Trump Brings Latin American Conservative Leaders to Florida Summit

US President Donald Trump, currently waging a war with Iran, hosts a dozen right-wing leaders from Latin America and the Caribbean on Saturday to discuss issues facing the region, from organized crime to illegal immigration. Trump greeted leaders at the “Shield of the Americas” summit in the southern US state of Florida, aiming to boost US interests in the region and curb those of foreign powers like China. 

Trump has already staked bold claims in Latin America with the ouster of Venezuela’s authoritarian leader Nicolas Maduro and working with his replacement, Delcy Rodriguez, to claim Venezuelan oil reserves for America.  The summit at Trump’s Doral golf club near Miami — not far from his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach — underscores the president’s effort to expand US authority in the Western Hemisphere, the so-called “Donroe Doctrine.”

It comes a week after Trump, with Israel, launched devastating strikes against Iran, sparking a regional conflict, upending the world’s energy and transport sectors, and bringing chaos to usually peaceful areas of the Gulf. Trump has also implied in recent days that communist-run Cuba is “next” after taking out leaders in Venezuela and Iran.

Among the leaders to attend the Florida summit are Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei, Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele — whose security crackdown is seen as a model for many in the region.  Most of the right-wing heads of state share concerns about the rising power of drug cartels, even hitting countries that until recently were considered fairly safe such as Ecuador and Chile, said Irene Mia, a Latin America expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. 

“All those countries used to be quite secure and didn’t really have an issue with organized crime, but they’ve seen increasing levels of organized crime because of the reconfiguration of the drug trade,” Mia said.  The strained security situation, which has contributed to the Latin American right wing’s recent string of electoral victories, means the trend of US intervention has received less pushback than in the past, she added. 

Some of the leaders, like Ecuador’s Noboa, have worked to strengthen their ties to Washington since coming to power.  Just this week, the United States and Ecuador announced joint operations to combat drug trafficking that has turned one of the region’s safest countries to one of the deadliest in just a few years. 

Late Friday, the US military and Noboa separately released video of a house exploding in a forested area of Ecuador, calling it a successful blow against “narcoterrorists.”

A very fine balance

In addition to Milei, Bukele and Noboa, Trump will host the leaders of Bolivia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Guyana, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, and Trinidad and Tobago — as well as Jose Antonio Kast, the president-elect of Chile. 

Although some of the leaders have much to thank Trump for — such as $20 billion in financial support to Argentina, or an endorsement that buoyed Honduran leader Nasry Asfura’s razor-thin electoral victory — the durability of such a conservative coalition remains to be seen, according to Mia.

“It’s entirely a negative agenda,” Mia said. “It’s all about the threats coming to the region for US security: migration, organized crime.”  She also pointed at the glaring absences from the summit, Mexico and Brazil, which are currently lead by leftists Claudia Sheinbaum and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. 

“Without Mexico and Brazil, it’s not going to be very successful in tackling those issues” of narcotrafficking and counterterrorism, she said, given that Mexican cartels play a key role in the trafficking supply chain and Brazil’s ports are critical narco-trafficking routes to Europe.

For Mia, the support of the right-led Latin American countries for US interests “is quite fragile because the relationship between Latin America and the US is so problematic.”  “It’s a very fine balance to see whether the population will approve of Trump’s policy and until when.”