Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Brazil’s Supreme Court bans X, U.S. authorities seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s plane, and an Argentine province fights austerity with a new currency.
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The social media site X (formerly Twitter) went dark last Saturday in Brazil, where it had an estimated more than 20 million users. The ban followed months of tensions between owner Elon Musk and Brazilian authorities.
Musk, who took over the site in 2022, has been increasingly vocal about Brazil’s domestic politics. His personal account has boosted right-wing politicians, cast doubts on the integrity of Brazil’s 2022 election, promoted posts about an upcoming political demonstration, and told foreign investors to stay away from the country.
Musk objected to court orders to suspend certain content on X, including the accounts of many right-wing activists, and last month, he refused to name a legal representative for the company in Brazil. Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ruled that if X did not reinstate a representative by Aug. 29, the platform would be shut down.
When the day arrived, in anticipation of the ban, X’s global affairs account posted that Moraes’s moves were “manifestly illegal.” It also pledged to publish confidential Brazilian court filings containing Moraes’s orders. Musk posted that the judge was an “evil dictator.”
“Economic power and the size of one’s bank account do not produce some strange immunity from jurisdiction,” Supreme Court Justice Flávio Dino wrote Monday as part of a five-person panel that unanimously upheld Moraes’s ban. In the days since the shutdown, Brazilians have migrated to other microblogging sites, such as Bluesky and Threads.
The ban has reignited fierce debates over Brazil’s approach to online content moderation, as well as the conduct of its powerful judges. Brazilian federal judges stepped up their role in policing what they deem to be anti-democratic online content after the 2018 election that brought former President Jair Bolsonaro to power. His campaign was dominated by disinformation, and social media platforms often fell short of their own pledges to moderate it.
Brazil is globally unique for the extent to which its judges moderate online content, University of São Paulo law professor Rafael Mafei told the Café da Manhã podcast. That’s because “the institution that should be leading this discussion, Congress, is not willing to do so,” Mafei said.
When Bolsonaro ran for reelection in 2022, a group of federal judges tasked with overseeing elections—led by Moraes—ordered X, then still known as Twitter, to remove accounts that spread unproved claims of election fraud and praised demonstrations objecting to the result of the vote. (A mob vowing to overturn Bolsonaro’s election loss later stormed various government buildings in the capital, Brasília.)
At the time, Moraes’s social media policing was generally applauded by Brazil’s political center and left. But a growing number of Brazilians have also slammed his content policing as opaque and excessive. Many of the court’s takedown orders in 2022 and since were never publicized. To critics, the secret proceedings—and the fact that the banned accounts were from similar political camps—smacked of censorship.
Moraes moved alone in ordering the new ban on X; only days later did he get an endorsement from the Supreme Court panel that included Dino. Moraes also received widespread criticism from across the political spectrum for ordering a ban on the use of virtual private networks (VPN) to access X—and a hefty fine for violating it. The Brazilian Bar Association filed a lawsuit to reverse the VPN fine.
Still, many people, including Brazilian digital rights experts and Brazilian lawmakers, have defended the X shutdown. Musk’s open efforts to sway Brazilian politics raised the stakes for regulators to take a stand, journalist Rubens Valente wrote in Agência Pública. “To find something similar to Musk’s crusade, you need to go back 60 years to the role of the United States in the 1964 coup.”
“While the threat of blocking [a platform] is nothing new and is provided for in our legal system, this case stands out as the first one a large scale in which a company has completely ignored court rulings for days—and sought the spotlight for it,” Brazilian researcher Fernanda Campagnucci told Foreign Policy’s Rishi Iyengar. She added that the measure, “although drastic, was necessary.”
Friday, Sept. 6: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken wraps up a visit to Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Thursday, Sept. 12, to Friday, Sept. 13: Group of 20 agriculture ministers meet in Rio de Janeiro.
Harris foreign-policy win. One of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’s most important international legacies is relatively unknown, FP’s Robbie Gramer wrote last week. Gramer looked at Harris’s role in behind-the-scenes negotiations to prevent a coup in Guatemala, where the outgoing government sought to block democratically elected President Bernárdo Arévalo from taking office in January.
