Continental Contradictions
November 5, 2025, marked the twentieth anniversary of the No al ALCA movement. Bringing together a wide swath of Latin Americans, the movement triumphantly rejected the United States’ proposed agreement, ALCA (FTAA in English: Free Trade Area of the Americas), at a Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata, a coastal city in Argentina. Around 40,000 people demonstrated in the streets, an event attended by trade unions, human rights movements, global figures such as Diego Maradona, and future leaders, like Evo Morales. But twenty years on from this landmark event, I did not see many remembrances or reflections: I found out about the anniversary through some Instagram stories, a controlled dose of nostalgia.
No al ALCA was the coordinated opposition—led by the presidents of Argentina and Venezuela, Néstor Kirchner and Hugo Chávez, with the silent complicity of Brazil’s Lula da Silva—to the U.S. project of making the entire Western Hemisphere, with the exception of Cuba, a free trade area. The ALCA was intended to eliminate tariffs, bind markets together, transform the production structures of many countries, and, of course, give the U.S. preferential access to Latin America. It was an ambition typical of the Clinton years—when the groundwork was laid—and which was pursued by President Bush.
No al ALCA was a cultural milestone, symbolizing the end of unlimited U.S. intervention in the region. The images brought forth by the movement were recognizable to many young leftists throughout Latin America. Hugo Chávez’s face appeared on banners and murals at universities from Buenos Aires to São Paulo; pictures of Maradona haranguing the gringos inspired young people from Cuba to Nicaragua, signs of encouragement in troubled neighborhoods.
With Bush and the neocons bogged down in the Middle East, the No al ALCA seemed to finally put an end to the turbulent 1990s, in which Washington had played a leading role in all Latin American arenas. After intense diplomatic wrangling within the Summit and the unstinting pressure applied by No al ALCA, Bush conceded defeat and the free trade agreement was paralyzed. It seemed, at the time, like the beginning of a new season.
The trajectories of Latin American countries after the 2005 summit have been very different. Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela managed to translate their opposition to U.S. commercial dominance into strengthening Mercosur, the powerful South American trade bloc founded in 1991. Meanwhile in Central America, a sort of miniature ALCA began to operate, a reality that Mexico had been living with since the signing of NAFTA.
A year after the summit, the War on Drugs, which had already been implemented in Colombia, reached Mexico. While Bolivia and Ecuador, governed by Morales and Rafael Correa, halted DEA operations and closed foreign military bases in their countries, the reality was completely opposite in their close neighbors upstairs. In the southern part of the region, following Chávez’s lead, governments were settling into power with high popular support and even daring to reform the constitution. In Central America, a spiral of violence and corruption was rotting the political systems established after civil wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala: there, some young people may have known about Chávez or Maradona, but most wanted to leave the country.
The Summit of the Americas showcased the new political moment Latin America was experiencing and Washington’s new priorities, which shifted its interest to other regions while maintaining some operations in nearby territories. In part because of this, the summit exposed a gap between Latin American countries that persists to this day and explains why it is so difficult to talk or think about Latin America as a whole.
However, the idea that the United States’ hegemony was coming to an end—a reflection, or a desire, expressed by the people and leaders of the No al ALCA movement—had taken hold in various embassies in the region. The idea was strengthened by the conflagration of the 2008 financial crisis. Washington’s disinterest or disdain for the region was increasingly palpable, and at times it seemed that Latin America was only mentioned by the U.S. political class as part of electoral calculations (which meant how to win Florida, and not much else).
Meanwhile, China began to dominate the trade scene, becoming the leading partner and investor in many southern countries, but also gaining new diplomatic allies in Central America. China’s economic weight became one of the few ubiquitous reference points across the continent. A series of regional institutions were created during those years, such as the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), which were intended to further integrate the countries of the region.
In the immediate years after the summit, left-wing governments and parties continued to invoke the No al ALCA summit as a founding moment of a new era in which the dominance of the United States, which had already deteriorated, would eventually come to an end.
