Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Some Latin American countries expand cooperation with partners in Africa, hundreds more troops ready for a deployment to Haiti, and a Miami trial pulls back the curtain on Venezuela’s lobbying efforts in the United States.

---

Colombia hosted two international forums last week: a leaders’ summit for the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the first-ever CELAC-Africa High-Level Forum.

CELAC was founded in 2011 as a space for regional leaders to discuss their affairs without the presence of the United States and Canada, which are members of the older (and better-resourced) Organization of American States.

Latin America is currently dominated by leaders intent on signaling positive relations with U.S. President Donald Trump, and the CELAC summit was—perhaps unsurprisingly—sparsely attended. Only four leaders from the region showed up: those of Brazil, Colombia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Uruguay.

The CELAC-Africa event was more noteworthy. It attracted Burundian President Evariste Ndayishimiye, who is also serving as the rotating chair of the African Union, and showcased recent policy evolutions for some Latin American and Caribbean countries.

Around 1 in 4 Latin Americans identify as being of African descent. Seeking to acknowledge this shared history to pursue broader south-south cooperation strategies, a few Latin American governments have sought to boost their political and business ties to African countries in recent years.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro is one figure at the forefront of these efforts. Petro and Francia Márquez, the country’s first Black vice president, have prioritized an explicit Africa strategy that has seen Colombia’s bilateral trade with Algeria, Nigeria, and Senegal roughly double—and increase twentyfold with Ethiopia—since 2022, albeit from low starting points.

Petro and Márquez have also opened embassies in Ethiopia and Senegal and launched cooperation projects with additional countries regarding sustainable agriculture and shipping logistics. Their administration established a “very different baseline for our relationship with Africa,” said Jerónimo Delgado-Caicedo, an African studies professor at the Externado University of Colombia.

Meanwhile, Mexico launched a chamber of commerce in Nigeria last year and is in talks with Ghana about that country’s plans to open an embassy in Mexico. Brazil grew its trade with African countries by some 11 percent in the last three years and opened an embassy in Rwanda. Since 2020, Barbados has opened an embassy in Ghana, and Suriname has done so in Morocco.

Most of these recent Latin American pushes toward Africa were advanced by left-wing leaders. The Caribbean has been more politically agnostic toward the continent: The Caribbean Community and the AU held joint summits in 2021 and 2025.

Though Latin America-Africa relations are growing, they are not at their highest point in history. The so-called pink tide of the late 2000s produced a bigger spurt of cooperation, led by leftist governments across Latin America that were intent on promoting south-south solidarity.

A 2009 summit in Venezuela attracted dozens of leaders from Africa and South America. Around that time, Brazil worked to revive plans for a South Atlantic “zone of peace” security arrangement between Latin American and African countries that was first floated two decades earlier.

The region’s swing to the right helps explain the low participation in this year’s Africa-Latin America forum, according to Renata Albuquerque Ribeiro, a political scientist and researcher at the State University of Rio de Janeiro.

Still, it would be a “basic error” to assume that south-south cooperation has been restricted to the left, Ribeiro said. Brazil’s right-wing military dictatorship sought out political relationships across the global south, spurred in part by the need to seek partners for oil trading and exploration following the 1973 oil shock.

The current surge in enthusiasm for Latin America-Africa ties could prove lasting if it is baked into government structures, Ribeiro said. The opening of embassies, rather than easy-to-cancel cooperation programs, is one such example.

Colombia’s pivot to Africa has resulted in institutional changes in multiple government bodies, such as the foreign ministry, Delgado-Caicedo said. He argued that some of that capacity would remain even if Colombians elect a right-wing president in May.

---

Friday, March 27: The U.S. House of Representatives holds a hearing on Latin America after the U.S. ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Sunday, April 12: Peru holds presidential elections.

Friday, April 24, to Wednesday, April 29: Colombia hosts a conference about transitioning away from fossil fuels.

