Latin America’s many Trumps
Latin America is turning right, and it’s a vindication for President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
In some ways, the Cold War never really ended in the Western hemisphere: Socialism has haunted the nations of Central and South America long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the same Cuban regime the Soviet Union propped up for decades remains in power to this day.
The hard left thought it had cemented control over Venezuela, too, thanks to Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro — until American forces snatched Maduro right out of his bed back in January and took him to New York to stand trial.
Yet most of our neighbors to the south are not ruled by dictators. Instead, elections in Latin America have swung back and forth between left and right.
Only now they’re all swinging to the right, as the region’s biggest nation dramatically illustrated last weekend.
Brazil is now the scene of the greatest right-wing comeback since President Trump’s own reelection two years ago.
Flavio Bolsonaro — whose father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, is under house arrest — defeated leftist incumbent Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in the first round of the country’s presidential contest on Sunday.
Bolsonaro took 47% of the vote to Lula’s 45%, and with other right-leaning candidates garnering nearly 5%, Bolsonaro’s prospects in the runoff election on Oct. 25 look bright.
Yet that’s only half the story: The right, and the Bolsonaro family itself, also made huge advances in the nation’s legislative elections.
“The Bolsonaro clan claimed victory in every race they contested,” the Buenos Aires Times noted.
The ex-president’s wife, Michelle, won a federal senate seat, as did his second son — Flavio’s younger brother — Carlos, while third son Jair Renan Bolsonaro was elected as a federal deputy, as was the former president’s brother, Renato.
Their party, the Liberal Party, nearly doubled its number of senators, from 15 to 28, and won the largest number of seats in the Chamber of Deputies of any party since the nation’s current constitution came into effect in 1988.
Smaller conservative parties also fared well on Sunday — the Brazilian people sent an unmistakable message that they are through with the leftism Lula represents.
In this, the Brazilian electorate is moving in synchrony with voters throughout Latin America, who in election after election have tossed out left-wing regimes or reelected conservatives who were already in office.
It’s as if the whole region has been going through its own version of Trump’s 2024 reelection over the past two years.
And more than one wit on social media has remarked leftists haven’t won a single national election in Central America or South America since USAID was dismantled.
Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Honduras and Costa Rica have all moved right, while Javier Milei’s party staved off left-wing challenges and won big in Argentina’s legislative elections last year.
No, this isn’t just because American taxpayer dollars are no longer being funneled by progressive non-government organizations — NGOs — into humanitarian efforts that get co-opted by left-wing foreign interests.
But the ecosystem of international aid, which during the Cold War was seen by Washington as a way to blunt the appeal of Communism in the Third World, has for a long time helped rather than hindered the global left.
That’s been true of Washington’s rhetoric as well:
Jeane Kirkpatrick, who became Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, argued in the late ’70s that Washington treated foreign friends on the right worse than most enemies on the left, as if the only way to beat Communism and socialism was to prove America could appeal to left-wing sensibilities, too.
Trump and Rubio have taken the opposite approach: They encourage pro-American, right-leaning governments, especially close to home in the Western hemisphere.
This has given Central and South Americans a moral boost to free themselves from left-wing governments, much as the stark contrasts President Ronald Reagan drew between freedom and Communism helped inspire Eastern Europeans to tear down the Berlin Wall.
The people of Eastern Europe knew better than anyone how evil Communism was, but they had reason to wonder whether the West was really willing to stand for an alternative, rather than offering endless moral accommodations and capitulations.
Until now, the State Department and Washington’s foreign-policy elite have habitually thought our country isn’t good enough and must prove itself equal to the professed — yet entirely fraudulent — ideals of left-wing regimes.
The Trump administration has a different attitude: It’s proud of America, and in the places around the world where hope and pride matter more than resentment and shame, that new attitude gets results.
Latin America knows it has a choice — and now that it’s clear, the people of South and Central America are choosing “Trumps” of their own.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.