The break since 2005 is stark, but it is difficult not to think of that time when considering Latin America’s response to Trump’s advance, especially among the left. In no other region has the new administration intervened so vehemently. The United States is one step away from armed intervention in Venezuela. Under the pretext of fighting organized crime, Mexico could follow suit. Colombia is not spared either, and its president—part of a new breed of leftist leaders in the region—has been labeled a drug trafficker. Trump has also flirted with intervening in the Panama Canal. The financial bailout he gave to President Milei in Argentina was key to Milei’s electoral victory, and his solidarity with Bolsonaro has notably affected the government of Lula, who at 80 years old remains in power and, instead of negotiating a coordinated regional response (as he did at the summit twenty years ago), has opted for a measured statement while negotiating bilaterally with Trump to ease tariffs.
These two contrasting realities, that of the 2005 summit and today, reflect the drift that regional fragmentation has taken and that of leftist projects, which have lost their common horizons and references. The authoritarian consolidation in Venezuela, the improvisation of new leaders such as Gustavo Petro in Colombia, and the lack of change in Brazil are different manifestations of the challenges facing Latin America’s left that Trump’s intervention promises to exacerbate. The U.S. advance is operating in a context dominated by its security agenda and many of the policies Trump proposes are no longer considered an aberration. Indeed, they are increasingly popular among Latin Americans themselves.
On fragmentation
Even accepting the premise that this fragmentation extends beyond the left and is shaped by each country’s closeness to the United States, the silence and lack of coordination on the left in the face of the advance is remarkable, with few historical parallels.
Take the latest CELAC summit. It is the only forum that brings together all the countries in the region, including the Caribbean, without a U.S. presence (and which was held jointly with the European Union). But the summit was an anticlimax. It ended with a communiqué that did not even mention Trump or the United States: “We addressed the importance of maritime security and regional stability in the Caribbean.” Venezuela abstained from signing it, since the document condemned the war in Ukraine. China was also not mentioned anywhere. “It seems like a communiqué made on another planet,” commented Colombian academic Sandra Borda.
There is no single way to deal with Trump, whose interventionism has become one of the hallmarks of his second term. Even for leaders who have been more adept at calibrating their relationship with the White House, such as Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, Trump’s arbitrariness has created a kind of diplomatic loop: when one issue seems to be resolved, another source of conflict arises, or one that seemed closed reopens. This leads to a definite reticence among Latin American leaders.
True to her style, Sheinbaum has criticized the U.S. attacks on ships in the Caribbean but only in a measured manner, a route that Lula has also followed. Both have prioritized their own relationships with the United States, abdicating any kind of leadership of what could be a joint initiative to outright reject the operations. In most cases, lukewarm condemnations or mere silence prevail. Colombia’s Petro is one of the few leaders who has chosen a more confrontational tone, but his strategy seems to be based on purely domestic calculations. Then there is the group of leaders that has positively welcomed Trump’s intervention in the region, on a front stretching from Argentina to Trinidad and Tobago.
It is difficult to find a more eloquent defender of U.S. intervention than Milei himself, who said in an interview with the Financial Times: “The United States has openly decided to be the leader of the region, and I strongly welcome that. Before, the United States was concerned with helping those who were not allies, feeding its own enemies. Today, they have made a Copernican shift, which is fabulous. That is to say: support for allies and no support for non-allies. I think it’s brilliant.”
This regional fragmentation mirrors the fragmentation within Latin American political systems themselves, compounded in some cases by greater ideological polarization. Not only is there no unified position within countries, but these positions are often antithetical. And it is no coincidence that it is in these polarized scenarios that Trump intervenes to help ideological allies.
Argentina may be the most visible and vocal example of this trend, but the case of Brazil is perhaps more illustrative. Twenty years after No al ALCA, Lula is the only leader still in power, after returning for a third term in 2022 with the decisive support of the Biden White House. But he has never had as many problems governing as he has now. His innate skills as a negotiator and tightrope walker no longer produce the same results.
