In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal shortly after being sworn in as Donald Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, speaking to the “America’s First” policy of the new administration, emphasized the necessity for the U.S. to pay “closer attention to our own neighborhood,” namely the Western Hemisphere. Almost two months into Trump’s second presidential term, from his cabinet picks, to the threat of tariffs and attacks on immigration, and to the promises of recapturing the Panama Canal, that much is self-evident.
Amid the growing crisis of U.S. hegemony and the return of great power conflict, Trump touted his policy of “Peace Through Strength” as the answer for the woes facing U.S. imperialism, on the campaign trail and while in office. Far from the shoring up of a post-WWII order shaped and led by U.S.-led multilateralism that Joe Biden so desperately wanted to revive after Trump’s first term, Trump’s return to office has been marked by his doubling down on a go-it-alone policy for the country. Saying that he is the best “dealmaker” for the U.S., Trump’s “art of the deal” has relied on leveraging the great power of U.S. capital to reassert U.S. dominance.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Latin America, which Trump has deemed central to his foreign policy agenda. In the aforementioned op-ed, Rubio wrote that Trump’s “foreign policy agenda begins closer to home.” Giving color to Trump’s supposed vision, Rubio goes on to explain how the central task of shoring up U.S. hegemony requires lining up the countries of Latin America which they see as “long neglected” for decades — behind U.S. leadership. In other words, behind Trump’s America-first agenda for the hemisphere that is set to be the “Monroe Doctrine 2.0”.
Trump’s vision for a new “golden age” for the U.S. is predicated upon a new cycle of imperialist plunder and domination. His racist and xenophobic vitriol has gone towards dividing the working class and creating “heroes” in the image of the U.S. and “villains” out of his adversaries to bolster America’s “manifest destiny,” and to give a carte blanche to U.S. imperialism to intervene in the continent.
For over two centuries, along with the idea of Manifest Destiny – which posited that the U.S. had the divine right to spread and possess the whole of the continent – the Monroe Doctrine has been used by Washington to shore up U.S. influence in the region and justify brutal political and military interventions in the region. From the Roosevelt Corollary, which ordained that the U.S. was justified in military interventions in the hemisphere, to Jefferson’s “Good Neighbor” policy that substituted boots on the ground for diplomatic maneuvering, U.S. foreign policy in the region has always been about subordinating the region to Washington’s will.
Yet, unlike the 20th century when the implementation of the Monroe Doctrine coincided with an imperialist project that was ascendant on the world capitalist stage, Trump’s same desire to conquer “new frontiers” comes at a time of U.S. imperialism’s historic crisis, where its hegemonic power is no longer uncontested. For Latin America, in particular, where U.S. imperialism is increasingly in dispute in light of China’s growing influence, Trump risks pushing its allies closer to its biggest adversary. Whether his aggressive strategy will reinforce U.S. dominance in the long term, or accelerate its unraveling, is yet undetermined.
From Cabinet Picks to Threatening Tariff Wars
Nowhere is the turn towards this “America first” foreign policy clearer than in the very functioning of Trump’s cabinet and the role played by Latin American hardliners like Rubio and Mike Waltz — both in offices that have, in the recent past, gone to Atlanticists specializing in Europe and Asia like John Kerry and Mike Pompeo. Beyond the influence of Elon Musk, (who has risen to become Trump’s de-facto second-in-command), Rubio especially has become a key enforcer of Trump’s policy in this first quarter of Trump’s second presidency. In a departure from previous administrations, notably, his first international trip as Secretary of State was made to Central America and the Caribbean, going to Panama, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic, where he aimed to shore up support for the new Trump administration. During his trip, leveraging Trump’s repeated threats of the annexation of the Panama Canal, Rubio was able to move Panama to withdraw from China’s Belt & Road Initiative. In addition, he also advanced alliances with key figures of the Latin American Right, including Nayib Bukule of El Salvador who, based on those agreements, has given Trump the use of his notorious “mega prisons” that have been at the center of his war on drugs to hold deportees from the United States. More recently, amid his ruthless targeting of immigrant students at home, he made his second trip to the Caribbean, with a visit to Jamaica, Guyana and Suriname, further emphasizing the centrality of the region to the administration’s foreign policy goals.
