Domination Without Hegemony: Trump's New Imperialism in Latin America

Gabriel Hetland
Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director
Department of Africana, Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies
University at Albany, State University of New York

Like so much of his presidency, Donald Trump's foreign policy is marked by continuities and ruptures. This is visible in his Latin America policy, which continues the United States' longstanding pattern of imperialist intervention in Latin America but with notable, and dangerous, novelties. This talk will examine how Trump's approach to Latin America is similar and distinct from past US policy towards the region. I argue that Trump's approach represents a move towards domination without hegemony. This is marked by a more nakedly colonial attempt to control Latin America and its resources, with little attempt to disguise this using rhetoric about democracy and human rights. The effects of this within the region are likely to be contradictory. On the one hand, the US has already gained greater direct control over a number of Latin American states, visible most clearly in the case of Venezuela, which is now akin to a US protectorate. On the other hand, Trump's naked imperialism is sparking nationalist backlashes, which have the potential to limit US influence in the region and strengthen leftist and popular forces.

Gabriel Hetland is a political sociologist who received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2015 and uses ethnographic and comparative historical methods to study democracy, the state, urban and national politics, climate, labor, and social movements in Latin America and the US. He is the author of the award-winning book, Democracy on the Ground: Local Politics in Latin America's Left Turn (Columbia University Press, 2023) which examines efforts to build participatory urban governance in left- and right-governed cities in Venezuela and Bolivia during the height of the Pink Tide. He has also published numerous scholarly and popular-press articles on Venezuela, Bolivia, and Colombia in outlets such as Theory and Society, Qualitative Sociology, Work, Employment and Society, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, The Intercept, and more.