Since coming into power, the Trump Administration has pursued policies in Latin America that are both deeply cynical and disadvantageous to U.S. interests. Nowhere has this been clearer than in Central America, where the United States under Trump has ignored history’s lessons and adopted a profoundly misguided approach to the two most pressing issues confronting the region: corruption and migration.
To understand how, look to Guatemala, which held presidential elections last week. For nearly 30 years, Guatemala has struggled to reemerge from the long shadow cast by its brutal civil war, which ran for more than three decades and pitted a left-wing insurgency against a series of repressive dictatorships supported by the United States. As a result of that conflict, Guatemala today is one of the poorest countries in Latin America, and also one of the most corrupt and dysfunctional.
The above excerpt was originally published in The Hill.
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