Part of Trump’s attempts to coerce his continental partners have also been about leveraging the attacks on immigration and the threat of tariffs to eke out concessions and reinforce the United States’ dominance in the region. Beyond revitalizing the fear mongering over the southern border, Trump has used this “war” on immigrants to force Latin American nations towards increasing militarization and sophisticating their security apparatuses in ways that are in service of Washington’s interests. In an article for the Miami Herald, Rubio, speaking of the Caribbean as the “third border” of the U.S.clearly outlines the aims of his aforementioned trip as strengthening the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative (CBSI), which is to advance the development and cooperation of the security forces in the region based on Washington’s will. Over the last months, the Trump administration has also advanced talks with Ecuador towards the construction of a new naval base for U.S. forces in the region, and signed a memorandum of understanding with Colombia that would give the U.S. access to biometric data collected from migrants in Colombia.
A key aspect of Trump’s Latin America policy in the coming period will be his efforts to redefine the U.S. relationship with Mexico, whose economic subordination to American capital has been a cornerstone of decades of neoliberalism. While Trump has largely spared Mexico and Canada from his broader tariff measures — set to take effect in April — he has repeatedly threatened both nations with steep 25% tariffs. In February, he temporarily retreated after Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum pledged to deploy 10,000 troops to the northern border to curb migration, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau committed $1.3 billion to bolster border security with new helicopters, technology, and personnel to combat fentanyl trafficking. However, Trump’s refusal to rule out future tariffs suggests an ongoing strategy to extract further concessions from Washington’s North American partners, as well as to push for a renegotiation of the USMCA on terms more favorable to the U.S., both economically and politically.
Though most USMCA-compliant goods — accounting for 50% of Mexican and 37% of Canadian imports — have been exempted from the latest round of tariffs, the targeting of the auto industry is a deliberate strike against the Mexican working class and the decades-long integration of North American supply chains, engineered by U.S. capital and enforced by American imperialism. Trump’s aggressive trade posture underscores his intent to leverage economic coercion to reshape North American trade dynamics in favor of U.S. interests.
The Strategic Competition with China
It is hard to understand the full scope of Trump’s policy towards Latin America without considering it against the backdrop of its increasing competition with China.
Over the last two decades, while the U.S. was largely embroiled in its conflicts in the MIddle East, China has sought to extend its own influence in Latin America. It has emerged as a key trading partner for many countries in the region, surpassing the United States as the top trading partner for several nations, including Brazil, Chile, and Peru. Trade between China, Latin America, and the Caribbean soared from $12 billion in 2000 to $315 billion in 2020, and is projected to surpass $700 billion by 2035. The region has not only become a key market for China’s manufactured goods, machinery, and technology, but also a source of raw materials like soybeans, copper, iron ore, and oil that are key to China’s industrial growth. Notable here is the Asian giant’s intervention in the Lithium Triangle — a 7,000 square foot region across Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia that holds an estimated three-quarters of all the world’s lithium resources — towards securing access to the precious mineral that is key to the development of rechargeable batteries. Indeed, through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China has financed and constructed major infrastructure projects, including ports, railways, and highways, aimed towards its own strategic interests in securing access to key natural resources and expanding its own global infrastructural network. For example, China has invested heavily in Argentina’s solar and wind energy projects, Brazil’s electricity grid, and Ecuador’s hydroelectric dams, to name only a few.
Furthermore, amid increasing tariffs from the U.S. through Trump’s first term and the Biden presidency, China has also leveraged the integration between Mexico and the United States, using the former as a strategic gateway to circumvent trade barriers. Chinese manufacturers have begun leveraging Mexico’s manufacturing capabilities and trade agreements for the assembly and re-export of goods to the U.S. in order to bypass tariffs on Chinese goods, and Chinese investment is beginning to drive the development of Mexican industrial parks, particularly in sectors like electronics, automotive, and textiles. By 2023, trade between Mexico and China crossed $100 billion. Indeed, it is this transformation of Mexico into a conduit between its northern partners and the Asian giant that has underlined much of former President Andre Manuel Lopez Obrador’s (AMLO) Fourth Transformation, which is now being overseen by his successor, Sheinbaum. In a letter to Biden in 2018, AMLO described the then-proposed project of the Trans-Isthmus Corridor —geared towards the extension of the maquiladora model into the south of Mexico — as a project that “implies taking advantage of the strategic location of this strip of national territory to unite the Pacific with the Atlantic, thus facilitating the transport of goods between the countries of Asia and the east coast of the United States.”
None of these things are far from Trump’s mind.
