migration, and hemispheric security will surely be the items that can provoke friction as well as “cooperation.” The impact on trade from the foreseeable protectionism; and on remittances, which feed the squalid Mesoamerican and Caribbean economies, will be key to thinking about the region’s relationship with the new U.S. administration.
It is a commonplace among colonized analysts, and even in a large part of critical analysts, to agree that Trump’s main concern will be the economic, commercial and productive recovery of his country. According to them, foreign policy will be conditioned by this situation. It is common to find comments that claim that Latin America is very far away on Trump’s agenda of priorities.
Honoring the thickest American diplomatic traditions of its founding moments, the “isolationist” policy of the president-elect will be affirmed. “Isolation” here takes up George Washington himself and his “Farewell address” (1796), a document that Henry Kissinger himself has defined in his memoirs as determining and guiding a “patriotic diplomacy”, with a need to concentrate on American values, interests and needs, without cultivating permanent alliances with anyone, or having to spend own resources in aid of others.
Diving into this document and contrasting it with the Trumpist narrative allows us to build a projection on international relations and how they will handle their interference in some very decisive situations on the planet.
But precisely understanding in the light of this document, as the title of this article proposes, Trump’s narrative and political action forces us to reaffirm what we have already defined as the situation of dependence and coloniality of the region with respect to the North American metropolis that builds its commercial, productive and financial strengths based on this relationship.
It cannot be said that Latin America and the Caribbean are not on the important agenda of the United States because that is to deny the imperialist relationship that is the matrix that produces politics in the continent. We can nuance and evaluate novel formats of plundering and colonialism, but never deny them.
That situation of the first Trump administration where the MAGA (Trump’s own sector, Make America Great Again) and the neoconservatives coexisted in permanent tension, will not be repeated this time, where the president comes stronger and with more complex alliances that include industrialist Democrats (Kennedy Jr). Therefore, some situations promoted by the neoconservatives, such as the provocations to Venezuela, are difficult to be repeated in this administration.
It is almost certain that the coming economic policy will imply highly inflationary consequences for Latin America and the Caribbean. The very likely rise in interest rates will redirect investments by moving capital from the region to the metropolis. In the same way, the policy of subsidies and tariffs will cause a reorientation of commercial destinations, where China is emerging as a very likely capturer of Latin American trade needs. There, the State Department will surely come into play to set its “red lines” in technology and communications (5G), for which it must also be able to offer some relief that provides governability to the tumultuous Latin American and Caribbean states.
Direct impact in each country
Mexico, along with Brazil, are the two main regional trading partners with the United States.
The president-elect said he would impose tariffs of between 25% and 100% on Mexican products if the neighboring country did not stop what he defines as an “attack by criminals and drugs” that comes through migration to the northern country.
The president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, whom Donald Trump has said that he knows is “a very nice woman,” said on the social media X, owned by Trumpist collaborator Elon Musk, that “Mexicans do not have a single reason to worry”. Sheinbaym stated that “we had a very cordial call with the president-elect, Donald Trump, in which we talked about the good relationship that there will be between Mexico and the United States.”
Trump’s victory has a contradictory impact on Brazil. On the one hand, there are sectors of the so-called São Paulo bourgeoisie that are enthusiastic about the possibility of greater autonomy to assert Brazil as a regional power and strengthen its relations with the Sino-Russian axis, with the idea of Trump’s abandonment of open competition against multipolarism. But on the other hand, shadows lurk from the tariff policy and the concern of the development of soft power that feeds references that take advantage of the current political fatigue of President Lula da Silva. The diplomatic blunder of the Brazilian president who, unnecessarily, two days before the elections made public statements in support of Kamala Harris’ victory, exposes him in a state of obvious structural weakness with respect to the northern country.
The Argentine government, which shares with Trump the membership of the conservative international (Conservative Political Action Conference-CPAC), assumes that it will be a period of opportunities in the expectation that the US government will advocate for better financial conditions for the devastated Argentine coffers. With a very suggestive phrase, President Milei congratulated Donald Trump, stating that he can “count on Argentina to make the United States great again.” That is, count on Argentine oil and gas, Argentine cereals, minerals, lithium, etc. The truth is that Trump did not respond to the insistent phone calls of the histrionic Argentine president, who could not make use of his alleged friendship with Elon Musk to make things easier. However, Milei is preparing a trip to the United States before Trump’s inauguration to meet with him and put himself at his command. It is the brand new Argentine Foreign Minister Gerardo Wertheim, who was sworn into office on the Torah and not on the National Constitution, a senior Zionist leader and professional lobbyist, who officiated until weeks ago as ambassador to North America, the one who works to achieve that meeting.
