Trump’s budget proposal shows disinterest and disdain for Latin America

(Photo: Evan Vucci AP)

President Trump’s newly-released budget proposal for 2018 confirms what many in Latin America have long feared: he has a negative agenda for the region, focused on building a border wall, deporting Latino immigrants and cutting foreign aid, including humanitarian assistance to Cuban and Venezuelan independent groups.

Trump’s proposed budget was released May 23, while the president was making his first foreign trip as president to Saudi Arabia, Israel and Europe. Trump was the first president in recent memory who did not make his inaugural trip to either Mexico or Canada.

Former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan all made their first foreign trips to Mexico or Canada, following a tradition that started when President William Taft made his inaugural trip to Mexico in 1909.

Most former U.S. presidents picked one of those two countries because they determined, rightly, that the first national security priority for the United States should be having good relations with its neighbors.

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