The shift to conservative governments across Latin America has been a trend that has been gaining momentum since 2025, with nine countries now having right-leaning governments. This trend began with Javier Milei's libertarian victory in Argentina in November 2023, who modeled much of his campaign on President Trump.
Milei's victory was followed by a string of right-wing victories in Panama and El Salvador in 2024, and gathered momentum in 2025 with wins in Ecuador, Bolivia, Honduras, and Chile. Costa Rica added to that count in February 2026, when right-wing candidate Laura Fernández won the first round with 48.6% of the vote.
The trend continued with Colombia's new president, Abelardo de la Espriella, a far-right lawyer and ally of President Trump, who defeated leftist senator Iván Cepeda in June 2026. De la Espriella's victory marks the latest in a series of right-wing wins in the region.
The shift back to the right in Latin America has been reinforced by President Trump, who has forged strong relationships with many of the region's conservative leaders. The Trump administration's cuts to USAID funding in 2025 have also been cited as a factor in the decline of socialism in the region.
USAID had been responsible for roughly 90 percent of the approximately $3 billion annual U.S. democracy aid budget globally, with the majority of that funding supporting left-wing causes and left-leaning governments in Latin America. The defunding of that apparatus removed the infrastructure that had sustained left-wing political movements across the region for decades.
El Salvador's Nayib Bukele, a Trump ally, has confirmed the dynamic from the inside, posting on social media that "the majority of these funds are funneled into opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas, and destabilizing movements." Those making the causal argument raise a second-order question: did the flow of U.S. dollars allow socialist governments to sustain themselves longer than their own disastrous economic policies would have permitted?
Under socialist governments, decades of central planning, protectionist policies, and extensive state subsidies and interventions left poverty largely undiminished and income distribution across Latin America largely unchanged. With roughly $1.7 billion per year flowing into the region through NGOs, public institutions, and UN programs, left-wing governments in countries such as Bolivia, Honduras, Ecuador, and Colombia did not have to fully absorb the costs of their own economic failures.
Food-security programs, poverty-alleviation funding, and civil-society grants funded by Washington effectively subsidized social stability in countries whose governments were simultaneously hostile to U.S. interests. In 2024, USAID transferred approximately $45 million to the UN World Food Programme to support Venezuelan migrants across Latin America, aid that relieved pressure on host governments regardless of their political orientation.
The trend in Latin America is set to continue with Peru's upcoming election, where conservative candidate Keiko Fujimori is projected to win pending final certification. The last major test of whether the wave holds is Brazil, where Lula faces Flávio Bolsonaro in the first round of the October 2026 election.
