Watch: Trump – Hands off Latin America!

Trump – Hands off Latin America! No to Racism & Intervention, yes to Social Progress & Equality!

With:

• Rodolfo Pastor, Former Secretary of the Presidency, Honduras
• Alex Main, Director of International Policy at the Center for Economic & Policy Research, Washington, DC
• Dr. Francisco Dominguez (VSC & NSCAG)
• Bernard Regan (CSC) 
• Maria Perez Ramos (Mexico) 

Presented by Arise – A Festival of Left Ideas with support from the Brazil Solidarity Initiative, Cuba Solidarity Campaign, Friends of Bolivia, Friends of Ecuador, Labour Friends of Progressive Latin America, Mexico Solidarity Forum, Venezuela Solidarity Campaign, Wiphalas Across the World & more.

Sarah Woolley (General Secretary of the Bakers & Allied Workers Union and also President of the General Federation of Trade Unions) chaired the meeting and set the scene by noting that around the world the left confronts a major crisis requiring it to put forward ways to transform society, in part by standing with all those fighting for public needs to come before corporate greed.

The meeting offered a platform to build links with the left in Latin America, where we’ve seen election victories in Mexico, Bolivia, Honduras, Colombia, Brazil and others, and where Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela are standing up against illegal US sanctions.

Today, then, provides an opportunity to learn about how the leftward shifts in certain Latin America countries have challenged the neoliberal order and US domination, and also alert our own movements and organisations to the dangers posed by Trump’s re-election as president, with Marco Rubio, a well-known advocate of sanctions and interventions in Latin America, as his Secretary of State nominee.

The first speaker was Rodolfo Pastor, Former Secretary of the Presidency, Honduras, speaking from Honduras where the Xiomara Castro’s government is currently engaged in big political battles for Honduras’s sovereignty and the needs of its people against corporate greed and US intervention.

Rodolfo is currently standing as a candidate for Mayor of San Pedro Sula, a prosperous commercial, financial and industrial city in the north-west of Honduras and used the city to explain the influence that the US has had over Honduras for the last 150 years. Although he saw the return of Trump as mid-boggling, in his view whether the president was Trump, Obama or Biden, the US’s approach to the region as an imperialist power is “pretty much stable”.

Honduras is the emblematic Banana Republic. As a country, it was taken over by the United Fruit Company which at one point were the owners of most of its economy, shaping its environment and industrial and commercial capacity. Banana companies felled and exported the native mahogany, drained the swamps around the area and used herbicides and pesticides to protect their crops. Together with the companies’ harsh labour conditions, this impacted badly on local people’s health.

He noted that Trump is unconcerned about being polite or diplomatic towards the region. He has characterised specifically Central American countries as the source of aliens coming to the US, invading the land and eating cats and dogs.

But the hardest impact on the region is the way that US corporate interests have been promoted, established and protected in Latin American at the cost of human rights, natural resources and local democratic institutions.

Rodolfo recounted how Hondurans were powerfully reminded about that in 2009, just when they thought that they had seen the last of coups in Latin America and in Honduras, only to see a leftist government replaced in a coup by a government that became increasingly corrupt and repressive and acted as a US ally at a local, regional and international level.

From 2014 the authoritarian President Juan Orlando Hernandez was supported and kept in power by US interests even though it was well known that he was highly corrupt and had active links with organised crime. He is now serving a sentence in the US for crimes against US drug trafficking laws, not for crimes committed against Hondurans when he controlled all the state institutions with US backing.

Ironically, Trump was a big fan of Hernandez as long as he controlled the influx of migrants to the US and the flow of drugs, but of course Hernandez’s corruption and repression provoked immigration towards the US, which peaked during his government. He was responsible for trafficking tons of cocaine to the US, but he functioned as a strong ally of the US.

Rodolfo summed up by saying that in his view it was clear that not a lot will change under a Trump presidency. Rubio as a Secretary of State represents so much of what Latin America struggles against, with his very hard line on any Latin American country that is trying to become more independent and more autonomous.

The US presence in Honduras is quite stable with its mining interests and agricultural exports, especially palm oil, at the expense of two million of its ten million citizens who suffer hunger. It’s a very formidable challenge when a country faces such powerful interests that can control the way that democracies can develop.

Rodolfo concluded by saying he was hopeful that Honduras is moving forward in the right direction, with President Xiomara Castro, the first woman to be elected president in Honduras, setting a way forward towards more independent development. Honduras is still subjected to US imperialism and a very close relationship with the US for the foreseeable future because of its proximity and connections. The US may be a declining superpower, but it still remains very powerful and will still have an enormous influence on the region and in Honduras.

