Latin America is turning right at a speed that would have seemed impossible five years ago. Meanwhile, America's largest cities are turning left at an equally remarkable pace.
In June, Colombia elected a hard-right outsider. Peruvian voters, after an ill-fated experiment of electing a Marxist-Leninist president, chose to re-establish a right-wing political dynasty. But New York City's Democratic voters headed in the opposite direction. They nominated socialists up and down the ballot last Tuesday, throwing multiple Democratic incumbents out of office.
That's two hemispheres, two directions, and possibly one explanation tying them together.
President Trump froze new foreign aid obligations the day he took office. Within weeks, the website of the U.S. Agency for International Development was taken down and its Washington headquarters shuttered. By March, Secretary of State Rubio announced that 83 percent of the agency's programs had been cancelled and roughly 5,800 employees laid off. USAID officially ceased independent operations that July.
I am not the first to point it out: In the time since since Trump ordered cancellation of the bulk of USAID's programs, center-right and conservative candidates have swept to victory in Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, Honduras, Costa Rica, Peru, and Colombia. In fact, not a single left-wing government has won a national election in the region. Seven consecutive wins, zero losses, across eighteen months, in a region once described as a permanent pink tide.
Ecuador's Daniel Noboa won his April 2025 runoff with 55.6 percent on law-and-order; Bolivia's Rodrigo Paz ended two decades of socialist dominance; Chile's Jose Antonio Kast won 58.2 percent, soundly defeating the Communist Party candidate; Trump-backed Nasry Asfura prevailed in Honduras after a contested December count; Costa Rica elected right-wing populist Laura Fernandez in February 2026; Peru's Keiko Fujimori edged to victory in a razor-thin runoff early last month; then Colombia went hard right last week.
That is a clean sweep in seven countries, and it sure doesn't feel like a coincidence.
The left's explanation is predictable. They blame crime, corruption and incumbency fatigue. And those factors are real. But what I would ask any serious investor — and what I ask every client before they put capital to work — is this: Why would all of those pre-existing conditions only now suddenly start producing consistent conservative wins, after the U.S. taxpayer funding is cut off?
To understand, we must start with what that money was actually funding. For USAID had a misleading name. It was a foreign policy organization at heart, not an aid organization. The Washington Office on Latin America — no one's idea of a MAGA think tank — acknowledged that the heaviest casualty in the budget cuts has been so-called "democracy and human rights promotion" programs, which were "hit especially hard." It reports that more than 90 percent of its partners in the region were affected by the cuts, with 70 percent forced to lay off staff.
A substantial portion of the cuts fell under the Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance portfolio — funding for a non-profit industrial complex that had sprung up in target countries to collect grant money for election support, legislative strengthening, and local governance reform.
Now the money is gone. One can draw one's own conclusions, based on the results, of the degree to which these programs were propping up left-leaning social and political agendas in foreign countries.
Now look north. In November 2025, the Democratic Socialists of America secured their biggest electoral victory ever with Zohran Mamdani's election as mayor of New York. The organization's membership has nearly doubled since October 2024. New York and Seattle now both have socialist mayors; Washington, D.C. and perhaps Los Angeles are poised to join them.
Then came last Tuesday night. The biggest upset came in New York's 13th district, where Mamdani-backed Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old community organizer and Ph.D. student, narrowly defeated five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.) — the first Dominican American elected to Congress and the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Espaillat lost despite being backed by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.).
In the 10th district, Brad Lander decisively unseated two-term Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), also endorsed by Jeffries. And in the open 7th district, democratic socialist Claire Valdez defeated Antonio Reynoso, the hand-picked successor of retiring Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-N.Y.), who was also backed by the liberal Working Families Party.
Socialist candidates also racked up victories in New York's state legislature, where they are poised to pick up at least six seats, despite $9.6 million in super PAC spending against them. "A year ago, it was not the end of a political movement," Mamdani said Tuesday night. "It was the beginning."
He is probably right. And note that his movement's candidates represent real change from the liberal Democrats they are devouring. These socialists don't just espouse unfashionable economic theories — they also promote abolishing the police and prisons, and banning deportations even of convicted criminals. And that's just for starters.
In Latin America, U.S.-funded institutional infrastructure propped up the left for decades. It collapsed the moment funding disappeared. But in New York, that infrastructure is being assembled from the other direction. Mamdani mobilized 50,000 volunteers, evincing an organizational capacity that did not appear from thin air. It had been built up, carefully funded and maintained.
How is it going where socialists have taken power? Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, who campaigned against punitive approaches to public safety, now finds herself directing a crackdown on an open-air drug market. Wilson has refused to grade her own performance amid a growing homelessness and crime crisis and a rash of businesses fleeing for less hostile business climates due to both city and state policies.
In New York, Mamdani has bigger problems than just a budget hole and the failure of his promise to make public buses free. At a moment when the financial industry had already been migrating away from New York, his media antics have inspired further capital flight, as when he personally convinced Citadel CEO Ken Griffin to abansdon his firm's planned New York expansion.
Margaret Thatcher famously said the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money. But America's socialist mayors are discovering that you also run out of other people's patience.
Does the rise of socialism in the Democratic Party reflects genuine voter preference? Or does it reflect a highly organized infrastructure, operating in a vacuum where institutional opposition has atrophied? The Republicans have not hesitated with their read: They would have you believe that the Democratic Party "officially belongs to the socialists" now.
Latin America ran the experiment already. Remove the institutional scaffolding, and voters choose security over chaos, sovereignty over dependency, results over ideology — in fact, they just did so seven times in a row.
North America's cities are still building the scaffolding higher. But at some point, gravity applies everywhere.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management.
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