The Biden Doctrine Begins With Latin America
The trip to Guatemala was a crucial one, Joe Biden told the delegation flying with him on Air Force Two. It was January 2016, and the Central American country was emerging from months of political chaos after its president and vice president were ousted and jailed over a multimillion-dollar corruption scheme. Fed up with the political establishment, Guatemalans elevated a TV star, Jimmy Morales, to the presidency. Now Biden would attend Morales’s inauguration, lending legitimacy to the new leader.
Biden would spend just one day in Guatemala, but nevertheless squeezed in a private meeting with Morales, led migration talks with the leader and his El Salvadoran and Honduran counterparts, joined a lunch with them and the American delegation, and answered questions from the local press. (Representative Norma Torres, part of the delegation, told me it was obvious to the other presidents in the room for the working lunch that Biden had just given Morales “the talk,” in which he set out the United States’ expectations for Guatemala, and she recounted how the other leaders all seemed to remember having that conversation with Biden at some point too.) While there, Biden pitched his vision for the region, in which the three so-called Northern Triangle countries could work to be more open societies and tackle the “root causes” of mass migration—all with American financial and political backing.
On the face of it, the trip was unremarkable: a diplomatic visit in keeping with those made by senior American leaders in the past, containing some combination of platitudes and pressure for the host country. Yet in many ways, Biden’s 2016 tour of Guatemala offers significant insights into what his administration’s foreign policy would look like.
President Donald Trump has largely ignored Latin America, part of a broader withdrawal from international affairs that has had