Thanking Rodolfo, Sarah read out a comment received from Calvin Tucker of the Morning Star: “I reported from inside Honduras during the 2009 military coup and the slogan of the resistance was ‘they are scared of us because we are not scared of them’. The then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sold Honduras down the river when she signed off the coup. Viva Honduras!”

 

Before the next speaker, Siân Errington of ARISE made an appeal for donations to cover the cost of the meeting. Remote meetings particularly on international topics accessible around the world and on YouTube and usable as a resource still cost money to put on. So she invited those who can afford to contribute (knowing that lots of people can’t) to donate so that solidarity events such as this can continue to be free for all.

The next speaker was Alex Main, Director of International Policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington D.C. Alex reflected that as his old colleague Rodolfo had said, it was quite mind-boggling to have another Trump presidency. Last time around there were some people trying to find a silver lining by noting that some of Trump’s advisers were sort of isolationists in their perspectives (or seemed to be) and there was a hope of a break with the old traditions of liberal imperialism and the more recent neo-conservative tradition in the US, two versions of imperialism that have treated Latin America in particular pretty terribly.

Alex differed from Rodolfo slightly in regarding the previous Trump administration as actually worse than the Obama administration, despite the latter’s many horrors including support for the 2009 coup in Honduras. He gave a quick rundown of some of Trump’s record in his previous administration, which could tell us a bit about what to expect.

The first thing of note was that you had various senior officials, including Trump himself, proudly bragging about reviving the Monroe Doctrine – in practice historically used to justify all sorts of nefarious US interference in the region.

In the first administration, the Trump team faithfully adhered to the Monroe Doctrine and supported overt military coups, a successful one in Bolivia in 2019 and then a failed one in Venezuela that same year. It also did an enormous amount of harm through its use of some very hard-hitting economic sanctions against Venezuela and Cuba, the latter having had a small measure of relief from sanctions under Obama.

Trump hardened the sanctions and broadened them to an unprecedented level such that they’re now at a level never seen really since the blockade against Cuba launched in 1960. Trump’s team really invigorated this Cold War policy that targeted the supposed threat of China and its influence in the region, which provides a pretext for more intervention and more militarisation in Latin America.

Through sheer example Trump boosted the far-right all over Latin America, with some far-right figures now in various governments, and has tightened relations with a number of far-right movements which are actively conspiring together against progressive movements in the region. In Alex’s view, this is a very unique and particularly sinister threat coming from this incoming Trump administration.

When Biden came in, he mostly kept in place Trump’s sanctions which have really suffocated Venezuela and Cuba and caused devastating economic crisis in both these countries, resulting in huge waves of migration in the last couple of years. Over a million Cubans, about 10% of the population, have left Cuba.

So now Trump is back and the way his foreign policy team is shaping up gives us perhaps an idea of how policy could look in the future. It contains some of the most militantly interventionist and militaristic, anti-leftist people around in Washington DC, starting with Senator Marco Rubio from Florida who’s a hawk across the board but particularly on Latin America. He will most likely have a very close comrade of his, another Cuban-American, Carlos Trujillo, who will be running the Latin American Division of the State Department and who played a very instrumental role in Bolivia’s military coup in 2019 when he was the U.S. Permanent Representative to the Organization of American States (OAS).

Trump’s nominated National Security adviser is a former Green Beret and complete neocon, Mike Waltz, who is currently in the House of Representatives where he’s been leading legislation that hardens sanctions against Venezuela and Cuba.

 

Alex foresaw a more direct and aggressive intervention against the progressive movements in the region and in favour of neo-fascist movements, such as Javier Milei’s far-right government in Argentina and in Brazil’s Bolsonaro and Bolsonaro’s family. He anticipated a huge threat of really major US interference in several regional elections that are coming up next year where progressive movements have been in power, such as Ecuador, Chile and Bolivia. In all these countries you have far-right candidates aligned with Trump and coordinating with Trump’s team.

Independently of elections, and particularly those where the US military has deep ties, you could see more US- backed coups ‒ that’s a real threat in Brazil where evidence has emerged of the very deep involvement of senior Brazilian military officials in a coup attempt in in 2022 to try to keep Bolsonaro in power after he lost the last election.

Those sort of coup-mongering elements that have deeply infiltrated the Brazilian military are present in Colombia too, where the country’s first left-wing president Gustavo Petro is under constant attack from right-wing elites. Trump and his entourage have extremely close ties with former right-wing president Uribe and his allies. Uribe is an absolutely rabid anti-leftist who played a central role in Columbia’s right-wing paramilitary groups that were responsible for enormous atrocities against civilians while he was president.

