What The Hell America!

After weeks of hesitation, in April Trump imposed a 10 percent tariff on most Latin American countries, with some exceptions. Cuba was already under a trade embargo — maintained by both Democratic and Republican administrations for decades, despite annual condemnations by the United Nations General Assembly — while Nicaragua and Venezuela were hit with 18 percent and 15 percent tariffs, respectively, as a pressure tactic against their regimes. These were the only politically motivated tariffs, since even friendly right-wing administrations like Argentina’s did not escape the 10 percent levy, leading to public embarrassment for President Javier Milei, who continues to boast about his friendship with the Republican.

Trade policy toward Mexico is the clearest example of Trump’s new, blatant style of imperialism. The White House twice threatened to impose 25 percent tariffs on Mexican products, disregarding the free trade agreement signed by Trump himself during his first term. Each time, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum made concessions: extraditing a record figure of drug suspects and deploying 10,000 Mexican soldiers to the border to prevent irregular migrant crossings and fentanyl trafficking.

What used to be subtle pressure is now direct blackmail. This US aggression has forced Sheinbaum’s left-wing government to reconcile its nationalistic rhetoric with concessions to Washington, due to Mexico’s economic dependency on trade with the United States. However, Sheinbaum has succeeded in deflecting tariffs that would have devastated both countries’ economies — an achievement that has shored up her popular support. Also influencing Trump’s decision to abandon 25 percent tariffs was the alarm among US business owners whose supply chains span both sides of the Rio Grande, meaning a tariff barrier would hit them just as hard as their Mexican counterparts.

Deporting “millions and millions” of immigrants was one of Trump’s campaign promises that brought him back to the White House. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit to Latin America in February — to Panama, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, and El Salvador — drove home Trump’s obsession with immigration.

This mass expulsion would mostly affect Latin Americans, since over half of foreign-born residents in the United States come from the region, and the Pew Research Center estimates that 77 percent of undocumented migrants are Latin American (about half of them Mexican). The US president wants to expel “one million” migrants this year, but in his first months in office, Trump has yet to surpass Joe Biden’s grim record — who, during his last year in office, deported an average of 57,000 people per month, 35 percent more than in Trump’s first month as president.

Trump’s 2025 deportation goal is unfeasible, far exceeding the capacity of the state, which is why his administration has instead relied on harassment and fear tactics to encourage self-deportation. Central to this effort has been the weakening of safeguards against cruel and unlawful deportations. The most dramatic measure has been the use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to expel hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador, accusing them, often without any evidence, of being part of criminal gangs.

The far-right government of Nayib Bukele, the only Latin American leader to receive an invitation to Trump’s White House, will be paid $20,000 for each person sent to his prisons, known for their severe human rights violations. The US administration is also negotiating with up to thirty countries to take in deportees who are not their own citizens. Tariff policy could serve as a tool of blackmail to force concessions in migration policy.

Since its creation in 1961 by John F. Kennedy, USAID has been a key instrument of Washington’s imperialism in Latin America. It played a role in the ideological and military fights against guerrillas and socialist and communist parties during the Cold War and today often serves as a bulwark against leftist governments. As part of his nationalist retreat, Trump is attempting to dismantle the agency, which, if his plans succeed, will be left with only eight employees for all of Latin America and the Caribbean, a region that received more than $2 billion from USAID in 2023.

The main recipients of aid are Colombia, Haiti, and Venezuela. The over $400 million destined for Colombia annually mostly goes to supporting the implementation of the 2016 Peace Agreement between the Colombian state and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas, although some funds are devoted to providing humanitarian support and a regularization service to Venezuelan migrants. The closure of USAID could jeopardize the United States’ efforts to outsource migration control to Colombia and other countries. Colombia has also received billions of US military aid in recent decades to fight drug trafficking and illegal armed groups.

Haiti, impoverished by centuries of colonialism and devastated by a 2010 earthquake, is the second-largest recipient. Much of USAID’s official aid for reconstruction after the earthquake ended up in the hands of US companies, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

USAID’s funds for Venezuela — which increased twenty-six-fold between 2015 and 2025 — are mostly allocated to “humanitarian assistance” and the category of “democracy, human rights, and governance,” a euphemism for supporting the opposition against Chavismo. USAID withdrawal would also affect Bukele’s far-right government, showing once again Trump’s disdain for the Latin American presidents who flatter him.

