While elected on an America-first, isolationist platform, freshly reinstalled U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration have quickly homed in on Latin America. The interactions hitting the headlines have not been positive.

Colombian migrants deported from the United States arrived in Bogotá. Soldiers marched with torches in Havana to mark the 172nd anniversary of the birth of Cuban independence hero José Martí.

Colombia’s president is calling on his compatriots working without legal status in the United States to leave their jobs and return home as soon as possible.

The U.S. president is resurrecting tactics from his first term and promising a more aggressive approach to migrant flows. Regional leaders are responding.

So Trump will likely get his way in more cases than not. But he shouldn’t celebrate just yet, because the short-term payoff of strong-arming Latin America will come at the long-term cost of accelerating the region’s shift toward China and increasing its instability. The latter tends, sooner or later, to boomerang back into the United States.

A simmering diplomatic stand-off over deportation flights spilled onto social media Sunday, threatening the once close relationship between the US and Colombia and further exposing the anxiety many feel in Latin America towards a second Trump presidency.

The U.S. embassy in Bogota canceled appointments for Colombians hoping to get visas to enter the United States. The move was the Trump administration’s response to short-lived resistance by the Colombian government to accept deportation flights.

A recent fight over between President Donald Trump and Colombian President Gustavo Petro has brought renewed attention to the policies of the former Marxist guerilla whose priorities often run counter to Washington,

Latin American leaders don’t like submitting to the United States in imperial mode. They also have an alternative.

Colombia isn’t the first nation to have materially countered Trump’s deportation plans. Still, its tiff with the U.S. is indicative of some lesser-known trade entanglements between North and South America—and of the potential for the Trump administration to hurt Americans’ pocketbooks in its craven pursuit of mass deportations.

It has always surprised me,” wrote the 20th-century Mexican poet and diplomat Octavio Paz, “that in a world of relations as hard as that of the