On June 21, Colombians narrowly elected the right-wing lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella to the presidency over the leftist candidate Iván Cepeda. Since 2023, right-wingers have won 11 of the past 13 elections in Latin America. De la Espriella’s victory comes as a jewel in the crown for the Trump administration and its so-called “Donroe Doctrine.” Sadly, the track record of recent conservative governments in the Americas—with the exception of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele—has been disappointing at best and catastrophic at worst.
In its current form, the Latin American right seems determined to act as little more than a foil for the region’s leftists. Time and again, Latin American conservatives have elevated market fundamentalism and the interests of Washington above those of their own nations and their workers. De la Espriella’s election is the culmination of this condition. The new president is the first in Colombian history to have won election after having campaigned as a toady to the Yankees.
De la Espriella fits the right-wing, Latin American archetype of the outsider businessman, having made millions representing clients of ill repute, including the former President Álvaro Uribe and the Maduro loyalist Alex Saab. In his own words, the new president’s international role models are the United States’ President Donald Trump, Argentina’s President Javier Milei and the Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele—Milei being de la Espriella’s greatest influence by far.
Like Milei, the new president was a natural adherent of elite libertarianism prior to his presidential campaign. Up until recently, he vocally supported euthanasia and unrestricted abortion, and even gave an impassioned speech in favor of adoption by same-sex couples. The issue, of course, is that this combination of progressive social and free-market views is repellent to working-class conservatives. De la Espriella now claims that he opposes abortion, championing family values. Of course, his platform calls for copying Milei’s “chainsaw” fiscal austerity.
Most dubious, however, is the millionaire lawyer’s conversion from godless globalist to Catholic, Colombian patriot. In 2017, de la Espriella gave an interview explaining his atheism, stating that he denied the existence of anything that reason could not explain. When asked why he married his wife through the Catholic Church, he replied, “We all commit foolishness and stupidities for love.” In the same vein, the new president is a tri-citizen of Colombia, Italy, and the United States, having spent much of his time living abroad since 2016.
The right-wing paragon now claims that he found God in 2020 following his aunt’s death during the Covid-19 pandemic. The new president has emulated the Christian-nationalist strains of MAGA and Bolsonarismo in Brazil while adopting the slogan Firme por la patria—firm for the homeland. He likewise embraced the Colombian national team’s soccer jersey as a quasi-uniform, despite having previously stated that he “detested” the sport. Accordingly, the sincerity of the former atheist’s conversion to Catholicism has been rightly questioned, as has his perceived dual loyalty to the United States.
In June, de la Espriella stated that he voted for Trump and is a registered Republican in the United States; his wife likewise made a gaffe during the campaign by saying that, if they lost the election, they simply could return to their luxury abodes in Florence and Miami. More troublingly, Abelardo the Miami Neocon has celebrated the White House’s extrajudicial killings of alleged “narcoterrorists” in Colombian waters, few of which have come with concrete proof of drug trafficking. The right-wing lawyer has even gone as far as to propose cooperating with the U.S. on strikes inside of Colombia.
De la Espriella is ultimately a caricature of a self-hating, cosmopolitan elite; he even went so far as to denigrate a traditional Colombian dish prior to his presidential campaign. Ironically, this disposition resembles the self-hatred of Western progressives, who skew overwhelmingly toward the credentialed classes. American progressives like Hasan Piker typically regard shows of patriotism as problematic and paradoxically extol foreign nationalist movements like Mexico’s Morena and the CCP. In the same way, leaders like de la Espriella and Milei worship Washington and its allies while regarding their own countries as backward; unsurprisingly, college-educated voters disproportionately favor right-wing candidates in the region.
