Welcome to the President's Inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boyes distinguished senior fellow in U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.

This is the fifth episode in a special presidential transition series on the President's Inbox.

From now until inauguration day, I am sitting down with experts

to unpack who will staff the Donald Trump administration and how it will likely approach

the many foreign policy challenges it faces. This week's topic is Latin America reacts to Trump's

election.

Will is a fellow for Latin America studies here at the council.

He has written extensively on the region with a particular focus on the rule of law,

corruption and organized crime, elections, and constitutional change. He recently wrote a piece in the General of Democracy with Javier Corales titled How Organized Crime Threatens Latin America. Will,

thank you for joining me on the president's inbox. Thanks so much for having me.

I guess where I'd like to begin is getting your overall assessment of how

Latin America has reacted to Trump winning the November 5th election in returning to the White

House in January. Well, I think across Latin America, this was not a surprising outcome. In certain

ways, you could see that governments from those hostile to the

United States to ones that typically align with us, they were all making smaller big steps to

prepare for this. So I think that this is a development some leaders in the region have actually

seem coming. That said, I do think it's going to imply some big changes, and they're bracing for that.

One, I think there's

a widespread expectation that the style of diplomacy towards the region will be more coercive.

You know, this is an administration surrounded by people who talk about reviving the Monroe

doctrine, the idea that the U.S. should be the only great power really present in the Western

hemisphere, the exclusion of China, others, et cetera.

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