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.

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.

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.

By treating the countries of the region as if they were still banana republics that would bend over backward to fulfill the U.S. government’s wishes, Trump gravely underestimates their power as a united bloc.

Trump’s uncharitable rhetoric and less-than-civilised treatment of illegal immigrants are, at the very least, likely to fuel more anti-American sentiment in the region. This resentment towards the US may well manifest in building bridges with governments and ideologies that are inimical to US interests.

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,

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.

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.

Latin American leaders have canceled a summit to discuss Donald Trump's migrant crackdown, as the region weighs the risks of openly confronting the firebrand US president. But Honduras was forced to cancel the meeting after no prominent regional leaders apart from Petro confirmed their attendance.

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

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