Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: New reports unpack the toll of U.S. boat strikes, El Niño triggers deadly flooding in Chile, and Cape Verde’s star goalkeeper is signed by a South American club.
A series of NGO and media reports sheds new light on the United States’ boat bombing campaign near Latin America, finding evidence that officials are withholding information about those killed and that the campaign has failed to achieve its stated goal of curbing drug flows.
Since last September, the U.S. military has killed at least 221 people in waters near Latin America. The campaign marks a sharp break from previous U.S. maritime counternarcotics doctrine, under which forces stopped and searched suspected smuggling vessels with the aim of arresting—rather than killing—those on board.
Members of U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration have repeatedly described those killed as “narco-terrorists.” But a review released last Friday by the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group, found that the administration had provided no public evidence that the targeted vessels were carrying drugs or that those killed were affiliated with specific trafficking groups.
Those targeted also had no opportunity to contest the allegations against them. For that reason, multiple United Nations and other legalexperts have concluded that these strikes constitute extrajudicial executions.
Former U.S. State Department legal advisor Charlie Trumbull argues that because the killings are state-backed and systematic, they also amount to the more serious offense of crimes against humanity. That charge is what led to former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s detention in The Hague, where he awaits trial, following his own militarized anti-drug campaign.
The Trump administration has not disclosed the identities of those killed by the strikes, but journalists have begun to piece together an account.
On July 20, the Los Angeles Timesreported that at least 13 Mexicans had been killed, raising an earlier estimate published by Mexico’s La Jornada. Last week, the Guardian reported that at least 16 Colombians who disappeared from the islands of San Andrés and Providence were suspected to be among the dead.
The emerging picture has also cast doubt on the administration’s characterization of those killed. While some victims were known by relatives to have supplied fuel or other assistance to drug traffickers, others had no known ties to the drug trade. Some appear to have been fishermen.
New reporting this week also suggests that the campaign has done little to stem the flow of cocaine into the United States.
According to a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) assessment seen by the Washington Post, traffickers have adapted by rerouting shipments through alternate channels, including aircraft or larger vessels that are less likely to be targeted.
Cocaine prices have remained relatively stable, and the purity of police-seized cocaine has not noticeably declined—two indicators that experts say would typically change if supply had been disrupted.
The Trump administration maintains that the strikes are both legal and effective.
Last October, it issued a confidential memo to Congress stating that the United States was engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug trafficking groups and considered their members to be “combatants.” A White House spokesperson told the Post this week that the boat strikes had “discouraged bad actors from trying to smuggle drugs into our country.”
As the death toll continues to mount, many leaders in the known victims’ home countries have been surprisingly quiet.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro has been the most outspoken, calling the strikes “murder.” But he is due to leave office next week and will be succeeded by a Trump supporter. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has said she does not agree with the strikes, though her administration has generally held back from commenting on the Mexicans who were killed.
Meanwhile, the leaders of Ecuador, Trinidad and Tobago, and Venezuela have aligned themselves with the Trump administration and have offered scant public criticism of the strikes.
Colombian journalist María Teresa Ronderos, who helped lead an investigation of the strikes by the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism, said documenting the campaign was “extremely difficult” because “official government sources, prosecutors’ offices—nobody wants to speak because everyone fears damaging relations with the U.S. and facing retaliation.”
Saturday, Aug. 1: Talks between Venezuela’s government and the opposition begin in Caracas.
Friday, Aug. 7: Abelardo de la Espriella is inaugurated as president of Colombia.
Candidates for U.N. secretary-general participate in a debate in New York on July 23. Leonardo Munoz/AFP via Getty Images
U.N. race heats up. Last Thursday, six candidates vying to become the next U.N. secretary-general participated in a town hall in New York.
Of the seven total candidates, five hail from Latin America and the Caribbean, including former Ecuadorian Foreign Minister María Fernanda Espinosa and former Guyanese Foreign Minister Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, who entered the race in May and June, respectively.
During the town hall, many candidates pledged to make the United Nations more efficient and develop new solutions to global security challenges.
Both Rodrigues-Birkett and former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet emphasized the importance of electing a woman and pledged to appoint a gender-balanced team if chosen. Many speakers also called for greater cooperation on financial support for developing countries, while Argentina’s Rafael Grossi focused more narrowly on conflict resolution.
A Bloomberg poll of the town hall audience found that Rodrigues-Birkett, who received a unanimous Caribbean Community endorsement this month, was viewed as the most convincing candidate by a wide margin. But the outcome will ultimately be shaped by the Security Council’s secret straw polls, the first of which took placeThursday.
Fujimori’s first signals. Conservative Keiko Fujimori was sworn in on Tuesday as Peru’s first elected female president.
Across multiple presidential runs, she has pledged to restore a hard-line security approach associated with her father, former President Alberto Fujimori. During the final weeks of this campaign, however, Fujimori also struck a more moderate tone on economic issues.
Her first address as president exemplified these tensions. Fujimori said her administration would expand the military’s role in combating crime during times of emergency but also that it would increase the country’s minimum wage in an effort to address concerns over inequality.
Fujimori and her team have also signaled a more pragmatic, rather than ideological, approach to foreign policy.
This month, Fujimori said she wanted to restore diplomatic ties with Mexico, which have deteriorated in recent months after Mexico granted political asylum to a left-wing former Peruvian official facing prosecution. Fujimori’s campaign platform also called for Peru to “avoid automatic alignment” with either the United States or China and instead take a “strategically balanced” position.
Star goalkeeper signs in Chile. Vozinha, the 40-year-old goalkeeper who became a breakout star for Cape Verde at this year’s FIFA World Cup, has signed a new contract to play for Chile’s top-ranked club Colo-Colo, which is named after an Indigenous Mapuche chieftain.
Excitement over Vozinha’s signing has been followed by a wave of fan concern that league rules could prevent him from displaying his famous nickname on his new jersey. He is seeking an exception.
Fans are hopeful that Vozinha can bring new energy to Chilean soccer and help restore it to past heights. Chile’s men’s national team won multiple South American championships in the 2010s and even famously defeated defending champions Spain in the 2014 World Cup, but its fortunes have since declined.
Vozinha’s given name, Josimar, was inspired by a soccer player from which country?
Josimar Higino Pereira played for the Brazilian national team in the 1980s.
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Two women stand at their house in a flooded area in Arauco, Chile, on July 16. Guillermo Salgado/AFP via Getty Images
The super El Niño weather pattern, driven by unusually warm waters in parts of the Pacific Ocean, has caused its first casualties in Latin America.
At least 13 people have died in severe flooding in Chile, with several others reported missing as of last Friday. The flooding also displaced more than 2,000 people, prompting President José Antonio Kast to declare an emergency in the affected areas.
El Niño typically brings wetter weather to the southern part of Latin America and drier weather to the north. Colombia, for example, is bracing for potential energy shortages caused by lapses in hydroelectric power generation.
Panama, meanwhile, could see low water levels that would slow traffic through the Panama Canal. That potential bottleneck is especially concerning to the global shipping industry, which has relied more heavily on the passageway amid closures in the Strait of Hormuz. Ship traffic in the waterway surged 8 percent this year after the outbreak of war in Iran.
The impact of El Niño disruptions can stretch on for years. Richard Choularton, the director of the World Food Program’s Climate and Resilience Service, told FP’s Christina Lu that in southern Africa, “the El Niño event in 2015 impacted food security at its most severe peak in 2016 and 2017, but has left many communities struggling to recover since then.”