Two days after the November 2016 elections that brought him to office, president-elect Donald Trump had a 90-minute meeting with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office of the White House. “We discussed a lot of different situations, some wonderful, some difficulties,” Trump told the media afterward. He later revealed that the major “difficulty” discussed was the North Korean nuclear threat.

We know little else about the two men’s conversation that day, but it is likely that one particularly “wonderful situation” they touched on was a part of the world where the United States had gained enormous ground during Obama’s presidency: Latin America.

When Obama first took office in January 2009, much of Latin America and the Caribbean were dominated by independent-minded, left-leaning governments, despite the previous Republican administration’s aggressive attempts to turn back the “pink tide” of progressive movements that had come to power in the early twenty-first century.