Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva travels to Egypt and Ethiopia in a bid to empower the global south, a judge in Haiti announces a new twist in the investigation into the 2021 assassination of the country’s president, and Peru reshuffles its cabinet.
Last week, while many Western officials debated geopolitics at the Munich Security Conference, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva chose to visit East Africa. Lula arrived on Feb. 14 in Egypt, where he discussed the Israel-Hamas war, signed various memorandums of understanding, and attended a session of the Arab League. He then continued on to the annual African Union (AU) leaders’ summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, which was held from Feb. 17 to 18. Lula called it “one of the most important trips I’ve taken.”
Lula’s Africa visit comes just two-and-a-half months into Brazil’s yearlong G-20 presidency. Upon his return to Brazil, the foreign ministers of the G-20 member countries descended on Rio de Janeiro on Wednesday and Thursday for a two-day meeting. Both U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov traveled separately to Brasília for bilateral meetings with Lula. There, they discussed topics including Venezuela’s upcoming elections and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
Lula’s stance on the Israel-Hamas war has put him at odds with Washington. Last Sunday, speaking at a press conference in Addis Ababa, the Brazilian president compared Israel’s war tactics to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s actions during the Holocaust. The remarks prompted fierce rebuke from Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz, who named Lula a “persona non grata” in his country. Brazil then recalled its ambassador in Tel Aviv for consultations.
Amid frictions with some in the West, Lula has chosen to focus his foreign-policy muscle on rallying the global south. “The global south is becoming an essential part of the solution for the main crises afflicting the planet,” such as inequality, climate change, and war, Lula said in his address to the AU.
The solutions to those crises must be both political and economic, in Lula’s telling. His address mentioned establishing an independent Palestinian state as well as working to ensure that developing countries are not restricted to neoliberal economic models by organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. “There will be no stability or democracy with hunger and unemployment,” he added.
Brazil has said its priorities for its G-20 presidency include combatting world hunger, reforming multilateral organizations including the IMF and World Bank, and giving fairer sovereign debt treatment to struggling borrowers. Accomplishing those goals depends on building strong coalitions. And “African countries are often getting behind the agendas Brazil is putting forth globally,” said Brazilian political scientist Renata Albuquerque Ribeiro.
Brazil is studying plans to restructure and partially forgive some of its $280 million in loans to African governments, including those of Ghana, Mozambique, and Senegal. Lula aims to pressure wealthier creditors to do the same. The countries that Lula visited—Egypt and Ethiopia—are also new members of the BRICS grouping. The BRICS’ development bank is taking small steps to build alternatives to dollar hegemony.
Improved ties between Brazil and Africa, as well as increased trade, could boost Brazil’s economy. During Lula’s first two presidential administrations from 2003 to 2010, Brazil opened or reactivated more than 15 embassies in African countries and launched multiple bilateral cooperation programs. By 2009, Brazilian exports to Africa reached a record high of 5.7 percent of its global exports. That number fell to 3.9 percent by 2023, when Lula took office again.
Now, in an effort to reboot commercial ties on the continent, the Lula administration is rolling out new credit lines for exports to African countries and planning bilateral cooperation programs with Brazilian state research agencies in the health care and agriculture sectors. “We don’t need to leave Africa in the sole hands of the IMF and the World Bank,” said Claudia de Borba Maciel, the Brazilian ambassador to Guinea-Bissau, in an interview last week. “Brazil and the BRICS bank can have an important role.”
Brazil’s geopolitical ambitions clearly run through Africa, but it will take concerted efforts to see results. Brazilian diplomatic outposts on the continent remain more sparsely staffed than those elsewhere, such as in Europe. And a spate of coups in the Sahel region have strained diplomacy and business outreach. “Brazil made a lot of promises” to African countries in the past, Albuquerque Ribeiro said—and while some were successful, others were not.
Friday, Feb. 23: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visits Argentina.
Wednesday, Feb. 28: Guyana hosts a summit of Caribbean Community leaders.
Friday, Mar. 1: Saint Vincent and the Grenadines hosts a summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States.
