Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Chilean President Gabriel Boric prepares to leave office, the United States and Ecuador step up anti-drug cooperation, and Colombian viewers delight in a new Netflix soap opera.
If recent presidential elections are any indication, the right is having a moment in Latin America. Some of the region’s most prolific conservative leaders are also its youngest, including Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa.
They stood in contrast to fellow millennial leader Gabriel Boric, the outgoing president of Chile. Boric campaigned on a promise to make his country the “grave” of neoliberalism and took office in 2022 at the age of 36. He will hand off power on Wednesday to a right-wing successor.
Boric rose to prominence after explosive anti-government protests in 2019. As president, he pledged to channel the demonstrations into an ambitious project to rewrite Chile’s dictatorship-era constitution, which grew into two constitutional assemblies. Although those efforts failed, his presidency marked a shift for the Latin American left that could echo beyond his time in office.
“What Boric introduces is a distinction between the authoritarian left and the democratic left,” especially when it comes to their positions on Venezuela, Argentine political scientist Andrés Malamud said.
In the 1980s and 1990s, human rights advocacy was central the left in Latin America. But in recent years, many leftists refused to criticize the authoritarian turns of countries around the world, including left-wing governments in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Boric struck a different tone when he condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Venezuela’s human rights abuses.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva once disparaged Boric for such remarks, calling him a “hasty young man” who was inexperienced in international diplomacy.
Even so, Boric’s position on Venezuela won him admiration among regional progressives befuddled by older officials’ softness toward Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who was so disliked in the region that 60 percent of Latin Americans told pollsters that they were glad the United States abducted him in January. (Lula later grew more critical of Maduro.)
Beyond his stance on human rights, Boric stood apart from a previous generation of leftists in his willingness to change course following mistakes, Chilean commentator Patricio Fernández said. Both of Boric’s constitutional rewrite efforts were marred by political polarization and rejected by voters in referendums. (Fernández was a member of the first constitutional assembly.)
After those failures, Boric shuffled his cabinet to include more moderate members and implemented measures that he had previously eschewed, including more aggressive policies on security and border control. By the end of his term, both homicides and irregular migration were falling in Chile.
Chile’s left wing is young and “capable of learning from its own errors,” Fernández said. “Is this a government that did extraordinary things? No. But in times of transformation, it was able to stabilize a country.”
On foreign policy, Boric mixed continuity on certain priorities, including regional cooperation and trade diversification, with some changes. He placed more emphasis on feminism and the energy transition than his predecessors, said Andrés Villar, a senior Chilean Foreign Ministry official. The Boric administration also launched an industrial policy for its lithium sector and became the second country to ratify the High Seas Treaty.
Boric’s legacy depends in part on his successor, José António Kast, Malamud argued.
“If Kast has a very good government—and this depends on the international context, like commodity prices and the interest rate—people will look back at Boric like a digression of juvenile foolishness that was overcome,” he said. “If it goes very badly for Kast, people will remember Boric with nostalgia.”
Though Boric has prompted some comparisons to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a fellow millennial and progressive, Malamud compared him to a different U.S. politician: former President Jimmy Carter.
“Carter did not win reelection, but people say he was the best ex-president in history. He observed elections, he was a pacifier, a normalizer, an institutionalizer,” said Malamud. “Boric could play a similar role … bringing the message of a new generation that was able to govern and has something good to say—something better than the war and realpolitik that exists now.”
Saturday, March 7: U.S. President Donald Trump hosts several Latin American presidents in Florida.
Sunday, March 8: Colombia holds legislative elections.
Wednesday, March 11: Kast is inaugurated as Chile’s president.
Iran war impacts. When the United States and Israel launched a war with Iran on Feb. 28, one big question was how Venezuela would react. Tehran was an ideological—and often economic—backer of Maduro’s government, and acting President Delcy Rodríguez has tried to maintain the aura of her predecessor’s political project even as she cooperates with Washington.