Harris and her national security advisor, Phil Gordon, were active in a diplomatic pressure campaign on Guatemalan elites aligned with the outgoing president, which included a trip by Gordon to hand deliver a letter from Harris to Arévalo just after his inauguration in January. The campaign acted in concert with envoys from around the region, especially ambassadors to the Organization of American States.
“While it went relatively unnoticed in Washington, where people are largely focused on wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the U.S. maneuver to bolster democracy in Guatemala was a policy win—in stark contrast to some of the administration’s endeavors in other parts of the world,” Gramer wrote.
Argentina’s unusual currency. In response to Argentine President Javier Milei’s austerity measures, the poor northeastern province of La Rioja has unveiled its own currency. Milei’s policies have dramatically reduced funding to the opposition-led provincial government, which defaulted on its debt in February. La Rioja’s governor, who created the currency, hopes that it can stimulate the local economy.
The currency, the chacho, is named after a local historical hero and can be exchanged for pesos at a fixed rate. The governor has so far distributed more than $3 million worth of chachos to residents. People who hang on to the currency rather than spending it can swap it in for a better rate at the end of the year.
Although the measure is a political affront to Milei, he has signaled that he will not block it. Whether it will help La Rioja’s economy, however, is another question: Analysts told Bloomberg that this type of money-printing is what got Argentina into its financial straits in the first place.
The other fútbol. On Friday, the U.S. National Football League (NFL)—which governs the sport known to the rest of the world as “American football”—will play its first-ever game in Brazil. The Green Bay Packers face off against the Philadelphia Eagles in São Paulo for the league’s second game of the season.
The NFL has played at least one regular-season game internationally since 2007. Brazilian organizers are going all-out for the event, and pop superstar Anitta is set to perform during halftime.
Football has a growing fan base in soccer-loving Brazil. Around 8.3 million Brazilians are estimated to be “avid” fans of the sport, including regularly watching games and attending events, Brazilian research group Ibope found in 2023.
To attract new fans, Brazilian commentators have practiced narrating tonight’s game without getting into the weeds of potentially unfamiliar rules. English jargon is also out: A “hail Mary” pass has been translated into Portuguese as “throw it high and pray.”
Which other Latin American country has hosted an NFL game?
Argentina
Colombia
Mexico
Chile
A 2005 game in Mexico City started the trend of internationally played NFL games.
Just over a week after Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro installed a hard-line army captain as his security minister, the country’s post-election crisis has escalated further.
Maduro claimed victory in the July 28 election, but opposition candidate Edmundo González has produced partial disaggregated voting data that multiple independent analysts have said indicates that González won. In weeks since, thousands of opposition protesters have been jailed. Human Rights Watch said this week it received “credible reports” of at least 24 killings that occurred in the context of the protests.
Maduro is hanging on to power, in part thanks to support from Venezuela’s military. The United States has sought to emphasize the costs for the military if it continues to back him. On Monday, the U.S. Justice Department seized Venezuela’s presidential plane in the Dominican Republic, saying the aircraft violated U.S. sanctions. It was in the Dominican Republic for maintenance.
Shortly afterward, Venezuelan authorities issued an arrest warrant for González, who has been in hiding for weeks. Then, on Wednesday, CNN reported that Venezuelan authorities had detained a U.S. service member who was traveling in Venezuela last week. Few details were immediately available about the detention.
As Maduro demonstrates his willingness to flex the repressive apparatus of the state, some observers have called for unorthodox approaches to resolving the crisis.
“In reality, the only government that truly has influence over Maduro is Havana’s,” former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda told Confidencial last week. “I think the most important thing now, given the failure of all other efforts, would be to try to enlist Cuba’s cooperation in exchange for genuine detente between the United States and Cuba.”
Washington took strides toward normalizing relations with Havana during the Obama administration, but former U.S. President Donald Trump reversed that action. The state of Cuba’s economy is dire, and a step back to the Obama-era economic opening might be something that Havana’s leaders “would be willing to pay a lot” for, Castañeda said.
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