In a pre-dawn raid in January, Delta Force soldiers burst in on a sleeping Nicolás Maduro, capturing the Venezuelan leader wanted on U.S. narco-terrorism charges.
The dramatic end of Maduro’s control over a country emblematic of left-wing politics underscored Latin America’s shift to the political right.
Since late 2025, the leadership has flipped from left to right in five Latin American countries: Bolivia, Chile, Honduras, Peru, and Colombia. Uruguay did the opposite, shifting from right to left in November 2024, the same month Trump was reelected.
The conservative realignment under Trump comes as his administration has refocused on America’s southern neighbors in what has been dubbed the “Donroe Doctrine”—a play on the Monroe Doctrine, which asserted U.S. dominance over the region.Gone is the “pink tide,” a wave of “soft” communism that emerged in Latin America in the late 1990s and extended into the 2000s before reemerging in the early 2020s.
The era gave rise to prominent left-wing leaders such as Maduro’s predecessor, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, whose takeover of oil and gas production tanked his country’s economy.
Experts believe a combination of Trump’s influence, along with economic and security concerns—two areas of strength for conservative candidates—has triggered a reversal of fortunes for leftist governments in the region.
Trump endorsed a number of right‑wing candidates in Latin America. In December 2025, he endorsed Chile’s José Antonio Kast, who won a landslide election against the communist candidate Jeannette Jara in December 2025. That same month, Nasry Asfura, a Trump-backed conservative, snatched victory away from Honduras’s socialist government.
The president also supported Colombia’s Abelardo de la Espriella, who this year edged out Iván Cepeda, a left-wing opponent aligned with outgoing leader Gustavo Petro, a former Marxist guerrilla.
In four of the five countries, conservatives also made gains in their respective legislatures. Only Colombia saw the left actually gain legislative seats, but neither side holds a majority in its two chambers.
In Bolivia, no party won an outright majority, but the conservative government became the largest force in both chambers of its legislature, while conservative factions together make up a supermajority in both chambers of Bolivia’s government. The former leftist government retained only two seats.
Honduras’s single legislative chamber gained conservative seats on the coattails of Asfura’s victory. In Chile’s legislature, a conservative coalition controls the lower chamber, while the upper chamber is evenly split. Likewise, Peru’s conservative bloc holds a plurality but not a majority in the lower chamber, while the upper chamber is evenly divided.
Crime and Economics
Latin America’s conservative trend was sparked by disappointment with leftist governments, which led to increased organized crime and inflation, according to Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, a Germany-based international political analysis group.
Of 16 democracies with populations greater than 1 million people, 10 have changed political direction since 2022, mostly from left to right, according to the report and recent updates.
Of those examined, only Brazil, Guatemala, Mexico, and Uruguay currently have left-wing governments.
Venezuela, which wasn’t counted as a democracy, remains in political limbo after Maduro’s removal, leaving his Vice President Delcy Rodríguez in charge. Cuba remains under communist control that took root in the 1950s. Another country not included in the survey was Nicaragua, ruled by former left-wing guerrilla leader Daniel Ortega, who has been consolidating power since 2007. He recently announced the nation would cease to hold elections.
Guyana, which has about 1 million residents, holds democratic elections but remains firmly in the grasp of socialists.
Just as Maduro’s demise signaled the end of the old communist guard, figures such as Argentina’s golden chainsaw-wielding leader Javier Milei symbolize the rise of conservative populist leaders.
“Figures such as Javier Milei in Argentina and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador embody the new political mood with their populist strategies, while moderate conservatives such as Luis Abinader in the Dominican Republic prioritize stability and pragmatism,” according to the report.
U.S. policy has reinforced the region’s conservative vibe, the report said, leading to positive relationships with right-wing leaders.
“This is hardly surprising given that Washington recently announced its intent to actively support like-minded political forces in the Western Hemisphere, to expand trade relations, and to stabilize Latin American countries in line with its own interests,” the report states.
‘Trump Effect’
Joshua Trevino, senior director for the Western Hemisphere Initiative at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, said having a conservative in the White House has driven change in Latin America.
Trump’s influence and policies have contributed to Latin America turning away from socialism and communism, he said.
“So what we see is a Trump administration effect to a lot of it,” he told The Epoch Times. “We can have a lot more open optimism in Latin America than we previously did.”
Trump’s foreign policy goals, which refocused on America’s backyard, began almost immediately after he took office in 2025, as he threatened to take back the Panama Canal over the administration’s stance that China had gained control of the critical waterway.
