Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: A top human rights organization changes its stance on intervention in Haiti, new details of the EU-Mercosur trade deal are released, and a tropical carbohydrate gains global recognition.
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The past few weeks have brought new signs that the international community’s solutions to Haiti’s crisis are not working. Violence continues to spiral in the country, while humanitarian access has worsened—despite the fact that a mostly Kenyan-staffed and largely U.S.-funded security mission has been operating there since June.
Last weekend, Kenyan forces failed to stop a gang massacre that killed at least 184 people in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital. Last month, gang control of the airport led humanitarian groups to cut back on aid distribution. Nearly 20 Kenyan officers have offered their resignations in recent weeks, Reuters reported last Friday, though the security mission denied these claims.
An increasing number of international actors are calling for a different approach. On Monday, Human Rights Watch joined several governments in the Americas in appealing for the U.N. to launch a full-blown security mission in Haiti. (The U.N. endorsed the current mission, but it does not run it.)
This follows a U.N. Security Council letter on Nov. 29 asking Secretary-General António Guterres to issue “strategic-level recommendations” on how the U.N. could address Haiti’s crisis—an acknowledgement that current efforts are insufficient.
It’s a remarkable turn of events given the unpopularity of the last U.N. mission in Haiti, which was tainted by sexual abuse scandals and the introduction of cholera into the country. Until now, Human Rights Watch has been skeptical about a new U.N. mission. “This is a decision that we don’t take lightly,” Human Rights Watch’s Juan Pappier told Foreign Policy. “This is one of the countries where U.N. missions probably have the least legitimacy.”
The appeals from the U.N. Security Council and Human Rights Watch highlight both the shortfalls of the current mission and the politics of preparing for U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s second term. Under President Joe Biden, Washington has worked to ensure that the U.N. endorsement for the current mission included a call for oversight to prevent human rights abuses.
The next administration may not take the same stance. On the campaign trail, Trump engaged in fearmongering about Haitian migrants. Though it is too early to tell, ensuring a rights-respecting approach to public security may fall lower on his priority list than getting Haiti and other Latin American countries to accept deportees from his much-touted mass deportation drive.
“We have serious questions about whether the U.S. government under the next administration will continue to be as supportive” of the current mission, Pappier said. The current security mission is voluntarily funded by governments, but a U.N.-funded mission would not be as subject to political changes in member countries.
For the Security Council to approve such a mission, China and especially Russia would also need to drop their skepticism. That is possible, given that they did not block the Security Council from sending its letter to Guterres last month. “It’s a long negotiating process,” Pappier said of Russia’s stance. “We hope they might change their view.”
After months of growing insecurity, prominent Haitian human rights leaders have joined calls for a U.N. mission, too. They include Pierre Esperánce of the Haitian National Human Rights Defense Network, who wrote in Foreign Policy in June that “military force alone cannot provide Haiti with long-term stability, and Haitians’ needs must be at the center of any military effort.”
For its part, Human Rights Watch called for an independent accountability board to monitor the actions of any potential U.N. force, among other recommendations. If carried out, they could set a new standard for oversight of U.N. peacekeeping—not only in Haiti but also elsewhere in the world.
Saturday, Dec. 14: Argentine President Javier Milei and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni meet in Rome.
Wednesday, Jan. 1: Brazil takes over rotating presidency of BRICS grouping.
Friday, Jan. 10: Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is scheduled to be sworn in for a new term.
Milei’s milestone. After one year in office, Argentina’s president remains more popular than most experts expected, garnering around 50 percent approval in a few late November polls. Milei has made good on pledges to carry out painful cuts in public spending and the public workforce, which pushed Argentina’s economy into a recession but also lowered inflation. As of October, monthly inflation stood at 2.7 percent, down from a peak of around 25 percent last December.
Since taking office, Milei has moderated some of his most controversial campaign stances, abandoning pledges to dollarize Argentina and close its central bank. However, one area where he has been far from moderate is foreign policy, international relations scholar Juan Gabriel Tokatlian argued in Clarín this week.
Milei has shifted significantly toward geopolitical alignment with the United States and Israel while retreating from many of Argentina’s longstanding commitments to multilateralism.
Familiar faces. This week, Trump nominated former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Christopher Landau for deputy secretary of state, the latest sign that Latin America will likely play a more central role in U.S. foreign policy than before. Landau would join secretary of state nominee Marco Rubio, who is Cuban American and has written and spoken extensively on the region.
Mexican officials, on edge from Trump’s tariff threats, looked positively on the nomination. “Ambassador Landau did a good job in Mexico,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Monday. “I knew him as head of government of Mexico City.”
Bread of the tropics. Amid national strife, Haitians received a bit of good news last week. The country’s joint petition with Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Venezuela succeeded in adding cassava bread to UNESCO’s List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Flour made from cassava root has been used to make flatbread in those countries for hundreds of years.
The application marked the first time that multiple countries in the Western Hemisphere submitted a joint entry for the list. It emphasized their shared heritage despite the fact that some of the countries speak different languages today.
What is not another name for cassava or its byproducts?
Agave
Manioc
Tapioca
Yucca
The most well-known types of agave are succulents.
Last Friday, top officials from the European Union and the Mercosur trade grouping (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia) shocked observers by announcing that they had reached an agreement after 25 years of negotiations, creating one of the world’s largest free-trade zones.
This week, the European Commission released details about what the agreement entails.
The main tenets have not changed since 2019 negotiations. They include the phased removal of tariffs for around 90 percent of goods. For some products, such as passenger vehicles, tariffs would be phased out even more gradually. The agreement would also improve European access to critical minerals from Mercosur countries.
New additions include a requirement that countries must remain “good faith” parties to the Paris climate accord and a dispute settlement mechanism that allows for compensation if one side breaks the EU-Mercosur deal.
The agreement still needs to be ratified by governments on both sides of the Atlantic. The most vocal potential spoiler is France—where farmers are concerned about the country being flooded with agriculture imports—but it’s unclear whether Paris can rally enough support to sink it. Rejecting the deal would require opposition from at least four EU countries with populations totaling 35 percent of the bloc.
If the EU-Mercosur deal passes, it could spur billions of dollars in new trade each year. A study from last December by a Brazilian government research institute estimated that by 2040, the deal would boost Brazil’s GDP by 0.46 percent annually, the EU’s by 0.06 percent, and other Mercosur countries’ by 0.2 percent.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called the deal “a win for Europe.” Now she will have to pitch it to EU members to see if enough governments agree.
The post Haiti’s Crisis Sparks a Rethink of U.N. Peacekeeping appeared first on Foreign Policy.
