Los Trumpitos
The dramatic Trumpification of Latin America
Real problems, copycattery and a network of hacks have helped Donald Trump’s pals win a string of elections
Illustration: The Economist / Getty Images / Library of Congress“To those who have sown terror all these years, your time is up,” roared Abelardo de la Espriella, the winner of Colombia’s presidential election on June 21st, from behind bullet-proof glass.
The former defence lawyer, who calls himself El Tigre, ran as a right-wing populist and outsider.
He received gushing endorsements from another man who fits that description: Donald Trump.
Mr de la Espriella is not the only Latin American president to echo Mr Trump.
Chile’s president, José Antonio Kast, cuts a less flamboyant figure, yet within days of taking office in March he was standing Trump-like in the desert on the border with Peru as army diggers cut a trench to stop immigrants.
Chile had been “violated by illegal immigration”, he declared.
Messrs de la Espriella and Kast are part of a Latin America that is shifting to the right at unprecedented speed.
Since Mr Trump took office in January 2025 the right has won all seven presidential elections in the region (see chart).
In October Brazil could follow suit.
No prior political “wave” has run at this pace, breadth or uniformity.
Nor is this a return to the centre-right, but to a harder Trump-imitating politics.
It is happening because voters are fed up and Mr Trump’s priorities—criminal gangs and illegal immigration—also exercise many Latin Americans.
His combative, hyper-online style is being deliberately adopted.
It is winning elections, but it may not fix the region’s biggest problems: insecurity and sluggish economies.
The ranks of new Trump-like presidents go well beyond Mr de la Espriella and Mr Kast.
Presidents Javier Milei in Argentina and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador top the list—and inspire their own imitators.
In different ways, Presidents Daniel Noboa of Ecuador, Nasry Asfura in Honduras, Laura Fernández Delgado in Costa Rica and Keiko Fujimori, Peru’s president-elect, also fit the pattern.
The leading right-wing hopeful in Brazil, Flávio Bolsonaro, also imitates Mr Trump, as did his father, the former president, Jair Bolsonaro.
Santiago Peña of Paraguay is aligned, as is Rodrigo Paz, the president of Bolivia, despite being more centrist.
Even Delcy Rodríguez, the interim president of Venezuela, an avowed Bolivarian socialist who was not elected to office, has cosied up to Mr Trump out of self-preservation.
The two countries now run military operations together.
Mexico, on Mr Trump’s border, is the only big, clear exception.
Latin America is surely now the world’s most Trumpian region.
There are real differences between these figures.
Mr Noboa is more technocratic, Mr Milei more libertarian.
Ms Fujimori and Mr Kast are not outsiders.
All are shaped by their own countries.
Some downplay their similarities to Mr Trump.
Yet they are undeniably part of the shift.
The primary reason for this Trumpian turn is that voters’ biggest problems overlap.
Mr Trump and his voters are angry about gangs shipping drugs into the United States; Latin Americans hate the bloodshed gangs create as they do it.
Mostly as a result of gang violence, the region accounts for about a third of the world’s murders despite having only about 8% of the world’s population.
Costa Rica and especially Ecuador have recently suffered from extraordinary surges in the murder rate.
In recent elections in Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras and Peru security has been a dominant issue.
The alignment with Mr Trump is deepest on adopting an aggressive, militarised response.
He has declared gangs to be terrorist organisations and has killed more than 200 people by blowing up small boats allegedly carrying drugs off the coasts of South America, in operations which are almost certainly illegal.
Ecuador’s Mr Noboa has sharply increased the army’s role fighting gangs, and launched raids with direct American operational support.
Mr de la Espriella promises to bomb the gangs, refuses to rule out use of American warplanes, and pledges to capture or kill ten gang leaders within 90 days of taking office.
All are signed up to Mr Trump’s “Shield of the Americas”, a shared military effort to hit drug traffickers.
Banging up baddies
Mr Bukele provides the model, backed by Mr Trump, for arrests and prisons.
He has locked up a staggering 2% of the adult population in El Salvador, often without trial, many in a specialised, purpose-built mega-prison.
In 2018, before he took office, the murder rate was over 50 per 100,000, one of the worst in the world.
It is now less than two, about the same as Canada.
That has made him popular across the region.
Mr de la Espriella promises to build seven Bukele-style mega-prisons in Colombia’s jungle.
Ms Fujimori promises four new normal prisons and one “mega”.
Mr Noboa has built one and promises another.
Conditions are grim.
In Ecuadorian prisons an inmate died on average every seven hours last year, some from fights and riots, but more from sickness and hunger.
As in the United States, irregular migration is also a hot topic in several Latin American countries.
