U.S. President Donald Trump will welcome the leaders of Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, El Salvador, Ecuador, and Honduras in Miami next month, in the first regional summit since he took office a little more than a year ago. A White House official, speaking to AFP on Wednesday on condition of anonymity, said the meeting between the South American presidents and Trump will take place on March 7.
All of those leaders are more or less close to the Republican president, who has made relations with the region’s southern neighbors an unexpected pillar of his foreign policy. In Trump’s view, Latin America and the Caribbean are the region that must be watched closely in a new world order in which China is the rival to be defeated.
China has been investing in the region for decades, and Trump wants to reverse that trend with a policy that alternates the stick and the carrot: interventions in Venezuela, attacks in the Caribbean, an oil blockade against Cuba, or threats against the region’s major countries (Brazil, Colombia) that dare to stand up to him.
True to his personalistic approach to politics, Trump is nevertheless capable of sudden shifts, such as his phone conversations with Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or the welcome he extended last week to Colombia’s leader, Gustavo Petro, after months of mutual insults.
Milei, the closest
Of the initial group of leaders traveling to Miami, Argentina’s Javier Milei is the closest ideologically, and the leader who has met Trump the most times, beginning with the celebrations Trump held after his historic election victory in November 2024. Argentina has received financial assistance from the U.S. Treasury, signed a free trade agreement, and is willing to deepen that relationship by opening the door to U.S. investment in its rare earth deposits, one of Trump’s obsessions.
Milei is also expected to attend Argentina Week in New York starting March 9, a business event aimed at attracting investment. El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele is another key ally because he decided from the outset to cooperate with Trump’s hard-line anti-immigration policy.
El Salvador regularly receives planes carrying undocumented migrants and has even agreed to place those with serious criminal records in its high-security prisons. Santiago Peña of Paraguay; Rodrigo Paz of Bolivia; Daniel Noboa of Ecuador; and Tito Asfura of Honduras are leaders determined to emulate, in part, Bukele’s citizen-security model, though each has his own priorities in dealings with Washington.
Asfura was received last Saturday by Trump in Florida, and the Republican boasts that he supported him decisively during the electoral campaign. The United States also gave him full backing during the long and controversial vote count, which put Honduras’s electoral system to the test.
Asfura is willing to cooperate on anti-narcotics and migration issues, but he also has another goal: getting Trump to reverse the end of Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which benefited thousands of Hondurans for years. Ecuador, with its oil and inputs such as coffee, and Bolivia, with its vast mineral deposits, also have bargaining chips with the U.S. president, who has proclaimed himself the region’s “leader.”
Trump has even renamed the famous Monroe Doctrine of intervention in the region as the “Donroe Doctrine,” and has elevated it as his national security strategy, regardless of who objects. The continent was supposed to hold a Summit of the Americas in 2025 in the Dominican Republic, but it has been postponed without a new date.
