📜 US-LatAm treaties that shaped history

Though Donald Trump has made Washington’s influence over Latin America more visible than usual in 2025, the United States has been shaping the region’s political and economic realities for more than two centuries. In this end-of-year special, we revisit five diplomatic agreements signed by the US that transformed Latin America, for better or for worse, and explain why they continue to matter decades — and in some cases centuries — later.

Often dismissed as ancient history, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo still underpins US-Mexican relations. It ended a two-year war between the two countries, but at the cost of Mexico ceding more than half of its territory to the US — a history-altering loss embraced in Washington as the fulfillment of the expansionist creed known as “Manifest Destiny.”

The lands transferred included what are now California, Nevada, Utah and New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming. Mexicans living in those territories were promised US citizenship and legal protections. Yet the legacy of the treaty remains politically charged, resurfacing whenever debates over the border, migration or sovereignty intensify.

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