Just as the Biden administration abandons the Monroe Doctrine, China's stepping up to scarf up allies in Latin America -- and so is Russia.

You know, the supposed pariah state that invades other countries, practicing the ultimate in imperialismo? With Latin America under the control almost entirely of far-left leaders, surprise, surprise, Russia has easy pickings for gaining a slew of new anti-American friends, and they're doing it.

According to the Russian Foreign Ministry's website:

On April 17-21, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will travel to a number of Latin American countries, including Brazil, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba.

The Foreign Minister will have a busy programme, including meetings with the leadership of these countries and talks with their foreign ministers.

Sergey Lavrov is flying to the region with a specific agenda aimed at strengthening mutually beneficial cooperation of our countries in politics, trade, economy, education, humanitarian sphere, culture and other fields. The talks will focus on strengthening international legal foundations of the modern world, with the UN Charter as its supporting structure.

For us, Latin America is a friendly region, one of the centres of a multipolar world with which Russia intends to maintain a dynamic dialogue and develop constructive cooperation free from outside interference.

A few Russian missile bases here, a few spy installations directed at gringo there, a few arms sales to wannabe dictators, a little money for some votes in the United Nations, and they're off to the races.

Which pretty well shows us how badly Joe Biden has messed up foreign policy in those quarters, too.

Now, granted, these nations to be visited are the low-hanging fruit for the Russians, as relations have always been pretty nice with these places over the years. But in the past, Russia would typically send over an oligarch under the radar to do their business. Now they're sending longtime foreign minister Sergey Lavrov to ensure that the international cameras are on them so that everyone else knows about the lovefest, too. Lavrov is an experienced and exceptionally able diplomat -- I used to know him when I was a correspondent at the United Nations -- and he's very nice in person, which will work well in Latin America.

And Biden? He can't even get his vice president to visit the border. Virtually no attention has been paid to this region which has slid into a dangerous leftist vortex not seen since the days of Hugo Chavez.

All that sucking up to Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro to get him to pump oil for us -- lifting sanctions, dumping recognition of top opposition leader Juan Guaido, letting Chevron in there to drill, putting "the three stooges" in charge of managing U.S.-Venezuela relations -- and Nicolas Maduro goes off to the Russians. With Venezuela just 1,000 or so miles off the coast of Florida, there should be some mighty good opportunities for spying on the gringos, or buying arms on credit with which to threaten the neighbors, or getting hold of some radar-evading equipment the better to ship cocaine to the states. The possibilities are endless. Biden just had the rug pulled out from under him.

The situation is similar with the post-Castro oligarchy in Cuba, except that they are only 90 miles from the U.S. coast, and ties with them date back to the Soviet Union. Biden's bid to de-sanction the Castro oligarchy and warm up ties with that hellish regime has once again, been met with a scurry to the Russians. Nice game there, Joe.

Nicaragua is a recent slide downhill into socialism, with "little dictator" Danny Ortega abandoning all pretense of being a democracy.  Russia sees its opportunities there and has taken them. Nicaragua, recall, was once a friendly country and still has a free trade pact with the U.S. Biden has employed no carrot or stick with that trade pact to keep them in line, the way President Trump frequently did with Mexico. Coast clear then, for Ortega to dance around for the cameras with Lavrov.

Brazil is another of these nations that Biden has spent a lot of time courting, loudly congratulating Brazil's newly "elected" president Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva as a fellow leftist leader, the odor of election fraud reeking over both states creating a potential honor among thieves situation. Did Lula repay that legitimacy extended? Not in the least. He's fresh from a trip to China to suck up to that superpower, and now is welcoming Lavrov into the presidential palace in Brasilia. He's very significantly refusing to sell arms to Ukraine, which makes Russia happy. Biden blew that one, too, unable to even leverage the leftwing solidarity. 

For most of these places, Biden may be leftwing, but it's just too much fun to stick it to the gringo. So now that Russia has come calling, they are there and ready, with their hands out, pay no attention to that issue over in Ukraine.

The scary part is that Latin America is loaded with newly elected leftist leaders, nearly all of whom are going to be likely recruits for Russia's new Latin American offensive beyond these four stalwarts -- to strike out at the U.S. from its underbelly, in an act of reciprocation for what they see is U.S. meddling in Russia's "near abroad" which is Ukraine. There's been a lot of talk about this over the past two decades, but now it appears that things are really happening.

