Trump’s Imperialist Aims in Latin America Have Bipartisan Roots

By Roqayah Chamseddine | February 13, 2025 | 11:51am

Photo by Sgt. 1st Class Gordon Hyde, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Immigration history

Trump’s Imperialist Aims in Latin America Have Bipartisan Roots

“They need us much more than we need them. We don’t need them. They need us—everybody needs us.” These words, uttered by Donald Trump from the Oval Office, may come to define this administration’s policy on Latin America and give us insight into what a second-term presidency will mean, not just for Latin America, but the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. It has long been a strategy of the United States, supported by both Democrats and Republicans, to enforce imperialist and ideological motives with economic and military force, and encroach upon the economic and political livelihoods of Latin Americans—empowering right-wing populists and fomenting instability and regime change.

The unilateral renaming of the Gulf of Mexico by executive order may be an insignificant stunt to some, but it signals what author Belén Fernández describes as “egregious imperialist hubris,” arguing that “while Trump’s insistence on behaving like a caricature of himself makes it easier to cast him as some sort of aberration in U.S. foreign policy, at the end of the day, it’s imperialism plain and simple.” The Trump administration’s attempts at topographical domination echo the crisis that Western imperialism finds itself in today, in which acts of open aggression, plunder, imposed vassalage, and anti-immigration policies at home are no longer enough to satisfy the coddled, nationalist Washington D.C. mind.

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Alexander Aviña, Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University, and author of “Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside,” tells Splinter that since at least the 1990s, the carceral and murderous anti-migrant and anti-refugee policies implemented by the United States have been bipartisan in nature. “Bill Clinton, as Ronald Reagan’s greatest accomplishment (to borrow from Thatcher’s comment about Tony Blair), expanded previous policies that militarized the U.S. border, criminalized undocumented migrants, expanded prison detention, and selectively followed U.S. laws on refugees (depending on geopolitical designs).” Aviña says that “Trump uses a different style, a different rhetoric that demonizes migrants, but his actual practices are in line with what Democrats have advocated, put into law, and practiced. One is a wolf, the other a fox, to paraphrase Malcolm X, but they’re both canine.”

Just a few examples of Aviña’s point can be found in Operation Hold The Line, a measure of border militarization enforced in 1993; Operation Gatekeeper, announced during Bill Clinton’s presidency in 1994; and most recently, the Biden administration’s initial refusal to end Title 42, a Trump era policy, resulting in the expulsion of immigrants and the denying of their ability to seek asylum, only to then impose further restrictions on immigration.

Aviña explains that Bill Clinton’s administration “militarized the border and built walls around major borderlands urban centers at the same time that they negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada,” with the full understanding “that the expansion of neoliberalism, so-called free trade, and the free mobility of capital and commodities across borders would create economic devastation and pauperization for most peasant and working-class Mexicans…people who would respond by migrating to Mexican cities or the U.S. Hence, the need for more border militarization, more border police, more border walls. This is an example of how U.S. imperial policy generates the very contradictions that it seeks to mitigate and eradicate. Whether in the form of economic war/sanctions (Cuba and Venezuela), direct military/CIA intervention (Central America), neoliberal capitalism, or capital-induced climate change, these processes create mass displacement of communities and people throughout Latin America.”

The violent immigration policies euphemistically referred to as forms of “Trumpism” only exist thanks to Clintonism, says Aviña. “The U.S.-Mexico border is where Cesaire’s boomerang flies back to. Trumpism exists thanks to Clintonism; Trump’s spectacles of caging and deportations exist thanks to the Deporter-in-Chief Obama; Democratic efforts to satiate revanchist white supremacism by offering a lighter version cloaked in corporate DEI language has only fueled it.”

Aviña describes what he calls the connection between the extensive history of the U.S. empire “in its so-called backyard” and the mass movement of people north as “the harvest of U.S. empire,” referring to journalist Juan Gonzalez’s seminal work on the role of the United States in the mass migration of Latin Americans. “U.S. empire helps generate the very conditions that push people to move and try to reach the U.S.; U.S. empire creates the very conditions that have fueled brutal and punitive anti-migrant policies internally, domestically. And then those internally-derived technologies and logics get exported elsewhere to help maintain the power and hegemony of U.S. empire. It’s a sort of feedback loop.”

“To give an example: some of the Border Patrol agents that participated in ‘Operation Wetback‘ in 1954—when at least 1 million Mexicans (and some Mexican-Americans) were rounded up and deported under horrific conditions—trained Latin American death squads and police forces during the 1960s and 70s,” Aviña said. “One of these individuals, John P. Longan, trained some of the worst Guatemalan torturers and executioners during the 1960s, including individuals who abducted, tortured, and disappeared more than 30 prominent leftists during ‘Operation Clean-Up’ in 1966. That year is generally marked at the beginning of Guatemala’s catastrophic thirty-year civil war. Many other Longan-types—including many from Israel during the 1970s and 80s—would go on to train more killers and death squads throughout the Civil War. So you can imagine how I reacted to Kamala Harris’ visit to Guatemala in 2021 as Vice President, when she told Guatemalans ‘do not to come’ to the United States.”

Despite deep collaboration between Democrats and the Trump administration and the bleak outlook facing migrant communities, Aviña has found encouragement in the protests inside the United States in support of migrant rights and in resistance to ICE. “Organizing and raising awareness around this single issue by the left also offers the possibility of critically interrogating and resisting U.S. empire. [Again,] migrants are the harvest of U.S. empire. They can help us track and analyze U.S. empire past and present. This issue also allows folks living in the U.S. to connect many of the threads, many of the issues and processes that underscore how this declining empire functions and operates within and beyond the borders of the U.S. And those borders are critical to understanding how imperial logics and technology circulate globally. There’s a reason why some refer to the U.S.-Mexico border as the Palestine-Mexico border, [making the connection between] the use of Israeli settler colonial technology to surveil, deter, and brutalize migrants here.”

In December 2023, Aviña wrote that in Arizona alone, there are 50 Elbit Systems surveillance towers guarding the Arizona-Mexico border “possibly alongside Border Patrol agents that have traveled to Israel for training. This is the Palestine-Mexico border: built on top of ongoing U.S. settler colonial projects that continue to strip indigenous communities of their land and sovereignty and maintained with technology violently developed in Gaza and the West Bank.”

The struggle for the dignity and freedom of multiple communities impacted by a bipartisan legacy of militarization and repressive, anti-migrant policies is ongoing, a conflict between empire and the masses of Mexico and Latin America. Imperialist aggression continues to evolve, but so does mass organization and direct action—and only a unified, mobilized people can confront the challenges that lie ahead.