Relations with the United States took precedent in Rodríguez’s official response to the conflict: She did not mention support of Iran on her social media channels, instead calling for a diplomatic solution in calls with Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
As the war intensifies, Latin American countries will grapple with its impacts on global energy and agriculture markets. Oil exporters such as Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela will see more revenue, but disruptions to fertilizer supplies could harm farmers. Around 41 percent of Brazil’s urea fertilizer imports last year passed through the Strait of Hormuz, which is now effectively closed.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio talks with Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness after posing for a family photo at the Caribbean Community summit in St. Kitts and Nevis on Feb. 25.Jonathan Ernst/AFP via Getty Images
Caricom convenes. Annual summits of the Caribbean Community, known as Caricom, often feature boilerplate statements about shared values. But amid trade turbulence and Trump’s targeting of Cuba, the event last week was different. Countries endorsed a new joint industrial policy and announced steps to ease the process for aviation employees to work in other countries in the bloc.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio attended the summit, and Caricom leaders pressed him on the humanitarian fallout of Washington’s fuel restrictions on Cuba. The prime minister of Jamaica, a close U.S. partner, said that “a prolonged crisis in Cuba will affect migration, security, and economic stability throughout the Caribbean region.”
In a potential sign of progress in Washington’s backdoor talks with Havana, on Monday, Cuba’s president announced that the country planned “urgent” changes to its economic model, including a “resizing of the state apparatus.” He did not immediately offer further details. As fuel supplies dwindled in Cuba, millions of people were plunged into a blackout on Wednesday.
Colombian soap opera. Netflix has pursued diverse offerings from Colombia—from the 2015 gangster drama Narcos to a 2024 cinematic rendition of literary classic One Hundred Years of Solitude. And in January, the streaming platform released a decidedly untraditional soap opera, Defying Destiny.
Telenovelas across the region have often focused on the foibles and romantic escapades of the rich and powerful, but Defying Destiny features the real story of María Roa Borja, a Black Colombian woman who left the war-torn countryside for the city of Medellín and eventually became a union leader, successfully advocating for a labor rights law for domestic workers.
Audiences are responding positively to Defying Destiny, which quickly jumped to a ranking within Netflix’s top-10 most-streamed shows in 17 countries, including several across Latin America and in Spain.
The show is far from preachy and includes plenty of the sex and violence common in soap operas. But it offers something fresh to audiences, lead actor Karent Hinestroza told El País: a chance for many Latin American women to see someone whose life story has parallels to their own.
What year was One Hundred Years of Solitude published?
1957
1967
1977
1987
The novel, by Gabriel García Márquez, was part of a literary movement known as the “Latin American boom.”
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa tour Ulpiano Paez Air Base in Salinas, Ecuador, on Nov. 6, 2025.Alex Brandon/AP via Getty Images
U.S., Ecuadorian, and European law enforcement agencies worked together to detain 16 suspects and dismantle an international drug smuggling network linked to the Los Lobos cartel, European law enforcement agency Europol and the U.S. Embassy in Ecuador said on Tuesday.
Since he took office in 2023, President Daniel Noboa’s tough-on-crime platform has included anti-narcotics cooperation with the United States. He signed multiple anti-drug cooperation deals with the Biden administration, paving the way for joint work during the Trump administration.
Drugs have continued to flow out of Ecuador “in industrial quantities,” according to the International Crisis Group. The Ecuadorian Defense Ministry reported seizing a record 135 tons of drugs at sea in 2025. (It said that the high number of seizures in part reflected more aggressive anti-drug tactics.)
But the surge in law enforcement has not led to fewer killings on the streets. After homicides in the country dipped at the beginning of Noboa’s term, they have now soared. Last year, Ecuador logged its highest-ever murder rate.
Noboa is attending this weekend’s meeting of right-wing Latin American leaders with Trump in Florida. It is possible that the announcement about joint anti-drug operations ahead of the summit was meant to reinforce Ecuador’s alignment with the United States.
Another move in lockstep with the Trump administration came on Wednesday: Ecuador declared Cuba’s representatives personae non gratae without issuing a reason why. The Cuban Foreign Ministry called the move “unfriendly and unprecedented.”
