Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Violence escalates in Venezuela following Sunday’s contested presidential election, Mexico investigates the U.S. apprehension of two drug bosses, and a Brazilian surfer shines at the Olympics.
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To say that Venezuela’s presidential election last Sunday was closely watched would be an understatement. The vote was the focus of months of international negotiations. Now, its contested result and violent aftermath have dominated Latin American nightly news shows and prompted intense rounds of regional diplomacy.
The election was notable because it promised and delivered new challenges to the legitimacy of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government. As part of a series of deals brokered last October, the United States lifted sanctions on Venezuela while Maduro committed to certain conditions for competitive elections.
Maduro violated parts of the deal in the ensuing months, leading to a sanctions snapback. But sustained diplomatic pressure on Caracas from regional actors who were party to the negotiations allowed opposition candidate Edmundo González to remain on the ballot. The oft-divided opposition united around González and close ally María Corina Machado, with most preelection polls estimating that González led Maduro by more than 20 percentage points.
Wary of the Maduro administration’s actions to manipulate past votes, opposition members on Sunday photographed paper receipts from polling stations across the country, which are considered verifiable records of the vote count. AltaVista, a group of data crunchers affiliated with the main opposition alliance, used a sample of those receipts and an open-source modeling method to estimate that González obtained about 66 percent of the vote nationwide, compared with about 31 percent for Maduro—consistent with many preelection polls.
Although the AltaVista members did not reveal their names for security concerns, independent experts who reviewed the model said their estimates appeared credible.
Venezuela’s election authority has usually published detailed vote counts as part of election results. But this time it did not—and instead announced on Monday morning that Maduro had won by 51 percent to González’s 44 percent without a data breakdown.
Countries including Russia, China, Iran, Serbia, Bolivia, and Honduras were quick to recognize Maduro as the victor in the vote. Some Latin American neighbors, including Argentina, Uruguay, and Costa Rica, published a joint statement questioning the official results; Venezuela promptly expelled their diplomatic missions from the country.
Others, such as Brazil and Colombia, issued more measured communiqués calling for the detailed vote data to be released. Appeals for a full and transparent count also came from Washington, European leaders, the G-7, and the nonprofit Carter Center, which sent a team of 17 election experts to the country to monitor the contest.
Protests questioning Maduro’s victory proclamation and calling for a transparent count have erupted across the country in the days since. In clashes with security forces and other armed groups, hundreds of people were arrested and more than 11 killed as of Thursday morning, watchdog group Foro Penal said. Venezuela’s military has stood loyally by Maduro as he has called for the arrest of top opposition leaders.
As of Thursday afternoon, election authorities had published no disaggregated results. Maduro said the electoral authority had been hacked and sent a request for an audit to the election to the country’s supreme court, which is stacked with loyalists.
Maduro appears willing to spoil relations with Latin American allies and risk additional U.S. sanctions to entrench his power, which would force him to rely even more on ties with countries such as Russia, Iran, China, and Cuba. Still, recent events have revealed new weaknesses for Maduro. If the AltaVista modeling is correct, he has experienced a dramatic drop in popular support—corroborated by post-election protests in working-class neighborhoods that were once bastions of his United Socialist Party of Venezuela.
The leftist presidents of Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico—who were previously friendly to Maduro and regularly advocated for sanctions relief for Venezuela—have not automatically aligned with him in the wake of the vote. It’s a departure from a long-standing pattern in the region of ideological camaraderie overriding concerns about democracy.
To that end, on Thursday night, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico issued a joint statement calling for the Venezuelan government to release disaggregated polling data. They also demanded “impartial verification of results,” voicing concern over “violent episodes” and expressing “willingness to support efforts at dialogue and the seeking of agreements that benefit the Venezuelan people.” Publicly, Maduro has continued to signal extreme obstinance to any kind of exit from power.
Further diplomatic isolation in the Western Hemisphere appears survivable for Maduro; he’s been there before. Still, it creates new friction in his coalition. Pro-Maduro businesspeople in the energy sector “are worried,” political scientist Pablo Andrés Quintero of LOG Consultancy said, because they want access to the U.S. market.
“I think right now there are a lot of people in Maduro’s inner circle that are asking themselves if they want to sign up for six more years of repression, economic chaos, and isolation,” the Atlantic Council’s Geoff Ramsey said. The voters, for their part, have spoken.
Saturday, Aug. 3: A six-month cease-fire between Colombia and the National Liberation Army militant group is due to expire.
