How has global Trumpism manifested itself in Latin America? The United States National Security Strategy for 2025 evoked a Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine to prioritize dominance in the technological and financial sectors, redirecting the US military presence toward the Western Hemisphere, expanding access to critical resources, and supporting regimes aligned with the Trumpist agenda.
By early 2026, far-right and authoritarian governments were in power or about to be inaugurated in Argentina, El Salvador, Ecuador, Honduras, Peru, Paraguay, Panama, Costa Rica, and Chile. While not all of these ruling political forces are Trumpist, they have all been under intense pressure to expand the transnational capitalist class’s (TCC) access to the energy and mineral resources needed for the digital technologies that will drive the restructuring and transformation of the global economy and to repress popular resistance from below. The cases of Ecuador, El Salvador, Argentina, Honduras, and Venezuela illustrate these dynamics.
In Ecuador, President Daniel Noboa’s government allowed violent criminal groups to operate with impunity, establishing their control in numerous impoverished communities. Only when the population, desperate due to the insecurity and violence of these mafias, demanded protection did the government intervene, declaring a state of emergency in 2024 and deploying the army throughout the country. However, instead of fighting criminal gangs, the army cracked down on popular protest movements led by indigenous communities. The emergency served as a smokescreen for Noboa to push for the expansion of hydrocarbon exploitation and mining and to pass legal changes that facilitate expropriation and looting by transnational corporations.
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele also implemented a model for controlling surplus labor based on manipulating insecurity and instilling fear of crime and social violence, consequences of chronic poverty, unemployment, and deprivation. Bukele managed to manipulate widespread demands for security to declare a state of emergency and rule by force and decree. Citizens feel safe on the streets, but they remain as poor as they were before the prison crackdown. Due to cuts in social spending, poverty has increased under Bukele’s government to about 30 percent of the population, while another 40 percent live in precarious conditions.
In Argentina, the Peronists swept the September 2025 legislative elections in the key province of Buenos Aires, home to nearly 40 percent of the country’s population. Trump subsequently offered up to $40 billion in economic assistance on the widely publicized condition that far-right President Milei win the nationwide midterm legislative elections, which he did. The government then took steps to authorize deforestation and mining—especially of the country’s vast untapped copper deposits—in protected periglacial areas, while poverty rose from 42 percent to 53 percent of the population.
Something similar happened in Honduras, where Trump acted in favor of the CCT in collusion with the local far right. On the eve of the November 30 elections, the US president threatened to suspend all US aid if voters did not elect the far-right candidate and heir to the National Party, Nasry Asfura. At the same time, he pardoned international drug trafficker and former National Party president Juan Orlando Hernández. During his presidency, from 2014 to 2022, Hernández ceded a portion of the national territory on the Caribbean island of Roatán to US venture capitalists to be administered as a private center for technological activities, cryptocurrencies, and other opaque financial operations, that is, as a private fiefdom with its own rules, fiscal and regulatory autonomy, and arbitration tribunals. The progressive government of the Libre Party, led by Xiomara Castro, had canceled this concession.
A confluence of three factors has driven the shocking attacks against Venezuela. First: the impunity enjoyed by Israeli genocidal forces has opened the door to an even more barbaric form of global capitalism that does not even attempt to legitimize its savagery under the cloak of international law or human rights. Second: there is the United States’ eagerness to access Venezuela’s vast oil and mineral wealth with the complicity of a regime more docile than Maduro’s. Third: the US state is immersed in a massive projection of power in the hemisphere, with Venezuela as the vanguard for violent expansion in Latin America.
We are at a crossroads in the Americas and around the world. The failures of the institutional left, with its statist and top-down approach, its authoritarianism and corruption, have paved the way for the return of the far right in much of Latin America. When the left has come to power, it has acted to contain popular struggles and has failed in its role as the left. In power, it has not hesitated to defend and, in fact, expand the extractivist model and adapt to transnational capital, absorbing rebellion into the capitalist state and the hegemonic order, acting as a transmission belt for the structural power of transnational capital and neutralizing the anti-systemic potential of one uprising after another.
* Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University
Original text by William Robinson* published in La Jornada on January 15th, 2026.
Translation by Schools for Chiapas.