{"id":560156,"date":"2026-07-26T09:58:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-26T09:58:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/560156\/"},"modified":"2026-07-26T09:58:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-26T09:58:10","slug":"proxy-for-trump-milei-tours-latin-america-to-meet-far-right-leaders-javier-milei","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/560156\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Proxy for Trump\u2019 Milei tours Latin America to meet far-right leaders | Javier Milei"},"content":{"rendered":"

Argentina\u2019s president, Javier Milei, is not particularly fond of travelling to multilateral forums \u2013 it is not unusual for him to skip Mercosur summits, as he did a few weeks ago<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But on Saturday he begins a tour of Latin America to meet far-right leaders, starting in Brazil<\/a> with the launch of Senator Fl\u00e1vio Bolsonaro\u2019s presidential campaign against the leftwing incumbent, Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva, ahead of October\u2019s election.<\/p>\n

Milei will then attend Keiko Fujimori<\/a>\u2019s inauguration in Peru on Tuesday, followed by Abelardo de la Espriella<\/a>\u2019s inauguration in Colombia on 7 August, from where he will travel to Ecuador to meet president Daniel Noboa<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The self-styled libertarian has justified<\/a> the trips as those of \u201ca president willing to open up to the world, seeking to triple the country\u2019s trade\u201d.<\/p>\n

But analysts point to the timing: amid his declining popularity<\/a> at home, the tour comes in the wake of a wave of far-right victories<\/a> in presidential elections across Latin America.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs someone who has been in power for a little longer, Milei is trying to establish himself as a leader of that group,\u201d said Crist\u00f3bal Rovira Kaltwasser, a researcher and professor at the Pontificia Universidad Cat\u00f3lica de Chile.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve never seen Milei take much interest in official visits to other countries,\u201d said Juan Gabriel Tokatlian, a sociologist and professor at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires. \u201cWhat interests him are figures from the world of big tech<\/a> and the far right, but in neither case is there any real interest in opening trade negotiations,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

Benjamin Gedan, a senior fellow and director of the Stimson Center\u2019s Latin America programme, said a constant in Milei\u2019s trips has been his effort to remain \u201cdeferential to the US president, Donald Trump, and never trying to upstage him\u201d.<\/p>\n

When Trump took office in January 2025, Milei faced relatively little competition for his affection in Latin America, where fewer than a dozen other far-right presidents were in office, most notably El Salvador\u2019s Nayib Bukele. Trump described Milei as his \u201cfavourite president<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

Since then, however, rightwing or far-right candidates have won all seven presidential elections held in the region, with the US president accused<\/a> of attempting to influence some of them<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Almost all of the winners also interacted<\/a> with Milei during their campaigns through public exchanges of praise or video calls but, according to Tokatlian, there is no doubt about whom they were really trying to please.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll these rightwing leaders see Milei as a kind of proxy for Trump, who is the one who is really in charge. They don\u2019t want to be under any kind of Argentine leadership. It\u2019s Milei who\u2019s trying, but there\u2019s no great eagerness for him,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Tokatlian believes that any contest for Trump\u2019s favour, if one exists at all, will be decided by \u201cwhoever gives the US the most on drug trafficking, migration, military cooperation and containing China\u2019s influence\u201d.<\/p>\n

The US has signed a series<\/a> of military cooperation agreements with countries across the region. In March, Trump launched the Shield of the Americas<\/a>, a \u201ccounter-cartel coalition\u201d made up exclusively of far-right leaders aligned with him<\/a>. Notably absent<\/a> were key countries for drug production and trafficking in the region \u2013 Mexico, Brazil and Colombia \u2013 all of which are governed by leftwing administrations.<\/p>\n

After being elected, De la Espriella said that Colombia would join the initiative and establish a local Shield of the Americas office in Medell\u00edn<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ariel Goldstein, a researcher and professor at the University of Buenos Aires, believes Milei nonetheless remains ahead of the others in the race for Trump\u2019s attention.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe has already spent the past two or three years building an intense relationship of friendship and subordination with the US,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

When Trump was re-elected, Milei travelled to Palm Beach to become the first foreign leader<\/a> to meet him after his victory.<\/p>\n

The Argentinian president has also emulated a number of policies from his US counterpart, including withdrawing<\/a> from the World Health Organization and tightening immigration policies<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Last year, Trump offered a $40bn US bailout that was widely seen as crucial<\/a> to the libertarian party\u2019s victory in Argentina\u2019s midterm elections<\/a>.<\/p>\n

However, Milei\u2019s path to re-election next year is far from looking smooth: although inflation has fallen<\/a>, purchasing power has also declined<\/a>, while unemployment and informality have risen and his administration has been hit by corruption scandals<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Goldstein believes that Milei and Trump are now heavily invested in winning the next major prize on the electoral calendar: Latin America\u2019s largest country, Brazil.<\/p>\n

Besides attending the launch of Fl\u00e1vio Bolsonaro<\/a>\u2019s campaign, the Argentinian president had hoped to visit the senator\u2019s father, former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is under house arrest after being convicted over an attempted coup, but the request was denied by a justice. Milei has never held a bilateral meeting with Lula.<\/p>\n

\u201cA Bolsonaro victory would be hugely important to Milei and Trump because it would allow them to reorganise the whole region around an axis of subordination to the US,\u201d said Goldstein.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Argentina\u2019s president, Javier Milei, is not particularly fond of travelling to multilateral forums \u2013 it is not unusual…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":560157,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":["post-560156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=560156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560156\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/560157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=560156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=560156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=560156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}