When asked about the national disgrace of Argentina’s 1982 defeat to the United Kingdom over the Falkland Islands, Milei told the BBC, “There was a war and we lost. The British did a good job. Margaret Thatcher was brilliant.” Putting aside the merits of Argentina’s longstanding claim to the Falklands, it’s stunning to see such deference towards the UK from the country’s head of state. Following Argentina’s victory over England in the World Cup semifinal, players from the Argentine squad raised a banner stating that the Falklands rightfully belonged to the country. In response, Milei warned his supporters not to fall for “cheap populist and nationalist slogans”.
More consequential was the Trump administration’s March gathering of virtually all of the hemisphere’s right-of-center leaders for the so-called Shield of the Americas Summit in Miami. The event was striking for its participants’ unwillingness to criticize the White House’s more than 200 maritime killings of their countrymen. Last month, de la Espriella announced that Colombia would open a Shield of the Americas office in Medellín.
Since the 1990s, and in some cases earlier, neoliberal centrist and right-wing governments in Latin America have adhered dogmatically to market fundamentalist policies, including the dismantling of labor rights, mass privatizations, and unrestricted trade liberalization. The net result has been deindustrialization and increased precarity for workers, particularly in countries like Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Colombia. Even as the Trump administration has embraced an admittedly haphazard form of protectionism, the region’s latest wave of right-wing leaders has selectively ignored the more pro-worker aspects of Trumpian populism. Latin American conservatives have seemingly interpreted America First a bit too literally, urging Washington to take advantage of lower trade barriers in their domestic markets while rejecting protectionism themselves.
In Argentina, Milei’s libertarian experiment nearly collapsed under its own weight following a run on the peso last September. Luckily for the too-libertarian-to-fail president, the Trump administration supplied a $20 billion bailout in order to stave off the crisis. The inflation rate remains a staggering 30 percent, and Milei’s disapproval has subsequently risen above 60 percent, with polls showing that he would lose if a presidential election were held today.
Similarly, the Kast administration’s attempts to emulate Milei in Chile achieved the remarkable feat of matching his progressive predecessor’s low approval ratings just two months after assuming office. The tragedy of Kast’s infatuation with Milei is that—unlike in Argentina—there simply was no case for mass cuts in Chile. At the time of Milei’s inauguration in 2023, Argentina’s debt-to-GDP ratio was a catastrophic 150 percent, warranting fiscal discipline. In contrast, Chile’s total debt is among the lowest, both in the hemisphere and the entire world, at just 40 percent of GDP.
Captured by the same free-market groupthink, de la Espriella has likewise promised to cut 40 percent of Colombia’s government spending and privatize many state companies. This is despite the fact that the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio is only marginally higher than Chile’s, at 60 percent. Mass cuts are similarly likely to shorten the new president’s honeymoon period and lead to social unrest of the kind seen in nearby Bolivia.
Under the center-right Paz administration, Bolivia is currently embroiled in mass protests as a result of hardline austerity policies. Many now fear that the administration will fail to complete its term and empower the former president Evo Morales, who has cast Paz as a puppet of foreign and domestic elites. Indeed, it is more often left-wing populists like Morales and Mexico’s AMLO who embrace country-first nationalism. Morales has resorted to birtherism against Paz, who—like de la Espriella—has multiple citizenships. Writing on X in May, the former president posted a picture of Paz’s Spanish ID card, stating, “A Spaniard is president of Bolivia.”
Somewhat encouragingly, President José Raúl Mulino has at times used rhetoric defending his country’s sovereignty over the Panama Canal. Initially Trump-friendly, Mulino was blindsided by Trump’s surprise threats to retake the canal, which efforts he has routinely rebuffed. Nevertheless, his administration has since suffered mass protests and record disapproval over repeated concessions to Washington. Under the 1977 Torrijos–Carter treaties, which handed Panama control over the canal in 1999, no foreign power can “maintain military forces, defense sites and military installations within its national territory”. Yet, in 2025, Mulino agreed to allow U.S. forces to deploy troops along the canal.
