US Secretary of State Marco Rubio boarded a government plane around 1 p.m. Brasília time on Tuesday (Sept. 8) bound for Colombia, the first stop of a three-day tour of Latin American governments aligned with Donald Trump. Through Thursday (Sept. 10), he will also visit Ecuador and Peru, according to the State Department. Brazil was left off the itinerary at a moment when it is in a diplomatic crisis with the Trump administration, as reported by g1, Globo's news portal.
In Bogotá, Rubio meets Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella to discuss US support after the magnitude 7.4 earthquake that killed hundreds in August, and he will attend the signing of agreements on civilian nuclear energy and critical minerals, CNN Brasil reports. The tour then includes Ecuador's Daniel Noboa and Peru's Keiko Fujimori, who was sworn in in Lima in July. In a statement, State Department spokesperson Tommy Piggott said the trip will discuss "US support for Colombia's earthquake response", stronger cooperation "in the joint fight against narcoterrorism" and "the benefits of closer trade relations".
Brazil off the map
For Brasília, the message is in the itinerary itself. Washington built the tour around three neighbors with openly pro-Trump governments and excluded the largest country in South America, which g1 describes as locked in a diplomatic crisis with Washington. CNN Brasil links the route to the wave of governments ideologically close to the Republican president that have taken office across the region, a shift that expands American influence around Brazil, the country of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, while leaving it outside the circle.
The core of that alignment is the Shield of the Americas, also known as the Coalition of the Americas Against Cartels. Launched in March with 12 countries, including Argentina, Bolivia and El Salvador, the US-led coalition now has 19 members, according to CNN Brasil. The group works mainly through intelligence sharing and joint military operations, a model inspired by earlier US actions against suspicious vessels in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Colombia, Ecuador and Paraguay have already agreed to host US troops on their soil, and other countries in the region are reportedly negotiating similar deals.
Coalition and the Monroe Doctrine
The trip follows a period of more assertive US rhetoric about the hemisphere. The State Department announced the route after claiming US "dominance" over the Americas and reviving the Monroe Doctrine, the strategy US governments used for roughly 200 years to project power and influence in Latin America, as g1 reported. In a video released in early August, the department says American dominance over the continent "will never be questioned again" and points to the operation that captured former Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro on January 3 as the most recent example of the doctrine at work, a "strong signal to the entire hemisphere".
This is Rubio's fifth trip to Latin America and the Caribbean since taking office, and the secretary has been working to expand his own influence on the continent, CNN Brasil reports, describing the effort as part of a plan to strengthen US power in the Western Hemisphere. The coalition also feeds the administration's narrative on security at the US southern border, including the fight against illegal immigration. For Brazil, the immediate result is the opposite of what its neighbors get: while Colombia, Ecuador and Peru sign agreements and host the secretary of state, Brasília remains outside Washington's circuit.