The conservative "It's funny how ever since we shuttered USAID, Latin America has been electing right-wing leaders" line was repeated across social media as some sort of factual talking point. I even saw people whom I respect and admire posting it and agreeing. It's a theory. It's a meme. The problem is that it leaves out a lot of important nuance that makes it not quite the flex many think it is.
It's the equivalent of me saying I stopped eating sugar this year, and my neighbor lost 70 pounds. The only way my diet maybe impacted my neighbor's weight loss was that I stopped sending him cookies on Christmas. That's not how he lost 70 pounds. He actually lost the weight through eating better and exercising.
The political change in Latin America is real. I've been covering it and predicting it for two years here at PJ Media. Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, Honduras, Costa Rica, Peru, and Colombia have all elected conservative, U.S./Donald Trump-aligned leaders since USAID shut down in 2025.
The fact that USAID did political work is real. The Trump administration has opened our eyes to just how bad it was over the last year and a half. We know that "political competition and consensus building" was part of its portfolio.
But when you dive a little deeper and look at the facts, you realize that while both things are true, they aren't necessarily related.
First, the timeline doesn't match up. It's the easiest fact to prove.
This swing to the right was happening before Trump was re-elected and took office in January 2025. Costa Rica, for example, already had a right-leaning president in Rodrigo Chaves, who was elected in 2022. When the country went to the polls in February 2026, it elected his hand-picked choice to succeed him, Laura Fernández. Chaves was an anti-establishment populist who was focused on security and often clashed with other branches of government and the media (sound familiar?). He was working with Nayib Bukele of El Salvador to curb crime in Costa Rica, including building a mega-prison, and he was moving his country's diplomatic and economic ties away from China and toward the United States.
Then there's Ecuador, a country that has become one of the United States' greatest regional security partners in recent months. Some people like to include it on the list — Daniel Noboa was elected to a full term in a runoff in April 2025. But Noboa was an incumbent. He'd been the country's president since 2023 when it held snap elections to replace the impeached president Guillermo Lasso.
Bukele has governed El Salvador since 2019. Javier Milei was elected in Argentina in 2023. Luis Abinader was elected in the Dominican Republic in 2024.
Marco Rubio announced that 83% of USAID programs were cancelled on March 10, 2025.
Then there's Bolivia, a country that saw one of the biggest political turns when it elected Rodrigo Paz, who assumed office in November 2025. After two decades of Movement for Socialism (MAS) rule, it finally had a center-right leader.
People love to equate this one with USAID. The problem? In 2013, the country's corrupt socialist president Evo Morales stopped the flow of all USAID money into Bolivia, accusing the agency of conspiring against his government and the Bolivian people.
Latin America's move to the right was already well underway before Trump and Rubio dismantled USAID.
GRTWT.
