After Trump dismantled USAID, the Latin American left stopped winning elections

Six countries. Six center-right victories. And one common thread: every one of them came after the Trump administration gutted the U.S. Agency for International Development and cancelled thousands of contracts that funneled tens of billions of taxpayer dollars into foreign civil-society programs.

Bolivia, Chile, Honduras, Costa Rica, Peru, Colombia, in each, conservative or right-leaning presidential candidates defeated left-wing opponents over the past eighteen months. The streak has prompted a pointed question that Washington's foreign-policy establishment would rather not answer: Was American aid money propping up the Latin American left all along?

The Daily Caller laid out the pattern in a June 22, 2026, commentary, tracing the electoral sweep back to President Trump's decision on day one of his second term to sign an executive order pausing most foreign assistance. That order triggered a six-week review led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who announced the results on March 10, 2025.

Rubio posted the numbers on X:

"After a 6 week review we are officially cancelling 83% of the programs at USAID. The 5200 contracts that are now cancelled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States."

USAID ceased independent operations and was absorbed into the State Department. Its Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance portfolio, the apparatus that funded election support, legislative strengthening, local governance reforms, anti-corruption efforts, independent media, and civil-society capacity-building across the developing world, was effectively dismantled.

Then the elections started.

A continent turns right

In Bolivia in 2025, center-right senator Rodrigo Paz Pereira won the presidential runoff, ending nearly two decades of dominance by the socialist MAS party. José Antonio Kast's right-wing coalition took Chile's presidential race. Nasry Asfura, a conservative, won in Honduras.

By February 2026, right-wing populist Laura Fernández Delgado had won Costa Rica's presidency. Rubio, posting from his official State Department account on February 2, congratulated her:

"Congratulations to President-Elect @laurapresi2026 and the people of Costa Rica. The U.S. looks forward to working with her administration to advance prosperity and security in our hemisphere."

June 2026 brought two more. Keiko Fujimori won Peru's presidential contest narrowly. Days later, Abelardo de la Espriella, described as a hard-right lawyer, prevailed in Colombia's presidential runoff against a leftist opponent.

The trend did not begin entirely from scratch. Javier Milei won Argentina's presidency in 2023, before USAID was restructured. But the pace and breadth of the shift since the agency's dismantling stand out. As commentator Cernovich posed on X on June 22: "Has a left wing government won an election in Latin America since the USAID NGO complex was defunded?"

What USAID was actually funding

The case that USAID's DRG portfolio served as something more than neutral democracy promotion did not originate with social-media commentary. It was laid out under oath before Congress.

In February 2025, Tyler O'Neil of the Daily Signal testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. His written testimony described an agency that had drifted far from its stated mission:

"USAID spent millions propping up the Marxist ideology of 'diversity, equity, and inclusion;' the unfair and divisive transgender orthodoxy; and the climate alarmist movement."

O'Neil also told lawmakers that "some of these grants arguably undermine America's standing in the world" and that USAID had "troubling ties to the Left's dark money network."

Federal spending records back up at least part of that picture. USASpending.gov shows USAID awarded a roughly $2 million cooperative agreement in 2024 to Asociación Lambda in Guatemala to help "strengthen" gender-affirming healthcare. Additional USAID-funded projects promoting transgender-themed artistic initiatives operated in Colombia and Peru, two of the countries where left-wing candidates subsequently lost.

The broader question of how U.S. foreign-aid dollars intersect with partisan politics abroad has drawn scrutiny from House Republicans already probing suspected foreign money flows in domestic campaigns. The USAID revelations suggest the pipeline may have run in the other direction as well, American taxpayer money flowing outward to organizations whose work, intentionally or not, bolstered left-leaning political ecosystems overseas.

Correlation, causation, and common sense

Even the Daily Caller commentary acknowledged that correlation does not equal causation. No one has produced a document showing USAID officials directing grants with the explicit goal of electing left-wing Latin American presidents. The agency's DRG portfolio was framed in neutral language, election support, anti-corruption, civil-society strengthening.

But neutral language does not guarantee neutral outcomes. When the organizations receiving "civil-society capacity-building" grants happen to promote progressive social agendas, when the "independent media" receiving support happens to amplify left-of-center narratives, and when the "human rights advocacy" being funded centers on DEI orthodoxy and gender ideology, the practical effect can look a great deal like political infrastructure, even if no one in Foggy Bottom ever typed the words "elect the left."

The mechanism matters. USAID's DRG portfolio did not simply hand checks to foreign political parties. It funded the connective tissue that surrounds elections: NGOs that train activists, media outlets that shape coverage, civic organizations that mobilize voters around specific issues. Remove that tissue, and the political landscape shifts, apparently, and substantially, to the right.

The pattern raises uncomfortable questions for those who defended USAID's spending as apolitical. If the money truly had no ideological tilt, its removal should have produced no ideological pattern in election results. Six for six is a difficult coincidence to explain away.

This is not an isolated concern about U.S. institutions quietly advancing a progressive agenda abroad. Some Republican lawmakers have raised alarms about Democratic officials actively undermining U.S. policy in the Western Hemisphere. The USAID story fits a broader pattern of taxpayer-funded institutions operating at cross-purposes with the voters who fund them.

The establishment's silence

When Trump moved to restructure USAID, the foreign-policy establishment reacted with alarm. Critics warned of humanitarian catastrophe, diplomatic retreat, and the collapse of American soft power. What they did not predict, or at least did not say out loud, was that dismantling the agency's governance portfolio would coincide with a historic sweep of conservative electoral victories across an entire continent.

That silence is telling. If USAID's programs were genuinely nonpartisan, the agency's defenders should have no trouble explaining why their removal produced such a lopsided political result. Instead, the conversation has largely moved on to other grievances against the administration.

Meanwhile, figures like Tim Walz have taken their opposition to Trump's foreign-policy approach overseas, criticizing the administration at progressive conferences abroad. The contrast is hard to miss: one faction of American politics spent years channeling taxpayer money to left-leaning organizations in Latin America under the banner of "democracy promotion," while another moved to cut off that funding and let those democracies speak for themselves.

The results speak clearly enough. Latin American voters, freed from the influence of a U.S.-funded NGO ecosystem that tilted left, chose candidates on the right, not in one country, but in six.

Trump's executive order restructuring foreign aid faced legal challenges from the start, but federal courts have upheld the administration's authority to reshape how American dollars are spent abroad. The judiciary's refusal to block the order left USAID's restructuring intact, and left the electoral consequences to unfold.

What comes next

Several open questions remain. No public accounting has detailed exactly which USAID DRG contracts were active in each of the six countries before cancellation, or how much money flowed to specific organizations in Bolivia, Chile, Honduras, Costa Rica, Peru, and Colombia. The identities and affiliations of the NGOs that lost funding, and their connections to the defeated left-wing candidates, have not been fully mapped.

Those details matter. If the correlation holds under closer scrutiny, it would represent one of the most consequential revelations about American foreign aid in decades: that a U.S. government agency, funded by American taxpayers, was effectively subsidizing left-wing political movements across an entire hemisphere.

The foreign-policy establishment spent years insisting USAID was above politics. Six elections later, the scoreboard tells a different story.

When you stop funding the machine, the machine stops winning. That's not a conspiracy theory. It's a receipt.