Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Peruvians vote in presidential elections, Mexico makes moves to start fracking, and Brazil announces new security cooperation with the United States.

Peru held a presidential election on Sunday, but the results only started becoming clear in the middle of the week. With at least 93 percent of votes tabulated on Thursday afternoon local time, right-wing candidate Keiko Fujimori advanced to a runoff. Leftist congressman Roberto Sánchez ranked in second place.

Dozens of candidates were on the ballot, and none received more than 18 percent of the vote. (To win an election outright in Peru, a candidate must earn at least 50 percent in the first round of voting.) Fujimori got around 17 percent and Sánchez about 12 percent. Despite the slow count, European Union observers said the contest appeared free of fraud.

The lack of strong enthusiasm for any one contender reflected Peruvians’ general distrust in politics after a turbulent decade that has seen nine different presidents. The national mood is one of “exhaustion in the face of an endless series of corruption problems” and “hopelessness, discouragement, and disinterest,” Peruvian political scientist Alberto Vergara told Uruguay’s Sarandí Radio on Monday.

But the election results showed more than just that. Though most polls suggested that two right-wing candidates would advance to a runoff—Fujimori and former Lima Mayor Rafael López Aliaga—Sánchez’s relatively strong performance revealed that many Peruvians are interested in a left-wing platform.

That support remains even after former leftist President Pedro Castillo attempted a chaotic 2022 power grab that led to his impeachment. Sánchez served in Castillo’s cabinet; Castillo is currently in prison and endorsed Sánchez, who won votes in Peru’s poorer and more rural areas.

Sánchez has pledged to increase spending on health and education, legalize informal mining, expand state control over the country’s natural resources, and oversee constitutional changes to provide more public services toward Indigenous Peruvians.

Fujimori and López Aliaga both pledged hard-line anti-crime crackdowns and pro-market policies. But Fujimori sought to position herself as a more conciliatory figure, while López Aliaga proclaimed himself an admirer of U.S. President Donald Trump. In recent days, López Aliaga voiced unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud.

On Wednesday, Sánchez’s performance prompted some international investors to sell off their Peruvian holdings, leading the country’s currency and stock market to drop in value.

López Aliaga’s vote gap with Sánchez stood at fewer than 20,000 votes as of Thursday afternoon. Few polls have been conducted about Fujimori’s prospects against either López Aliaga or Sánchez in a runoff.

Fujimori has unsuccessfully run for president three times. She is a staunch defender of her father—former President Alberto Fujimori, who ruled as a dictator—and has gained a loyal following as well as many detractors. Fujimori espouses pro-market economics and an aggressive anti-crime stance.

Sánchez’s own connections could turn off some voters: He is an ally of Antauro Humala, a former member of the military who served 17 years in prison for participating in a pro-Indigenous, ethnic nationalist uprising.

While Sánchez performed well among Peru’s poor, Fujimori received support from across the country’s socioeconomic spectrum, according to analysis of district-level voting patterns by researchers at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences.

Preliminary results from a congressional election also held on Sunday suggest that right-wing lawmakers will outnumber left-wing ones in Peru’s legislature. But neither camp will have a strong majority without the support of centrists. The presidential runoff will take place on June 7.

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Friday, April 17, to Saturday, April 18: Several Latin American and Caribbean leaders visit Spain for a summit of progressive governments.

Tuesday, April 21: The United Nations Security Council discusses Colombia.

Thursday, April 23: The Security Council discusses Haiti.

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

New economic forecast. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) published a forecast on Tuesday for how the Iran war will affect economies worldwide. The report came with a caveat: The baseline projection assumes that the war will end in the next few weeks, with more damage possible if it stretches into midyear.

For the time being, Latin America and the Caribbean are faring well compared with other emerging markets, according to the IMF, in part because several countries are oil exporters. Since the IMF’s last forecast in January, it increased its prediction for Brazil’s GDP growth by 0.3 percentage points, to 1.9 percent. Venezuela’s economy is expected to grow by 4 percent.

