Human Rights Watch has warned that the impact of the policies promoted by the administration of Donald Trump is not limited to the territory of the United States. On the contrary, it has generated a spillover effect that is being instrumentalized by several governments in Latin America to justify serious setbacks in human rights. According to the organization, the lack of effective containment of the global deterioration of rights has created a permissive international environment in which authoritarian, repressive, or openly illegal practices find new margins of legitimacy.
Human Rights Watch’s diagnosis is based on a central observation: when a global power abandons, relativizes, or manipulates the language of human rights, it not only weakens multilateral frameworks but also enables imitative behavior in states with fragile democracies or eroded institutions. In Latin America, this dynamic has operated as a cascade effect, in which governments of different ideological orientations have found in Washington’s rhetoric and policies a pretext to harden internal controls, repress social protest, and restrict fundamental freedoms.
One of the most evident areas is the expansive use of national security frameworks. Human Rights Watch documents that several Latin American governments have adopted discourses and practices inspired by the logic of “order” and “law and order” promoted by Trump, using the criminalization of protest, the militarization of public space, and the strengthening of security forces without accountability mechanisms as tools of political control. In this context, the defense of security becomes an argument to suspend rights, normalizing de facto states of exception.
Human Rights Watch places this pattern in governments that, in the context of Donald Trump’s return to the White House and the deliberate weakening of international human rights language by Washington, have intensified repressive practices invoking sovereignty, security, or control of internal order. In El Salvador, the government of Nayib Bukele has deepened the permanent state of exception, with mass detentions without due process, prolonged suspension of constitutional guarantees, and systematic imprisonment of impoverished sectors, in an international context where the “law and order” agenda promoted by Trump reduces external pressure on such policies. In Guatemala, judicial persecution of prosecutors, judges, and independent journalists has been reinforced by a regional climate in which the United States has ceased to prioritize the defense of the rule of law as a condition of political cooperation. In Honduras, Human Rights Watch has warned of the recurrent use of security forces against social protests and Indigenous communities, in a scenario in which U.S. policy privileges stability and migration control over rights guarantees. In Ecuador, the expansion of states of exception, the militarization of public space, and the normalization of arbitrary detentions under the discourse of the war on organized crime have been observed as part of a regional trend that finds indirect legitimization in the securitarian shift driven from Washington. In Peru, following the political crisis of 2022, the use of lethal force against protesters and the criminalization of social protest unfolded in a less demanding international context, where the Trump administration has shown little interest in sanctioning human rights violations committed by allied governments. In all these cases, the organization underscores that Trump’s policies do not originate the abuses, but drastically reduce the international political cost of committing them, weakening regional and global containment mechanisms.
Migration policies constitute another key axis. The extreme hardening of the U.S. approach toward migrants and asylum seekers has been replicated or adapted by governments in the region, which have reinforced arbitrary detentions, collective expulsions, and practices contrary to international law. Human Rights Watch notes that these measures not only violate basic rights but also turn migrants into scapegoats for economic and social crises, reproducing a pattern of racialized and class-based exclusion.
The anti-institutional rhetoric promoted from Washington has also had direct effects on judicial independence and press freedom in Latin America. According to Human Rights Watch, the systematic delegitimization of courts, oversight bodies, and critical media has been adopted by regional leaders to weaken democratic checks and balances. When attacks on judges, journalists, and human rights defenders are normalized in the discourse of a global power, the political cost of replicating them at the national level is reduced.
From a regional perspective, Human Rights Watch emphasizes that this phenomenon is exacerbated by the weakness of the inter-American human rights system. Pressure exerted by the United States on multilateral bodies, together with its lack of interest in complying with international standards, has eroded the capacity of institutions such as the Inter-American Commission and Court to act as effective brakes on state abuses. In this scenario, Latin American governments encounter fewer external obstacles to advancing regressive policies.
The organization warns that the problem does not lie solely in specific decisions, but in a shift in the normative climate. The Trump era has contributed to installing the idea that human rights are negotiable, secondary, or subordinate to interests of security, sovereignty, or economic growth. In Latin America, where recent history is marked by dictatorships, internal armed conflicts, and state violence, this flexibilization of the normative framework has particularly severe consequences.
Human Rights Watch emphasizes that responsibility for these setbacks cannot be attributed solely to the United States. Latin American governments are sovereign actors responsible for their own decisions. However, Washington’s role as a political and geostrategic reference amplifies the impact of its policies. When the principal historical promoter of human rights discourse abandons that role, it leaves a vacuum that is quickly filled by authoritarian logics.
This process reveals a profound contradiction of the contemporary global order. Human rights are selectively invoked as tools of geopolitical pressure, but abandoned when they interfere with projects of power. In Latin America, this instrumentalization translates into a reconfiguration of authoritarianism, no longer necessarily linked to classic military coups, but to degraded democracies that operate through formal legalities and normalized violence.
The Human Rights Watch report concludes with a clear warning: unless there is a coordinated response that reaffirms human rights as a non-negotiable limit on state power, the regression will continue to deepen. In Latin America, where structural inequalities and institutional weakness persist, the human cost of this drift will be high and long-lasting.
What is at stake is not only the democratic quality of the region, but the very validity of the principle that human rights do not depend on the political mood of a power or the contingent convenience of governments. When that principle breaks down, the exception ceases to be an anomaly and becomes the norm.
