The Trump Corollary and the Remaking of US Power in Latin America

Disclaimer: These opinion pieces represent the authors’ personal views and do not necessarily reflect the official policies or positions of Norwich University or PAWC.

The most consequential transformation in U.S.-Latin American relations today is not rhetorical, ideological, or even overtly partisan. It is operational. What can be described as the Trump Corollary marks a decisive shift in how the United States exercises power in the Western Hemisphere: away from direct responsibility for political outcomes and toward the outsourcing of coercion, enforcement, and political risk to compliant regional partners. This approach does not constitute disengagement. It represents a colder, more transactional mode of governance that prioritizes short-term control over long-term stability, and security outcomes over democratic institutions.

The 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) makes the logic explicit. Washington now defines a “reasonably stable and well-governed” hemisphere primarily as one that prevents and discourages mass migration and cooperates against cartels and “narco-terrorists,” while denying extra-hemispheric competitors’ control over “strategically vital assets.”[1] The center of gravity is not democratic governance; it is controllability.

From primacy to perimeter management

In earlier eras, U.S. hemispheric policy swung between crusading language and pragmatic deals. What is unique now is how openly the NSS promotes “enlist and expand” as a delegation strategy: recruit regional allies to “create tolerable stability” and grow partnerships, even with governments “with different outlooks,” when interests align.[2] This isn’t a return to Cold War-style anticommunism but rather a move toward transactional governance-by-proxy.

That shift is already evident in Washington’s view of the border. The NSS’s claim that “the era of mass migration is over” is presented as a matter of sovereignty and national security, with border control emphasized as “the primary element of national security.”[3] When migration is seen as an existential threat, exceptional measures become standard tools. In practice, the “Trump Corollary” becomes a license to move the most difficult, legally complex parts of migration control offshore.

The same lens is applied to markets and infrastructure. The NSS links hemispheric dominance to commercial diplomacy and the prevention of “hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets,” explicitly connecting security to ports, sea lanes, and strategic locations. This is important in countries where logistics hubs, telecom networks, and mineral supply chains are politically contested. The Corollary’s economic promise is speed: urging nearshoring and “reciprocal” deals, supported by tariffs and conditionalities.[4] Its economic risk is fragility: governments will hedge when they perceive U.S. demands as coercive rather than cooperative, and rivals will exploit the resulting resentment.

Outsourcing coercion as policy, not aberration

Outsourcing coercion isn’t just about capacity; it’s about jurisdiction. Externalized detention and transfers to third countries create a cloud of legal ambiguity: the United States maintains influence and leverage, while partner governments provide territory, custody, and plausible deniability. The aim is to strengthen the perimeter without incurring the full domestic political and legal costs of doing the same things within U.S. borders.

This is why the migration architecture matters beyond migration. When a great power normalizes delegated coercion, it exports incentives. It rewards leaders who can deliver “results” quickly — measured in removals, detentions, and visible toughness — while weakening the reputational and diplomatic penalties that previously constrained illiberal practices. The result is a regional market for coercive services.

The Trump–Bukele security bargain

The clearest expression of the Corollary’s operating logic is the alignment with President Nayib Bukele. The United States agreed to pay El Salvador to detain hundreds of migrants deported from the United States — many allegedly tied to criminal organizations — inside the country’s high-security prison system.[5] The underlying message is not subtle: detention is now a tradable instrument of bilateral cooperation.

Human Rights Watch has argued that U.S. transfers and Salvadoran custody have produced conditions consistent with enforced disappearance, detainees held incommunicado, with families unable to confirm location or status, and with neither government providing transparent, reviewable processes.[6] Subsequent documentation by Human Rights Watch and Cristosal alleges torture and other severe abuses against Venezuelan deportees held in El Salvador’s detention system, including the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT).[7] Amnesty International has similarly warned that expulsions to El Salvador amid the ongoing state of exception expose people to grave abuses and undermine due process guarantees.[8] Even if one accepts the premise that criminal networks exploit migration flows, policy choices remain subject to legal and normative constraints. The Corollary’s wager is that those constraints can be managed through distance.

This is where the bargain becomes a strategic trap. By making Bukele’s carceral state an instrument of U.S. policy, Washington strengthens the very governance model that has hollowed out judicial independence and normalized emergency rule in El Salvador. It also supplies other leaders in the region a new playbook: promise “order” and deliver cooperation to Washington, and the democratic costs become secondary.

The legal architecture reinforces the pattern. A detailed legal analysis of U.S.-El Salvador “diplomatic notes” argues that the arrangement functions as a “fig leaf”: non-binding assurances that do little to mitigate the risk of torture while simultaneously implying continuing U.S. influence over detainee disposition.[9] That is the essence of outsourced coercion, control without responsibility.[10]

The diffusion problem: when “success” travels

If you want to see how the Corollary remakes power, watch how quickly coercive governance becomes exportable. Once a model is treated as “effective,” it spreads through imitation and selective learning. In the short term, this diffusion can manifest as policy convergence on public safety. In reality, it often means convergence around institutional shortcuts: emergency decrees, militarized policing, expanded detention, and weakened oversight.

That diffusion has predictable second-order effects. It pressures civilian control of security forces by elevating coercive capacity as the key currency of international relevance. It expands the political role of prison and police institutions. And it makes the line between domestic governance and international bargaining porous: a leader’s ability to deliver repression at home becomes an asset in negotiations with Washington.