In Honduras, there is a major US military presence in the country that’s been there since the late 70s or at least since the 80s. There’s certainly a risk of something like the military coup that happened when Obama was president in 2009, given the very deep opposition in Washington to the progressive government of Xiomara Castro.

In Mexico, Republicans have already been threatening US military attacks as part of the US Drug War. The left recent landslide re-election doesn’t sit well at all with the US foreign policy establishment, let alone with the Republicans. Trump has just named as ambassador there Ronald Johnson, who is a former Special Operations combatant active in El Salvador in the 80s alongside the death squads and then a senior CIA official.

So the picture is of some serious threats of coups, and under Trump we can expect sanctions against left governments in the region as well as tariffs which Trump seems to be weaponising against adversaries.

Interestingly, Alex thought Trump is going to run into a big issue which is already huge, namely that his sanctions have triggered massive waves of migration, particularly from Cuba and Venezuela. Yet one of the central planks of his nativist electoral platform was resolving the so-called migration crisis by kicking out millions of existing immigrants and keeping new migrants out. The right-wing press and the rest of the media depict these migrants as a threat to the US, even though they’ve been a boon to the US economy.

But it Is US- backed military coups and far-right governments who support neo-liberal agendas that create economic misery and that is going to be another factor driving more migration as it has been for many years now. In Alex’s view this is perhaps one of the best ways, certainly in Washington, to denounce Trump’s past and future policies in Latin America.

A major priority also needs to be Cuba where the situation is increasingly desperate for ordinary Cubans due in large part to the additional sanctions that Trump has imposed.

aLEX recommended that those in the UK in solidarity with Cuba and Latin America more generally should really urge the government as much as possible about removing the blockade obviously but also about the removal of the ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ designation which is causing massive human suffering.

It’s a major obstacle to UK residents and residents from Europe and many other countries that visit Cuba. If UK visitors to Cuba want to go to the US, their visa which allows them to go to the US is removed and then they have to reapply for a formal visa to the US. This is a massive headache creating a huge obstacle to tourism, leading to a massive downturn in tourism which Cuba increasingly relies on as its second biggest source of income for Cuba.

There’s absolutely no justification for keeping Cuba on this list and so really the UK needs to join with many Latin American countries in denouncing this ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ designation as well as of course the blockade more generally.

Sarah gave billed Bolivian speaker Claudia Turbet-Delof’s apologies as she had to attend a funeral that day, before introducing the next speaker, Bernard Regan from the Cuba Solidarity Campaign.

Bernard reflected that it was in 1960 under President Eisenhower that a key policy document was produced saying basically that the only way to get rid of Castro was to create disenchantment and dissatisfaction by applying economic penalties on Cuba. In essence that has been the continuous policy followed by all United States administrations since those early days of the Cuban Revolution of 1959, and although there’s been slight variations between Democrats and Republicans, essentially the strategic objective of United States administrations has been to bring about the downfall of the Cuban Revolution.

That was true even of Obama who was is widely viewed as having the most liberal approach towards Cuba, establishing diplomatic relations and beginning some sort of processes of normalisation that nevertheless did not bring about any fundamental changes. So it’s clear, for example, that in the last four years of President Biden that you could not put a cigarette paper between the Democrats and the Republicans in terms of their policies.

When Trump left office in the very last days of his presidency in January 2021, he introduced something like 243 additional coercive measures and designated Cuba as a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’. Biden did nothing to remove that designation and has never changed a scintilla of the policies that Trump implemented in terms of attitude towards Cuba.

So in essence in 2025 our starting point is Trump Mark 1. Trump Mark 2 will be just a continuation of that – nothing significant will have to be changed from what has happened over the last four years. Cuba is under an extremely vicious blockade: it has lost in the region of $164 trillion over the last 60 years. Cuba is a developing poor country, it’s not a destitute country – you don’t see homelessness or the kind of poverty that you see in places in the West but you do see a relative poverty. So it’s clearly a major problem.

Cuba suffered very strongly as a result of Covid which hit tourism in a very major way so that its foreign revenue stream was limited over that last period but in addition the ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ designation that Trump imposed on Cuba makes it very difficult for Cuba to use normal international mechanisms for transferring money, for buying goods, for raising credit on the international market etc.

