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President Trump has been diligently implementing a mandate to drain the swamp and put America First—which has extended to foreign policy. His efforts enacting the “Donroe Doctrine,” which has resulted in a renaissance as nation after nation rejects socialism and chooses freedom across Latin America, have been particularly impressive, especially considering the fifth column working within the State Department to undermine him.

Within the foreign policy apparatus, none are more subversive than Deputy Assistant Secretary Ana Rosa Quintana-Lovett. Her recent actions have jeopardized President Trump’s bold foreign policy successes in the hemisphere. Multiple sources have confirmed that Quintana regularly intervenes on behalf of Bernardo Arévalo—the Maduro of Guatemala—who is currently on the verge of being ousted as President as part of the Latin American conservative populist renaissance. After obtaining office due to widespread election fraud, Arévalo has allowed Guatemala to fall into squalor due to rampant narcoterrorism, which was called out by the Trump Attorney General’s office.

FOIA records show that Quintana was working on Arévalo’s behalf since at least July 2023 when she was advocating on behalf of the House Foreign Affairs Committee for Arévalo to meet with Biden administration officials. Arévalo cynically plays lip service to U.S. goals in the hopes to avoid the hammer of President Trump, and Quintana’s influence has allowed Arévalo’s disingenuous gambit to be largely successful up until this point.

Multiple sources have also confirmed that Quintana was a dogged opponent of the National Party of Honduras, working within the State Department to undermine support for President Tito Asfura in the lead up to the election. Asfura successfully defeated socialist opponents Rixi Moncada of the far-left LIBRE Party and Salvador Nasralla of the Liberal Party by a narrow margin in last year’s Honduran national election. Quintana was using her state department authority to shill for Nasralla, a defector from the LIBRE Party who President Trump called “no friend of freedom” who was “pretending to be an anti-Communist only for the purposes of splitting Asfura's vote.”

President Trump’s support of Asfura—as well as the pardon of former President Juan Orlando Hernandez—were the deciding factor in putting Asfura over the top. As a result, Asfura and the Trump administration are now on the same page when it comes to migration policy and drug interdiction with state-of-the-art freedom cities, known in Honduras as ZEDEs, once again open for business. This tremendous success came in spite of oppositional efforts by Quintana who would have preferred a tepid foreign policy that would have doomed the Honduran people to living under communism.

Quintana’s actions are not borne out of naivety or incompetence. She has been groomed for this very role for well over a decade.  Her résumé reads like a tour of Washington’s permanent establishment: internships at the Defense Intelligence Agency and USAID, work at the foreign aid contractor IRD, nearly a decade at the Heritage Foundation (before its recent shift right-ward), a fellowship at the far-left National Endowment for Democracy—which has pushed militant transgenderism in Latin America and throughout the world, senior roles at the Vandenberg Coalition, and Staff Director for Western Hemisphere under Rep. Michael McCaul on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Now she sits in a senior political post after being molded in the deep state apparatus—combining the worst extremes of neoconservatism and leftist interventionism—making her an ideal sleeper cell within the administration to undermine Trumpism.

The danger is not that Quintana will walk into the State Department and publicly declare herself opposed to President Trump. Bureaucratic resistance rarely works that way. The modern foreign-policy establishment is considerably more sophisticated. An official does not have to openly defy the President to dilute his agenda. She can influence who receives meetings. She can determine which political actors are presented as “credible.” She can frame one government as a stabilizing democratic partner and another as a reputational risk. She can recommend caution. She can demand more review. She can slow-roll an initiative. She can selectively manufacture urgency. She can cancel meetings with key opposition leaders. She can ensure that the President’s political instincts are filtered through fifty pages of bureaucratic conventional wisdom before they reach the decision-making table. And throughout the entire process, she can insist that she is faithfully implementing the President’s policy. 

Quintana’s past writings indicate a window into her America Last ideology. In an article written in Dec. 2021, Quintana argued that the empowerment of women must be a pillar of U.S. foreign policy. In May 2015, Quintana argued for a “Free Trade Area of the Americas” to expand the failed NAFTA agreement and “to integrate the economies of the Americas,” or, in other words, cede American sovereignty further and double down on policies that deliberately destroyed the U.S. manufacturing sector.

Quintana held particular animus for former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, dubbed the “Trump of the Tropics.” In a March 2020 article, Quintana chided Bolsonaro for refusing to implement crippling lockdown policies while praising socialist nations in Latin America for taking “bold, decisive steps to prevent a deadly outbreak.” After French President Immanuel Macron used the globalist green agenda to interfere in Brazil’s internal affairs, Quintana condemned Bolsonaro in April 2020 for standing for his nation’s sovereignty.

To be abundantly clear, President Trump and Secretary Rubio have the right instincts: maximum pressure on adversaries, secure borders through hemispheric accountability, and an end to business as usual with communist holdouts and narco-enabled governments. But when key posts go to figures whose entire professional lives were built inside the very institutions that resisted draining the swamp—DIA pipelines, USAID programs, NED grants, Vandenberg networks, and McCaul-era Hill staff—the amount of damage they can do to the overall agenda is severe and oftentimes extremely difficult to root out until it is too late.

President Trump’s supporters did not vote for the same failed foreign policy with a new coat of paint. They did not vote for USAID thinking without the USAID logo. They did not vote for democracy-worshiping bureaucrats repurposing MAGA vocabulary for deep state ends. Quintana’s agitation on behalf of Nasralla in Honduras and Arevalo in Guatemala demonstrate her inclination for progressive governance in Latin America. Nobody voted to put Quintana into this role, but personnel is policy. Quintana is a test case for whether President Trump can tame the foreign-policy machine that has worked counter to American interests for decades.