Trump’s Latin America allies deepen ties with Washington lenders

Latin America’s rightward, market-friendly shift is reshaping its relationship with Donald Trump’s Washington, including new flows of money from the multilateral lenders historically villainised in the region for pushing fiscal austerity.

The alignment was on full display at the International Monetary Fund-World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok over the past week, as officials from the so-called Bretton Woods institutions embraced many of the policies being pursued by new, Trump-aligned governments. They also described growing demand across the region for fresh funding and policy guidance.

“We do see a shift in policy direction,” Nigel Chalk, director of the IMF’s Western Hemisphere Department, said at a briefing Friday. “We see our role as supporting that shift toward more socially conscious, more fiscally responsible, more market-oriented policies in the region.” 

The growing footprint coincides with a dramatic redrawing of Latin America’s political map, including leaders aligned more closely with Trump. 

The IMF has 10 active programmes in the Americas, according to Chalk, out of a total of 35 active lending programmes. That includes a precautionary line with Chile and fresh financing for Bolivia, as well as active talks with Colombia for a new programme – all of which recently elected Trump-backed presidents. It’s also active in MAGA-inspired El Salvador and Argentina, while both the fund and the bank are re-enaged with Washington-controlled Venezuela.

To be sure, Chalk and and his counterpart at the World Bank, Susana Cordeiro Guerra, said politics doesn’t play a role, and kept Trump out of the discussions this week.

“The bank is agnostic, as much as we can, to the politics of reform,” Cordeiro Guerra said. The increased engagement with the new leaders is because “the overlap with the jobs and growth agenda is tremendous.”

While many world leaders’ relationships with Trump are more personal and transactional than ideological, his Republican party has traditionally backed the fiscal discipline and market-friendly policies of the IMF, known as the Washington Consensus, and is more aligned with right-wing parties globally on issues of immigration and security. 

Argentina’s Javier Milei had already emerged the region’s conservative standard-bearer, with the Trump ally yielding a chainsaw as the symbol of his austerity programme. 

The country got a US$20-billion boost from the IMF last year – despite concerns by some fund board members — with an extraordinary $12 billion disbursed up front. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, sharing the stage on a panel this week with Economy Minister Luis Caputo, held up Argentina as an example to follow.

Chile’s market-friendly reformist José Antonio Kast became president earlier this year and received a renewed flexible credit line from the fund in August. 

Colombia’s President Abelardo de la Espriella took office in August and is now in talks for a new programme to help deal with the fiscal ruin left behind by his predecessor. 

And Bolivia’s Rodrigo Paz, ending almost 20 years of socialist rule last year, secured a US$1.9-billion programme earlier this month as the country faces its deepest economic crisis in four decades. His administration has moved to unwind fuel subsidies and pursue other measures aimed at restoring the public finances after years of dwindling natural-gas revenue and dollar shortages.

“In spite of the international context, new windows of opportunity are opening up for our region and it’s the moment to be responsible in seeing how we take them,” Bolivia’s Finance Minister Christian Andrés Morales said in an interview this week.

Governments that inherited fiscal strains, weak growth or depleted financial buffers are increasingly turning to Washington-based institutions for money while pursuing policies those lenders have long advocated. Leftist governments in the past used the fund and other multilaterals as scapegoats for fiscal restraint.

“I get the sense there’s also much more support in the region, both for the role of the fund, but also I think for the role of multilateralism more broadly,” Chalk added.

The IMF’s sister institution, the World Bank Group, is also more involved. 

“We want to reward the reformers,” Latin America chief Cordeiro Guerra said in an interview. “It’s about doing the hard work and actually implementing reforms about fiscal consolidation and macroeconomic stability.”

Cordeiro Guerra pointed to Paraguay, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Panama as examples of governments pursuing private-sector-friendly reforms while expanding at annual rates above four percent.

The bank could loan Venezuela – which hadn’t received a loan from the bank since 2005 – as much as US$5 billion over the next two years, pending the country clearing arrears with other multilateral lenders. 

The country resumed formal relations with the Washington-based lender earlier this year – after the US capture of ex-president Nicolás Maduro – and this week marked the first time in over two decades that Venezuelan officials were part of the IMF-WB meetings, including Economy Vice-President Calixto Ortega sharing the stage at one event with Chalk.

The bank is also preparing a comprehensive lending package for Colombia, another for Barbados, and Argentina, which is facing more than US$25 billion in debt maturities. The loans are all subject to executive board approval, and aim to tap the bank’s private and public arms.

Colombia’s talks include three separate loans for spending efficiency, energy and health, Cordeiro Guerra said, without disclosing their size. The bank plans to use a similar financing structure in Barbados to support payment regulation and digital government payments. 

Some of that financing will follow a model already deployed in Argentina, where the World Bank backed a commercial loan of as much as US$2 billion. The structure uses the lender’s guarantees to lower risks for private creditors, which helps governments obtain financing on better terms.