Banana ban blowback. Ecuador has canceled a deal with the United States to supply weapons parts bound for Ukraine after facing economic retaliation from Russia. Washington requested the parts and was poised to act as a broker between Quito and Kyiv in exchange for providing new U.S. weapons to Ecuador. But when Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa announced plans to comply, Russia said it would stop buying some Ecuadorian bananas and flowers, which rank among Quito’s top exports.
The full details of bilateral talks between Ecuador and Russia were not made public. Last Friday, Ecuador’s trade minister said that Russia had lifted its embargo on Ecuadorian banana purchases. Ecuador’s foreign minister confirmed on Monday that Quito “will not send any war materiel to a country in an international armed conflict.”
The United States has levied economic weapons in its response to Russia’s war in Ukraine, and with Ecuador, Russia showed it is ready to do the same.
The plot thickens in Haiti. This week, a Haitian court probing the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse included Moïse’s wife on a list of 51 people indicted in the case. The judge did not present evidence that Martine Moïse participated in the assassination plot against her husband, but he said that she had contradicted herself in her statements. Some other defendants in the case said she sought to run for president after the killing.
Martine Moïse’s lawyer pushed back forcefully against the allegations, calling them “trumped-up charges.” She has not been charged in a parallel U.S. investigation into the killing, which moved forward earlier this month by doling out a life sentence to a former Drug Enforcement Agency informant who confessed to helping plan the assassination. U.S. prosecutors have also accused several former Colombian soldiers in the case.
Sosima Olivera, a member of a collective that runs the mezcal factory Tres Colibries, walks in a field of arroqueño agave in Villa Sola de Vega, Mexico, on July 26, 2022.Pedro Pardo/AFP via Getty Images
Mezcal’s heartland. Mezcal, a broad category of agave-based liquor, is experiencing a global boom in popularity. For a while, only tequila—mezcal’s most well-known subset, which is produced from the blue agave plant—was widely available on international markets, but other varieties are now gaining steam. That has put pressure on the small-scale distilleries in central Mexico where mezcal is made, Bloomberg reported.
During the tequila boom, which began in the mid-20th century, marketers pushed artisanal producers to add ingredients that made production quicker and easier to scale. Similarly, mezcal producers told Bloomberg that some were already harvesting immature agaves to boost mezcal production, worsening the spirit’s quality. The prospect of large-scale harvesting also poses a risk to Mexican ecosystems, although mezcal demand has also spurred agave replanting schemes in new areas to support sustainable production.
Where does mezcal—including tequila—rank among the most-purchased liquors in the United States by sale volume?
No. 1
No. 2
No. 3
No. 4
Peruvian President Dina Boluarte attends the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Leaders’ Week in San Francisco, California, on Nov. 15, 2023.Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
Peruvian President Dina Boluarte replaced her finance minister in a four-person cabinet shake-up last week, the latest sign of broad dissatisfaction with the country’s economic performance. The energy, environment, and defense ministers also got the boot.
Last year, a long-standing tenet of Peruvian public life—that even if the country’s politics are bad, its economics are stable—broke under the weight of anti-government protests and lower-than-usual crop yields caused by an El Niño climate pattern. Rather than continuing its pandemic recovery, Peru’s economy fell into a recession.
Peru’s most recent official economic data is from December 2023, when it showed that the country’s economic activity has continued to shrink. In the second half of 2023, then-Finance Minister Alex Contreras repeatedly predicted economic recovery. This month, he was replaced with economist José Arista, who has held positions at Peru’s finance and agriculture ministries. One of Arista’s first actions was an announcement that he would cut back public spending.
Boluarte, for her part, hit a rock-bottom 9 percent approval rating in December. Peruvian authorities are investigating her involvement in a police crackdown against anti-government protesters in 2022 and 2023.
Many young Peruvians are deciding to emigrate as a result of economic and political malaise, Andrea Moncada wrote last November for Americas Quarterly. Departure numbers soared in 2022 and 2023, and a September 2023 poll by a Lima think tank found that 60 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 24 have plans to leave the country in the next three years. (Fifty-one percent of 25-to-39-year-olds said the same.) Rising crime has also spurred emigration.
“It’s a huge shift from the prevailing attitude ten years ago,” Moncada wrote. “Peru is in dire need of a new political class, of ambitious people who want to work in the civil service or in the private sector”—but it is not keeping them.
