Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Claudia Sheinbaum is elected Mexico’s first female president, Chile applies to join the International Court of Justice case against Israel, and a Colombian poet wins an international prize.
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While Mexicans voted last Sunday, many Latin American officials traveled to nearby El Salvador to see President Nayib Bukele inaugurated for a second term.
During his first five years in office, Bukele used a legislative majority to stack the country’s Supreme Court with loyalists—a judicial overhaul that set off alarm bells among pro-democracy watchdogs. But Bukele stayed his course and has proved enormously popular among Salvadorans. In February, he coasted to a reelection victory.
As Bukele began his second term, former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum won Mexico’s presidency with a more than 30-percentage-point lead over her closest competitor. Although final results are still being tallied, Sheinbaum’s Morena party and its allies are on track to gain a supermajority in Mexico’s lower legislative house and a near-supermajority in the Senate.
El Salvador under Bukele is an example of the kind of governance—good or bad, depending on whom you ask—that is possible with such substantial legislative power. Sheinbaum will enjoy a level of congressional backing that is rare in Latin America and the democratic world today.
Sheinbaum’s election was partially an endorsement of the legacy of her predecessor and patron, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. She pledged to generally continue his popular policies, which included minimum wage hikes, support for unions, and rules that reduced labor outsourcing.
Now that Sheinbaum is president-elect, some potential policy differences with López Obrador are emerging. In the days after his 2018 election victory, the only foreign leader López Obrador tweeted about corresponding with was then-U.S. President Donald Trump. What followed was a foreign policy that engaged relatively little with countries beyond the United States; critics have said Mexico punched below its weight in international forums.
Sheinbaum, on the other hand, has issued a string of posts and a video about all the foreign leaders she has spoken to so far. In her victory speech, she said she wants to maintain friendly and respectful relations with Washington—and bring Mexico closer to “the South and the Caribbean.” Those places went unmentioned in López Obrador’s victory address.
Another new term that appeared in Sheinbaum’s victory speech is “renewable energy.” Sheinbaum holds a doctorate in energy engineering and was a contributing author to the United Nations’ flagship climate change report.
While the López Obrador administration has overseen state oil company Pemex and state power utility CFE’s embrace of oil and coal, Sheinbaum’s energy advisors suggested in interviews that Pemex would also embrace geothermal energy and CFE be used to speed the adaptation of wind and solar power as well as to produce biodiesel. However, the advisors cautioned that this transition would not be sudden. Sheinbaum will also have to address Pemex’s heavy debt load.
Sheinbaum may hew closer to her predecessor in other areas. Although López Obrador’s economic policies dramatically reduced poverty, Mexico’s high levels of violence continued under his watch.
On security, Sheinbaum has said she aims to maintain López Obrador’s National Guard, a gendarmerie that has militarized Mexican law enforcement, to criticism from experts. This year, she also endorsed his controversial wish list of desired constitutional reforms, including the direct election of Supreme Court justices. Dramatic judicial changes often send countries down the totem pole of democracy indexes, as in the case of El Salvador.
Mexico’s new Congress and its pro-Morena majorities will be sworn in a month before Sheinbaum. In that window, López Obrador may be able to make the constitutional changes he desires. On Monday, he said he would speak to Sheinbaum to jointly define which reforms he will pursue. The agreement they reach will offer one of the first major clues as to how Sheinbaum plans to use her new power.
Monday, June 10, to Tuesday, June 11: Brazil attends the BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting in Russia.
Sunday, July 28: Venezuela is due to hold a presidential election.
Climate consequences. A new study from international scientists found that the rains that caused southern Brazil’s deadly flooding in late April and May were twice as likely to occur due to human-induced climate change. The authors also calculated that the intensity of these events increased by 6 to 9 percent for the same reason.
Around a month after the flooding began, more than 170 people have been confirmed dead in southern Brazil, and the region is battling a bout of infectious diseases that spread via contaminated water.
In another recent paper, climate scientists had a reason for optimism: Research found that severe respiratory disease in Chile had fallen in an area where solar power replaced coal between 2012 and 2017. The study looked at a part of northern Chile that has seen solar power incorporated into its electric grid due to abundant sunlight in the Atacama Desert.