In 2005, while quietly working to reject the ALCA, Lula still wanted to cultivate a good relationship with the United States—a vitally important trading partner—while betting on Mercosur to gain industrial muscle. Today, Brazil’s productive structure is dominated by agribusiness, an ally and promoter of the far right that has altered the balance of the Brazilian political system, making governance more difficult. The growing power of agribusiness is directly related to the commercial rise of China, which demands raw materials. To make matters worse, Lula now suffers the wrath of the United States, whose previous administration had helped him come to power. In other words, Lula’s difficulty in governing is due less to his age (another problem that the left has failed to resolve since 2005: succession) than to the transformation of the geopolitical landscape since then, marked by the rise of China and the domestic crisis in the United States.
On the current situation
What else has happened since 2005? Venezuela became an autocracy, expelling more than 7 million people and creating an unprecedented migration crisis; many of the regional initiatives and institutions that had been created collapsed, in many cases due to decisions made by the now-extinct center-right parties; Colombia reached an agreement with the FARC, but the armed conflict was not resolved—rather, it fragmented. Partly because of this, organized crime began to spread across the region.
Then Trump came along. Part of the problem facing the Latin American left is that Trump’s hyper-security approach is becoming increasingly popular in the region. In the latest Atlas Intel poll for Bloomberg, a majority of Latin Americans support armed intervention in Venezuela. And there are many more people (39%) who consider Trump to be “very committed” to “bringing freedom” to the Venezuelan people compared to Lula (17%) or Petro (16%).
One should be skeptical of a single survey, and the truth is that the image of the United States is not in good health in the region. Trump is not a particularly popular figure either, unlike El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, who is overwhelmingly popular. But that is the point: the threat of intervention comes at a time when a large segment of Latin Americans are open to radical solutions in terms of security and the defeat of organized crime. In fact, Trump’s narrative of “narco-terrorism,” which operates as a fusion of the pretexts used in the War on Drugs and the War on Terror—both misguided and with enormous strategic consequences—had already been used by other Latin American leaders, from Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa to Bukele himself.
There are many examples, but a recent police operation in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro sums the situation up well. It resulted in a massacre that left 121 dead, and most of those killed were civilians. Hardly any relevant organized crime leaders were captured. And yet, a majority of the local population, including residents of those same favelas, supported the operation because of their concern about rising crime.
Two crises are intertwined in the U.S. advance. First, the spread of organized crime, most notably in Ecuador, but also in other countries such as Chile and Uruguay. It would be wrong to blame the left for this crisis, which cannot be explained without the U.S. as a primary factor, but it is true that no one on the left has managed to construct a coherent in response to the problem. Naturally, the right is now exploiting the growing wave of crime for its own ends.
In the second crisis, Venezuela’s authoritarian drift, the responsibility of the left is greater: a significant part of the left has been slow to condemn Maduro (Argentine Peronism, for example, has still not done so). Above all, it has failed to offer a negotiated solution to Venezuela’s descent, or at least a coherent narrative to shield itself. Brazil and Colombia attempted mediation between Maduro and the opposition after the last election, but the negotiations quickly ran aground (it seems that they were manipulated by Maduro). In the regional context, the security and migration crises go hand in hand: most of the proposals for a tough crackdown on organized crime also include deportation or restrictions on Venezuelan migration.
And it is not just security. Trump’s intervention also comes at a time of economic fragility, when voters are susceptible to the destabilizing threat coming from the White House. The latest legislative elections in Argentina are a case in point: voters understood perfectly well that the withdrawal of U.S. aid—which Trump said would happen in the event of a Milei defeat—meant financial disaster. In Brazil, a majority of the population may be against the tariffs imposed by Trump, but voters penalize the president if they believe that the economic costs—such as rising inflation—were the result of poor management of the bilateral relationship. The same could happen in Colombia.
There is a section of the left that operates under the assumption that Trump’s intervention could be an electoral gift, capable of reactivating an anti-imperialist sentiment that is currently dormant. That is unlikely.
