Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Trump’s team considers recalibrating U.S. Venezuela policy ahead of both countries’ January 2025 inaugurations, El Salvador scores a major IMF loan, and Brazilian researchers submit a new dengue vaccine to regulators.
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The Venezuelan government has continued repressing dissidents ahead of President Nicolás Maduro’s inauguration for a third term on Jan. 10. Hundreds of people remain jailed after protesters objected to Maduro’s evidence-free claim that he won the country’s July election.
Venezuela’s opposition has presented disaggregated voter data that appeared to show that Edmundo González won. The United States recognizes him as the victor of last year’s election and has sanctioned top officials close to Maduro. Key Latin American neighbors such as Brazil and Colombia also don’t recognize Maduro’s victory.
But there is no apparent path for González to take office; he fled to exile in Spain in September. In the meantime, Maduro has reinforced ties with his willing international partners. After traveling to Russia in October, Maduro hosted a conference for Chinese investors this month, and Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez visited Beijing.
Maduro has also cracked down at home. In recent weeks, six Venezuelan opposition activists who face arrest warrants and have been sheltering in the former Argentine Embassy have been deprived of food, water, and electricity from Venezuelan authorities.
Argentina began hosting the dissidents in March as protection against arrest warrants, but it broke diplomatic ties with Venezuela after the election. Although Brazil then assumed custody of the building, Caracas revoked it in September; since then, the former embassy’s occupants have experienced shortages of basic needs.
Into this scenario steps U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who will be inaugurated 10 days after Maduro. A failed “maximum pressure” strategy to try to oust Maduro through sanctions was a hallmark of Trump’s first administration; Wired reports that it involved covert CIA action.
When Trump picked Sen. Marco Rubio as his secretary of state nominee last month, it appeared that maximum pressure might return; Rubio is a Venezuela hawk. But that prognosis was complicated over the weekend, when Trump tapped his former acting intelligence chief, Richard Grenell, as presidential envoy for “special missions”—including in Venezuela.
During Trump’s first administration, Grenell reportedly held a discreet meeting with a top Maduro administration official to try to negotiate the Venezuelan leader’s exit. Although that was unsuccessful, it suggests that Grenell may be open to deploying carrots in addition to sticks. At the end of Trump’s first term, the U.S. State Department released a framework for a negotiated democratic transition in Venezuela.
Grenell did not respond to Foreign Policy’s request for comment about his priorities on and approach to Venezuela.
U.S. talks with Maduro could lead to outcomes other than his exit. Some U.S. oil executives have pushed for a deal with the Venezuelan leader that would see Washington normalize economic relations in exchange for Caracas working to control its migration outflows.
Trump, for his part, repeated four times in his Monday press conference that Venezuela will take back migrants from the United States. Maduro has called Trump’s second term a “new start for us to bet on a win-win.”
Meanwhile, human rights activists in Venezuela have continued to raise alarms about the government’s record. A prominent activist was reported detained just last week. This month, Maduro even lashed out at a band, Rawayana, that had urged Venezuelans to vote for González. The group, which was founded in Caracas but is now based abroad, quickly canceled Venezuelan appearances on its international tour.
In the hopes that concerns for Venezuelan democracy do not get lost in any potential dealmaking with the United States, people close to González have reportedly aimed to arrange a meeting between the opposition candidate and Trump ahead of the U.S. inauguration.
Wednesday, Jan. 1, 2025: Brazil takes over the rotating presidency of the BRICS grouping.
Friday, Jan. 10, 2025: Maduro is scheduled to be sworn in for a third term.
Bukele bows on bitcoin. After years of talks, El Salvador and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have reached a deal. The country will receive a whopping $1.4 billion loan in exchange for dialing down its controversial ambitions to incorporate bitcoin into its economy. One provision of the agreement, released Wednesday, specified that the government would no longer require businesses to accept bitcoin as a form of currency.
Although Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele is a bitcoin evangelist, his devotion to the cryptocurrency proved an obstacle to securing a much-needed IMF bailout deal. In the end, he got the deal through an orthodox economic approach: reducing El Salvador’s deficit.
Vaccine breakthrough. Brazil’s Butantan health research institute submitted the world’s first one-dose dengue vaccine to regulators for approval this week. The vaccine was developed through a yearslong partnership with the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Butantan hailed it as a breakthrough in a year when warm temperatures have caused dengue cases and deaths to spike in the Americas.
Brazil currently uses a two-dose dengue vaccine made by Japanese firm Qdenga in its public health system, but the country was able to procure only enough jabs this year for around 3 million people to be completely vaccinated in a country of more than 200 million.
If Butantan’s shot is approved, it could produce 100 million doses within three years, the institute said.
Colombia-RSF links. Retired Colombian soldiers were hired by Emirati recruiters to participate in Sudan’s civil war alongside the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, La Silla Vacía reported—sometimes being misled about where they would be working.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro publicly condemned the involvement of Colombians in the conflict, though the shadowy forces that recruit Colombian fighters are largely out of his reach.
Colombia has a large pool of soldiers who were trained for the country’s war on drugs. They have been recruited to work abroad before: A former Colombian colonel was convicted for the 2021 killing of Haiti’s president, and in 2015, Colombian fighters were identified in the war in Yemen—thanks to the Emirati military.
Which of the following is not a Venezuelan slang term?
Pana
Vaina
Chimbo
Balada
That’s São Paulo slang for “nightclub.”
When comparing neighbors Argentina and Brazil these days, good economic news typically comes from the latter. Brazil’s economy is on track to grow by 3 percent this year, according to the IMF—one of the highest rates in Latin America, and higher than that of the United States.
Libertarian Argentine President Javier Milei’s shock policies since taking office last December, meanwhile, threw the country into a recession—and the poverty rate shot up to more than 50 percent.
But this week, the countries’ economic fortunes seem to have reversed. Argentine government data released Monday showed that the country had exited its recession in the third quarter, growing by 3.9 percent since the previous quarter. Milei celebrated the news as a sign that his economic reforms were working; he had promised pain before gain.
Milei’s next big test will be whether Argentina can make upcoming debt payments in 2025, including to the IMF. Milei, who plans to attend Trump’s inauguration, hopes that positive relations with the U.S. president-elect could help Argentina’s dealings with the IMF; Washington is the IMF’s largest shareholder.
Brazil, meanwhile, experienced an accelerated drop in the value of its currency, the real, this week. Despite the Brazilian economy’s overall growth, a string of comments from government officials in the last few weeks suggested the country may stray from its targets to keep the deficit under control.
On Sunday, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva scoffed at those concerns; by Wednesday, the real was trading at an all-time low of around 6.3 against the dollar.
Emerging market currencies have weakened against the dollar since Trump was elected, promising aggressive trade wars. But the real has performed even worse than other currencies. Top Brazilian officials have pledged that passing long-debated spending cuts would stabilize markets and raced to approve them before the holiday legislative recess begins today.
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