In Brazil, a case can be made that Bolsonarismo—so named after the former president Jair Bolsonaro—represented a sincere national conservatism at its onset. Prior to Trump’s return to the presidency, Bolsonarismo cemented much of its popular appeal defending Brazil’s sovereignty over the Amazon against the likes of foreign NGOs and heads of state like Emmanuel Macron. Instead, the movement has since devolved into a sad imitation of the Venezuelan opposition, perpetually lobbying Washington for penalties against real and imagined excesses of the Brazilian judiciary and Lula’s “communist” dictatorship.
In March 2025, Eduardo Bolsonaro traveled to the White House to lobby for sanctions against Brazilian officials over his father’s trial for an attempted coup. Much to the dismay of the Bolsonaros, Trump opted to tariff Brazilian goods—a development which rallied support for the embattled Lula, who slammed the right-wing dynasty for conspiring with a foreign power. Brasília ultimately secured the removal of most U.S. tariffs following an unlikely rapprochement between Lula and Trump.
Unshaken, the presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro completed yet another pilgrimage to the White House in May, where he successfully lobbied the president to designate Brazil’s cartels as terrorist organizations. As in Venezuela and Colombia, the designation opens the door to extrajudicial killings of Brazilians by U.S. ordnance. And, in another U-turn from Washington, the Trump administration reimposed tariffs on Brazilian imports in July, hobbling the Bolsonaros once more ahead of October’s presidential election.
The Venezuelan opposition, long funded by the U.S., has itself suffered its greatest humiliation in the face of a collaborationist, MAGA-Bolivarian regime under the “interim” dictator Delcy Rodríguez. More than six months after the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro by U.S. forces, officials within the Trump administration appear rightfully concerned that a democratic transition could jeopardize vital oil interests amid the Iran War. Despite overtures to that effect, no timeline for free and fair elections has yet to be unveiled.
The ostensibly “anti-imperialist” Bolivarian regime has since taken to auctioning Venezuela’s vast resources in minerals and hydrocarbons to the same empire it swore to oppose; Rodríguez and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have reportedly exchanged birthday greetings and selfies via WhatsApp. In contrast, the opposition leader María Corina Machado has been sidelined by the White House. In the wake of twin earthquakes that left over 5,000 dead, Machado attempted to return to Venezuela to participate in aid distribution efforts. Instead, the neoconservative heroine was ordered to turn around mid-flight by the Trump administration. One senior official went as far as to tell Axios that Machado’s stunt constituted “grotesque political opportunism”.
Most tragic, however, is the fate of Ecuador. Since the end of the leftist Rafael Correa’s presidency, the Ecuadorian right has presided over nearly a decade of neoliberal austerity, a collapsing energy grid and spiraling narcoterror. The country’s homicide rate rose from just 7 per 100,000 in 2017 to over 50 per 100,000 in 2025. Despite an ongoing state of exception modeled on Bukele’s El Salvador, homicides have increased since President Daniel Noboa assumed office in 2023.
The increasingly autocratic Noboa now holds the ignominious distinction of guaranteeing neither law nor order in Ecuador. In March, an Ecuadorian judge outlawed the country’s chief opposition party ahead of local elections. Noboa then authorized an American strike on a drug camp within Ecuador, which was later found to hold no trace of narcotics. Yet another dual citizen, the Miami-born president invited the American military to set up shop in Ecuador despite voters rejecting a 2025 referendum that would have allowed the U.S. to open military bases in the country.
Nevertheless, security remains by far the strongest issue for conservatives in the region, particularly when voters are presented with progressive alternatives such as so-called “criminal justice reform.” Crime and insecurity helped power the elections of de la Espriella, Kast and Milei, whose opponents, such as Gustavo Petro, railed against “mass incarceration” and referred to criminals as victims of society.
Conservatives such as Bukele, Colombia’s Álvaro Uribe, and Peru’s Alberto Fujimori successfully reduced gang and guerrilla violence, though at great cost to civilians. In El Salvador, Bukele’s approval rating has hovered north of 80 percent as the country’s homicide rate has cratered to among the lowest in the hemisphere. At the same time, it’s worth noting that the “Bukele Model” of indefinitely suspending due process is in many ways similar to other low-crime autocracies like leftist Cuba and Nicaragua.
