Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Argentina inaugurates a major new pipeline, Caribbean nations lay out a plan to liberalize migration, and Guatemala’s election drama intensifies.

For decades, Bolivia has been one of South America’s biggest natural gas exporters. The country’s abundant gas reserves began being pumped in earnest in the 1970s and solidified the rise of popular former President Evo Morales, who dramatically increased state control over the industry after taking office in 2006 and used revenues to expand Bolivia’s welfare state.

But Bolivia’s gas exports have declined over the past decade—in part because a heavy state hand stifled new investment in the sector. Furthermore, due to what economic analysts have called poor government planning, alternative exports have not grown at a pace that can recoup the loss. The slump has strained Bolivia’s economy, limited the government’s spending options, and triggered worry in its customer countries, such as Argentina and Brazil.

Now, South America’s energy map appears to be shifting. Argentina is positioning itself to move into some of the space that Bolivia is losing—and could reap political and economic rewards in the process. Even as both countries attract geopolitical attention and investment for their ample lithium reserves—and potential to supply the global green energy transition—Argentina’s and Bolivia’s diverging natural gas fates show that we’re still living in an era of fossil fuel politics.

With uncharacteristic speed, the government in Buenos Aires on Sunday inaugurated a pipeline connecting a massive shale gas deposit in central-western Argentina to consumers in the province of Buenos Aires, which relies on imported liquefied natural gas from abroad for part of the year. The government said it expects the pipeline from the oil and gas field—named Vaca Muerta, or Dead Cow—to save Argentina $1.7 billion in imports this year. Argentina has pumped oil from Vaca Muerta since 2011.

The project’s quick construction was unusual because Argentina is experiencing a biting economic crisis, with annual inflation at more than 110 percent. The pipeline, which had been planned since 2015, was constructed over 10 months, beginning in September.

A key factor that helped accelerate the project, Argentine energy journalist Nicolás Gandini told Foreign Policy, was the arrival of a new economy minister last July who prioritized the pipeline and was “seen as a legitimate interlocutor by the private energy sector”—a critical attribute amid the country’s macroeconomic woes. The pipeline was built via a partnership between state energy company Energía Argentina and three private firms; the minister put together a mix of funding sources that included credit from Latin American development bank CAF.

That finance minister, Sergio Massa, is the ruling left-wing coalition’s presidential candidate in this October’s elections. (Incumbent President Alberto Fernández has declined to seek reelection.) Polls suggest a difficult race for Massa, but if he performs well, his record on natural gas may be part of the reason why. Though drilling and fracking at Vaca Muerta has sparked environmental and Indigenous protests in Argentina over the years, no major presidential candidate today opposes those activities.

In addition to Massa, front-runners in October’s election include anarcho-capitalist candidate Javier Milei and the center-right opposition coalition’s Horacio Rodríguez Larreta and Patricia Bullrich, who will face off in an opposition primary next month.

Gandini, who is the director of energy and mining news agency EconoJournal and has been tracking the energy advisors working with Argentina’s leading presidential candidates, said that Milei and Bullrich are more opposed to state involvement in the economy than Massa and Larreta. He added that while Larreta is more pro-market than Massa, Larreta would likely be open to mobilizing government resources if necessary in order to move gas investments forward.

Bullrich and Milei “have the illusion that they can get projects financed on the private market, which is not so simple in a country as complicated as Argentina,” Gandini said.

Buenos Aires will open an auction for a state contract to build a new extension of the pipeline to another province this September—just one month before the election—and has ambitions to export gas to Brazil and Uruguay in the future. Argentina’s gas export potential has even attracted the attention of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who discussed the matter on a bilateral visit in January. (Argentina’s Congress is in the early stages of discussing a regulatory framework that could allow it to start exporting liquified natural gas.) Even before any exporting occurs, reducing gas imports helps the Argentine government conserve something it badly needs: dollars.

But gas exports cannot be Argentina’s economic lifeline forever as the global energy transition advances. Neighboring Bolivia serves as a cautionary tale of what can happen when a country fails to plan for an economic future beyond fossil fuel exports. The same week Argentina’s new pipeline was completed, its government released its energy transition strategy for 2030, which focuses on how the country will transform its electric grid but not how it will transform its exports.

For a country in such economic uncertainty, however, 2030 feels a long way off. “Right now, the government needs to improve its trade balance,” and other national accounts, “which requires it to export as much as possible—not just natural gas, but above all, oil,” especially at the current international prices, Gandini said.