ICJ updates. Chile will apply to join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Chilean President Gabriel Boric announced in his State of the Nation address last weekend. Mexico expressed its intent to do so last week. That brings the number of Latin American countries backing the case up to four, including Colombia and Nicaragua.
Latin American countries’ sympathy for Palestinians partially reflects diaspora politics: Chile is home to the largest Palestinian diaspora outside of the Middle East. But those commitments are not always straightforward. Mexico’s Sheinbaum, who will be the country’s first Jewish president, has invoked her family’s refugee history to speak up in favor of Palestinians.
Meanwhile, El Salvador’s Bukele, a descendent of Palestinian Christians, has largely refrained from commenting on the war save an outspoken post calling for the riddance of Hamas.
Poetry crown. This year’s Reina Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry, jointly awarded by the Spanish government and the University of Salamanca to living writers who publish in Spanish and Portuguese, honors Colombian poet Piedad Bonnett.
Bonnett, 73, is a former laureate of Colombia’s National Poetry Prize and is known for a body of work that is “luminous, even when it deals with difficult themes, such as disaffection, war, loss, or mourning,” a Reina Sofía representative said. Many of her poems focus on love, family relations, and the difficulties of everyday life in Colombia.
“In a polarized world, poetry is the voice of complexity,” Bonnett told Spain’s ABC this week. “It’s a form of knowledge that goes far beyond beauty and lyricism.” Fans posted favorite Bonnett poems on social media to celebrate the prize. Among them was “Prayer”—which asks “not for water to quench my thirst, but for thirst itself / nor for dreams / but for the urge to dream.”
Last year’s Reina Sofía was awarded to Gioconda Belli. Which country is Belli from?
Honduras
Nicaragua
El Salvador
Mexico
Belli was part of a group of government critics that President Daniel Ortega’s regime officially stripped of their nationality in 2023.
U.S. President Joe Biden issued a proclamation on Tuesday dramatically limiting asylum processing at the southern U.S. border, sparking an immediate lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union. Migrants and migration experts are uncertain about how the changes will play out. U.S. officials appear to be expecting Mexico to host an increased number of deported migrants, but these details were not immediately made public.
The new executive action allows the U.S. government to block migrants from seeking asylum at the border if undocumented crossings exceed 2,500 per day, a threshold surpassed for most of Biden’s presidency. Migrants are exempted from the ban if they are unaccompanied minors, trafficking victims, people who face life-threatening emergencies, or one of 1,400 people per day who can make appointments with U.S. Customs and Border Protection through a mobile app.
The proclamation allows for a narrow possibility that any asylum-seeker could qualify for a different kind of protection from deportation known as “withholding of removal” or protection under a United Nations treaty on torture. But the new rules also remove a requirement that border officials directly ask migrants if they fear returning to their home countries.
Biden’s action reduces the time migrants seeking those alternative forms of protection have to consult a lawyer before their interview from 24 to four hours.
The Biden administration says the move makes sense in the context of broader executive actions to change immigration policy. The White House has raised its annual cap on refugees and used an authority called humanitarian parole to allow tens of thousands of people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to enter the country in the past year, among other steps. Biden said in a speech Tuesday that taken as a whole, his policies aim to bring order to the border.
In the past, some migration experts have praised Biden administration policies to make the asylum evaluation process faster for people on U.S. soil. But Tuesday’s near-blanket ban on asylum at the border crossed a line for migrant rights groups and some progressive lawmakers. “I am skeptical the executive branch has the legal authority to shut down asylum processing between ports of entry on its own,” Sen. Chris Murphy said.
Murphy’s skepticism is well founded: Federal courts struck down a similar move by former President Donald Trump in 2018. The U.N. Refugee Agency, for its part, said it was “profoundly concerned” and called for the United States to live up to its obligations under international law, which protects the right to asylum.
While the order remains in place, much will depend on other countries’ abilities to receive deported migrants. “Unilateral and rushed decisions are not sufficient for dealing with a problem of this magnitude,” the Migration Policy Institute’s Diego Chaves-González posted on X on Wednesday.
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