With Trump or Biden, Latin America will lose but will also try to win

With only 11 days to go before the presidential elections on 3 November in the United States, the Latin American countries are looking with reserve at a result in which, according to Carlos Malamud, a researcher at Spain's Real Instituto Elcano, "everyone will lose, but everyone will try to win".
According to the Spanish researcher, "Obviously, there are many things to lose with one and gain with the other, but also vice versa, that is, if (Joe) Biden wins for some things he will be better received but the fears of a hardening of the Democrats' protectionist policies are there. Who wins and who loses? Everyone is going to try to win but everyone is going to lose.
According to Malamud, "the relationship between the United States and Latin America had been losing consistency as the 21st century progressed and, indeed, on 11 September 2001, the terrorist attacks showed that the region had lost strategic value for the United States. Today this is because the Latin American region does not involve any potential or systemic risk to the United States' very existence".
"In general terms, Latin America can be described as a land of peace, where the incidence of Islamic terrorism is not non-existent, but except for a few specific points it is relatively marginal and this has caused attention to be diverted away from the region", he adds.
The arrival of President Donald Trump in 2017 somehow confirmed this trend, but according to Malamud "made it worse from the perspective that Trump's interest in Latin America is marginal; in fact, his interest in the rest of the world is based on his premise and motto of "America First"; everything else is somehow superfluous, but in general what was seen, both in the campaign that brought him to the White House and in his subsequent management, is that Latin America was something totally secondary".
This has been seen in Trump's visits abroad; "to Latin America just once, and not on the occasion of a bilateral visit but of a G20 summit in Buenos Aires, then Latin America plays a secondary role and even the closest allies such as the president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, the Colombian Iván Duque, and the former Argentine president Mauricio Macri, in the years that coincided, were rather marginal", he says.
Similarly, "the long absence of someone in charge of the Under-Secretary of State for Hemispheric Affairs, which is crucial to relations with Latin America, and the identity of many US ambassadors in Latin America, often without sufficient weight, underline Trump's lack of interest in the region", the analyst explains.
Trump's isolationism has some exceptions. For Carlos Malamud, the issue of the "migratory border stands out because of a question that basically encourages nationalist and xenophobic sentiments, which are very clear to Trump's electorate, but also because of the migratory issue in addition to the famous wall, that is, the relationship with Mexico and Central America, the problem of drug trafficking, where we also include Colombia in some way, and the relationship with Cuba, with Nicaragua and Venezuela.
These relations with Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua are more "a matter of internal order, such as the vote in Florida, which these days is going to be fundamental in establishing the winner of the election, especially if it is a close one".
President Trump accused the Democratic candidate of being "socialist" and insistently reminded the Florida electorate that it was under the presidency of Barack Obama (2009-2017), in which Biden was the vice-president, that the US came closest to the island in fifty years.
Similarly, the issue of China has been fundamental to Trump's policy towards Latin America, as "it is a major international player and in fact we are going to see in the coming years, decades, how this confrontation between China and the United States is going to become more acute; tensions are going to increase; we are not only facing a trade war but a confrontation of all kinds, not only economic but also political and ideological".
"We are coming to a point at which both China and the United States are beginning to demand, to ask, and in some cases, when they can, to force their allies, friends or allies to take sides. So much so, for example, that the European Union (EU) has decided to promote an autonomous policy outside the two or to try to choose its own path".
"That is, in Frank Sinatra's terms, as Josep Borrell, the European Union's High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Common Security Policy, said, to choose My Way," Malamud concludes.

For Latin America, a region that is very fragmented, where consensus is scarce, "where the process of regional integration is in crisis, this is going to be much more complicated. And we saw this in the case of Brazil," Malamud describes.
"When he travelled to Taiwan during the election campaign, Bolsonaro clearly marked his differences with the Beijing regime, but after the victory, the People's Republic of China sent him a very strong message that there were red lines that could not be crossed, such as the visit to Taiwan, and that if he wished to change trade and economic partners he had every right to do so, but he had to choose.
So there are a number of issues to consider, whether Trump wins or Biden wins the confrontation with China will remain the same. "It's a question that has much more to do with the geopolitical interests at stake than with the political or ideological identity of the White House tenant," he says.
Furthermore, "the fragmentation in Latin America that began as a result of the attempt to impose a Cuban-Venezuelan hegemonic project or the Bolivarian project has been deepening, and today it is not only a question of confrontations between left and right, but is much more serious and has to do with ruptures that go beyond that", which will continue to complicate relations between the region and the United States.