Pablo Rubio Apiolaza 
PhD in Contemporary History (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), specialist in Latin American political history and collaborator of Fundación Alternativas
Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election last November 5 represents a major political shift in U.S. history, comparable perhaps to Ronald Reagan’s triumph in 1980. Although Trump during his first term (2017-2021) reflected a similar change, these 2024 elections seem to have a greater relevance, all of which is directly expressed in the global world and in particular on the Latin American continent.
At the institutional level, it should be noted that the victory of Trump -who won 312 Electoral College votes against 226 for the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris-, and of the Republican Party, extended to other organs of American politics. In addition to winning the popular vote -which had not happened with a Republican candidate since 2004-, Trump and the Republicans obtained the majority in the Senate -53 senators out of 100 total seats-, and everything points to them reaching the majority of the 435 members of the House of Representatives. They will also have a chance to maintain, and even deepen, the conservative control of the Supreme Court, one of the most important bodies in the institutional framework of the North American country.
Therefore, Trump’s triumph, apart from reflecting deep fractures and the polarization of US society, reveals the concentration of power in the presidential figure -the result of his great popular legitimacy-, which entails important consequences. As the world’s leading power, the impact of the U.S. elections has an obvious impact, and in this sense the situation in Ukraine, the Middle East and, mainly, its relationship with the Indo-Pacific and, in particular, China, will be the most relevant scenarios for U.S. action.
For Latin America, Trump’s influence would be decisive in multiple dimensions. According to analyst Brian Winter, “Latin America will probably play a more important role under Trump 2.0 than any U.S. administration in the last thirty years”.
One of the latest developments has been the appointment of the next Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. The current Republican senator for the state of Florida would be the first Latino at the helm of foreign policy, the son of Cuban immigrants and who speaks perfect Spanish. Rubio, as a member of the powerful Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, has already held meetings with Latin American presidents of the conservative wing such as Javier Milei, from Argentina, and the Salvadoran Nayib Bukele, showing who would be his main allies at the diplomatic and geopolitical level. His role will seek to strengthen ties with the region, with the aim of counteracting China’s influence in the continent.
However, given this general background, Latin America is a much more complex and diverse reality, where regions such as Central America and the Caribbean, the Andes, the Southern Cone and Brazil coexist. In each of these territories, the economic variable, migration, the fight against drug trafficking and/or organized crime, are expressed in different ways. The same occurs with presidential leaderships, where the Trump administration would maintain more neutral relations with the administrations of Chile’s Gabriel Boric and Brazil’s Lula da Silva, of notable geopolitical and economic influence in South America. At the same time, there is a hardening of U.S. positions against leftist dictatorships in the region, such as those of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, Miguel Díaz-Canel in Cuba and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua.
For the United States, and especially for President Trump, the main concern in Latin America is Mexico. With a 3,000-kilometer border and trade between the two countries exceeding US$800 billion annually, trade exchange is at its best. It should be noted that the main interest of the United States lies in reducing China’s economic influence in Mexican territory, which would be achieved by raising tariffs. According to the Capital Economics think tank, a 10% tariff on products imported from Mexico to the United States means a 1.5% reduction of the Latin American country’s GDP. At the same time, Trump’s position could tend to delay the negotiation of the T-MEC, the trade agreement inherited from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which is due to renew its terms in 2026.
Another important element relates to immigration and border protection. During his campaign, Trump has said that his administration would hire 10,000 new agents to patrol the border. This is also mixed with the threat of mass deportations, which could affect many of the estimated eleven million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, with all the humanitarian and economic impact that would entail. In addition, combating drug cartels will be at the forefront of Trump’s agenda; the amount of fentanyl crossing the border from Mexico into the United States is said to have increased tenfold in the last five years. This whole situation has generated concern in the recently assumed president of that country, Claudia Sheinbaum, who will have the Trump administration and relations with the United States as her main foreign agenda item.
In summary, the impact of Donald Trump’s presidency on the Latin American region, according to this background, will be fully perceptible. At the economic and trade level, the protectionist and isolationist stance will materialize with the increase of tariffs and tariffs, which could impact on the rise of the dollar and generate inflationary pressures. At the geopolitical level, the United States, in its “trade war” with China, will try to convince the different governments of the region of the virtues of the economic and trade alliance with them. In short, it is a question of returning to the linkage – not only economic – that characterized the United States with Latin America since the 20th century, which defined a large part of its political, economic and cultural development.
Finally, and at the political level, the election of Donald Trump generates uncertainties and questions about the nature and functioning of the democratic regime in the region, which could be expressed in the strengthening of new political leaderships, and eventually affect the fight against the structural problems experienced by the region such as inflation and the rising cost of living, organized crime and drug trafficking, migratory phenomena, insecurity and deep inequalities.
