Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Mexico takes out a major drug boss, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling triggers some tariff relief for the region, and we remember a salsa legend.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has long faced comparisons to her predecessor and mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Last weekend, however, around a year and a half into her term, she signaled a definitive break with López Obrador on security policy.
López Obrador advocated a largely nonconfrontational strategy toward organized crime dubbed “hugs, not bullets,” but on Sunday Sheinbaum’s administration carried out a major operation that killed the notorious boss of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho.” The United States provided intelligence support.
Sheinbaum’s security policies had already produced different results from López Obrador’s. During her tenure as mayor of Mexico City, her intelligence-driven approach led to better trends on homicide reduction than the country at large, according to official numbers. After Sheinbaum became president in October 2024, homicides linked to organized crime fell by 16 percent nationwide from 2024 to 2025, according to consulting firm Lantia Consultores.
The Sheinbaum administration has stepped up scrutiny of financial flows to drug gangs and sought to arrest the gangs’ logistical operators, as well as their most violent killers. Still, Sunday’s strike against El Mencho was an escalation.
Last year, Sheinbaum vowed to take security policy seriously but promised not to fight a “war on drugs.” What changed was pressure from Washington. U.S. officials have repeatedly floated sending troops over the border to attack gang sites, which would cross a red line for the Mexican government.
The hit against El Mencho “was related to U.S. pressure” for “more powerful blows against organized crime,” Eduardo Guerrero, the director of Lantia Consultores, said. The Trump administration promptly praised Sheinbaum following the operation. “The good guys are stronger than the bad guys,” one senior U.S. official wrote on social media.
But the operation sparked fears of prolonged violence. “Mexicans have seen this movie enough times,” Antonio De Loera-Brust wrote in Foreign Policy, explaining that killing one cartel leader can escalate into turf battles with civilians caught in the crossfire. In the hours after the military operation against El Mencho, retaliatory attacks occurred in multiple cities across the country.
By choosing stepping up cooperation with the United States in recent months, Guerrero said, Sheinbaum secured access to valuable intelligence to carry out her priorities. Earlier this month, the Sheinbaum administration arrested multiple local officials accused of aiding CJNG.
Though that operation didn’t trigger as many headlines as the El Mencho hit, it demonstrated Sheinbaum’s efforts to “dismantle the actual operational capacity of these groups,” said Cecilia Farfán-Méndez, the head of the North American Observatory of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
Farfán-Méndez said Sheinbaum has generally pursued a “follow the money” anti-crime strategy, naming a new head of Mexico’s financial crimes unit who has a more technical than political background.
But more could be done on this front, Farfán-Méndez said: “Mexico issues a very small amount of money-laundering sentences” relative to “the size of the country’s economy and the estimated amount of illicit flows.”
There is one point on which Sheinbaum has not deviated from López Obrador: In addition to following the money, her administration says fighting crime requires following the guns. Earlier this month, Mexico’s defense secretary announced that an almost 80 percent of the firearms seized during the Sheinbaum administration so far came from the United States.
Friday, Feb. 27: The Caribbean Community concludes a leaders’ summit in St. Kitts and Nevis.
Saturday, March 7: Trump meets in Miami with heads of state from Argentina, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guyana, Honduras, and Trinidad and Tobago, along with the incoming presidents of Costa Rica and Chile.
Sunday, March 8: Colombia holds legislative elections.
China-Chile controversy. U.S. efforts to thwart Chinese economic activity in Latin America flared into public controversy in recent days. Chilean officials last month weighed greenlighting an undersea internet cable to Hong Kong but, amid warnings from Washington, quickly canceled a decree that would move the project forward, El Mercurio reported. Nevertheless, the U.S. State Department revoked the U.S. visas of three top Chilean officials last Friday.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the officials’ work on telecommunications infrastructure “undermined regional security in our hemisphere,” comments echoed by the U.S. ambassador to Chile.
Left-wing Chilean President Gabriel Boric is due to leave office in days. In a press conference on Monday, Chilean Foreign Minister Alberto Van Klaveren rejected both the visa ban and the premise that Chile was putting anyone at risk, calling comments by the U.S. ambassador “unacceptable and inconsistent with diplomatic practice.”
