Can Biden Reverse Trump’s Damage to Latin America?

Jill Biden and Joe Biden with former Guatemalan Foreign Minister Carlos Morales standing in front of Air Force One
President Biden has vowed to end his predecessor’s “incompetence and neglect” in the region, but first he must persuade allies to trust Washington again.Photograph by Johan Ordóñez / AFP / Getty

In his final days as President, Donald Trump travelled to the Rio Grande Valley to survey the project that he had made his signature political issue—the border wall with Mexico. Behind Trump, dozens of American flags lined an unfinished stretch of barrier; helicopters and all-terrain vehicles from the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol stood nearby. “We gave you a hundred per cent of what you wanted,” he boasted to a small crowd of supporters. “Unlike those who came before me, I kept my promises.” Trump glossed over the fact that his Administration had, in fact, completed less than a fourth of the two thousand miles of wall that he had promised. Of the roughly four hundred and fifty miles of wall constructed, all but forty-seven replaced existing barriers. But none of that seemed to matter to the outgoing President. The wall was an emblem of Trump’s divisive political project. One in which deserts were bulldozed, mountains dynamited, communities split, and ancestral lands defiled. It cost U.S. taxpayers—rather than Mexico—an estimated fifteen billion dollars.

The wall was emblematic of the former President’s “Trump-first” approach to Latin America, Michael Shifter, the head of the Inter-American Dialogue, said. “There’s always a mix of policy considerations and political interests. But this was skewed to such an extent that you can reduce his entire policy to his own personal interests.” A U.S. official who specializes in the region said that Trump’s policies had prioritized domestic political wins for the President, particularly regarding immigration, but failed to address the long-term dynamics that prompt people to flee north. “It’s hard for the Trump Administration to look back and say that we resolved the illegal immigration issue,” said the official, who asked not to be named. “Trump created a humanitarian disaster.” In a reversal of decades of past American practice, the former President revoked the right to apply for asylum in the United States and impelled Latin American countries to shoulder the burden by keeping tens of thousands of asylum seekers waiting in camps in northern Mexico. A growing number of them will soon test the new Administration’s promise to restore the right to apply for asylum in the U.S. Diplomats say Biden’s challenge is to find a way to reform immigration—and relations with Latin American as a whole—in a lasting way.

In his first weeks in office, Biden has adopted a starkly different approach to the region, but four years of Trump’s coercive diplomacy have cemented decades of distrust of Washington. To pressure Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador to reduce the number of migrants leaving their countries, Trump withheld millions of dollars’ worth of U.S. development assistance. The result was twofold. Governments were left without the funds meant to address the lawlessness and poverty causing people to migrate. At the same time, leaders had no incentive to abide by the commitments on corruption or human rights that Congress had tied to the American funds. The State Department official said that Trump aggressively employed blunt tactics across the region. “The preferred approach was to put pressure bilaterally, issue threats—whether it’s economic sanctions, visa sanctions, or other kinds of threats—and basically force countries to do things that we want.” When the Trump Administration began separating families at the border and forcing asylum seekers to remain in Mexico for the duration of their court proceedings, Washington defied long-standing humanitarian norms. “Foreign governments were asking, ‘What happened to our kids?’ ” the official recalled. They said U.S. authorities had “stolen” migrant children from their families.

In the summer of 2019, Trump pressured Mexico—one of the U.S.’s largest trading partners—into deploying thousands of national guardsmen to prevent migrants from reaching the Southern Border. On Twitter, he threatened to impose tariffs as high as twenty-five per cent on all Mexican goods. Fearing the cost to Mexico’s already ailing economy, the country’s leaders acceded, prioritizing fiscal survival over national dignity. The guardsmen temporarily blocked migrants from reaching the border, but Trump’s tactics reinforced the sense among Mexicans that American leaders punish their country for domestic political gain. “It’s what I call Trump’s Sinatra doctrine of My Way or the Highway,” Arturo Sarukhan, who served as Mexico’s Ambassador to the U.S. from 2007 to 2013, said. “The legacy is basically built on the political pimping of Mexico.” Dan Restrepo, a former special assistant for Western Hemisphere affairs in the Obama Administration, said that Trump turned the clock back in relations between the two nations. “Trump was very reductionist in his approach to Mexico and the Mexican president was comfortable in that reduction,” Restrepo said. “But that’s not the relationship the United States and Mexico have—it’s the relationship they had in the seventies.”

To some observers, the Trump Administration’s strategy in Latin America was at times reminiscent of Washington’s brazen gunboat diplomacy of the past. Halfway into Trump’s term, National Security Adviser John Bolton proudly declared before a group of Bay of Pigs veterans: “The Monroe Doctrine is alive and well”—a reference to the U.S.’s early nineteenth-century policy of military intervention in the Western Hemisphere. Bolton’s use of this type of rhetoric was an attempt to reassert U.S. dominance in Latin American countries and counter the growing influence of China. During visits to the region, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo regularly warned local government officials against doing business with Beijing. “They’re showing up at the doorstep,” he told a crowd in Santiago, Chile. “They will use debt traps, they will disregard rules, and they will spread disorder in your home.” But, in the last four years, other than limiting Mexico’s ability to pursue a free trade agreement with China through the U.S.M.C.A. trade pact, the Administration did little to curtail Beijing’s sway over Latin America. In addition to importing billions of dollars in commodities since the early two-thousands, Beijing has deepened its military ties across the region and invested heavily in everything from electricity grids to nuclear power plants, highways, ports, and a satellite control center. Not counting Mexico, China became Latin America’s largest trading partner during Trump’s tenure.