What lies ahead
Even if the United States does not militarily intervene in Venezuela, Trump’s roadmap in Latin America is unclear, and perhaps nonexistent. But the days when the United States looked the other way (as with No al ALCA) seem to be over.
U.S. intervention consists of different approaches, some more permanent than others. First, the Trump administration is giving the Western Hemisphere a prominent place—alongside domestic threats such as organized crime—in its defense policy. This is consistent with government leaks about the new National Defense Strategy, which points to a decisive military primacy in the region while consolidating a retreat in the rest of the world. It represents a break with the previous vision of containing China abroad.
Military action against Venezuela, one of the few countries in the region with defense ties with China and Russia, could inaugurate the new hemispheric policy (Thomas Barnett has developed this argument in detail). But to understand the new approach, one must also pay attention to the concessions that Trump is extracting from negotiations with presidents such as Milei and Lula himself, ranging from access to rare earths and minerals, increased trade quotas, and even, in the case of Argentina, the possibility of opening military bases. These moves, according to researchers such as Bernabé Malacalza, are consistent with a new doctrine that consists of achieving self-sufficiency in minerals and rare earths and preventing China from transferring its economic and commercial advantage in the region into military dominance.
Then there is the domestic component. Although he is mistaken in his conception of the roots of the problem and its targets, Trump’s attacks on ships and eventually armed groups are part of a publicity campaign aimed at the American electorate, which is concerned about the fentanyl epidemic. On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, these moves reflect Latin America’s place in the MAGA universe, represented by Marco Rubio’s unexpected rise in Trumpworld.
At least in the Venezuelan case, and according to various reports, Rubio has managed to impose a more hawkish vision than the strategy of dialogue cultivated by Richard Grenell, and has the support of Stephen Miller, JD Vance, and Susi Wiles, the chief of staff who has known Rubio for more than a decade and is one of the people responsible for turning Florida into a safe state for Republicans.
Florida has become the center of Trumpism. It is where the boss lives and does business, and the political hub for various figures besides Rubio and Wiles, such as Pam Bondi and Ron de Santis. It is also the origin of several of the ambassadors Trump has appointed to key countries in Latin America, such as Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and Panama.
But this picture goes beyond Rubio’s presidential aspirations and beyond Florida. The last election in the United States demonstrated the importance and complexity of the Latino vote, which is increasingly decisive in other swing states. Added to this is another reality that has been little explored in regional analyses, namely the growing weight of South American migration to the United States, which, although still a minority, is increasing rapidly. The sources are diversifying: in addition to Venezuela, migrants from Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, and Argentina may begin to play a more important role in the future.
Although it is difficult to attribute a medium- or long-term commitment to Trump, there are reasons to believe that U.S. intervention in Latin America will not be a passing phenomenon. It is important to ask, then, whether the Latin American left has underestimated the region’s place in this second administration, or whether it continues to deal with the advance as if it were a Trumpist aberration that will eventually be corrected by a Democratic administration (which, by the way, has done little or nothing to prevent this situation). Diplomats and intellectuals insist that, in the long run, these events will only benefit China, which appears in their fantasies in the form of a Messiah ready to save the continent from the U.S..
A few years after that memorable 2005 summit, then-President Chávez revealed what had been the diplomatic strategy to defeat the United States. “Hugo, we are going to defeat these people by exhaustion,” Argentine President Kirchner reportedly told him. “When I need you to talk and talk and talk to tire them out, I’ll give you the floor.”
The United States’ interest was elsewhere at the time. It was easier to out-talk them twenty years ago, to wait out a tiring hegemon. Today, in times of imperial retreat in other parts of the globe, the question about Latin America’s place in the world must be reformulated in Leninist terms: What is to be done?
Juan Elman is an Argentine journalist who specializes in international affairs. He is the author of the book “Nada será como antes. ¿Hacia dónde va Chile?” (“Nothing will be like before: What’s next for Chile?”).