The Venezuelan case takes on singular importance because of the background of the past Trump administration and the bravado that the elected U.S. president spat out in the middle of the campaign, defining Nicolas Maduro as a dictator.
Neither the pragmatism of the presidents nor the MAGA program should be underestimated. One of the pillars that is likely to result in an immediate executive order after taking office will be the US withdrawal from the Paris Treaty and the rejection of the energy transition (Trump faithfully represents the conventional US oil industry). The sanctions program on the Caribbean country is administered by OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control), which has measures that make it possible to relax sanctions, so that, for example, Chevron exploits and markets Venezuelan oil associated with PDVSA. Oil and energy rationing will be pillars of Trump’s administration.
It is obvious to any analyst that the political stability offered by Nicolás Maduro and his perfect civilian-military-police alliance in the country with the most important oil basin on the continent, contrasts radically with an eventual scenario of a civil war against a colonized, poorly organized and inconsistent coup plotter. On the other hand, the intention of mass deportations of illegal migrants from the US forces to a civilized coexistence with some countries receiving these deportees.
There are approximately 12 million illegal and undocumented migrants in the United States, triple the number in comparison to the previous government. Illegal migration during Trump’s first term came from the countries of the so-called Northern Triangle (Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras), but today it is Venezuelans, Cubans, Mexicans, Ecuadorians, Colombians, Peruvians who comprise the millions of illegal migrants that Trump proposes to deport and for which the need for agreements with the countries of origin is obvious.
The continuity of the long imperialist lines
All of the above does not neutralize dynamics of imperialist political and economic production that may not be carried out by the U.S. executive itself but through other agencies or platforms that constitute the “Deep State.” The recent replacement of the industrious General Laura Richardson from the head of the Southern Command, by her deputy, now Admiral Alvin Hosley, does not mean a change but a reaffirmation in the pentagonal diplomatic offensive that will continue to advance in the reassurance of the operation of its strategic supply chains with common goods of our Americas.
The control of borders that they already exercise in Haiti as in several places in the Caribbean, the monitoring and transit control agreements with Panama (one of the most important airports of distribution and intra-American circulation); border and migration control agreements with Mexico; the maintenance of the military presence in Colombia; and the articulation of experiments in police democracies such as in El Salvador, Ecuador and eventually Argentina; this will continue to advance with various agencies and platforms such as the successor of the School of the Americas, which since 2001 has been called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), or the International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) located in El Salvador.
The New York Times hastened, in what would appear to be an installation operation, to anticipate the appointment of Marco Rubio as probable Secretary of State, which anticipates probable rhetorical battles against Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. There is not much they can do about Cuba from a political, commercial, and diplomatic point of view; with Nicaragua toughen sanctions on a very small economy and probably harass it with the control of remittances; and with Venezuela we have already exposed the unstable balance that will surely mark the future relationship between the two countries.
The consolidation of police democracies with governments that declare themselves “friends” of Trump will surely be a second-rate line of work of the State Department, promoted fundamentally by the Southern Command by installing forced cooperation in the policy of “hemispheric security” and leveraged on a strong offensive against the autonomized drug traffickers.
For the ultra-neoliberals who propose in their peripheral and subordinate countries policies of deregulation, liberalization of controls, promotion of private direct investment, the arrival of Trump will be a contrast that will probably dislodge them in the first moments against the carefree liberalism of globalism expressed by Biden and Harris. Trump goes so far as to repatriate U.S. capital and defend his companies against competition, however small and insignificant it may be, from any other capital.
In conclusion, and with the complexity of the times to come, we believe that Latin America and the Caribbean will suffer times of U.S. redeployment operated from the platforms of the “Deep State” and pentagonal diplomacy (Southern Command), which will probably advance in the attempt at political overdetermination by sponsoring the so-called new right, transformist left, and regimes of police democracies.
The very world order based on rules that globalism pondered so much is an order with which President Trump himself feels uncomfortable, so these circumstances open up possibilities, if there is according political decision, to strengthen autonomous regional spaces.