Boric will be replaced by José Antonio Kast, a conservative, next month. In his statement, Rubio described Boric’s legacy as “tarnished” and said that the United States was looking forward to working with the Kast administration.
However, China is Chile’s largest trade partner—and unlike some other right-wing leaders in the region, Kast did not bash China during his campaign. His administration will test Chile’s nonalignment.
Venezuela’s amnesty law. Less than two months after the U.S. military ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the country’s legislature passed an amnesty bill that could facilitate the release of political prisoners. Such amnesties are often part of democratic transitions, but the scope of that possibility is unclear in Venezuela, where Maduro’s former deputy remains acting president.
The amnesty law affects people convicted in 13 incidents of political upheaval that date to 1999. But people serving time for other incidents are not included in the bill, nor are those accused of inciting foreign military violence against the state. That means opposition leader María Corina Machado, who has voiced support for a U.S. military intervention, might not be cleared of charges.
Michael Penfold, a professor of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Administration in Caracas who agreed to serve on the interim government’s Program for Coexistence and Peace, wrote on social media that while the amnesty law is not perfect, “if there is political will” and “mutual concessions,” it could be expanded quickly.
Musician Willie Colón performs at the Earth Day Climate Rally on the National Mall in Washington on April 25, 2010.Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images
Colón remembered. Salsa great Willie Colón died on Saturday. Colón was a New Yorker born to Puerto Rican parents, and his story is an integral part of Latin American music. Top Cuban and Panamanian stars played and recorded with Colón; his partnership with Panama’s Rubén Blades on the 1978 album Siembra made it one of the best-selling salsa records of all time.
Colón, a trombonist, singer, and composer, was part of a movement to add political critiques and gritty stories of urban life to salsa, Blades wrote on Monday. Colón also helped bring a Pan-American flavor to the genre, embracing Caribbean rhythms. One track on Siembra shouts out to countries across Latin America, almost half a century before Bad Bunny did the same at the Super Bowl halftime show.
A group of music journalists from across the region in 2024 published a list of 600 top Latin American albums. They named Siembra as no. 1.
The most famous song from Siembra is about a fight between a thief and a sex worker. What is it called?
“Pedro Navaja”
“Plástico”
“Buscando Guayaba”
“María Lionza”
In this, as in many of Colón’s songs, the details of hardscrabble life contrast with an upbeat and highly danceable tempo.
A general view of a container yard near the port of Rio de Janeiro on July 17, 2025. Pablo Porciuncula/AFP via Getty Images
At first glance, Latin American countries appear to be some of the big winners of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Feb. 20 decision to strike down the Trump administration’s tariffs imposed using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
Those include all of Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs announced last April, as well as additional duties on Mexico over allegations of drug trafficking, on Brazil over issues including the prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro, and on countries shipping oil to Cuba—though the latter levies were threatened rather than formally imposed.
By Tuesday, Trump had immediately moved to impose 10 percent worldwide tariffs using another authority. That is lower than the previous average rate for Brazilian goods of an estimated more than 26 percent and the 25 percent rate for a limited set of Mexican goods that were not covered by the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
Alongside China and India, Brazil saw some of the biggest tariff reductions following the U.S. court ruling, trade monitoring body Global Trade Alert wrote this week. The ruling led Brasília to exhale, but only partially: In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Trump vowed to maintain tariffs through other authorities.
Meanwhile, after Trump’s fuel restrictions on Cuba sparked warnings of a major humanitarian crisis, Russia began shipping diesel to the country, though it appeared to halt the voyage Wednesday. Also on Wednesday, the United States announced it would allow U.S. companies to resell Venezuelan fuel to the island, if channeled through Cuba’s private sector. Rubio framed the step as part of efforts to force Cuba to change its economic model.
Tensions between Washington and Havana remain sky-high. Yet Rubio denied that one flare-up this week had anything to do with the U.S. government: On Wednesday, Cuban border troops shot several people aboard a Florida-registered speedboat who Havana said attacked them.