A few large economies—Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, and Peru—are even expected to grow faster than the United States. The IMF has not yet published forecasts for smaller countries in the region—many of them energy importers that are expected to fare worse. Energy-importing Bolivia, which was included, is expected to see its economy contract by 3.3 percent this year.

Some effects of the war are due to stretch into next year. Because it will take several months for disruptions in fertilizer shipments to show up in agricultural data, the IMF revised Brazil’s 2027 GDP projection down by 0.3 percentage points compared with January.

Fracking in Mexico. Against the backdrop of the energy crisis, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced last week that her government plans to study the possibility of fracking for natural gas. It’s a major policy reversal from Sheinbaum and also contrasts with that of her predecessor and mentor, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Mexico imports around 75 percent of its natural gas, mostly from the United States. That arrangement was easier to defend when bilateral relations were more positive. But U.S. tariffs and threats of military action in Mexico have led Sheinbaum to look for ways to become more energy independent.

Fracking would also create a new revenue stream for the highly indebted state oil company Pemex. Sheinbaum said Pemex would look to use new, more environmentally friendly fracking techniques and that the plan was pending the review of a government environmental committee. In the same announcement, she pledged to scale up wind and solar energy.

However, environmentalist groups have not held back their criticism, with Greenpeace Mexico calling Mexico’s move toward fracking a “betrayal.”

Photographic honors. This year’s World Press Photo awards—one of the most prestigious in documentary photography—feature images of anti-austerity protests in Buenos Aires; sea level rise due to climate change in Tabasco, Mexico; and an Afro-Colombian community ritual from a riverside village near the country’s Pacific coast.

The prizewinning Colombian entry is noteworthy: The event has never been photographed in such detail or for such a wide audience. In the village of Juntas, residents and former residents gather to mark Holy Week with a syncretic ritual called Manacillos. It incorporates elements of Catholicism, African musical traditions, and the history of the slave trade.

Masked dancers pretend to whip residents of the community, which photographer Ever Andrés Mercado Puentes said signifies both the torture of Jesus before his death and the whipping of enslaved Africans brought to Colombia.

Many families have left Juntas in recent years due to dangers posed by armed groups and illegal miners; they say their return for the festival is an act of community resistance.

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U.S.-Brazilian relations have appeared to be on ice in recent months. Plans for Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to visit the United States—originally floated for March—have not materialized. Though the countries have not said why, Lula has criticized U.S. military interventions in Venezuela and Iran.

Still, there is a sign of new cooperation between Brasília and Washington: Last Friday, Brazilian Finance Minister Dario Durigan announced that the countries had established a partnership to detect and curb the illegal flow of guns and drugs.

Brazil’s tax authority and U.S. Customs and Border Protection will work together to track illegal payments, Durigan said, adding that the initiative stemmed from a phone call between Lula and Trump last year in which they discussed anti-crime strategies.

The Trump administration has considered designating Brazilian organized crime groups First Capital Command and Red Command as terrorist organizations. Brazil is opposed to the move, arguing that it is a misclassification and could lead to unfair sanctions on companies that unwittingly transact with the groups.

Durigan’s announcement suggests a step toward a more bilateral way of dealing with organized crime—rather than one imposed by the United States. The Trump administration opted not to make any statement about the initiative.

In the days since, contradictory statements about a high-profile Brazilian detained in the United States raised doubts about the countries’ security cooperation.

On Monday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reported that it had Alexandre Ramagem, a former Brazilian official, in custody. Ramagem was convicted of plotting a coup to keep former President Jair Bolsonaro in office but evaded capture in Brazil.

Brazil’s federal police said an unspecified fugitive was detained in the United States thanks to cooperation between the two countries, and Lula called publicly for Ramagem’s extradition. But a Ramagem ally said he was simply arrested at a traffic stop. By Wednesday, ICE had released him.