| |  | | Donald Trump has named Christopher Landau, a lawyer and former ambassador to Mexico, as his pick for deputy secretary of state, cementing migration as a central focus of the incoming administration. Landau would work alongside Florida Senator Marco Rubio, tapped to serve as secretary of state, to implement Trump’s “America first” foreign policy agenda, including promises of mass deportations, the implementation of tariffs on foreign manufactured goods, and potentially deploying the military to the U.S. - Mexico border. Trump has credited Landau with reducing undocumented migration during his tenure as ambassador to Mexico from 2019 to 2021. For the role of ambassador to Mexico, Trump has nominated Ronald Johnson, a former military and CIA officer who served as ambassador to El Salvador under Trump’s first term and became President Nayib Bukele’s “gran amigo.” Writing for Foreign Affairs, Brian Winter notes that Trump’s State Department picks herald a heightened focus on Latin America after decades of “benign neglect.” Mike Waltz, the incoming national security advisor, introduced legislation in 2023 seeking to authorize U.S. military force against Mexican cartels, including through the use of drones, cyber warfare, and “naval assets.” Rubio has even supported sending U.S. troops into Mexico, “as long as there is cooperation from the Mexican government.” While Trump’s victory has been celebrated by conservative governments in the region, including by Bukele in El Salvador and Javier Milei in Argentina, Winter warns that “Trump’s policies toward the region are likely to be highly disruptive.” Beyond Mexico, countries from Guatemala to Colombia “will also face tariffs or other sanctions unless they are seen to be halting the northward flow of migrants through the Darién Gap and other key transit points and taking back citizens swept up in Trump’s promised mass deportations.” In the Latin America Risk Report, James Bosworth notes that it remains to be seen how hawkish figures like Rubio and Landau will treat center-left governments in the region, including Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva Lula, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, and Chile’s Gabriel Boric. While representing a more traditional arm of the Republican Party, both Rubio and Landau “have a history of disliking those democratic center-left politicians, viewing them as wolves in sheep’s clothing that work against U.S. interests.” Emboldened by a stronger-than-expected electoral mandate, the Trump administration is poised to implement coercive and punitive measures to achieve its goals in the region more freely than during his first term. Writing for NACLA, Ociel Ali López observes that Latin America’s progressive governments do not have the same degree of cohesion as in the previous decade, “when there were fewer leftist leaders in power but with greater shared political force.” Despite the disarticulation of mechanisms for hemispheric integration, however, a regional shift to the right is not a foregone conclusion. “Even if the Republicans impose their agenda of promoting right-wing forces,” writes Ali López, “they could end up unintentionally reviving social movements and generating new leftist proposals in the region.” As history has shown, even as recently as Trump’s last term, repression can serve as a powerful animator of collective mobilization and resistance, especially at the grassroots level. |
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| | | DONATE TO NACLA TODAY! ¡Mil gracias, Naclistas! Thanks to support from readers like you, we met our Giving Tuesday fundraising goal of $5,000. We’re one step closer to reaching our End of Year goal of $30,000, which will support NACLA’s critical reporting and analysis in 2025. We still need your help to strengthen left journalism as fascism, authoritarianism, and neoliberalism battle and conspire for hemispheric influence, targeting the most vulnerable in the process. Join us by making a tax-deductible donation today! |
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| | TO EXIST IS TO RESIST: ¡VIVA
PALESTINA LIBRE! Our Winter 2024 issue of the NACLA Report explores transcontinental encounters between the land of historical Palestine and the land we know as the Americas. Attending to collective realities, interconnected struggles, and geographies of violence, authors in this issue examine solidarities extended by states and pueblos, from above and below, from Abya Yala to Palestine. The deadline to subscribe has passed, but use this form to order an individual copy of this issue for $18. Cover art: Linda Quiquivix |
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| | | | | | | |  | “The intifada rises up.” A collage of mobilizations for Palestine in Chile from May and June 2024. This artwork was originally featured in the Winter 2024 issue of the NACLA Report, "To Resist is to Exist ¡Viva Palestina Libre." For a limited time, you can read this student roundtable and a select number of articles from this issue Open Access here. (Felipe Sierra) |