An antiglobalist, Trump believes that stunting China’s advance amid U.S. hegemonic decline requires using the latter’s coercive imperialist power to get concessions from the continent that has long been under its thumb. And Trump’s agent, Marco fRubio has made it clear that he won’t be shying away from using punitive actions against any country that doesn’t comply.
Despite painting himself as a friend to American workers, Trump has centered his attacks not on the bourgeoisie and their multinational corporations that discarded the American working class and plundered the Global South for resources and cheap labor (indeed, for them, he has cuts and subsidies), but on the working class on the other side of the border who are were hyper-exploited for pennies to the dollar by the same bosses.
Indeed, paid for by American capital, Northern Mexico was transformed into an “export processing zone,” with maquiladoras factories that imported and assembled duty-free components for export back to the U.S. – dotting the U.S.-Mexico border, and where labor rights abuses, low wages, and environmental degradation run rampant. Central to this precarious labor force was the migrant labor that powered the maquilas, made up of both poor peasants who flocked from other parts of the country to these brutal factories for better wage labor, as well as undocumented immigrants from Central America stuck in Mexico due to border regulations. Investor-state dispute mechanisms — maintained through the renegotiated NAFTA, known as the USMCA — further gave the U.S. multinationals unprecedented power to intervene in the domestic affairs of Mexico, with the ability of corporations to sue the state for any legislation that it perceived went against its interests.
Free trade in the region didn’t just mean the replacement of one labor force with another – the globalization of production only strengthened the interdependency of the working class in the region. To take the example of the auto industry alone, key components of manufacturing in American industries such as auto moved south of the border, and industrial centers across the Rust Belt dried up due to capital flight. While the U.S. remained as a hub for higher-value manufacturing activities, research and development, and the production of complex components such as advanced engines, electronics, and automotive technologies, Mexico became a key location for the assembly of vehicles and the manufacturing of large volumes of lower-value auto parts.
Seeing NAFTA as one of the biggest culprits in the loss of American jobs, Trump renegotiated the USMCA in his first term to not only require that 75% of a vehicle’s components be made in North America to qualify for zero tariffs (up from 62.5% under NAFTA), but also mandating that 40-45% of auto manufacturing be done by workers making at least $16 per hour. Despite their attempts to sell the USMCA as “better” for American workers because of its provisions for new wage floors, it set the basis for attacks on workers on both sides of the border. While workers in Mexico – where wages averaged $8 a day – faced layoffs and closures due to the increase in costs of production across the border, it also created the grounds for the suppression of wages here in the U.S., where wages that average $32 per hour were pushed towards the new wage floor of $16. However, as Trump’s strong-arming attacks on immigration and the weaponization of tariffs have made clear, an important part of Trump’s agenda is to renegotiate the USMCA for a far more favorable outcome for U.S. capital on the backs of the disintegration of the North American working class. As it shapes up, key to this will be the push to bar China from accessing U.S. markets indirectly by pushing Mexico to impose greater tariffs on Chinese goods; offsetting the U.S.’ trade deficit with Mexico and forcing them to increase their purchase of American goods, especially as Mexico has, in the face of “nearshoring,” become the biggest exporter of goods to the U.S.; and pushing Mexico to strengthen the vertical border across Mexico to curb the flow of immigrants from Central and South America.
Caught between the growing rivalry of these two great powers, Latin America’s ruling classes — along with their political representatives — offer little more than hollow rhetoric in response to Trump’s bullying. At best, they feign resistance; at worst, they openly align themselves with his far-right agenda. As neoliberalism’s crisis deepens and U.S. hegemony wanes, both Washington and Beijing are scrambling to reshape their spheres of influence, imposing new cycles of capitalist exploitation on the region’s working class, all to the benefit of the imperialist bosses. Even in the United States, labor leaders like Shawn Fain, while beating the drums of class struggle, have endorsed Trump’s tariffs, ignoring the devastating consequences they hold for the working class, especially in Latin America.
Faced with this volatile situation, it is imperative that we reject this chauvinism that is geared towards organizing sectors of the working class in the imperialist core behind the interests of the imperialist bosses, and against the interests of its own class. Now more than ever, in the face of new threats of capitalist crises and domination, it is essential that the working class and poor of the region, across Latin America, and arm-in-arm with workers in the imperialist core, take up the struggle against imperialist plunder, and — against the politics of fragmentation of our class — take up the fight to put the interconnected value and supply chains not towards the production of increasing profits for the bourgeoisie, but towards the aims of a socialist society that meets the needs of all people.