Rightward Shift in Latin America Could Bolster Pro-Life at UN

By | 2026

UNITED NATIONS, May 29 (C-Fam) A political shift to the right across Latin America could threaten the left-wing UN consensus on abortion, gender, climate, and migration for the first time in two generations.

A spate of right-wing victories in the region, including Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Honduras, raises the possibility that Latin American delegations will align with the Trump administration, and not the European Union. The recently elected conservative leaders are openly pro-life and pro-family and embrace conservative policies more broadly.

In the run up to the 2025 election, the now President of Chile, Antonio Kast, said, “I am a man of conviction. I support life from conception to natural death.” He was also critical of “propaganda or support for abortion and gender ideologies” in public education. The new President of Costa Rica, Laura Fernández, said that the government has an “obligation to defend the lives of those not yet born” and called abortion “nothing other than murder.”

For over two decades, Latin American governments have been a reliable ally of the left at the United Nations. Democrats and the EU bureaucracy leveraged their influence networks in America’s backyard to lock in leftist priorities in UN policy. Now they are facing the possibility of a real challenge. Global warming, open borders, gender ideology, and abortion rights are standard fare in major UN agreements.

These positions have been challenged by the Trump administration in recent months. For now, only Argentina and Paraguay have offered support to the U.S. position from Latin America. The number of countries from the region that support the Trump administration could grow to more than ten because of recent elections.

The Trump administration will have to work in a concerted way to match the diplomatic pressure of the European Union and other progressive actors in the region and disrupt existing bureaucratic mechanisms to get UN delegations from Latin America on board with UN reforms.

Changes to UN policy, however, are not automatic. The positions of delegations in the General Assembly and other UN bodies do not always reflect the political realities back home. Just because a Latin American nation elected a conservative government, it does not ensure that the positions of its UN delegation will change accordingly. Progressives have several advantages over conservatives in UN debates in this regard.

Progressives have the advantage of significant bureaucratic momentum. The European Union, as the leading progressive actor at the United Nations, has built multiple layers of control over UN policy debates through political engagements with governments and funding for a vast network of left-wing organizations in Latin America.

Progressives also have a personnel advantage. Because of their long-term bureaucratic engagement, progressives can rely on diplomats and officials who are well-versed in UN debates and understand the bureaucratic mechanisms used to discuss and decide UN policy both at the domestic and international level.

Conservatives, on the other hand, are largely disengaged from international organizations. They tend to only engage when they are directly challenged, but otherwise discount international mechanisms as toothless and a waste of time. As a result, they don’t have enough experts to staff the political and bureaucratic positions necessary to effectively change UN policy.

The challenge of modifying UN policy was on display during recent conservative political cycles in Europe. Poland, Hungary, Italy, Croatia, Slovakia, and several central European nations elected conservative pro-life and pro-family governments over the last decade. But they failed to change UN policy in any significant way. Most didn’t even try.

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