Chinese leaders took advantage of decades of U.S. neglect of its dealings in the region and Trump tactics that bolstered Beijing’s standing, according to Kevin Gallagher, an economics scholar and the author of “The China Triangle: Latin America's China Boom and the Fate of the Washington Consensus.” “Trump literally built walls in the region while the Chinese built bridges,” Gallagher said. “We’ve been telling folks not to take a cent from China but haven’t offered anything in return.” Beyond China, the Monroe Doctrine also drove the Administration’s aggressive use of economic sanctions and other punitive measures against Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, which Bolton dubbed the “Troika of Tyranny.” Trump’s advisers promised that putting “all options” on the table in Venezuela would reverse what they called the Obama Administration’s “anemic” approach and restore democracy in the country. As Trump’s former Senior Director for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Juan Cruz, put it: “We’ve sanctioned everything except Venezuela’s oxygen and the sun. But, if we could figure out how to do that, we’d sanction that, too.”

Yet, the Administration’s draconian policies yielded meager results. “They focused an enormous amount of rhetorical energy on targeting the regimes in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua,” Restrepo observed. “But, on January 20th, when Donald Trump departed the White House, Nicolás Maduro, Díaz-Canel, and Ortega were as firmly entrenched as ever.” When visiting Florida, which is home to myriad Latin American exile communities, Trump often spoke of a “new day” in the region and of socialism’s impending demise. Those who came to believe him grew hopeful that his policies would usher in change by way of force. But critics accused the President of rolling out an electoral strategy in South Florida instead of a viable Latin America policy. “He tripled down on a discredited policy of resource denial—a policy that we had seen fail for the better part of the last sixty years,” said Ric Herrero, the executive director of the Cuba Study Group, which advocates engagement with Cuba. “Cubans come out of the other end of the Trump Administration impoverished, suffering greater hardship than they’ve seen since the Special Period. And, ultimately, for what?”

One of Trump’s final acts before leaving office was to add Cuba to the list of state sponsors of terrorism, a designation that only North Korea, Syria, and Iran have in common. The decision increased travel restrictions to the island and barred remittances from the United States to Cuba; it may also hamstring Biden’s efforts to re-engage with a regime which was subject to more than a hundred punitive measures under Trump. Biden’s advisers on Latin America have promised to thaw relations with Cuba, but how quickly the new Administration will ease Trump’s restrictions or restore a full American diplomatic presence remains unclear. They are under pressure to weigh a policy of rapprochement against the Cuban government’s slow pace of reform. In April, Raúl Castro is expected to step down as head of the Communist Party, and the country’s political future is in question. Herrero argued that Biden should boldly push for change. “Cuba was used as a punching bag,” he said. “Allowing Trump’s policies to fester at this time out of an abundance of caution will only give the upper hand in Cuba to those who favor continuity.”

In many ways, Biden’s objectives on everything from immigration reform to restoring Venezuelan democracy will first require reversing his predecessor’s legacy. To bring the wall’s construction to an end, his Administration will have to settle claims brought by land owners and contractors, which could cost billions; in Caracas, Biden faces a political opposition in complete disarray and a regime that only tightened its grip on power despite Trump’s sweeping sanctions. The expectation is that the new President will broaden American engagement in the region and revive the principles which once defined it. Biden supporters contend that his decades of work in the region make him well suited for the staggering task at hand. As Vice-President, he oversaw Obama’s Latin America policy and visited the region sixteen times. One of Biden’s signature achievements was to secure seven hundred and fifty million dollars from Congress to help Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras tackle corruption, violence, and poverty, declaring that Central America’s security and prosperity is “inextricably linked with our own.” In return, leaders in all three countries committed to enact reforms. After Trump took office, he slashed hundreds of millions in aid. Now, Biden is proposing four billion in assistance to the three nations.

In dealings with Venezuela, Biden is expected to look beyond Trump’s sanctions regime and work with regional allies to pressure Maduro; in Brazil, he will likely place climate change—a pillar of his foreign-policy agenda—at the center of the bilateral relationship. Biden’s victory has already discomforted heads of state in Mexico, Brazil, and El Salvador, who either embraced Trump or benefitted from his indifference. When Biden said last year that his multibillion-dollar proposal to protect the Amazon would include economic penalties for those who failed to comply, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro threatened to respond with “gunpowder.” Rivals such as China and Russia will also challenge Biden’s attempt to re-engage in the region. During the pandemic, Beijing has successfully conducted “mask diplomacy” and supplied millions of dollars’ worth of medical supplies and personal protective equipment to the region. In recent months, China and Russia have also emerged as two of the primary suppliers of coronavirus vaccines in Latin America.

With Beijing’s influence in the region now close to rivalling that of Washington, Latin American countries may soon be asked to take sides. “As we look forward, Latin Americans may get caught in China-U.S. hostilities in a way that they haven’t had to choose yet,” Shannon O’Neil, a senior fellow for Latin American Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said. The rivalry is playing out at a moment when the region is undergoing its largest economic contraction in a century and social tensions are mounting. Latin America accounts for less than ten per cent of the world’s population and more than a quarter of its coronavirus fatalities. Due to the pandemic, the G.D.P. declined more than eight per cent last year—a reversal that could wipe out two decades in poverty reduction. Most workers in the region are employed in the informal sector, and historic economic inequalities are worsening. Opinion polls show that people’s perception of democracy has also been seriously tarnished: fewer than half of Latin Americans currently believe it to be the best form of government. Restrepo, the former Obama aide, said Trump’s coercive style of diplomacy and chaotic tenure could help China showcase its comparative reliability as an ally. “The last four years were deeply cynical, deeply electoral,” he said. “The reliability of the United States as a good faith partner across the region is very much in question.”