Financial Times Interviews Eric Farnsworth about Donald Trump's Latin America Ties
Financial Times Interviews Eric Farnsworth about Donald Trump's Latin America Ties
"It's always a risk, to align yourselves too closely with one party or the other in Washington," said the AS/COA vice president to the newspaper.
Since launching his tariff war, the US president has not met the leaders of his neighbours and key trading partners, Mexico and Canada. But Donald Trump did find time to put his arm around the premier of tiny El Salvador in the Oval Office.
Nayib Bukele is “one hell of a president”, Trump told his White House audience last month. Bukele, who has called himself the “world’s coolest dictator” and is hosting US deportees in his mega-prison, is one of a trio of rightwing Latin American leaders vying — with some success — for Trump’s affection.
While other global leaders fret about tariffs and authoritarianism, Bukele, Argentina’s Javier Milei and Daniel Noboa of Ecuador believe that drawing close to the US president could secure more investment, access to top officials and cover for controversial policies.
Eric Farnsworth, who leads the Washington office of the Council for the Americas business group, said: “El Salvador is a very small country in Central America that doesn’t necessarily play on the global stage. So this really does elevate President Bukele. He has the first visit to the Oval Office [by a Latin American] with President Trump during this term and that puts him in a different category. It also, presumably, reduces the impulse to criticise what he might be doing domestically.” [...]
No leader wants to be placed in the category that one senior Trump administration official calls the “really bad guys” in the hemisphere — the revolutionary socialist governments of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
But perhaps the biggest risk for the Trump-supporting trio of Latin American presidents is a change in the political winds in Washington. “It’s always a risk, to align yourselves too closely with one party or the other in Washington,” said Farnsworth. “Because inevitably, the politics will shift and then you find yourself frozen out.”
