To gain influence in Washington, many conservative leaders in Latin America are ditching traditional diplomatic channels to play to an audience of one: U.S. President Donald Trump. This caudillo courtship, as I have termed it—where foreign politicians aim to curry favor within the MAGA ecosystem—reflects the deeply personalized nature of Trump’s approach to power. Caudillo is a Spanish word for a Latin American strongman; under a caudillo, power is highly personalized and concentrated in a charismatic leader rather than in institutions.
Caudillo courtship carries great risks. While flattery and fealty may benefit some Latin American countries during the remainder of Trump’s time in office, the strategy could undermine the region’s long-term strategic interests. Caudillo courtship might also endanger regional right-wing leaders’ political survival, allowing their opponents to frame them as sellouts and potentially triggering a nationalist backlash.
To gain influence in Washington, many conservative leaders in Latin America are ditching traditional diplomatic channels to play to an audience of one: U.S. President Donald Trump. This caudillo courtship, as I have termed it—where foreign politicians aim to curry favor within the MAGA ecosystem—reflects the deeply personalized nature of Trump’s approach to power. Caudillo is a Spanish word for a Latin American strongman; under a caudillo, power is highly personalized and concentrated in a charismatic leader rather than in institutions.
Caudillo courtship carries great risks. While flattery and fealty may benefit some Latin American countries during the remainder of Trump’s time in office, the strategy could undermine the region’s long-term strategic interests. Caudillo courtship might also endanger regional right-wing leaders’ political survival, allowing their opponents to frame them as sellouts and potentially triggering a nationalist backlash.
No Latin American conservative has courted Trump’s affections more persistently than María Corina Machado. The Venezuelan opposition leader and 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner has gone to remarkable lengths to signal loyalty to Trump, seldom missing an opportunity to lavish praise upon the president or parrot his rhetoric. In a November 2025 interview, Machado even echoed Trump’s discredited narrative about alleged fraud during the 2020 U.S. election, claiming that Venezuela’s leftist regime manipulated the result in favor of Democrats.
On Jan. 15, Machado took her flattery to historic heights. After securing a White House meeting with Trump, she handed him her Nobel medal and lauded the president’s “unique commitment” to Venezuela’s freedom. (Nobel organizers in Norway reiterated that the prize “cannot be revoked, shared, or transferred.”)
Despite Machado’s best efforts, Trump has thus far declined to return the favor by helping her reach the Venezuelan presidency. After toppling President Nicolás Maduro on Jan. 3, Trump dismissed Machado as lacking “respect” inside Venezuela and quickly embraced Maduro’s deputy, Delcy Rodríguez. While Trump has since hinted that the United States might “get [Machado] involved” in Venezuela’s future, he has crushed any hopes of an immediate political transition in the South American country.
In Argentina, President Javier Milei has found more success in gaining favor with the MAGA right. Ahead of the October 2025 midterm elections, Milei—a libertarian firebrand who has described Trump’s United States as a “beacon of light”—secured the U.S. president’s endorsement. Trump conditioned a $20 billion currency swap line and $20 billion credit facility on Milei’s coalition obtaining a strong result.
Trump’s overt meddling in Argentina’s elections broke countless diplomatic norms. At a press conference, Trump warned that U.S. aid to the country would vanish if Milei underperformed—a tactic the Argentine left denounced as extortion. But the gambit appeared to have paid off: Milei’s party won roughly 41 percent of the vote, increasing its share of seats in both houses of Argentina’s legislature. Trump claimed credit for the “big win.”
Milei’s success in marshaling Trump’s support is rivaled only by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. An authoritarian populist and a millennial, Bukele is particularly adept at navigating the MAGA landscape. He has tailored his social media channels to appeal directly, often in English, to right-wing American audiences, weighing in about U.S. political debates on crime, inflation, and “wokeness” and granting exclusive interviews to Trump-friendly commentators such as Tucker Carlson. Bukele has also embraced cryptocurrency as a political and ideological bridge to Trump-aligned circles.
Caudillo courtship has made Bukele a darling of Trump’s inner circle—lending El Salvador geopolitical clout to which it is largely unaccustomed. The Biden administration shunned Bukele’s government for eroding civil liberties and undermining Salvadoran democracy; now, El Salvador is a key U.S. partner and an indispensable part of Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
With the political and economic favoritism Trump showed to Milei and Bukele, it was only a matter of time before candidates throughout Latin America began competing for the U.S. president’s imprimatur.
In the lead-up to Honduras’s presidential election last November, right-wing front-runners Salvador Nasralla and Nasry “Tito” Asfura both made appeals to the MAGA-sphere. Nasralla, a television personality-turned-politician, campaigned in a Tesla Cybertruck with his name plastered on the back; his wife sported a MAGA hat. But this Trumpian pageantry could not compete with Asfura’s strategy.
