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US government records reveal Latin American leaders have spent millions hiring Washington’s top lobbyists to push for a laundry list of requests – from free-trade deals, security assistance and energy investments – heard by the Trump administration, according to an analysis by the Guardian and The Quincy Institute.
Since the lead-up to Donald Trump’s election as president in November 2024, Department of Justice records show that at least 10 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have registered their top officials and envoys as foreign principals under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (Fara). Fara aims to promote transparency by requiring those working as foreign agents to disclose their activities and compensation.
“Under Trump, we’ve seen a more directly transactional approach to influencing government,” said Jake Johnston, director of international policy at the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research (Cerp). “The very personal relationships that have developed with the far right in Latin America have given direct access to the White House. I wouldn’t say this influence peddling is unprecedented, but the magnitude is.”
El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, has arguably seen the greatest return to his three-year, $1.5m lobbying spree. Since February, Bukele has scored an Oval Office meeting with Trump, a nuclear energy deal, US assurance to help expand his country’s notorious mega-prison and an upgraded travel safety rating from the state department.
A lucrative contract with Mercury public affairs may have helped the Ecuadorian president, Daniel Noboa, secure his sought-after photo op with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, win approval for increased arms shipments to tackle a devolving security situation, and rack up a positive US intelligence assessment about his candidacy just days before winning a presidential runoff marred by irregularities.
Argentina’s Javier Milei has taken a somewhat different route to becoming Trump’s “favorite president”, spending tens of thousands to dine with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and appearing alongside Elon Musk at February’s conservative CPAC conference in Washington, easing the path toward a $20bn, US-backed IMF deal and a visit to Buenos Aires from the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, with expectations of an Oval Office visit and a trade deal coming soon.
From Panama to Guyana, Honduras to Haiti, the Dominican Republic to Colombia (and Venezuela’s opposition, too), leaders across the hemisphere are playing Trump’s uniquely transactional game to provide cover for controversial policies, position themselves electorally, and curry favor with top lawmakers and officials running policy for the next four years toward their often-overlooked countries.
Key among these efforts is the Argentinian American Damian Merlo of the Miami-based Latin America advisory group, who renewed his $75,000-a-month contract with Bukele for another year last June and previously lobbied for Argentina’s then-candidate Milei.
After winning Argentina’s December 2023 election, Milei dropped Merlo, a veteran Republican insider, to smooth things over with the Biden administration. Since then, Milei’s contact with the Trump world has only grown stronger, facilitated by the US and Argentinian operators at Tactic Global, a strategic advisory firm which helped organize the CPAC Argentina conference last December and recently hosted Paraguay’s president, Santiago Peña, and Ecuador’s ambassador to the US at a Los Angeles reception with top Trump officials.
Merlo, a fixture in Trump circles who stood behind Bukele in the Oval Office alongside members of the Salvadorian president’s “Venezuelan shadow cabinet,” previously worked for five years as vice-president of the lobbying firm run by Otto Reich, a longtime Republican official focused on Latin America.
Reich, a Cuban American, introduced another Cuban-American lobbyist, Mauricio Claver-Carone, to Trump’s then-national security adviser, John Bolton, who brought the latter on to become the top official for Latin America policy at the national security council in 2018.
Claver-Carone, who for more than a decade through the US-Cuba Democracy political action committee helped funnel millions of dollars to legislators on both sides of the aisle to block increasing calls for engagement with Cuba, is now Trump’s special envoy to Latin America, working side by side with his longtime ally, secretary of state, Marco Rubio.
Sitting behind Rubio at his Senate confirmation hearing in January was another Trump-connected Latin America lobbyist, retired Cuban-American ambassador Carlos Trujillo, who was widely rumored to be tapped for a high-level post in the new administration.
Trujillo, who served as Trump’s ambassador to the Washington-based Organization of American States (OAS) and was later nominated but not confirmed to be assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, has recently taken on the Caribbean nations of Haiti, Guyana and the Dominican Republic as his clients at Continental Strategy LLC, coinciding with Rubio’s trips to the region.
Trujillo’s firm, which netted $3.6m in the first quarter of 2025 and added 50 new clients since Trump’s victory, also employs the White House chief of staff Susie Wiles’s daughter, Katie, and Rubio’s former chief of staff in the Senate, Alberto Martinez.
Continental was reportedly key to brokering the $23bn deal for a BlackRock-led consortium that included its client Mediterranean Shipping Company to wrest control from China of strategic ports in Panama and around the globe, which Trump hailed as a step toward “reclaiming” the Panama canal, a top priority for his administration.
Panama’s government, like that of Colombia and Honduras, has retained a more ideologically mixed group of lobbyists to preserve historically bipartisan support in Congress for their foreign policy objectives, including restraining the US military presence in the Panama Canal Zone, maintaining trade preferences for Colombian exports and strengthening US-Honduran cooperation on immigration and security.
To those ends, Panama hired the Democratic strategist Manuel Ortiz, together with the longtime Trump ally David Urban, in January as part of $2.5m deal with BGR Group, while a month before Trump’s election Colombia extended a $60,000-a-month agreement with Squire, Patton and Boggs, tapping a former Obama administration trade official (who has since departed) and the deputy chief of staff to former Republican House speaker John Boehner.
Honduras, for its part, extended a $90,000-a-month contract with the former US ambassador to the country, Hugo Llorens, along with a state department veteran who worked in the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations, Tom Shannon, as part of a deal with the lobbying giant Arnold and Porter.
Latin America is by no means the region of the world whose leaders spend the most lobbying US officials, nor is it uncommon under a new US administration, Democratic or Republican, for foreign governments to seek access to freshly nominated political appointees and elected lawmakers.
Yet for a region analysts say will be prioritized under the current administration – but has historically spent little to ensure that is the case – Latin America is increasing its lobbying to ensure its seat at the table, in turn becoming a prominent player in Washington’s vast foreign influence web.
“Given Florida’s general involvement in this administration, specifically in foreign policy, and the state’s centrality to Latin American politics, that combines to create greater relevance and attention to the region than we’ve seen before,” said Johnston. “Now that some of these folks are in government or have direct access to government, Latin American leaders will certainly find more fertile breeding ground to pursue their interests.”