Some 340,000 undocumented migrants have arrived in Chile since 2018.
Peru hosts about 1.6m Venezuelans who fled the failing economy and regime repression.
Mr Kast is not just building a border trench, but has also promised to deport all of Chile’s undocumented migrants.
Ms Fujimori has also promised deportations from Peru.
Even in Argentina, less affected by Venezuelan migration, Mr Milei has made deportation easier and has sent police on highly publicised immigration raids.
Mr Bukele has struck a deal with Mr Trump to accept deportees from the United States who are from third countries and put them in his mega-prison.
Given Latin America’s history of synchronised political swings, it is tempting to wave away the recent Trumpian shift as mere anti-incumbency.
That is part of it; left-wing governments have left an economic mess in Argentina and worsening security in Colombia.
But that would normally have meant victories for the established centre-right.
Instead voters are rewarding candidates with the most extreme messages on tackling crime, even when it is a crude brand of security populism.
Established centre-right candidates, mocked by the hard-right as “derechita cobarde”, the “cowardly little right”, have repeatedly been outflanked.
Voters remember when the centre-right was in office and often think it achieved little.
The anti-incumbency argument also ignores the fact that the new, Trumpian right has won re-election in Costa Rica, Ecuador and El Salvador.
Polling data from 18 countries across the region show that Latin Americans identify as more right-wing than they have in more than two decades.
There is also more to the rightward shift than overlapping voter concerns.
Wannabe presidents are choosing to copy big parts of Mr Trump’s political style because they believe it will help them win.
Above all, Mr Trump has opened the door to angry, outsider politics in the region.
“Without Trump there could be no Javier Milei,” as one Milei campaign staffer told the New Yorker, a magazine, after his victory.
“We set the tone for the western hemisphere”, says United States Senator Bernie Moreno, a close Trump ally who was born in Colombia.
The direct inspiration is often obvious.
Mr Milei’s supporters have donned “Make Argentina Great Again” hats.
Mr de la Espriella, an American citizen as well as a Colombian one (and Italian), celebrated Mr Trump’s win in 2024 by posting a video to social media in which he toasts a desire to “Make America and Colombia great again” by downing a shot of his personal brand of rum.
In an interview with The Economist before the first round of the Colombian election, he declared Mr Trump an example in economic policy and his “cultural battle against gender ideology”.
Mr Kast cites the Trump administration’s migration policy to argue that many immigrants in Chile will self-deport.
Trumpy see, Trumpy do
Much of Latin America’s new right copies Mr Trump’s communication style, his positioning as an outsider, and his relentless rhetorical and legal assaults on political opponents and the press.
When journalists publish information that Mr Bukele does not like, he issues warrants for their arrest.
The norm-breaking tendency to put family and close friends in positions of power has also been copied, as has Mr Trump and his family’s interest in and use of cryptocurrencies.
A hatred of causes perceived to be “woke” or “globalist” is perhaps the defining trait: Mr Milei calls climate change a “socialist lie”; Mr de la Espriella says the United Nations is an “instrument of the left”; Mr Kast is against abortion in all cases and has opposed his wife taking the pill.
Many have sought Mr Trump’s endorsement.
In addition to Mr de la Espriella, he also backed Mr Asfura in Honduras, who went on to win.
Mr Trump endorsed Mr Milei and his party in the Argentine midterms last year, as well as providing more than $20bn in support from the US Treasury to help avert a run on the Argentine peso.
That helped Mr Milei’s party to victory and rescued his presidency.
Mr Noboa met Mr Trump two weeks before his re-election in March 2025.
Last month Flávio Bolsonaro, the leading right-wing candidate for Brazil’s upcoming election, met Mr Trump in the Oval Office.
The members of this growing network of Trump allies also support each other.
Mr de la Espriella’s campaign received public backing not just from Mr Trump, but also from Mr Milei, Mr Asfura and in Paraguay Mr Peña.
Mr Noboa went further.
Just before the first round of the Colombian election he promised, at Mr de la Espriella’s request, to remove tariffs he had imposed on Ecuador’s northern neighbour as a gesture of good will.
This chumminess is not necessarily organic.
The right has long complained about the influence of the São Paulo Forum, a get-together of Latin American left-wingers.
Now it is building a rival structure for the social-media age.
Axel Kaiser, a Chilean public intellectual-cum-influencer, is part of it.
His brother ran for president in Chile as a far-right candidate in 2025, winning 14% of votes in the first round before backing Mr Kast.
“Ideas precede institutional change and political change,” says Mr Kaiser, echoing the maxim of the conservative American journalist Andrew Breitbart that “politics is downstream of culture”.