More broadly, leftist governments suffer from electoral maladies comparable to those of their conservative peers. Nationalists like Evo Morales are generally more attuned to both the values and material interests of workers, yet are often prone to authoritarianism and eventual mismanagement. In contrast, progressives like Chile’s Gabriel Boric tend to alienate workers by catering to out-of-touch progressive interest groups, including foreign NGOs. Others, such as Lula and Petro, oscillate at times uncomfortably and incoherently between both camps; Venezuelan Chavismo stands in a despicable category of its own.
Yet unlike their right-wing peers, most leftist leaders—with the notable exception of “anti-imperialists” like Delcy Rodríguez and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega—stress a nonaligned, country-first foreign policy as opposed to reflexive alignment with Washington or its enemies. Many American nationalists may be tempted to view the rise of Trump sycophants in the Americas as a boon for American interests. This is a mistake. Leaders who lack independence from Washington are unlikely to promote the flourishing of American workers, let alone workers in their own countries.
A core tenet of country-first populism is that the routine backstopping of parasitic, foreign clients ultimately harms both nations in the long run. Nowhere is this more evident than in the White House’s recent bailout of Argentina. The Milei administration suspended export taxes on soybeans, enabling Argentine producers to outcompete American farmers in the Chinese export market. Adding insult to injury, the Trump administration opted to further undercut farmers by increasing the import quotas of Argentine beef.
It’s likewise misguided to believe that recent elections of Trump-aligned candidates constitute widespread support for the American president among voters in Latin American countries. Quite the opposite: Pew found that 53 percent of Colombians, 61 percent of Peruvians, 64 percent of Chileans, 66 percent of Brazilians, 68 percent of Argentines and 88 percent of Mexicans expressed little to no confidence in Trump. Indeed, positive sentiment toward both the U.S. and its leader has cratered since Trump returned to office. Far from cultivating resilient allies in the hemisphere, American meddling will continue to stoke backlash against right-wing incumbents. The ground, moreover, is certainly fertile for a right-wing that is less captive to the whims of Washington.
There is a better alternative for the Latin American right. After initially seeking to accommodate Trump, conservatives such as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and France’s Marine Le Pen have since condemned the White House over its attempts to annex Greenland and its aggression in Iran that has led to spiraling energy prices. In contrast to right-wing leaders in the Americas, Le Pen also denounced the dire precedent set for sitting heads of state by the U.S. kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro; Meloni has ruled out assisting American efforts in Iran and even denied U.S. bombers access to a U.S. base in Sicily.
An earlier generation of Latin American conservatives had a better sense of national interests, even as they remained broadly aligned with the U.S. against the Soviet Union. In Brazil, the military dictator Ernesto Geisel—while deeply conservative and anti-communist—was the forefather of the country’s historic South-South diplomacy, pursuing a pragmatic foreign policy. His government recognized Marxist Angola and Mozambique, supported the retrocession of the Panama Canal, and adopted a policy of neutrality between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Unlike Milei or Bolsonaro, moreover, Geisel promoted state-led industrialization, leading to the future success of national champions such as the state oil company Petrobras and the aviation firm Embraer .
There is some (admittedly minor) cause for optimism that the next generation of right-wing leaders may learn from their predecessors’ mistakes. In 2022, Petro barely defeated the heterodox populist Rodolfo Hernández, who ran on a platform of anti-corruption and economic nationalism. Further, the Brazilian presidential candidate and former defense minister, Aldo Rebelo, has drawn support from nationalists from across the political spectrum for his defense of Brazil’s sovereignty from both the Trump White House and foreign progressive NGOs.
Until such time as Latin American conservatives heed the importance of pro-worker conservatism and defend their own countries’ sovereignty, they will remain damned to perpetual mediocrity and irrelevance.
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