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Latin America has come up plenty on the U.S. presidential campaign trail—mostly by former President and Republican nominee Donald Trump, who has leaned into negative claims about Latin Americans and pledged to levy tariffs on several countries.
Not only has Trump threatened a 200 percent tariff on every car coming across the Mexican border into the United States, he has vowed to impose tariffs on countries that shun the U.S. dollar. Brazil, a member of the BRICS grouping, is among the countries that aim to increase non-dollar trading, as I reported last week following the bloc’s most recent summit in Kazan, Russia.
Mexico might be the first and hardest hit by Trump’s tariffs. A report released this month by research firm Moody’s concluded that “under the worst-case scenario, the Mexican economy will fall into recession, the currency will depreciate, and inflation will rise.”