Companies which do business with Cuba, if they have any business in the USA, are extremely cautious about engaging in activities that have Cuba related to it. For example, the French bank Paribas was fined $9 million just a few years ago for transferring money to Cuba as one of its activities. Even in Britain if you try to set up a Go Fund Me page to raise money as Bernard’s union, the National Education Union, has done to buy Braille machines for Cuban schools for the visually impaired and blind children there’s a difficulty there, because if it mentions Cuba in the title or references Cuba in any way then it’s very likely that it will be will be blocked.

So Bernard thought that we are in for a sharp situation in the coming period of the Trump administration. He wasn’t particularly optimistic, although he agreed with Alex Main that we have to put pressure on the British government. But given Starmer’s attitude towards the events that are taking place in Palestine he was not convinced that there’s going to be any great deviation from the Trump administration’s policies internationally, any more from what there was in relation to Starmer’s attitude towards Biden for example.

A real challenge is the incoming Secretary of State Marco Rubio. We know his track record in relation to politics in the United States of America and the attitude that he will have, so Bernard hoped that people will engage in solidarity action.

It’s a major challenge for all of us in respect of Latin America as a whole, requiring a real effort to put internationalism on the agenda of the trade union movement and the political parties and to challenge not only the complicity of Britain in terms of what is happening in the Middle East but also to challenge its acquiescence to the policies that Biden and Trump have been pursuing vis-à-vis Latin America and, from Bernard’s perspective, particularly in relation to Cuba.

The next speaker was Maria Perez Ramos, speaking on behalf of the Mexico Solidarity Forum. Maria gave some background to current events in Mexico, where a second leftist government elected by a landslide is headed by President Claudia Sheinbaum, the first female and Jewish president of Mexico – an impressive feat given machismo in Latin America generally and Mexico in particular.

Maria talked about the gains in social progress made in Mexico in recent years, thanks to the previous president Andrés Manuel Lόpez Obrador (AMLO) and the MORENA party. In a transition from neo-liberalism to a more normal capitalism AMLO started new social programmes focused on people at the centre of them, such as pensions for the elderly. Other programmes were geared to helping women, Indigenous people and different types of workers, across the region as well as in Mexico.

Environmental programmes included the “Planting Life” programme to promote food self-sufficiency and reforestation programmes across the country, and a commitment to invest in renewable energy initiatives.

In the foreign policy field, Mexico now has an embassy of Palestine in the country Mexico and with Chile were the first countries to make a referral to the International Criminal Court (ICC) over possible war crimes.

The current president Claudia Sheinbaum has started with some very big promises of new environmental programmes such as clean water, and new policies to restrict the exploitation of scarce resources.

Maria then focused on Trump’s policies that are threatening Mexico, specifically the one that worries her most – his racist rhetoric around immigrants and the threat of mass deportations and sending every single migrant to Mexico because they are ‘illegal’ although they are just undocumented. The new narrative that Trump is propagating is his typifying the drug cartels as terrorist organisations to find an excuse to invade Mexico, by switching the war against drugs to a war against terrorism.

Although all the practices that the cartels are carrying out don’t count exactly as terrorism as defined in the dictionary because they are not following any type of ideology or trying to gain any political power, as we know the cartels are working more like corporations – they just care about profiteering. This is very worrying because the right-wing leaders in Mexico and also the corporate media that are basically paid by them have been cheering on what Trump is saying and justifying it, even asking for it.

So Maria made the point that it is very important for activists in Mexico that solidarity activists elsewhere offer support and speak about the issues. There is a need to stand in solidarity together because Latin America is a region that shares not only a common language but a history and cultures that have suffered greatly together from US imperialism.

The final speaker was Latin America expert Dr Francisco Dominguez of the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign and the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign Action Group on the growing efforts from the US for illegal regime change in Venezuela and new sanctions on Nicaragua.

Francisco emphasised the importance of understanding what Trump will have to do regarding Latin America rather than what he’s planning to do because there are imperatives that imperialism has in the region.

Trump’s appointment of Marco Rubio as his Secretary of State is a clear indication of what he intends to do. Rubio has been instrumental, along with a bunch of other extreme right-wingers in the Republican Party in his intent to destroy the Cuban

Revolution, the Venezuelan Revolution and any other progressive government that may emerge in the region.

Latin Americans have had the unfortunate destiny of having to cohabiting with the most powerful military machine in the history of humanity. The Biden administration has prepared the ground for Trump who is accusing Nicaragua of weaponising this migration so that hundreds and hundreds of thousands – there a huge amount

of exaggeration in the media – are illegally migrating to the US which Trump and co do not want at all.

