Take a long gaze and you’ll see a disturbing paradox playing out across the American landscape.
The federal government, under the direction of an increasingly autocratic president, is hurriedly trying to de-Latinize the United States. Immigration agents are seizing Latino landscapers, day workers and housekeepers in Los Angeles and other cities.
These detentions and deportations have accelerated and will likely be turbocharged by the passage of the reconciliation bill last week. It triples spending on Immigration and Customs Enforcement, surges more border-security funding and creates a massive immigration detention industry.
Construction crews are back at work on the Mexican border, building more wall again to literally barricade us against Latin America. It’s a region I love, having spent long stretches in six countries from Mexico to Chile. And I notice that as we expel people and build walls, the USA becomes more Latin American in our politics and economics.
It’s not something Trump’s advisers would like to admit. Stephen Miller has expressed antipathy toward Latinos since he was in middle school and high school, and now he’s the architect of the president’s immigration policies. Another presidential friend and adviser, Laura Loomer, has been calling indirectly on social media for all Hispanics to be deported, or killed as the case may be.
Repeatedly in recent days, she has claimed there are “65 million illegal aliens in the United States.” Probably not coincidentally, there are 65 million people of Hispanic or Latin American origin in the United States.
Referencing the new immigration detention camp in the Everglades surrounded by alligator-filled waters, Loomer wrote on X, “Alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million good meals if we get started now.”
Loomer’s version of the message is extreme, but the administration’s basic idea could hardly be more clear. People of Latin American descent, not just those with criminal records, will be detained and deported on any justification. The fact that millions of Latinos descend from families native to what’s now the United States makes little difference — some Latino U.S. citizens have been arrested in the sweeps, some citizen children have been deported with their undocumented parents.
Federal law enforcement officers wait in a garage near immigration court in Phoenix take people into custody.
It’s paradoxical when you consider how President Trump is changing the way the federal government operates. The U.S. administration is embracing some of the worst traditions of Latin American politics even as he tries to get rid of millions of Latin Americans.
The masked men seizing people from the streets.
The browbeating and threats against judges.
The targeting of critical news outlets
The companies, law firms, and universities forced to bow and pay tribute or face punishment.
The leader using his power to enrich himself and his family.
The cult of personality that dominates our politics.
It’s like something you would see in a Latin American country under a traditional strongman’s grip. Far from being a model of governance for Latin America to emulate, the United States is becoming a really big El Salvador, with our own President Nayib Bukele named Donald Trump.
The ‘caudillo’ model
In Latin American history, such strongman leaders have been called “caudillos.” They emerged in the 19th century in the power vacuums after independence from Spain, but this tradition persisted and evolved into the 20th and 21st centuries.
I asked Teresa Meade, a professor emerita of Latin America history at Union College, who has studied the region’s caudillos, which strongman Trump reminds her of. She said via email, “The caudillo who most comes to my mind is Rafael Trujillo (1891-1961) in the Dominican Republic.” Trujillo was a dictator who ruled by force, erected statues of himself, and enriched himself through his position over three decades.
“Trujillo had the delusions of grandeur, even fixation with beauty pageants, that Trump has,” Meade said. “And he was similarly profoundly racist.”
In fact, in 1937, Trujillo infamously ordered the massacre of hundreds of black Haitians living near the Dominican border.
There are also echoes of other Latin American strongmen — think, for example, of Hugo Chavez, Manuel Noriega and especially the present-day Salvadoran leader, Bukele. He has made his name by suspending the constitution, undermining judicial independence, imprisoning more than 100,000 people, including political dissidents, and embracing cryptocurrency.
Of course, not all strongmen are Latin American. A wave of them has come to power across the globe, including Viktor Orban in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, and Vladimir Putin in Russia. They’re all leaders whom Trump has admired.
And there’s a whole other tradition in Latin American governance. In fact, the inspiration for this column came from hearing Yale University historian Greg Grandin give interviews and from reading his new book, “America, América: A New History of the New World.”
The book is a history of Anglo America and Latin America in interaction with each other. It emphasizes a tradition of humanism, egalitarianism and pluralism that threads through Latin American history, from the critical priest Bartolome de las Casas in the 1500s to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the current president of Brazil.
“In Latin America, that strongman tradition is very strong, but so is a kind of social-democratic tradition,” Grandin told me in an interview. “For every Bukele, you have a Petro (Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro), or a Lula.”
Convergence with Latin America
Grandin won the Pulitzer Prize for his last book, “The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America.” He noted in our interview that the United States and Mexico especially have been increasingly integrated, economically, for decades. He argues that the economic program of neoliberalism — deregulation of business, free trade for multinational corporations, destruction of the social safety net — are what have created the similar circumstances from the United States southward.
“There is a convergence between the United States and Latin America,” Grandin said. “You can make that argument for convergence that avoids the cultural or moral argument and understand the way that economic restructuring was imposed on Latin America but also imposed on the United States.”
“Trump is a consequence of the same kind of economic restructuring that the United States, before the Cold War and coming out of the Cold War, imposed on the world.”
In fact, Grandin notes in his new book that Idaho’s U.S. Sen. Frank Church warned in the 1970s of the “Latin Americanization of America,” an awkward phrase for those who see “America” as encompassing the whole western hemisphere, but a penetrating idea.
Church wasn’t talking about immigration from Latin America to the United States. He was talking about an economic order in which multinational corporations and oligarchical rulers extract resources, spur wealth inequality, and create societies of haves and have-nots, instead of the remarkable, broadly educated middle-class country the USA had built.
“What he feared was that corporatist conservatives, if given free rein, would turn our standard of living into what you find in Latin America,” journalist David Neiwert, who interviewed Church in 1979, wrote in 2023. Church’s fear was “that working Americans would one day be reduced to the level of near-serfdom that is the common way of life for millions of Latinos.”
Slashing the safety net
Standards of living have improved for many Latin Americans since that era, but wages for the vast majority in the USA have been relatively stagnant, while the rich have grown fabulously wealthy and used that wealth to dominate our politics, much as they have traditionally in Latin America.
The bill signed into law on Friday will only extend the USA’s tendencies toward this type of “Latin Americanization.” Most importantly, it slashes the social safety net — a key pillar of neoliberal economics — and transfers wealth from lower-income Americans to wealthier Americans.
The cuts in spending on Medicaid and food aid are equivalent in size, about $1.1 trillion over 10 years, to the value of the tax cuts for people making $500,000 per year or more, also about $1.1 trillion. It’s a direct, upward wealth transfer. And it’s happening simultaneous to the seizure of near-total power by our own American strongman.
It seems Frank Church was shortsighted only in seeing how multifaceted our system’s Latin Americanization would be.