Who are some other likelies to join hands with the Russians? Four candidates come to mind -- Mexico, Colombia, Honduras, and Chile, all of whom have leftist leaders just as far-left as at least Brazil.

What's the story with Mexico and Russia? Well, Lavrov has already met with Mexico's hostile, anti-American foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, this past September. It has resisted selling arms to Ukraine, which makes Russia happy, and refused to sanction Russia, not particularly concerned what Joe Biden might think about it, as this article explains. The U.S. is Mexico's largest trade partner, and has virtually zero trade with Russia. Not a problem for the Mexican government there as they know that Joe will always bend over. The analysts describe what's going on this way for Scripps News:

"The president is not very fond of the United States to start with, but also when President Lopez Obrador contracted COVID-19, President Putin offered to send his medical team to Mexico City to attend to the president, so there's a degree of gratitude there," said Pamela Starr, director of the U.S.-Mexico network at the University of Southern California.

A month after Russian troops invaded Ukraine, lawmakers from Mexico's leftist ruling party created a Mexico-Russia friendship committee and invited the Russian ambassador to the event.

"They're very anti-American, and as such, they believe that the enemy of my enemy is my friend," said Mariana Campero, host of Mexico Matters podcast from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

 And yes, that is a problem for the U.S., and we're not just talking about Joe Biden's broken treaties with Mexico on immigration coupled with Joe's open border. Scripps News continues:

The U.S. also suspects that Mexico harbors a large number of Russian spies, a point recently made by a top U.S. military official. "The largest portion of GRU members in the world is in Mexico right now," said General Glen VanHerck, commander of the U.S. Northern Command. "Those are Russian intelligence personnel."

The statement is an apparent reference to Russia's huge embassy in Mexico City.

"Mexico has very little economic ties with Russia, very little political interaction, so to have an embassy in Mexico that's about 30% larger than their embassy in Brazil is suggestive," Starr said.

Russia and Mexico seem very squared away -- right under Joe Biden's nose.

There's also Honduras which fairly recently elected a far-left leader who was a "first" -- the first leftist woman president, so the inauguration was attended by Biden's "border czar" Kamala Harris, who came and went and was never heard from since.

What's the situation there? Here's a headline from TASS, the Russian state news agency, dated April 5:

Russia to develop relations with Honduras — Putin

Seems Kamala's charms and all those "firsts" didn't do much. The Bidenites couldn't even figure out how to use leverage on open borders to keep Honduras in the U.S. camp, let alone free trade, of which Honduras also has a pact. We will stay tuned for further developments there.

And let's look at Colombia, the U.S.'s historically oldest and finest ally on the South American continent. They elected probably the worst leftist of any of them, the Bill Ayers of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, a former M-19 communist narcoguerilla who was one of the late, unlamented Hugo Chavez's best buddies because his guerrilla group once burned down the Colombian supreme court with all the justices in it. This guy is repulsive. Petro has repackaged himself as "green" but is still the same anti-American narcoguerrilla he always was. His greenie stances sound pretty on paper to lefties here, but his big project is similar to Joe Biden's -- to shut down Colombia's oil production in favor of green energy, which is a disaster in the making. He's particularly vulnerable to money and economy problems which Russia might just be able to solve for him -- at a price.

The Sept. 21, 2022 MercoPress headline reads:

Putin finds Colombia's Petro “a promising partner”

The article says that Russia is looking to make Colombia "an ally," which would be quite a thing, given that Colombia is a major U.S. treaty ally. Biden doesn't have a clue what could come down with that one, and doesn't seem to be trying.

Only Chile, which is also headed by a godawful leftist, Gabriel Boric, seems to be resisting the bounce to Russia, possibly because of its rivalry with Brazil (and Argentina, which it goes without saying is pro-Russia) as the most successful Latin American economy, possibly because of domestic problems --  Boric is very unpopular and inundated with angry protests from conservatives and moderates, or possibly because Chile's nickname is "finis terrae," which means the end of the earth. They are really far away from everything and focused domestically. It's not known how long that will last, but thus far, the center is holding over there.

Not so elsewhere, where we see Russia racking up the diplomatic victories in Latin America, welcomed with red carpets and dominos falling, right in the U.S.'s sphere of influence, it's own "near abroad." It's not that these places are staying neutral or out of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. It's that they are now openly siding with Russia and working to undercut U.S. interests to extend Russia's.

Chalk that up to another Biden failure, an important one, even if nobody's reporting it in the news. It's worse than it looks.

Image: Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, per terms of service.