Colombia last Sunday turned into the last domino to fall in Latin America, becoming the seventh country in a row in Latin America to vote in conservative president, most of them not just conservative but actually Trumpian. 

This is a welcome turn of events for Europe and of course for the United States. Europe is the mother of all the countries in Latin America just as of course it is for the United States. Colombia itself is literally named after Christopher Columbus, such a symbol of the nexus between the West and the Western Hemisphere that he has become a target for the Left, which studly derides him as the personification of colonially and white supremacy. 

How did we get here? Well, there are a couple of simple explanations.

These elections have all started in April of last year, 2025, so three months after Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Marco Rubio began to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID.

Over the years, the Left had built itself a neat system in which government handed federal financial assistance to leftist projects overseas and domestically. 

Overseas, these projects, initiatives, NGOs, parties, candidates, etc. that we gave money to were anti-American in nature—one of the central tenets of the Left is to be anti-American and anti-West—but they were subsidized by this machine the Left built nonetheless for ideological reasons.

This approach was best put by Juan Gonzalez, who led Latin America policy inside Joe Biden’s National Security Council at the White House, who told a meeting in 2022, when Inacio Lula da Silva was running against Jair Bolsonaro for president of Brazil, that the White House would back Bolsonaro, even though he would make American foreign policy harder, and even though it ran against national security interests, only because the pro-American Bolsonaro was a friend of Donald Trump. A friend of mine was at the meeting and told me about it.

Biden also sent in Democrat party political advisors, including Dan Restrepo, to Buenos Aires in 2023 to help Sergio Massa try to defeat Javier Milei in that country’s presidential election. Luckily they failed.

And In 2022 alone, USAID sent $34 million to Colombia under its “Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance” program. That was the main vehicle to send the taxpayers' hard-earned money to left-wing NGOs that fix elections for the Left. We basically gave this money to the campaign of the Marxist Gustavo Petro, an anti-American Marxist who had been a member of the 19th of April Movement (M-19), a Colombian urban guerrilla terrorist group.

So we are not doing silly things like that anymore, subsidizing forces that are inimical to U.S. national interests.

And, of course, let us not forget that since January 3 this year, when we arrested Nicolas Maduro, we have closed another unending source of cash for Latin American Leftist groups.

Unfortunately, you in Europe continue to finance leftists in Latin America, through some of your leftist governments, such as that of Pedro Sanchez in Spain, and through the EU.

Over the last decade, the European Union has spent €1 billion euros of European taxpayers’ money on approximately 800 NGOs operating in Latin America, many of which promote causes associated with progressive and left-wing political agendas. Some of this funding has gone to organizations advocating for LGBTQ rights and inclusion, such as Asociación Centro de Estudios de la Diversidad Sexual y Genérica in El Salvador, which received €3.5 million. The EU has also provided financial support to migration-focused organizations that advocate greater freedom of movement and less restrictive border policies within Latin America. For example, Alianza Cooperativa Internacional in Costa Rica reportedly received about €8 million.

In Colombia, your EU has sent money to the Corporación Misión de Observación Electoral and Fundación Karisma, as well as others.

And never mind the some €18–25 million the EU provides to the communist tyranny in Cuba every year, mostly through development cooperation, plus smaller amounts of humanitarian aid. 

All this help is very shortsighted, as it goes to the forces that want to turn Latin America away from the West, that is, Europe and the United States, and toward the Marxist Global South. Latin America sits in the balance. You, and us, should be spending our citizens’ money in a manner that favors their interests, not oppose it.

Mike González, Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow, The Heritage Foundation (United States)