The first official visit made by a U.S. secretary of state is a symbolic expression of the new administration’s imperialist priorities. For example, Mike Pompeo’s first official visit in 2018 was to Jordan, Israel, and Egypt to discuss policy toward Iran and Palestine. Antony Blinken in 2021 made his first trip to Japan and Korea to prepare these allies to counter China and North Korea.

At first glance, Central America and the Caribbean seem to lack the geopolitical importance of the aforementioned states. But we must look more deeply. Central America and the Caribbean will be launching pads for the new U.S. imperialist strategy: Trump’s aggressive immigration and forced-deportation policy, combating the influence of China in the region, which is linked to the discursive escalations around the Panama Canal. Another pillar of U.S. policy is recovering political presence in this part of its “backyard,” seeking a strong presence in the Central American isthmus and the Caribbean to deploy a better offensive.

Trump’s Atrocious Anti-immigrant Policies

Trump’s far-right rhetoric scapegoats migrants from Central America, Mexico, the Caribbean, Venezuela, and the rest of Latin America as responsible for the United States’ political and social crises. To be clear, in no way are migrants from this region responsible for the decline of the U.S. or the tensions opened because of the country’s trade war with China. Immigrants are not responsible for the relative deindustrialization carried out in the U.S. by the capitalist class in order to obtain higher profits by paying low wages in China and condemning U.S. blue-collar workers to unemployment and the overexploitation of the multiethnic working class in general.

Trump does not even recognize that there has been a 10 percent decrease in the number of Mexican migrants in the United States since 2008. The president’s rhetoric drips with hypocrisy, given that the U.S. is responsible for the political and economic situation in Latin American countries — a result of imperialist policies, such as economic sanctions, interventionism, IMF policies, and more.

Trump’s brutal policy of persecution and forced repatriation has already begun. The images of handcuffed migrants have caused widespread righteous indignation, as have new policies that allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in schools and churches. This is how wealthy U.S. employers pay back the labor force that has been producing surplus value for them for decades without labor rights.

In this sense, Rubio’s immediate objective in his first trip is to advance and deepen immigration agreements so that the Central American states take in the massive forced deportations, including migrants from other countries. Under the subordination of U.S. imperialism, from the progressive president Bernardo Arévalo in Guatemala to reactionary leaders in the region like Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, José Raúl Mulino in Panama, Rodrigo Chaves in Costa Rica, and Luis Abinader in the Dominican Republic have already deployed immigration agreements with the United States, turning a blind eye to the absolutely unacceptable treatment of migrants by the U.S. federal government.

“We will dance to the music they play for us,” said Costa Rica’s president Chaves, referring to Trump’s guidance. An example of this “dance” is the aggressive political and economic reprisals that ended with Colombian president Gustavo Petro acquiescing to Trump’s demands to accept Colombian deportees, demonstrating the limits of Latin American “progressivism.”

Trump and the most rancid right wingers in the United States assume that with these agreements, the flow of migrants will stop. But it is the very policies of plunder and brutal economic plans, such as those implemented by the IMF, that deepen misery for the working class in those countries and push migrants to search for job opportunities in the North.

Additionally, the region’s capitalist economies remain structurally dependent on the United States, making it all the more difficult to solve their serious social problems. On the other hand, migrants are a tremendously important labor force for the United States: in these first days of Trump’s attacks on migrants, we have witnessed mass absenteeism in agriculture and industry, the sectors that depend most on these exploited workers.

The agreements sought by Rubio are also meant to send a message to regional governments. By recovering a political and diplomatic presence in Central America and the Caribbean, the Trump administration is sending a message to all Latin American countries. It is a message, on the one hand, to crush any opposition to imperialist policies, and on the other, to prevent these governments from seeking further rapprochement with China and Russia. More generally, it is a threat to the working class of the region not to confront permanent imperialist aggression.

China in the Background and the Panama Canal

China has been establishing deeper diplomatic and economic relations in Central America since 2007, when Costa Rica established diplomatic ties with the country and broke ties with Taiwan. The relationship between Taiwain and Latin America had been established during World War II and the Chinese Revolution in 1949.

Since then, the Chinese presence has been tangible, with varying intensities, in virtually all Central American and Caribbean countries, several of which are part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic, but especially Panama, have seen a significant increase in Chinese presence in recent years. This allows China to bring goods into the U.S. market through the major ports on the east and west coasts of the United States.

Central America, including the Panama Canal, is a vital point in international trade that has recently gained more geopolitical importance. This is because China aims to build a new interoceanic canal through Nicaragua in the form of “dry canals” — an extensive network of roads, railroads, and advanced logistic centers, taking advantage of the isthmus.