Monday, July 17, to Tuesday, July 18: Leaders of European Union and Community of Latin American and Caribbean States countries attend a summit in Brussels.

Sunday, August 13: Argentina holds primary elections.

Central American power plays. In El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele’s party nominated him as its candidate for the country’s 2024 presidential election, despite the fact the country’s constitution does not allow incumbents to run for reelection. After a legislature controlled by Bukele’s party removed several justices from El Salvador’s top court and appointed others in 2021, the judicial body ruled that presidents could run again, but some legal experts view the ruling as overreach.

Meanwhile, Guatemala’s post-election saga continued this week as election authorities moved to certify the June 25 first-round results on exactly the same evening that a prosecutor announced that one of the parties that made it to the runoff—Seed Movement—was disqualified on grounds that it used fraudulent signatures to register. Bernardo Arévalo, the Seed Movement candidate, disputed the charges; the prosecutor in question has been sanctioned by the United States for hampering anti-corruption work in the country. As of Thursday afternoon, it was still unclear how the next steps of the election will proceed

Countless coca. The United States has suspended its satellite monitoring of coca crops in Colombia. According to El Tiempo, the decision was made in part because the United Nations also conducts such monitoring, which is expensive. But it also appears to reflect a slight adjustment in Washington’s regional strategy on drugs, which had previously advocated forced coca eradication that at times involved spraying herbicide across the Colombian countryside.

Such an approach has been tried over decades to little long-term effect. Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s administration last year suspended Colombia’s own eradication efforts, calling for a more holistic strategy to combat drug trafficking and rural poverty. Petro urged Washington to shift its approach, too.

Political theater pioneer. This month, Brazilians remembered playwright and director Zé Celso, who died on July 6 at age 86. Celso was one of the founders of a pioneering political theater group that has run from 1958 to the present day. He and his colleagues established Teatro Oficina in São Paulo only a few years before Brazil’s dictatorship began in 1964, and used their early productions to poke fun at the military regime.

Visually, they embraced bright colors, exuberance, and irreverence, abandoning a more somber style of theater that was seen as highbrow and serious. “Zé Celso substituted good taste for the truth,” Folha de S. Paulo’s Gustavo Zeitel wrote.

Celso oversaw a 1990s remodel of his São Paulo theater by one of Brazil’s most famous architects, Lina Bo Bardi. The theater is long and narrow, with spectators sitting on scaffolding-like platforms along the length of the stage. Celso worked to bring politics to the stage until the end of his life, most recently working on a theater adaptation of the manifesto of spiritual leader Davi Kopenawa of the Yanomami Indigenous group.

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The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) turned 50 last week. To mark the anniversary, leaders held a summit in Trinidad and Tobago and announced what they called a landmark initiative: a plan for all nationals of CARICOM countries to be able to move, live, and work freely across the bloc by March 2024. The regime would resemble the kind of free movement available to EU nationals.

Currently, such free movement is allowed only for 12 categories of skilled professionals—including nurses and teachers—within the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME) countries. (CSME includes most CARICOM countries but excludes others, such as Haiti.) CARICOM citizens outside of those worker categories can stay in other countries for six months without a visa.

CARICOM chair and Dominica Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit said in the announcement that “there are some legal issues that we have to examine” before the measure takes effect. Reporting by Loop and the Miami Herald as well as comments by Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley suggested that Haiti will not be part of the agreement. Loop cited Haiti’s “humanitarian and security issues”; at the summit, Mottley said the new arrangement would aim to guarantee that “a minimum level of rights” such as health care and education are available to migrants in participating countries.

Looking back at 50 years of CARICOM, some leaders reflected publicly that they wished the bloc had achieved more. Antigua and Barbuda diplomat Ronald Sanders lamented unrealized dreams of greater economic integration in a column marking the anniversary. Still, he wrote, the vision of a Caribbean “where borders are irrelevant, and collective strength prevails” is still alive.

CARICOM’s announcement is noteworthy at a time when some other countries in the Western hemisphere are taking steps to restrict migration. Mexico, for its part, ordered agencies in May to stop giving migrants and refugees permits to be in the country and replaced some humanitarian permissions with expulsion notices, though the New York Times reported that some of those measures were later softened.

In the Caribbean’s CSME, however, existing movement permissions—especially the six-month visa-free stay—have already helped countries react better to climate-driven natural disasters, a new Migration Policy Institute report found.