The Trump administration said China’s operation of two critical ports on the canal potentially violated the U.S.–Panama Neutrality Treaty, which was part of the agreement turning over control of the American-built waterway to Panama in 1999.
Legal maneuvers allowed Panama to seize control of the ports this spring from a subsidiary of a Hong Kong-based company.
Andrés Martínez-Fernández, Latin America Senior Policy Analyst at The Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for National Security, said the leaders and people of Latin America are responding to Trump’s willingness to engage with the region.
“I think it is really being noted, by not just leaders in the region, but also voters who see an opportunity to align with the United States,” Martínez-Fernández told The Epoch Times.
Historically and culturally, Latin America has stronger ties to the United States than to communist countries like China, which stepped into the void left by a lack of American engagement in the region over the years, he said.
The Right Security
Domestic and international factors are reshaping current Latin American politics.
Failed left-wing leadership had significant consequences on their respective domestic populations, Martínez-Fernández said.
Former Colombian leader Petro, for example, negotiated conditional ceasefires directly with various guerrilla and criminal factions rather than relying solely on military force. The result was increased insecurity, violence, and organized crime activity, Martínez-Fernández said.
Security failures under socialist governments helped usher in conservatives who were tough on crime.
“It’s one reason that [Peruvian President] Keiko Fujimori, almost from the moment she took office, imposed the state of emergency and announced that there’s going to be a crime crackdown,” Trevino said.
Peruvian President Keiko Fujimori said in her inaugural speech on July 28 that the military would temporarily lead security operations in crime-ridden areas. During her campaign, she vowed to take a hardline approach to violent crime, similar to that of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.
Likewise, citizens are seeking law and order, particularly those in cartel-infiltrated nations such as Chile, Colombia and Ecuador, he added.
Trump’s efforts to engage Latin American countries on shared security challenges surrounding narco-terrorists will likely retain American influence in the region.
One tool for that is the Shield of the Americas, a security and intelligence coalition designed to stop narco-terrorist gangs. The Trump administration launched the coalition in March.
Also in March, the Paraguayans approved a status-of-forces agreement allowing American forces to deploy in Paraguay for the first time.
“I would keep an eye on all that because there is an evolving U.S. military infrastructure in Latin America in particular, that I think is going to be with us for a very long time, and that too is going to have a political effect,” Trevino said.
Inflation and Politics
Amid inflation and a cash crunch that crippled flour imports, bread became a symbol of Bolivia’s economic crisis prior to the country’s elections in 2025. Bolivians were paying the same government-fixed price, but a loaf of bread had dwindled to about half its former size, as bakers cut size and quality.
Bolivia isn’t a country known for a high cost of living to begin with, yet people were struggling to survive under socialism.
As with crime, Latin Americans trusted conservatives at the polls more than liberals to help them economically.
“There’s a cost of living crisis around the world right now,” Trevino said. “It’s affected Latin America just as much as anywhere else. It is 100 percent made worse by socialist policies.”
Likewise, Argentina’s economic crisis under socialism was the catalyst for political change. The country’s “social welfare” government was in such shambles, with inflation soaring to 100 percent, that voters were open to trying someone new and elected Milei in 2023.
As a free-market capitalist, his election proved especially important for Argentina.
In 2025, the Trump administration announced a $20 billion currency swap with Argentina’s central bank. Under the deal, the U.S. Treasury agreed to purchase $20 billion in pesos in exchange for U.S. dollars to help Argentina stabilize its currency.
The Buenos Aires stock market surged 15 percent on news of the deal, potentially averting currency devaluation ahead of that country’s midterms, which Milei’s party won. His government promptly repaid the draw on the fund in full.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent praised Trump’s strategy of peace through economic strength, posting on X in January that his boss was “transforming Latin America in ways that are America First, surrounding the United States with stability and prosperity.”
Gaining Ground
Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung noted in its report that young people on social media were accelerating the region’s conservative shift.
Martinez-Fernandez agreed, saying Latin American youth have lived their entire lives under left-wing policies, have seen them go awry, and are driving change. However, the conservative shift in Latin America remains tenuous.
Older citizens are more leery of the right-wing dictators of the 1980s, such as Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, Martinez-Fernaández added.
If the razor-thin victories in Peru and Colombia are any indication, then the pendulum could easily swing back to the left.
Yet renewed U.S. engagement in the Western Hemisphere will likely put a thumb on the scale in the future.
“That is going to be a shift in the kind of underlying environment for regional politics, which is going to favor a more consistent pro-U.S. posturing than we have seen in the past,” Martínez-Fernández said.
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