Monday, Aug. 5, to Tuesday, Aug. 6: Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva visits Chile.
Drug boss detentions. In the week since two high-profile actors in Mexico’s drug trade were taken into U.S. custody in Texas last Thursday, conflicting versions of how the events unfolded swirled through media reports and the courtroom. U.S. officials detained powerful Sinaloa Cartel boss Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and Joaquín Guzmán López, the son of the jailed Sinaloa Cartel boss known as El Chapo.
The arrests were carried out without the knowledge of the Mexican government, which has launched its own investigation into the developments. While Zambada’s lawyer said that Guzmán López kidnapped Zambada ahead of the arrest, Guzmán López’s lawyer denied those claims in an interview to Mexico’s Radio Formula.
Meanwhile, the New York Times cited unnamed current and former U.S. officials who said the arrests were “the culmination of a back channel that a small team of F.B.I. agents had maintained” with Guzmán López and some of his brothers for years.
Boric in the Persian Gulf. Chilean President Gabriel Boric traveled to the United Arab Emirates this week, becoming the latest Latin American leader to intensify ties in the Persian Gulf. The two countries signed a trade and investment deal that removes import tariffs on at least 95 percent of Chilean goods that are exported to the UAE, Chile’s economy minister said. Emirati investment in Chile rose to around $2 billion last year.
The agreement is Chile’s first such comprehensive economic deal with a Middle Eastern country, Chile’s foreign minister said. It comes after a major Saudi investment expo for Latin America was held in Brazil in June.
Surfing to stardom. Latin American athletes have captivated audiences at the Paris Olympics—not only through their sports performances but also through iconic images and fashion. An AFP photo of Brazilian surfer Gabriel Medina exiting a wave to fly into midair alongside his surfboard went viral, amassing millions of likes on Instagram.
In the image, Medina is seen pointing his index finger to the sky, knowing he had delivered an outstanding performance. He earned a record-breaking score of 9.90 out of 10 for riding a single wave during the third day of the men’s surfing competition, a performance that earned him a spot in the quarterfinals.
While the surfing competition is taking place on French Polynesian island of Tahiti, most other events are being held in Paris. In the opening ceremony’s boat parade of athletes down the Seine River, the Haitian squad’s costumes captured the attention of fashion critics. Their fabric incorporated prints inspired by the Haitian artist Philippe Dodard. Elle wrote that “Team Haiti has already won gold in our eyes for its glorious Olympics uniform.”
Besides Brazil, what other Latin American country sent a surfer to the men’s quarterfinals?
Peru
Ecuador
Mexico
Chile
Peruvian surfer Alonso Correa competes in the quarterfinals alongside Brazil’s Medina on Thursday.
G-20 finance ministers met last week in Rio de Janeiro. For the first time, officials approved a statement that called for joint engagement on taxing the super-rich. The communiqué noted a report commissioned by Brazil and written by French economist Gabriel Zucman that found that imposing a 2 percent wealth tax on all billionaires around the world could raise some $200 billion to $250 billion per year globally.
Every G-20 nation has its own priorities for its leadership of the group, and global taxation has emerged as one of Brazil’s, which holds the G-20 presidency until Nov. 30. The measure outlined in the Zucman report would be redistributive, aiming to correct the fact that effective tax rates for the super-wealthy are often quite low.
The Zucman report is inspired by other recent international tax cooperation: In 2021, the OECD brokered a deal in which some 140 countries agreed to set a global minimum tax on corporate profits. In the years since, a group of mostly developing countries has led the charge to push international talks on taxes forward at the United Nations, which is a larger and more inclusive forum than the OECD.
A resolution passed at the U.N. last year kicked off talks on a potential new U.N. treaty on taxation. Colombia was a big booster of those U.N. talks; just as Colombia recently passed a tax overhaul, Brazil feels it has the legitimacy to push for global tax reform because it has just approved progressive tax reform at home.
After introducing the billionaire tax at the G-20, Brazil aims to move the idea forward in both the United Nations and the OECD, Finance Minister Fernando Haddad said. Its approval in either won’t be easy. Though mention of the plan appeared in last week’s G-20 communiqué, officials from the United States and Germany voiced doubts about globalizing the issue rather than leaving it to member countries.
Brazil, for its part, referred to the declaration as a starting point. But charity Oxfam called it “serious global progress,” saying, “Massive fortunes afford the world’s ultra-rich outsized influence and power.”
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