From the moment he was inaugurated for his second nonconsecutive term in January 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump’s policy toward Latin America has used more “sticks” than “carrots.” The most prominent of those sticks has been the use of military force, including a massive naval deployment in the Caribbean; air strikes against alleged drug-trafficking boats; a daring mission to capture and rendition Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to a prison in New York; efforts to blockade and seize ships moving sanctioned Venezuelan oil; and threats to strike other targets in countries around the hemisphere, including Mexico, Colombia and Panama.
Beyond the hard power approach, Trump has also relied heavily on tariffs, calling “tariff” his favorite word in the dictionary. Unfortunately for the president who once called himself “Tariff Man,” on Friday, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, to impose many of those tariffs, ruling 6-3 that he had exceeded his authority under the 1977 law. The ruling is an enormous setback to Trump’s efforts to boost domestic manufacturing and could now lead to billions of dollars’ worth of reimbursement claims by U.S. businesses that have been paying the illegally imposed duties. But given how important tariffs were to Trump’s regional agenda during his first year in office, it will also force him to significantly readjust his policies toward Latin America for the rest of his term.
In his very first week in office, Trump announced a tariff threat against Colombia after its president, Gustavo Petro, refused to accept deportation flights by U.S. military aircraft. In February, Trump imposed 25 percent tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, citing the flow of fentanyl into the United States (falsely in the case of the latter, according to the U.S. government’s own data). In April, he announced tariffs on nearly every country in the world, with much of Latin America facing a blanket 10 percent duty. In July, Trump hit Brazil with a 40 percent tariff as political retaliation linked to the prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro for an attempted coup.