Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Latin America reacts to the discourse at the World Economic Forum, Guatemala enacts a state of emergency, and Chile battles deadly wildfires.
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Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s show-stealing speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week carried a direct message to many Latin American countries. After denouncing the liberal international order as a “fiction,” Carney called for “middle powers” to unite to defend their shared principles, autonomy, and economies—or risk ending up on the “menu” of more powerful ones.
Carney was reacting to U.S. President Donald Trump’s repeated shattering of norms, including respect for other countries’ sovereignty and international treaties. Trump has threatened to make Canada the 51st U.S. state and has shown disregard for a trade pact that he negotiated with the United States’ northern neighbor in his first term.
Latin American countries are even more familiar than Canada with assertive U.S. behavior. That’s due to a long history of U.S. intervention in the region.
Even so, several conservative Latin American leaders have opted to vocally back Trump’s policies. Among them is Argentine President Javier Milei, who railed against the “catastrophic” effects of international institutions on Wednesday in Davos and elected to join Trump’s so-called Board of Peace for Gaza.
But some other governments have staked out a more independent stance. They include Colombia and Brazil, which are led by leftists. Both countries dispatched top officials to Davos in the past but did not send their presidents this year.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro planned to attend the conference but canceled his trip at the last moment in order to prepare for his upcoming visit to the White House, El Colombiano reported. Petro and Trump agreed to hold a Feb. 3 meeting following a de-escalation call this month.
Petro’s circumstances help explain why no Latin American leaders delivered barnstorming speeches against U.S. aggression in Davos: Many of those who object to Washington’s behavior are treading carefully, lest they trigger further blowback.
Some regional officials have been sharing Carney’s speech on social media and in text messages seen by Foreign Policy, and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum praised it at a press conference. Although many Latin Americans welcomed its themes, they did not find them novel: Academics and policymakers in the region have spent years publicly airing their preference for active nonalignment—the approach that Carney defended—after suffering the negative effects of great-power posturing on the world stage.
Perhaps the most similar message to a Carney-esque critique in recent days came from Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Writing in the New York Times on Sunday, Lula called the Jan. 3 U.S. attack in Venezuela “yet another regrettable chapter in the continuous erosion of international law and the multilateral order established after World War II.” But in the same article, Lula mentioned that Brazil was negotiating with the United States in areas such as investment and fighting crime.
In addition to his more global comments, Carney specifically hailed Canada’s progress toward a trade deal with South American customs union Mercosur. While the European Union just completed such an agreement, the European Parliament voted on Wednesday to submit it to a harsh court review process, casting doubt on the compact’s future.
Ultimately, how well Latin American countries can respond to a “world without rules”—as Lula advisor Celso Amorim called it in a recent Economist essay—will be measured more in economic results than in speeches. That’s why the lack of a headline address by a regional leader in Davos this week may matter less than the fact that senior officials from Chile to Mexico were present in the Swiss resort town, touting their countries as investment destinations.
They have their work cut out for them. The region’s average annual growth rate is hovering just above 2 percent—so low that a Davos panel on Latin America was devoted to how to break this “growth ceiling.”
Friday, Jan. 23: The U.N. Security Council discusses Colombia.
Tuesday, Jan. 27: Honduran President-elect Nasry Asfura is sworn in.
Wednesday, Jan. 28, to Thursday, Jan. 29: The Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean hosts its annual forum in Panama.
Sunday, Feb. 1: Costa Rica holds general elections.
Tuesday, Feb. 3: Petro and Trump meet at the White House.
Venezuelan oil sale. The first $300 million from U.S.-facilitated sales of Venezuelan oil has passed into Venezuelan government control, acting President Delcy Rodríguez said on Tuesday. She added that the funds will be used in Venezuelan currency markets as part of efforts to control inflation and help “stabilize” the country, without providing further details. Reuters reported that some of the first U.S.-brokered purchases went to oil refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.
Delcy and her brother Jorge Rodríguez, the president of Venezuela’s National Assembly, have both said they will spearhead changes to the law governing the country’s oil sector to allow for more private investment. The current law generally requires private investors to form partnerships with the state oil firm.
A firefighter carries a hose as he works to extinguish burning vegetation during a wildfire in Florida, Chile, on Jan. 20.Raul Bravo/AFP via Getty Images
Wildfires in Chile. Wildfires have blown through south-central Argentina and Chile over the past week, killing at least 21 people in Chile. Deadly wildfires have become increasingly common in the country amid global warming-fueled droughts; fires in 2024 caused more than 130 deaths.
The latest disaster in Chile comes as President-elect José Antonio Kast prepares to take office in March. He pledged that he would devote early efforts to postfire reconstruction and met with outgoing President Gabriel Boric to discuss the blazes on Monday.
On Tuesday, Kast named his cabinet. His environment minister, Francisca Toledo, is a civil engineer with little-known experience in environmental protection. She is close to Kast’s incoming finance minister, Jorge Quiroz, who has pledged to reduce economic regulations.
Teaching Nobel. Teachers from both Argentina and Colombia are among this year’s 10 finalists for the Global Teacher Prize, nicknamed the “Nobel Prize for teaching.” The winner will be announced in Dubai early next month.
Argentina’s nominee is Gloria Argentina Cisneros, a rural educator in a part of northern Chaco province that lacks running water. Despite scarce resources, Cisneros’s school guided the students through projects in biodiversity protection and traditional medicine—which regularly earned them recognition at science fairs.
In Colombia, finalist Joshue Castellanos Paternina created an app to help teenage students study core parts of the country’s public school curriculum. The platform is now recommended by government education officials.
The prize is awarded each year by the U.K.-based Varkey Foundation, which aims to raise the status of teaching globally. Latin American countries overwhelming rank in the bottom half of those surveyed in math, reading, and science proficiency in the widely respected Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) exams.
Students in which Latin American country got the highest math score on the most recent PISA, published in 2022?
- What Spheres of Influence Are—and Aren’tby Stephen M. Walt
- The Grand Strategy Behind Trump’s Foreign Policyby A. Wess Mitchell
- In Davos, a Tale of Two Speechesby Ravi Agrawal
Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo greets a relative of a slain police officer during a funeral at the Interior Ministry headquarters in Guatemala City on Jan. 19.Johan Ordonez/AFP via Getty Images
A dramatic spate of violence in Guatemala over the weekend led President Bernardo Arévalo to declare a monthlong state of emergency on Sunday. Guatemala’s Congress approved the measure the next day.
The upheaval started when gangs took hostages in three maximum security prisons. When government forces began an operation to retake one prison, gangs outside the prison walls started killing police officers. At least 10 officers died in those clashes, authorities said.
As part of the declared emergency, the right of public assembly is suspended, and officials can carry out arrests without a warrant. It mimics states of exception first imposed by neighbors El Salvador and Honduras in 2022, both of which have continued since then.
Arévalo—a progressive—had previously held back from taking such a step and has generally defended human rights concerns. But he is also trying to maintain Guatemala’s positive relationship with Washington, which is leaning hard on Latin American officials to fight crime. Guatemalan police took advantage of their new permissions under the state of emergency on Tuesday to carry out a large operation against gang Barrio 18 in the capital, Guatemala City.
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