Staff Reports
Senator Flávio Bolsonaro beating President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil’s first round and forcing a runoff lit a fire on social media. The hot take going around is neat and tidy: the Trump administration shut down USAID in 2025, therefore Latin America swung right. Cute theory. It is not how history works.
What people are saying — and why the USAID story is appealing
Yes, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced big cuts to USAID programs after a review. Yes, those moves upset aid groups and had real humanitarian risks. That makes for a juicy narrative: cut the aid, watch the politics flip. But a tidy meme is not a causal chain. Many of the biggest rightward shifts — Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Javier Milei in Argentina, conservative wins in Costa Rica and elsewhere — happened before the 2025 USAID cancellations. Blaming one administrative decision ignores a longer, louder story voters were already telling at the ballot box.
Timing, money, and the limits of the “shuttered USAID” thesis
The math and the timeline both kill the simple claim. In 2023 the U.S. spent far more on Europe, Africa, and the Middle East than on Latin America — only about $1.8 billion went to the region that year. Most of that supported Colombia, Haiti and programs aimed at migration in northern Central America. Taking that money away annoyed NGOs and left gaps, sure. But it didn’t flip elections that were decided by crime waves, corruption scandals, and failing economies. Also worth noting: some governments shut out USAID long before 2025. Bolivia stopped receiving USAID money under Evo Morales in 2013. If the agency was the puppet master, it was a very inconsistent one.
Real drivers — not a single-button explanation
What experts and pollsters keep saying is simple: voters reacted to insecurity, corruption, and economic pain. Candidates promising order, lower crime, and a new kind of populist energy caught on. Success in one country encouraged copycats in another. That contagion of ideas — tough-on-crime leaders, anti-establishment messaging, savvy use of social media — did far more to change politics across the hemisphere than the bureaucratic fate of a U.S. aid agency.
Conservative takeaway: don’t steal the credit, sharpen the message
Conservatives should enjoy the wins without telling a story that isn’t true. It’s fine — sensible, even — to argue USAID needed reform and to back Rubio for cutting wasteful programs. But don’t pretend that pulling a few aid levers is what delivered voters. If the right wants to keep gaining ground, offer real answers on security, jobs, and corruption. And if we care about both winning and doing good, let’s fix how we help people abroad so aid works, not so pundits have another meme. The region’s swing was earned at the ballot box, not handed to us by a budget memo.