Asfura, a construction magnate and former mayor of Tegucigalpa, hired former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale as an advisor and, through lobbying, “managed to convince Trump that Nasralla is anti-American,” a former State Department official told Vox. At the same time, former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, also of the National Party, enlisted Trump ally Roger Stone to successfully lobby for a pardon. A U.S. court in 2024 found Hernández guilty on drug trafficking and firearms offenses and sentenced him to 45 years in prison.
Trump announced his support for Asfura just days before the vote, writing on Truth Social that “Tito and I can work together to fight Narcocommunists, and bring needed aid to the people of Honduras,” while smearing Nasralla as a “borderline Communist.” The president followed his endorsement with swift action: In a now familiar sequence of events, Trump first threatened to cut off U.S. aid to Honduras if Asfura lost—a dire prospect for a country dependent on financial support and remittances. Finally, as early vote tallies began to show a virtual tie between Asfura and Nasralla, Trump accused Honduran election officials of fraud.
There is little precedent for a U.S. president so openly micromanaging a foreign election and crowning his preferred candidate as victor. Asfura, for his part, trumpeted Trump’s backing at every turn and won by a razor-thin margin after weeks of uncertainty. Nasralla has since contested the election’s outcome and blamed Trump’s intervention for unfairly tilting the race. But he was not able to stop Asfura from being inaugurated this week.
Nasralla, like Machado, has learned a harsh lesson: Pageantry toward an unpredictable Trump doesn’t always work. But that won’t stop other Latin American political hopefuls from trying to catch his eye.
In Peru, caudillo courtship is already shaping this year’s presidential race. Last October, Lima’s ultraconservative mayor, Rafael López Aliaga, organized a memorial event for Charlie Kirk, the far-right U.S. activist and Trump ally who was assassinated last year. Billed as the first Kirk tribute in Latin America, the gathering featured a large-scale projection of Kirk videos playing on a continuous loop in Lima’s largest park. According to a New York Times report, many attendees—most of whom had been bused in from poor neighborhoods and provided free lunch—struggled to identify Kirk. The event’s true purpose lay elsewhere: López Aliaga hoped to seize on Kirk’s martyrdom to increase his campaign’s visibility in Washington.
In Brazil, too, a potential presidential hopeful has gone out of his way to celebrate Trump’s political resurrection: São Paulo Gov. Tarcísio de Freitas, a right-wing ally of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. On the eve of Trump’s inauguration last year, Freitas declared on social media that “The time is coming!” and hailed “new winds pointing to progress, prosperity and freedom.” He posted a video of himself wearing a red MAGA baseball cap. Freitas also shared a tribute to Kirk upon the activist’s assassination, even though Kirk was largely unknown in Brazil at the time.
Freitas is currently vying with Flávio Bolsonaro, one of the former president’s sons, to be the right’s main challenger in Brazil’s October presidential elections. Flávio, who officially received his father’s endorsement, seems to have better chances for now. The Bolsonaro family is skilled at caudillo courtship; Flávio’s brother, Eduardo, is based in the United States, where he spends time with the MAGA right. Last year, he lobbied the Trump administration to impose high tariffs on Brazilian goods amid his father’s prosecution on coup plotting charges.
For some leaders, including the Bolsonaros, caudillo courtship has yielded real rewards: Trump has shown himself willing to reward loyalty with endorsements and policy favors. But by sidelining institutional ties between nations in favor of personalist signals, both Trump and his admirers are eroding the traditional framework of bilateral relations. U.S. support for foreign countries will become less predictable and more transactional, hinging on individual rapport between leaders rather than consistent principles or mutual interests.
For the region’s wannabe Trumps, the gamble may seem worth it—for now. Yet in the longer term, caudillo courtship carries risks, leaving countries more exposed to rapid changes in bilateral relations with the United States if the political winds in Washington shift.
In some countries, it may also create a political trap, especially when U.S. intervention creates a rally-around-the-flag effect. That’s exactly what happened in Brazil last year, when President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s approval ratings improved after he took a firm stance against Washington’s tariffs and attacks on judicial interference during Jair Bolsonaro’s trial.
Latin American politicians’ displays of subservience to Trump may generate short-term access to U.S. policymakers, but they can also undermine domestic legitimacy, feeding public perceptions of dependency and a loss of sovereignty. In polarized political environments, opponents of right-wing leaders, including Lula, have effectively framed these gestures as opportunistic, unpatriotic, or beholden to a foreign power. That narrative resonates deeply in a region with a long history of resistance to external domination—especially from the United States.
