Debate overlooked Latin American issues that affect your wallet, and US security

Andres Oppenheimer

Tuesday’s debate between Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and Republican rival Donald Trump will go down in history as the one in which the former president shot himself in the foot by repeating the false racist claim that Haitian immigrants are eating American dogs and cats in Ohio.

But Trump’s long list of blatant lies about immigrants obscured the fact that neither he, Harris, nor the ABC moderators even mentioned several foreign policy issues that affect millions of Americans.

I’m talking about the increasingly violent dictatorships of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, whose brutal repression and disastrous economic policies are the reason why so many undocumented migrants from these countries are coming to America.

And I’m talking about what’s happening right now in Mexico, the top U.S. trading partner in the world, where President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s judicial reform is likely to turn the country into Latin America’s biggest elected autocracy.

The 1-hour-and-45 minute debate touched on several foreign policy issues, including — justifiably so — the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Afghanistan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The names of several foreign dictators, including that of Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban came up, but nobody mentioned Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega or Cuba’s Miguel Diaz-Canel.

Nearly 8 million Venezuelans have already fled their country since Maduro took office in 2013, and millions more are expected to leave since Maduro stole the July 28 elections and unleashed a wave of repression.

Trump mentioned Venezuela in passing, but without addressing Maduro’s attack on democracy and human rights abuses. Trump claimed Venezuela is systematically emptying its prisons to flood the United States with criminals posing as migrants, and that thanks to that Venezuela has become a safer country. Both assertions are false.

Just as amazingly, neither of the candidates even mentioned Mexico’s judicial reform, which was approved by the government-controlled Mexican Senate on Tuesday. It will allow Mexico’s leftist populist president to control the executive, legislative and judicial powers. U.S. ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar has described it as a risk to Mexico’s democracy and a threat to commercial ties between the United States and Mexico.

If Mexico returns to its authoritarian leftist past of the 1970s, the United States will not only have a hostile neighbor that may allow Russia or China to increase their presence in its territory, but America will also potentially lose a major source of low-cost imports. Mexico replaced China last year as the largest U.S. trading partner.

Throughout the debate, Trump, 78, came across as a rambling lightweight who didn’t have answers for the questions he was asked, and who kept repeating ridiculous assertions about immigrants no matter what the question was about.

“You see what’s happening with towns throughout the United States. You look at Springfield, Ohio,” Trump said. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

In fact, the Springfield police department says it has not received any reports of pets being stolen and eaten. And the city of Springfield said there are “no credible reports” of pets being harmed. Trump echoed a right-wing media report that originated from a Springfield Facebook group where one person wrote that a neighbor’s daughter’s friend had lost her cat, and that it may have been eaten by Haitian migrants.

Most of Trump’s other claims about immigration are equally absurd. While it is true that unauthorized immigration reached record levels in 2023, it plummeted this year after the Biden Administration imposed new restrictions on asylum seekers. And FBI statistics say violent crimes are at their lowest levels in about 50 years.

Summing up, Trump lost the debate on almost every front. But when it came to foreign policy, everybody in the room made a big mistake in not talking about Latin America, the region that affects most Americans’ daily life whether it’s on immigration, trade, drugs, the environment or economic opportunities.