Since President Trump cut USAID funding, every presidential election in Latin America has been won by the conservative candidate, leading many to believe that USAID had been propping up leftist governments.On June 21, far-right lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella defeated leftist senator Iván Cepeda to become Colombia’s new president. De la Espriella, a political newcomer endorsed by President Trump, ran on a platform of tougher security, ending peace talks with rebel groups, expanding oil and gas production, and lowering taxes, directly reversing the policies of outgoing leftist President Gustavo Petro.With the shift in Colombia, nine Latin American countries now have right-leaning governments, a regional trend that began accelerating in late 2023 and has continued through mid-2026. Conservative and right-wing forces have dominated Latin America’s political leadership since 2025 for the first time in many years, with the proportion of Latin Americans identifying as center-right reaching its highest level in more than two decades.The Biden presidency coincided with the peak of the second Pink Tide in 2022-2023, when only five countries, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Paraguay, and Uruguay, stood outside leftist control. As a result, roughly 13 of Latin America’s 18 major countries had left-leaning or center-left governments.Of those, at least seven were openly socialist or further left. Peru’s Pedro Castillo ran on an explicit socialist platform before being jailed after attempting to dissolve the government. Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, a former M-19 guerrilla, became the country’s first left-wing president in its 212-year history. Honduras’s Xiomara Castro governed as a self-described democratic socialist, while Bolivia’s Luis Arce maintained the MAS movement’s socialist agenda financed through state extractivism.Venezuela under Maduro, Cuba under Díaz-Canel, and Nicaragua under Ortega had largely abandoned electoral democracy, operating as socialist or communist one-party states. Brazil under Lula, Chile under Boric, Argentina under Fernández, and Mexico under AMLO and his successor Sheinbaum occupied the softer center-left.The shift back to the right has been reinforced by President Trump, who has forged strong relationships with many of Latin America’s conservative leaders. The trend began with Javier Milei’s libertarian victory in Argentina in November 2023. Milei modeled much of his campaign on Trump. Rather than adopting the slogan “drain the swamp,” he wielded a chainsaw at rallies to symbolize his pledge to slash public spending and cut through government bureaucracy, earning him the nickname “the Chainsaw President.”His slogan, engraved on the chainsaw, was “¡Viva la libertad, carajo!” or “Long live liberty, damn it!” The symbol gained international attention in February 2025 when Milei gifted a red chainsaw to Elon Musk at CPAC. Musk waved it above his head onstage and declared, “This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy.”The blue wave continued through Panama and El Salvador in 2024 and gathered momentum in 2025 with right-wing victories 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. Runner-up Álvaro Ramos Chaves also belonged to the center-right.Colombia followed in June 2026, and Peru appears set to do the same, with conservative candidate Keiko Fujimori 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.In addition to coinciding with President Trump’s second term, the decline of socialism in Latin America accelerated following USAID cuts enacted by the Trump administration. On January 20, 2025, his first day back in office, Trump signed Executive Order 14169, “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid,” imposing an immediate pause on foreign assistance pending review.By March 10, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that 83 percent of USAID programs had been eliminated, representing 5,200 contracts. On July 1, 2025, USAID formally ceased operations and was absorbed into the State Department.USAID and the State Department had been responsible for roughly 90 percent of the approximately $3 billion annual U.S. democracy aid budget globally, with the National Endowment for Democracy accounting for the remainder. That funding supported NGOs, civil society organizations, media projects, and election-monitoring programs across Latin America for decades, consistently backing left-wing causes and left-leaning governments.In 2024, USAID awarded a $2 million grant to Asociación Lambda in Guatemala to fund sex-change operations and related treatments, including hormone therapies and puberty blockers. It also funded transgender-themed artistic initiatives in Colombia and Peru, while its Democracy, Rights and Governance election-integrity arm operated alongside those programs.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 vilified by the left for incarcerating gang members and transforming his country into one of the safest in the region, confirmed the dynamic from the inside, posting on X 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: even where USAID was not directly funding left-wing political movements, 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 but also reduced the visible human cost of regional economic mismanagement driven by Venezuela’s socialist collapse.In Peru alone, USAID allocated approximately $135 million in 2024 for food security, anti-narcotics operations, job creation, environmental protection, public health, and democracy-building. That portfolio supplemented government service delivery and reduced the political accountability that would otherwise have fallen on the incumbent government.NGOs receiving USAID funding distributed services, employment, and resources through networks aligned with left-wing political movements, functioning as a parallel welfare state that reinforced incumbent support without appearing on any government budget.Americas Quarterly noted the irony that some of the Latin American leaders most hostile to USAID, including Evo Morales, Hugo Chávez, and Rafael Correa, owed part of their political rise to USAID-supported aid infrastructure.For decades, USAID funding coincided with a rise in left-wing governments coming to power in Latin America, then the funding stopped, and so did the left’s dominance.The post Trump Presidency and USAID Cuts Directly Correlated with Conservative Shift Across Latin America appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.