Can Biden Reverse Trump’s Damage to Latin America?
President Biden has vowed to end his predecessor’s “incompetence and neglect” in the region, but first he must persuade allies to trust Washington again.Photograph by Johan Ordóñez / AFP / Getty
In his final days as President, Donald Trump travelled to the Rio Grande Valley to survey the project that he had made his signature political issue—the border wall with Mexico. Behind Trump, dozens of American flags lined an unfinished stretch of barrier; helicopters and all-terrain vehicles from the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol stood nearby. “We gave you a hundred per cent of what you wanted,” he boasted to a small crowd of supporters. “Unlike those who came before me, I kept my promises.” Trump glossed over the fact that his Administration had, in fact, completed less than a fourth of the two thousand miles of wall that he had promised. Of the roughly four hundred and fifty miles of wall constructed, all but forty-seven replaced existing barriers. But none of that seemed to matter to the outgoing President. The wall was an emblem of Trump’s divisive political project. One in which deserts were bulldozed, mountains dynamited, communities split, and ancestral lands defiled. It cost U.S. taxpayers—rather than Mexico—an estimated fifteen billion dollars.