Rightwing Leaders in Latin America Are Hoping for Trump’s Return

There are high stakes for the upcoming U.S. presidential elections, and not just for the United States.

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While there is a lot to criticize about the Biden Administration, it has sought to uphold democracy in the Western Hemisphere at a time where there is a growing trend among both leftwing and rightwing populist governments away from internationally recognized norms of democracy, diplomacy, and statecraft. Now rightwing populists across Latin America are eagerly awaiting the upcoming elections in the United States, which could signal a shift in the U.S. approach in the region. 

For rightwing populists, the return of Donald Trump’s politics in the United States could mean the end of oversight and anti-corruption discourse and policies. It would also empower them to further pursue regressive, religiously inspired policies.

“Conservative actors are going to be empowered [with the possible return of Trump],” Ana María Méndez Dardón, the Director for Central America at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), tells The Progressive. 

Trump’s return could also heighten the conservative Christian supremacist language that is emerging in the region, explains Méndez Dardón.  

“[There is already] a narrative, even from [Nayib] Bukele in Central America and in other South American countries, as in case of Argentina, that utilizes God first in the discourse and the discourse of the ‘traditional family,’ and then the free market capitalist [narrative] and the entire economic part,” she says. “And the effect [of Trump’s return] would mean that corrupt actors are going to be empowered.” 

In the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential elections there has already been a shift towards ideologically driven exercises of power/influence across the hemisphere.

Countries like Ecuador have directly violated diplomatic norms. In April, the country’s military invaded the Mexican embassy under orders of President Daniel Naoba to detain former vice president Jorge Glas, who had requested asylum. In another recent instance, Argentina’s President Javier Milei sparked a diplomatic crisis with Spain on May 20 after making derogatory comments about the wife of Spain’s leftist prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, during an appearance at a rally for the Spanish far-right/neo-fascist Vox party. 

Milei, a far-right libertarian and self-described anarcho-capitalist, has increasingly become a star of the far right in both Latin America and the United States since he won the presidency in 2023, especially in the far-right Christian dominionist circles. El Salvador’s Bukele, too, has become a darling of the far right, appearing multiple times on Tucker Carlson’s now defunct Fox News program. 

Both Milei and Bukele were featured speakers at the February 2024 Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) meeting in Delaware, with Bukele being received as a “rockstar,” according to the Associated Press. In both of their speeches, the two leaders echoed increasingly global far-right talking points, including antisemitic tropes. 

For both, Trump’s return would be ideal for their political brands.

El Salvador’s Bukele told a reporter, as he was leaving the CPAC event in February, that he had preferred his interactions with the Trump Administration over those with the Biden Administration. Bukele faced increased concern from the Biden Administration early on, but tensions have since eased and the Biden Administration has remained silent on Bukele’s illegal re-election in 2024 and the grave violations of human rights during his crackdown on gang violence.

In the end, it doesn’t matter whether Trump wins in November, as the far right has sought to build a parallel network across the hemisphere. However, a Trump victory would undermine the efforts to protect fragile democracies throughout the region. 

Democracies across Central and South America have received major blows in the four years since Trump left office. 

There have been at least two high-profile attacks on democratic institutions in Latin America since 2020. Brazil saw its own January 6-style riots on January 8, 2023, when supporters of Jair Bolsonaro, rejecting the results of the presidential election, attacked government buildings following the inauguration of the progressive Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva. And in Guatemala, the far right, in conjunction with the office of the attorney general, sought to propagate a fraud narrative around the election of progressive presidential candidate Bernardo Arévalo. 

Both countries have seen Trump allies moving in the circles of the opposition. Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon had supported the Bolsonaro candidacy, and in Guatemala, Trump’s controversial former ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, has aided the far right in spreading the fraud narrative. 

As efforts by the far right to undermine the democratic order in Guatemala continue, Trump's return to office in the United States could be disastrous. Although the Biden Administration has defended the democratic order in Guatemala, eighty years ago, the United States destabilized the country and ended the democratic order in Guatemala by supporting a coup d’état against President Jacobo Árbenz. 

Guatemala’s attorney general, María Consuelo Porras, and the leadership of the Public Prosecutor’s office—all of whom have been sanctioned by the United States for acts of corruption—have sought to create a parallel government in which they have given their wholehearted support to Donald Trump. In April 2024, they launched an investigation into the international organization Save the Children following accusations from an individual that the organization was involved in child trafficking, a narrative promoted by the far right and those around Trump. 

Trafficking is a major problem in countries like Guatemala, but today’s rightwing narrative seeks to play into QAnon conspiracy theories which suggest that global elites are stealing children to consume their blood in a ploy to remain young, echoing age-old antisemitic conspiracy theories. 

The action of the Public Prosecutor’s office also seeks to echo the narratives around the 2023 film Sound of Freedom which has become popular on the right. The film was screened in Guatemala in August 2023. 

“[The narrative] tugs at the heartstrings of the Republican Party,” Méndez Dardón says. “The whole issue around gender identity, [promoted] by conservatives, has an influence that comes from churches and from others. It is seen as something that is negative negative.” 

There is hope among Porras and others from the Public Prosecutor’s office that a Trump victory would mean the lifting of the sanctions against them for the attempts to overturn the results of the 2023 election and for their role in trying to debilitate Arévalo’s Movimiento Semilla Party. 

“What we also know is that if the coup d’état continues [in Guatemala],” Méndez Dardón says, “Then the risk [created by electing Trump] is going to be enormous.”