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MASS KILLING IN HAITI — More than 180 people were massacred in Port-au-Prince last weekend, in a slaughter perpetrated by a gang boss seeking retribution over his son’s fatal illness. Nearly 130 of the victims were over 60 years old. Gang leader Micanor Altes targeted older people suspected of being Vodou practitioners after being told by a priest that Vodou caused his son’s illness. The grim massacre and difficulty confirming the total tally of victims “highlight the depth of criminal control in the country’s capital, Port-au-Prince, where a largely absent state has left citizens exposed to depraved gang attacks,” reports InSight Crime. On Thursday, the Miami Herald editorial board pleaded for a bigger United Nations mission in Haiti and stronger American leadership to address the violence and chaos. Meanwhile, neighboring Dominican Republic is rounding up and deporting Haitians in caged trucks that appear to have been designed for livestock. More than 71,000 people have been forcibly deported from the Dominican Republic to Haiti since October. |
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ONE YEAR OF MILEI — Argentine President Javier Milei marked the one year anniversary of his turbulent administration on December 10. Under his extreme austerity measures, unemployment has grown, economic activity is in decline, and poverty has surged to over 53 percent of the Argentine population. Nonetheless, the far-right president maintains an approval rating of some 50 percent, a sign of the desperation people had reached with the country’s soaring rates of inflation. In true form, Milei marked the anniversary by eliminating legal protections for Indigenous peoples that served to halt evictions from their ancestral lands. James Bosworth predicts that the pro-Milei hype will persist for another year or two, even though “an eventual crash is almost inevitable.” “To be fair,” writes Bosworth, “I think a leftwing populist or a centrist technocrat may have gotten the same results, hype, and eventual crash as Milei, but with different actors cheerleading it.” For extensive coverage of Milei’s first year, see Revista Anfibia. In particular, we recommend the second season of the podcast Sin Control: El universo de Javier Milei, co-produced by Anfibia and El País. -
BUKELE TARGETS JOURNALISTS — Last month, El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly, dominated by President Nayib Bukele’s Nueva Ideas party, approved new cybersecurity and data protection laws. The first creates a new agency to oversee cybersecurity and data protection, which will be directed by a presidential appointee who will serve for three years. The data protection law gives the agency the power to order the removal of information about individuals that is deemed “inaccurate, incomplete, or out of date.” Experts worry these authorities will be abused. “These new laws could be used to delete online publications that are critical of the government under the guise of data protection,” said Juanita Goebertus, Americas director at Human Rights Watch, this week. “This is a recipe for censorship and opacity.” Bukele, who remains wildly popular despite widespread human rights violations under his militant anti-gang policies, has created what the Committee to Protect Journalists described as “a growing culture of silence” among Salvadoran journalists. Ahead of Bukele’s re-election earlier this year, Mneesha Gellman wrote for NACLA: “Whereas under gang control Salvadorans had a mandate to ‘see, hear, and shut up,’ multiple interviewees commented they were staying silent to stay safe under the regime.” -
PROTECTING MEXICO’S CENOTES — An Indigenous Maya organization in Mexico has brought a lawsuit seeking personhood status for hundreds of cenotes on the Yucatán peninsula, which would grant these subterranean lakes basic rights and protections. The Ring of Cenotes, which is sacred to the Mayans, who call themselves the Kana’an Ts’onot, or Guardians of the Cenotes, is also the main source of freshwater in the region. Breweries, massive soybean fields, hundreds of pig farms, and the construction of the Maya Train have increasingly polluted the cenotes in recent years. Thanks to efforts by Indigenous communities, several countries — including Ecuador, the United States, India, New Zealand, Bolivia, and Panama — recognize the legal rights of nature. But this is the first case of its kind in Mexico. In an AP story on the case, Indigenous Mayan Maribel Ek describes a cenote as her neighbor and explains the motivation behind the lawsuit: “Because you have to be the voice that she doesn’t have.” - PERSECUTION OF GUATEMALAN JOURNALIST — Guatemalan authorities charged exiled journalist Juan Luis Font with collusion and bribery and issued a warrant for his arrest on December 6. Font denies the allegations, which he says are based on a case from 2022 accusing him of unlawful association with an anti-corruption judge. Due to the harassment he faced as a result of the case, Font was forced into exile. Dozens of journalists, prosecutors, and judges have fled the country in the face of lawsuits enacted to undermine anti-corruption efforts under former President Alejandro Giammattei. Guatemala’s current president, Bernardo Arévalo, who won the presidency last year on an anti-corruption platform, has faced endless challenges brought by corrupt elites and opposition parties using lawfare to undermine his administration.
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| | | North American Congress on Latin America
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