Venezuela and the managed-authoritarianism temptation

Venezuela is the Corollary’s other test case because it exposes the strategic contradiction at the heart of U.S. power. Washington wants decisive outcomes — reduced migration, weakened transnational crime, diminished extra-hemispheric influence — but it also wants to avoid prolonged responsibility. In a War on the Rocks analysis, the “day after” problem is framed bluntly: decapitation is not the hard part; stabilization and governance are.[11] Any serious regime-change scenario produces a Pottery Barn dilemma — break it, own it — even if the United States tries to keep boots on the ground and responsibilities outsourced.

The more recent corollary is darker. If the United States prioritizes short-term controllability over long-term democratic reconstruction, it can end up tolerating, even facilitating, a post-regime order that is “managed” rather than democratized—an authoritarian equilibrium that is cleaner, more predictable, and externally aligned.[12] That outcome can reduce immediate volatility and migration pressure while entrenching coercive institutions and narrowing the space for genuine pluralism.

This is not theoretical. Authoritarian systems often survive leadership loss through “coup-proofing”: overlapping coercive agencies, patronage networks, and incentives that make defection costly. Research shows that transitions following dictator removal frequently stall or invert when coercive institutions remain intact and unaccountable.[13] In Venezuela, the risk is that a transition becomes a security project led by those best positioned to control violence rather than those best positioned to rebuild legitimate authority.[14]

What this does to U.S. power

The Corollary’s promise is clarity: reduce migration, constrain rivals, and reassert hemispheric primacy. The price is that U.S. influence becomes increasingly dependent on illiberal partners, and U.S. legitimacy becomes contingent on the very abuses Washington once claimed to oppose. That is not just a moral problem; it is a strategic problem.

First, outsourced coercion creates blowback risk. Abuses in partner prisons do not stay “over there.” They create litigation, congressional scrutiny, reputational damage, and, over time, distrust among publics whose cooperation the United States needs for everything from intelligence sharing to port access. Second, it narrows diplomatic bandwidth. When migration control is the organizing principle, Washington’s leverage becomes hostage to a small set of strongmen who can credibly threaten non-cooperation.

Third, the Corollary reshapes the regional balance in ways that can undermine U.S. objectives. A hemisphere that is “stable” because citizens are afraid, courts are compliant, and prisons are overflowing is stable only in the short term. In the medium term, it produces exactly the kinds of brittle states that generate new displacement, new criminal markets, and new forms of anti-American politics.

The key point is not that the United States should ignore migration, cartels, or extra-hemispheric competition. It is that the Corollary’s method — delegated coercion paired with democratic permissiveness — turns U.S. power into something narrower and more coercive, and therefore more fragile. In Latin America, power experienced primarily as detention, deportation, and punishment is rarely durable. It travels fast, but it also backfires fast.

Orlando J. Pérez, Ph.D., is a political science professor at the University of North Texas at Dallas. He authored Civil-Military Relations in Post-Conflict Societies: Transforming the Role of the Military in Central America and Political Culture in Panama: Democracy after Invasion; co-authored Making Police Reform Matter in Latin America, and co-edited Democracy and Security in Latin America: State Capacity and Governance under Stress. As a consultant, he has worked on issues of democratization, civil-military relations, and anti-corruption for the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.N. Development Program.

[1] The White House. (2025, December). 2025 National Security Strategy (pp. 5, 15).

[2] The White House. (2025, December). 2025 National Security Strategy (p. 16).

[3] The White House. (2025, December). 2025 National Security Strategy (p. 11).

[4] The White House. (2025, December). 2025 National Security Strategy (pp. 5, 13–14, 16).

[5] Bubola, E., & Aleaziz, H. (2025, March 16). EE. UU. pagará a El Salvador por encarcelar a presuntos miembros del Tren de Aragua: fuentes. Reuters.

[6] Human Rights Watch. (2025, April 11). Estados Unidos/El Salvador: Desaparición forzada de deportados venezolanos.

[7] Human Rights Watch. (2025, November 12). US/El Salvador: Torture of Venezuelan Deportees; Cristosal. (2025, November). “Llegaron al infierno”: Tortura y otros abusos contra venezolanos en el Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo de El Salvador (report).

[8] Amnesty International. (2025, March). Unlawful expulsions to El Salvador endanger lives amid the ongoing state of emergency.

[9] Finucane, B. (2025, July 17). The Legal Fig Leaf: The U.S.-El Salvador Detainee Diplomatic Notes. Just Security.

[10] El País. (2025, July 8). El Salvador asegura que Estados Unidos tiene “jurisdicción y responsabilidad legal” sobre los inmigrantes deportados al Cecot. El País US.

[11] Pérez, O. J. (2025, November 17). The Day After: What Successful Regime Change in Venezuela Would Really Take. War on the Rocks.

[12] Pérez, O. J. (2026, January 13). After Maduro: Trump’s Managed Authoritarianism Trap in Venezuela. War on the Rocks.

[13] de Bruin, E. (2020). How to Prevent Coups d’État: Counterbalancing and Regime Survival. Cornell University Press.

[14] Trinkunas, H. A. (2000). Crafting civilian control of the military in Venezuela: A comparative perspective. Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 42(4), 109–136.

[v] Peter H. Smith. Talons of the Eagle: Latin America, the United States, and the World, fifth edition. Oxford University Press, 2021.

[vi] Smith. Talons of the Eagle: Latin America, the United States, and the World.

[vii] Smith. Talons of the Eagle: Latin America, the United States, and the World, p. 95.

[viii] As quoted in Smith. Talons of the Eagle: Latin America, the United States, and the World, p. 97.

[ix] Cordell Hull, “Just Compensation for the Good Neighbor,” as cited in Latin America and the United States: A Documentary History, p. 142 (original statement in 1938).