---

Drug strike hits dairy farm. After the New York Times visited a site in Ecuador where the U.S. and Ecuadorian militaries said they bombed drug traffickers this month, the newspaper reported that the strike actually hit a dairy farm and that three of its workers said they were tortured by Ecuadorian security forces before being released.

The report reflects one of the few instances where U.S. claims about anti-drug strikes can be scrutinized by independent reporters. Dozens of those targeted in recent U.S. attacks have been killed at sea. In response, the U.S. Defense Department said it does not discuss targeting data, while Ecuador said it found evidence that drug traffickers used the farm but did not share it.

New Haiti deployment. Some 800 security personnel from Chad are due to arrive in Haiti by June as part of a United Nations-endorsed international force, Reuters reports. They will first take part in training from “European and American partners.” The force is an expanded version of a U.N.-backed squad that deployed in 2024 but has failed to retake control of Haitian territory from gangs.

Last year, Haiti’s national homicide rate rose to 49.8 per 100,000 people. The homicide rate in Port-au-Prince, home to around one-fourth of the population, reached almost 140 per 100,000 people, according to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. That makes it one of the world’s most violent cities.

An idiom for this era? Reflecting on the policy changes that Cuba’s government has proposed in response to increased U.S. pressure on the island, a Latin America Brief reader wrote in last week to suggest that a Spanish-language idiom does the job better than English.

Juan Antonio Muller of Caracas argued that Cuba’s announcements so far appeared to be merely gatopardismo. The expression is used in intellectual circles to indicate surface-level changes that leaders carry out to keep underlying structures the same.

The word jumped first from Italian to Spanish and comes from a line in a famous Italian novel, Il Gattopardo (The Leopard): “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” (Foreign Policy reviewed the Netflix adaptation of the book last year.)

The idea that gatopardismo occurs in Latin America today also inspired the name of a prominent magazine in Mexico City, Gatopardo. Its founders believed the concept was useful for scrutinizing how much societies in the region are actually transforming despite big talk from leaders.

---

• Three Scenarios for a Post-Trump World by Hal Brands
• What Trump May Do if He Loses in Iranby Suzanne Nossel
• The Israel Lobby’s Responsibility for the Iran Warby Stephen M. Walt

---

Maduro appeared in U.S. federal court on Thursday as part of the drug trafficking trial that served as the legal justification for his removal by force in January. But it wasn’t the only Venezuela-related hearing to draw national attention in the United States this week.

In Florida on Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio became the first sitting cabinet member to testify in a criminal trial since 1983. The case offers a look at how oil, politics, and lobbying are intertwined in the halls of power in both Caracas and Washington.

U.S. prosecutors accuse former Rep. David Rivera, a Republican, of lobbying for the Venezuelan government without declaring the activity as required under U.S. law. Prosecutors say the lobbying fee was contained in a payment from the U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s state oil company to Rivera.

Rivera countered that he was doing standard commercial advocacy for the subsidiary, trying to attract business with ExxonMobil.

Rubio is a longtime friend of Rivera’s and was called to testify about the fact that Rivera solicited meetings with him regarding Venezuela during Trump’s first term. Rubio was unaware at the time that Rivera was being paid by a Venezuelan-controlled entity, he said.

In another eyebrow-raising revelation, the Wall Street Journalreported last week that former Chevron executive Ali Moshiri maintained close relationships with senior Venezuelan officials while also serving as a CIA informant. Moshiri told the CIA last year that Washington should work with Delcy Rodríguez, who is now serving as the country’s interim president, according to the Journal.

Chevron stands to earn billions of dollars as Venezuela reopens to U.S. oil markets. Exxon downsized its operations in the country years ago after Caracas expropriated some of its assets and is trying to get the Venezuelan government to pay it compensation.

“A lot of the struggle within the Trump admin between the hawks/regime change/[María Corina] Machado and doves/negotiation/Maduro can be understood as a proxy for Exxon vs. Chevron,” Michael Paarlberg, a political scientist at Virginia Commonwealth University, wrote on X.