This network of influencers “dramatically changed the mentality of millions of people”, he claims.
Amplifying these ideas are people like Agustín Antonetti, a 24-year-old Argentine social-media influencer.
He and those like him definitely make an impact. Last November Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s left-wing president, blamed him for fomenting protests against her government.
The Cuban regime has denounced him as a CIA operative.
“I was following what was happening from my bed,” he chuckles.
But he says there is no doubt that social media are fundamental to right-wing success.
Mr Kaiser calls it “decisive”, especially for outsiders like Mr de la Espriella.
Some 40% of Latin Americans say social media are their main source of news, double the share in Europe.
Humour is powerful online, says Vicente Fernández Moujan, who runs Mr Milei’s digital campaigns.
The online left, in contrast, is “boring”.
New media outlets matter, too.
Leading the charge is La Derecha Diario, a hard-right news website launched in 2020.
Its co-owner, Javier Negre, a Spanish journalist, sits in the White House press pool.
Mr Trump, he says, “shows the way to a lot of candidates [in Latin America] that didn’t have the support of legacy media”.
La Derecha Diario helps “our candidates” deliver their message “without fake news”, he says.
The line between news organisation and campaign consultant is hard to detect.
He claims to be “very close” to nine presidents, and to be helping Mr de la Espriella “because he is a friend”.
Sometimes he is paid to help candidates’ messages go viral; sometimes his services are free, he says.
Power to the posters
Campaign strategists and lobbyists help spread techniques.
Another Argentine, Fernando Cerimedo, who co-owns La Derecha Diario with Mr Negre, is perhaps the most important.
In 2023 he helped to run Mr Milei’s social-media strategy.
He stepped in to arrange for Tucker Carlson to interview Mr Milei when he was running for president.
He says he managed Mr Asfura’s campaign in Honduras and co-ordinated Mr Trump’s endorsement.
He helped to get Mr Paz elected in Bolivia, and continues to work as an adviser to the president.
He works closely with Brad Parscale, Mr Trump’s former campaign manager.
The record of the Trumpian leaders in office is mixed so far.
Mr Bukele’s remarkable success in slashing the murder rate has come at huge cost in people locked up without due process or trials.
He has also changed the constitution to allow himself to stay in power.
His security model is unlikely to work as well elsewhere.
El Salvador is tiny and its gangs are largely domestic.
Colombia is more than 50 times bigger and eight times more populous.
It produces two-thirds of the world’s cocaine and its gangs are deeply embedded in transnational criminal networks.
In Ecuador, also larger and battling international gangs, Mr Noboa has copied Mr Bukele and also called in the army, to little avail.
The homicide rate was 46 per 100,000 in 2023, the year he took office.
It fell slightly in 2024, but then rose to an all time high of 51 in 2025, even as several gang leaders were captured.
So far 2026 looks a little better, but after nearly three years of Mr Noboa the country remains exceptionally bloody.
Milei-flavoured Trumpism
Mr Trump’s new friends are doing better at managing their economies.
After inheriting an extraordinary economic mess, Mr Milei’s aggressive spending cuts and deregulation have pulled inflation sharply downward, allowing for capital controls to be reduced and the peso to be partially floated.
Growth is uneven and jobs are a problem, however.
Still, he has far exceeded most expectations.
Mr Noboa’s macroeconomic management has been prudent and tightly in line with the IMF’s recommendations.
Borrowing costs have fallen sharply. Growth remains patchy, however.
In Chile Mr Kast’s pro-market plans look sensible.
They are only now starting to kick in, but reaching the 4% growth that he promises will be difficult.
Illustration: The Economist / APMarkets cheered Mr de la Espriella’s election, and he is right to say he will get a grip on Colombia’s soaring public debt.
But his commitment is undermined by his crowd-pleasing promises of cheap mortgages and extra spending.
His pledge to deliver 7% growth looks extremely hard to fulfil.
Most of the good economic news has been delivered by orthodox right-wing policy—smaller states and freer markets—rather than by Trumpian favourites such as tariffs.
Indeed, unlike Mr Trump and some Latin American leftists, so far most of the new right seem to be respectful of central-bank independence.
Whether all this will be enough to secure future re-elections for the new right remains to be seen.
The region is highly polarised and some victories have been extremely tight.
The left could win elections again soon.
Yet even if it does, the right is now dominated by much more hardline and populist ideas and leaders.
That will probably not change soon.
Even centre-right figures have been becoming more extreme to try to stay relevant, with little success.
So when the right wins again it may well be a hardline, populist variety.
As with Mr Trump, the next iterations of hard-right governments in Latin America may be even more disruptive than the first.
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