Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Right-wing regional leaders attend a summit in Florida, Colombia holds legislative elections, and Latin American cinema gets the red-carpet treatment in Spain.
Leaders from 12 Latin American countries traveled to Doral, Florida, to meet U.S. President Donald Trump on Saturday. It is rare for so many heads of state from the region to gather in person, and the event was an opportunity for Trump to voice a common agenda with them.
The summit, which Trump dubbed the “Shield of the Americas,” revealed itself to be light on policy commitments. The joint declaration signed ahead of the summit was half a page long. Still, the meeting offered signals about Trump’s evolving approach to the region and how leaders are responding to it.
Trump was the only head of state to give a formal speech at the event. In it, he said that the “heart” of the coalition represented a “commitment to using lethal military force” against drug cartels. He praised U.S. strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats—attacks that have killed at least 157 people since September.
That focus “aligns closely with Trump’s law-and-order narrative at home,” Diego Area wrote in Foreign Policy.
For all of Trump’s pomp, he did not announce new funding toward these aims from the United States or from partner countries. The U.S. military has already run anti-narcotics cooperation programs with militaries across Latin America for decades.
Though several Latin American leaders were expecting meetings of at least four minutes with Trump, he shortened those to roughly one-minute photo-ops, according to Bloomberg’s Eric Martin.
It is possible that the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran distracted the Trump administration from making more substantive announcements at the summit. But the fact that several Latin American heads of state made the trip shows that they see value in signaling alignment with Trump.
The leaders in attendance were generally conservative or right-wing. The presidents of Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico—all leftists—did not attend the event, saying they were not invited. (Trump later said they had been.) Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico have openly criticized Trump’s more aggressive anti-drug policies, but their exclusion may have been mostly symbolic.
At least in the cases of Colombia and Mexico, bilateral counter-narcotics cooperation with the United States is robust. Trump even said in his speech that he liked Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum “very much” and, in his State of the Union address last month, praised a recent operation in Mexico that took down a major drug boss.
Some countries that attended Saturday’s summit have also quietly staked out policy differences from the United States. On Monday, Bolivia’s interior minister announced at a United Nations drug policy conference in Vienna that the country would take a follow-the-money approach to dismantling gangs and address drug addiction as a public health problem—far from Trump’s call for “lethal force.”
Altogether, the ideological bent of the Doral meeting suggests that the Trump administration sees utility in sorting Latin American leaders into two buckets: those who largely go along with the White House and those who don’t.
One summit development needed no reading between the lines. After news outlets have reported for weeks that Washington is in talks with powerful figures in Cuba regarding economic liberalization, Trump confirmed in his speech that Cubans “are negotiating with Marco [Rubio], myself, and some others.”
Monday, March 16: The U.N. Human Rights Council discusses Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Monday, March 16, to Friday, March 20: U.S. and Mexican negotiators hold a meeting to prepare for a review of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
Sunday, March 22: Bolivia holds regional elections.
BRICS watch. As the Iran war intensifies, the BRICS grouping has been disengaged and divided in how to respond to the conflict. Iran joined the bloc in 2024. Though founding member Russia is reportedly providing targeting information to Iran, the United Arab Emirates—another new member—has been one of Iran’s biggest targets.
The leaders of Brazil and South Africa made little mention of a BRICS joint security strategy regarding the war when they met in Brasília on Monday. The group’s disperse positions on the conflict reinforce the idea that BRICS is a loose forum rather than a military alliance, and that its main function is economic diversification.
A man rides his bike past the facade of Banco Master, with the bank’s logo covered in plastic, in São Paulo, Brazil, on Jan. 22.Nelson Almeida/AFP via Getty Images
Brazil’s financial scandal. In Brazil last week, a powerful fixer involved a growing financial scandal was reported to have died by suicide after being jailed.
The scandal revolves around fraud at a now-collapsed bank, Banco Master. It has entangled many in Brazil’s economic and political elite, triggering investigations into potential misconduct by central bank regulators and Supreme Court justices.
Banco Master’s owner, Daniel Vorcaro, is still in prison and may yet give a plea bargain that exposes more about the network. Finance Minister Fernando Haddad has already said the case could be the biggest bank fraud in Brazilian history.
Oscar alternative. While many film fans will turn their eyes to the Academy Awards this weekend, few Latin American movies are up for a prize. Far more are being showcased halfway across the world: at the Málaga Film Festival in Spain, which focuses on Spanish-language films and serves as a gateway to the European market for many Latin American directors.
One of the most-anticipated films from Latin America is the joint Mexican-Cuban production Anonymous Neurotic, which tells the story of a Havana movie theater usher who once dreamed of being an actress and is now trying to save the local cinema from destruction. The film uses absurdity and irony to illustrate living through Cuba’s social and political crises, Cuban writer Leonardo Padura wrote in El País.
Another picture generating buzz is Peru’s The Heart of the Wolf, which tells the story of an Asháninka Indigenous boy forcibly recruited into fighting for the Shining Path guerilla group in the 1990s. Director Francisco José Lombardi also made a 1988 film from the point of view of Peruvian security forces who fought the guerillas.
Around how many people were estimated to have been killed or disappeared in the Peruvian countryside in clashes between the Shining Path and the military?
30,000
50,000
70,000
100,000
A Colombian presidential candidate for the conservative Democratic Center party, Paloma Valencia, raises hands with her running mate, Juan Daniel Oviedo, during a rally in Bogotá on March 12.Raul Arboleda/AFP via Getty Images
Legislative elections and presidential primaries in Colombia on Sunday offered a preview of May’s presidential vote, boosting some candidates in a crowded field.
In the legislative vote, President Gustavo Petro’s leftist Historic Pact grew its share of seats in Congress to win the most of any party, although it will still hold around a quarter of each house. Close behind it was the right-wing party of former hard-line President Álvaro Uribe.
Groups of political parties from the left, right, and center also held primaries. The contests are optional, and several prominent candidates sat them out—including Petro’s preferred candidate, Sen. Iván Cepeda. (Petro is ineligible for reelection due to term limits.)
Few voters showed up to participate in the left-wing primary. The low turnout, together with the Historic Pact’s strong showing in the legislative election, suggests that Cepeda may have the advantage among left-wing candidates heading into the general election. If no candidate wins a majority, the top two contenders will proceed to a runoff. Cepeda’s chances of making it to this stage appear good.
Uribe protégé and Sen. Paloma Valencia won the right-wing primary. A popular far-right candidate who has courted Trump, Abelardo de la Espriella, boycotted the contest. Valencia’s win was so decisive that it appears possible she could surpass Espriella in May’s election.
In a move that could widen her potential base, Valencia named her runner-up in the primary on Thursday, the more centrist Juan Daniel Oviedo, as her vice presidential candidate.
Colombia’s centrist voters, for their part, participated little in their own primary and thus offered few signals of a surge for its participants. Former Bogotá Mayor Claudia Lopez won that primary. Centrist voters could nevertheless be decisive in a presidential runoff.