Francisco recounted following the US presidential election and seeing an unbelievable degree of demonisation against immigrants, with one town in Ohio becoming notorious because Trump said in the debate with Kamala Harris that the Haitian immigrants went around the place eating people’s cats and dogs and other animals.

The US has punished the Nicaraguan government by imposing sanctions on

250 members of the government and three key entities, all of which has economic ramifications. The idea is to punish the country – John Perry, a Nicaraguan expert a

who lives in Nicaragua has written an excellent article on this with a great amount of detail.

Trump’s election victory in terms of overall votes cast was relatively small in percentage terms (1.5%) but he and the Republican Party have majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate, with Republican majorities on both houses’ Foreign Affairs Committees that can dictate policy virtually unopposed. Trump also has the Supreme Court, with its majority of extreme right- wing Christian nationalists, on his side.

So, therefore, Trump’s got all the mechanisms that he wants in order to really attack now. His imperative, Francisco thought, is to follow SOUTHCOM, the Southern Command of the US which is the military body in charge of the Western Hemisphere from the point of the Pentagon. What they have identified as a key strategic problem is the influence that China particularly but also Russia are getting in the region.

This influence is because they’re trying to cooperate with the Latin American countries on all sort of areas. China is involved in infrastructure projects everywhere and China is the main trading partner for most Latin America countries, which are getting investment, credits, markets and access to technology.

China is not going to send a fleet to invade anywhere in Latin America, so when the former head of SOUTHCOM Laura Richards was saying that China’s activity in Latin America was a key problem what this meant was that the US politically needs to ensure that it is able to compete or exclude any rivals using any means necessary.

Experience tells us this can include sanctions, coups, assassinations and so on. The worrying sign is that SOUTHCOM is doing the running of this – the US is militarising this particular foreign policy and Trump is going to impose it with everything he has available.

To give you one example of this, following the coup attempt in 2022 there was recently an assassination attempt on Lula organized by Bolsonaro and in which a participant was the Bolsonarista president of the Central Bank who is really sabotaging economic policy massively. The interest rate that he set, because the bank in Brazil is independent, is at the moment’s 12.5% so the government finds it impossible to do really much.

As well as the bank president, several generals were also involved and a few other characters. It’s an indication of the techniques they’re prepared to use.

Finally, on the question of Venezuela, because of the amount of oil that it has the United States will absolutely do everything to get that prize. Francisco anticipated that the US would intensify massively the sanctions and the aggression against Venezuela. Venezuela is in a much better position now to defend himself because it is recovering economically but it does depend on oil.

Nevertheless, there is a problem with the extreme right-wing opposition, Maria Corina Machado and the people who lost the election, who will be supported by Rubio and co.

 

Over the last period what we have seen is a spate of terrorist attacks, with the electricity supply the main target, and there have been attempts to bring in a huge amount of weapons from the Colombian side by paramilitaries and extreme right-wing people who have been trained militarily. The intention is obviously to cause havoc.

The worry that everybody has is that on President Maduro’s inauguration day, the 10th of January, the defeated candidate Edmundo González says he’s going to Venezuela (from Spain where he is now living) to proclaim himself the president of the country.

What that means is that the right-wing must be preparing something interesting. What is reassuring is that the extreme right-wing have been trying to organise several stunts over the last period and they’ve only got something like 50 to 100 people in every mobilisation, indicating that their political defeat has been so crushing that people don’t want to know anymore.

This, then, is the context. So it’s extremely important to understand that where any

of the progressive governments in Latin America make a mistake or are weak or

think for one moment that the US is not going to attack them or whatever, the United States under Trump will use that to the hilt. So it is absolutely vital that we redouble our solidarity efforts. The coming period is going to be very difficult. We cannot trust the current British government to behave helpfully in any way whatsoever and we cannot trust any of the Europeans to help either. We can only trust in the rest of the geopolitical context which in more than one degree is favourable.

Francisco ended by asking the audience to join Venezuela Solidarity Campaign and the other campaigns of solidarity with Latin America.

Sarah Wolley reinforced this by urging people to sign up and become supporters of the different Latin American campaigns, get their branches and unions to pass motions at local branch AGMs and trade union conferences to offer support and affiliate to show actual solidarity.

She thanked all the speakers for covering so much in such a relatively short amount of time and the volunteers who put the event on. She ended the meeting by saying that we’ve got to keep working together, not only to argue that a better world is possible but to win that better world – and a key part of that is solidarity with progressive forces in Latin America who are set to face renewed threats and attacks from Trump on his return to the presidency.