In Panama, Trump’s cynical rhetoric undoubtedly aims to set up a scenario of confrontation with China in the region. His statement that “China controls the canal” is untrue: the canal is administered by the Panama Canal Authority and the five canal ports, only two of which are operated by China through companies based in Hong Kong. The other three are operated by multinationals from the United States, Singapore, and Taiwan.¹The Port of Manzanillo is operated by the U.S. multinational SSA Marine, and has the country’s highest container throughput, with more than 2.7 million TEUs (standard 20-foot containers) in 2024. The Port of Balboa has been operated since 1997 by the Panama Ports Company (PPC), which has been owned since 2015 by Hong Kong–based CK Hutchison Holdings. The Port of Colon, or Colon Container Terminal (CCT), is part of Taiwan’s Evergreen Group. The Port of Rodman is operated by PSA Panama International Terminal, which is part of the Singapore-based PSA International Group. The Port of Cristobal, like the Port of Balboa (Pacific), is operated by the Hong Kong–based subsidiary of CK Hutchinson Holdings. It is the latter company that Trump is referring to, which, although it is true that it has mostly Chinese capital, also has Canadian capital.

In this sense, the central objective of the Trumpist position to “retake the canal” is to control a fundamental strategic point, diminishing China’s presence in the region. The goal is also to further subjugate the Panamanian people, who still remember the military invasion of 1989.

The United States will also rely on Guatemala, which continues to recognize Taiwan and not the People’s Republic of China. Yet, Marco Rubio has little to offer the region. The recent Chinese investment in the Chancay port in Peru, of an initial $1.3 billion and up to the expected $3.4 billion, contrasts with the little investment that the U.S. federal government or the U.S. bourgeoisie in general has the capacity to make.

Moreover, the announced investment in technology that the Biden administration sought through the CHIPS Act, through which superconductors could be developed in Mexico and Costa Rica, has been called into question by Trump. Figueres Olsen, the leader of the most important bourgeois party in Costa Rica, Liberación Nacional, complained bitterly about the implicit prohibition emanating from the U.S. imperialist power to do new business with China.

More generally, for the working class and the peoples of Central America and the Caribbean, the U.S.-China conflict means nothing more than submission to international powers and the impossibility of political and economic independence. We must not ignore that China acts as an imperialist country in regions of the world with high economic dependence or semicolonial status, such as in Central America and the Caribbean, just as it does in Africa, seizing assets when these dependent countries cannot repay loans or economic investments.

The Policies of the Region’s Governments and the Upcoming CELAC Conference in Honduras

Trump’s policies are an attempt to recompose U.S. imperialist hegemony — the “golden age” that Trump seeks. Strong resistance in Central America and the Caribbean would be a major blow to his agenda.

Trump is clearly imposing a harsh policy in the region. The United States’ historical contempt for Central America and the Caribbean is seen in Trump’s racist rhetoric, in which he insults our peoples in every way imaginable — the very peoples the U.S. has plundered and oppressed since the 19th century.

For workers, women, and youth, it is clear that none of the regional governments, be they right wingers like Bukele or Chaves or so-called progressives like Sheinbaum, Petro, or Arévalo, represent their true interests, nor do these leaders represent the interests of the migrants who are forced to return because they could not find work or conditions to live with dignity.

Far from it, all these governments have ended up accepting Trump’s impositions. In Mexico, for example, President López Obrador deployed 6,000 National Guard troops to detain migrants on the Guatemalan border, acquiescing to the first Trump administration. Sheinbaum’s rhetoric regarding the U.S.-Colombia conflict ends up being a policy of submissively accepting imperialist policy.

The ruling classes of our Central American and Caribbean countries, along with their politicians, have been utterly incapable of resisting U.S. economic and political domination. The history of the 20th and 21st centuries has shown that the ruling classes of Latin American countries cannot develop a real resistance to the offensives of imperialism. In this sense, the emergency summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), called by Honduran president Xiomara Castro, should not lead us to false expectations regarding how to confront the Trumpist offensive.

Faced with this new situation, it is imperative that the working class and the poor of Central America and the Caribbean take the initiative in the anti-imperialist struggle, organizing independently and joining forces with the workers of Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, and other countries at the regional level to confront this historic oppression. This perspective of joint struggle against imperialist oppression and aggression must be taken up again from an internationalist perspective of the working class, uniting this fight against imperialism to the resistance struggles that will take place against the Trump administration in the United States itself.

To confront Trump’s aggressive U.S. policy, we need the broadest mobilization of the workers, large popular sectors, peasants, and native peoples in our countries. Already the protests of young people in front of the Panama Canal on the day of Trump’s inauguration indicate the road to follow. In that sense, the trade union leaderships and the Left must take the lead in the face of the imperialist policies of the new White House administrator.

It is fundamental to link spaces where the entire political Left can converge, where unions and rank-and-file workers can carry forward a consistent plan of struggle against Trump’s impositions against our migrant brothers and sisters. It is necessary to fight for all migrants to have all rights. Such is the call we make from La Izquierda Diario Costa Rica and from Organización Socialista Revolucionaria de Costa Rica, part of the FT-CI, which has a presence in 14 countries in America and Europe.

Originally published in Spanish on January 28 in La Izquierda Diario