Although some left-wing analysts have welcomed USAID’s withdrawal from the region, in the short term it will hurt impoverished populations who depend on its programs, and it seems unlikely that the Trump administration will eliminate allocations directly aimed at securing US political and military dominance of the Americas. As said by Jake Johnston, author of Aid State, “moving USAID under the State Department, as now seems to be the most likely scenario, will only make foreign assistance more political. It is the US doubling down on all the worst parts of the industry.”

In 2005, Latin American leaders told George W. Bush “No al ALCA,” the US-proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, a phrase that became an anti-imperialist slogan and the symbol of a period of Latin American unity under the leadership of popular presidents such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Lula da Silva in Brazil, and Néstor Kirchner in Argentina.

Today the situation could not be more different. Only Colombian president Gustavo Petro has directly challenged Trump, refusing to allow a plane carrying handcuffed Colombian migrants to land in the country in January. Amid a diplomatic crisis with Washington, Petro sought support from neighboring countries by calling an extraordinary meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), which was abandoned once a deal was reached.

CELAC was founded in 2011 in Caracas, Venezuela, during Latin America’s progressive “pink tide.” It was also the golden era of the regional organization UNASUR, or Union of South American Nations, moribund since 2018. That organization struggled to achieve consensus among its left- and right-wing member states, but today even leftist governments are not as unified as in the 2010s.

Venezuela, in particular, continues to be a point of contention among broad left governments: while Mexican, Brazilian, and Colombian presidents tried to mediate between Nicolás Maduro and the opposition to secure fair elections last year, Chile’s Gabriel Boric has consistently opposed the Venezuelan president. Whereas Chávez was one of the driving forces behind early-century Latin American unity, his successor has become one of the main obstacles to such coordination.

The only significant gesture of unity has been the annual CELAC summit, which took place in April, where presidents like Petro and Sheinbaum called for Latin American unity and expressed their opposition to the Trump administration’s commercial and anti-immigrant offensive. These statements, however, have yet to be accompanied by joint actions.

Despite shared interests in challenging US hegemony, individual states’ economic calculations have largely won out. Sheinbaum has enjoyed a stronger bargaining position than other Latin American leaders because Mexico is the United States’ largest trading partner. Over 80 percent of Mexican exports are already destined for the United States, and Sheinbaum appears willing to exploit the benefits of further nearshoring, especially as other US imports become more expensive due to the higher tariffs imposed on China, the European Union, and other states.

Petro, despite his resistance to Trump’s deportation flights, ended up signing a biometric data-sharing agreement for migrants with the US secretary of Homeland Security, who visited Bogotá shortly after the showdown. The United States is the main destination for Colombia’s exports, and the Andean state depends on Washington’s security cooperation in its war against illegal armed groups. No matter how anti-imperialist Petro’s rhetoric may be, his margin of action is limited by Colombia’s decades of dependency on its northern neighbor.

Boric and Lula recently met in Brasília to sign economic integration agreements and showcase their joint opposition to Trump’s protectionist tariffs. “It’s not fair for the United States to close its economy and expect the rest of us to accept it without protest,” said the Brazilian president, whose Congress approved a law to respond to US trade tariffs with countermeasures. However, neither Brazil nor Chile has yet imposed a reciprocal 10 percent tariff on US products. Their strategy, like that of most Latin American states, boils down to three goals: trying to negotiate with Washington to minimize the damage, reinforcing commercial integration within the region, and increasingly redirecting their exports to other countries, especially China.

Between 2000 and 2022, the value of trade between China and Latin America increased by a factor of thrity-five, according to a 2023 report by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL), making the Asian power the region’s largest trading partner after the United States and South America’s main one, with Brazil leading and Chile in second place. The recently signed free-trade agreement between Mercosur and the European Union — which is expected to have disastrous environmental impacts, particularly regarding Amazon deforestation — will also help reduce South America’s commercial dependence on the United States.

For now, the United States’ barefaced imperialism toward Latin America is not ushering in a new era of regional unity but accelerating states’ individual efforts to gradually distance themselves from US economic influence and strengthen their ties with other trade partners.

This will prove a difficult task if each country acts alone. It was precisely during the pink tide that Latin America was most united and came closest to becoming an autonomous economic and geopolitical bloc, free from Washington’s imperial yoke.