Isn't it time we brought the South on board?

I mean South America. And Central America.  We take the water from the rivers that flow south.  We enter trade agreements that stifle their economies. We deport their people when they try to reach the land of plenty and do what we can to discourage them from even trying.

Honduras is threatening to ditch a bilateral extradition treaty, furthering a pattern of snubs delivered against the United States by an array of Latin American leaders.

Anti-American rhetoric has been on the rise in the region.

[...]

Honduran President Xiomara Castro ordered her government to drop the U.S.-Honduras extradition treaty after U.S. Ambassador Laura Dogu expressed concern over Honduran military officials meeting with Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López, a prominent member of President Nicolás Maduro’s inner circle.

[...]

Padrino is under indictment by the U.S. Department of Justice for allegedly running a drug trafficking operation through Belize, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico.

[...]

Castro’s saber-rattling follows a week of heightened U.S.-Mexico tensions, with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador declaring his relationship with the U.S. embassy on “pause” after Ambassador Ken Salazar said a judicial reform proposal “represents a risk for the functioning of Mexico’s democracy, and the integration of the American, Mexican and Canadian economies.”

  The Hill

"Saber rattling?" I hardly think that qualifies as saber rattling.

Seeking distance from the United States is ideologically consistent for regional leaders like Castro, López Obrador and others like Colombian President Gustavo Petro, all of whom to some extent embrace the historical vision of the United States as a post-colonial interventionist power in Latin America.

Historical vision? How about the historical reality?

Castro’s motivations could be more personal than historical.

In 2009, Castro’s husband, Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, was ousted as president of Honduras in a coup.

While the Obama administration was critical of the coup itself, the United States quickly moved to recognize a post-coup swift election that much of Latin America saw as de facto support for the coup.

Porfirio Lobo Sosa, the president who won that election, and Juan Orlando Hernández, his successor, both have direct links to the multinational drug trade. Hernández is serving a 45-year sentence for drug trafficking in the United States. Lobo’s son Fabio is serving a 24-year sentence, and Lobo had related corruption charges dismissed in Honduras this year but has been under U.S. sanctions for his alleged corruption since 2021.

It does seem a little odd to recognize drug traffic-linked people while complaining about their relationships with other countries' drug traffickers.

“Revenge was inevitable, as the U.S. abandoned [Zelaya] after the coup. Now, with his wife in power, they’re back with a vengeance, exposing the shortsightedness of U.S. policy during the Lobo and Hernandez years.”

[...]

Castro’s first big play on the global scene was to recognize communist China in 2023, dropping a longstanding diplomatic relationship with Taiwan.

China’s interest in Latin America is multifaceted — political and security interests are intertwined, if not secondary, to economic interests both in Latin America as a market and provider of raw materials, and as a gateway to the U.S. market.

Also short-sighted of the US to have been fucking around in and fucking up Latin American affairs for decades now.

China is not the only major power looking to Latin America, a region that’s rarely a high U.S. foreign policy priority under either Democratic or Republican administrations.

Putting it mildly.

“Our future is tied to this region, and we have seen in recent years all these nefarious actors, the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, gaining a foothold. And we have to be able to counter that,” said [Eddy Acevedo, chief of staff and senior adviser on national security and foreign policy at the Wilson Center.]

Yeah, like maybe making Latin America a priority.  And maybe promoting more feminist ideas and less machismo.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.