Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

Below, we preview some of the biggest stories we’ll be following in 2024, including Brazil’s G-20 agenda, Mexico’s presidential election, and an expected oil boom across the region.

How Much Can Brazil Chew?

Brazil took up the rotating presidency of the G-20 this month, a role it will hold through November 2024. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his administration now have a new platform to show off their ambitious foreign-policy aspirations after the hits and misses of 2023.

Though most countries around the world celebrated Lula’s January inauguration after the environmental destruction and election denialism of his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro, some Western partners grew uneasy when Brazil challenged their approach to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

In April, when Ukraine was said to be gearing up for its spring counteroffensive, Lula suggested mediating an end to the war that would involve some Ukrainian territorial concessions to Russia. Then, in October—as temporary president of the United Nations Security Council—Brazil tried to broker a resolution for increased humanitarian aid to Gaza that was vetoed by the United States. In December, Lula had more luck facilitating a non-aggression pledge after Venezuela’s threats to annex a large chunk of Guyana.

The G-20 is traditionally focused on economic issues, however, and Lula’s agenda for the body hews to that tradition. Brazil’s G-20 leadership will test how much global south countries can advance reforms to global sovereign debt and development lending systems.

Brazilian Finance Minister Fernando Haddad said he aimed to pick up where previous G-20 president India left off—with efforts to increase the funds that multilateral development banks loan to poorer countries for climate, infrastructure, and other projects. An expert group that India convened this year laid out technical steps to make this possible, and the World Bank and Asian Development Bank in September announced plans to increase their lending by billions. Now, Brazil is setting up its own task force to study how additional multilateral development banks can take similar steps.

As G-20 president, Brazil also hopes to improve the process by which highly indebted countries seek debt relief and restructuring, Haddad said. A G-20-designed system launched during the COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t been used much, because it became bogged down in disagreements over how various lenders should share the burden of restructuring. Haddad suggested streamlining this process and even introducing debt swap arrangements where governments’ financial savings would be used on health spending.

Additionally, Lula plans to use his G-20 meetings to advance talks about reforming the global tax system that have started but not concluded in other international fora, such as the U.N. General Assembly and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Brazil’s tenure as G-20 president could be impacted by big-ticket guests. The G-20 leaders’ summit in November was missing both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Putin did not attend the meeting amid tensions with Western countries over the war in Ukraine; the International Criminal Court also has a warrant out for his arrest, though India is not a member of the court. Xi stayed home to prioritize domestic issues. (China and India are in some ways strategic rivals.)

It’s hard to reform the global financial architecture without Beijing’s full participation: China is the world’s second-largest economy and a leading creditor to many debt-distressed nations. Brazil has friendlier political and deeper economic ties with China than India does.

Unlike India, Brazil is a member of the International Criminal Court, and would technically be obliged to arrest Putin if he visits the country. But Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira said this week that Brazil would be “very content” if Putin attends the 2024 leaders’ summit and would not detain him, echoing a comment Lula made in September and later walked back. While Brazil might hope including Putin in person at the G-20 will demonstrate Lula’s capacity to convene diverse actors, doing so risks diverting the focus of the forum away from Brazil’s tangible objectives.

Overall, Brazil has said that its three overarching goals for the G-20 presidency are to promote sustainable development and global governance reform as well as to fight global inequality. Those aims can “reconnect the global south and global north,” Haddad said in a speech. The year ahead will show how much consensus Lula’s Brazil can generate.

FP’s Most Read This Week

• No, Putin Is Not One of the Year’s ‘Winners’ by Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian
• America Is a Heartbeat Away From a War It Could Lose by A. Wess Mitchell
• The Trouble With a Cease-Fire by Raphael S. Cohen

More Stories We’re Watching

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador attends a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, and U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar, in addition to other officials, at the National Palace in Mexico City on Dec. 27.Rodrigo Oropeza/AFP via Getty Images

Migration policy under fire. Around half a million migrants crossed the jungle border between Colombia and Panama this year, more than double last year’s level. The increased flows of northbound migration through the Western hemisphere have prompted new international cooperation on migration policy. Still, many of the new initiatives are ad hoc and fall short of the comprehensive, adequately funded programs experts say are necessary to receive asylum-seekers and economic migrants in host countries.

Political changes could also complicate matters. Mexico holds a presidential vote in June 2024. And ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November next year, Republican lawmakers are pushing for a border crackdown in exchange for new war funding for Ukraine and Israel. U.S. President Joe Biden is reportedly weighing new steps to reduce the numbers of undocumented migrants who arrive at and cross the U.S.-Mexico border, including making it more difficult to claim asylum in the United States and decreasing the number of people allowed humanitarian parole. Republican frontrunners for the presidency generally suggest they would implement even more restrictive measures.

The election-era pressure in Washington appears likely to escalate two ongoing dynamics in hemispheric politics.

If the past is any indicator, Mexico—in exchange for deploying its security forces and other state authorities to physically block the northward progress of migrants—will extract political concessions from the United States. On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken held closed-door migration talks with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico City. López Obrador said “important” deals had been reached but did not disclose details.

Second, Washington may lean on other countries in the region to erect further barriers to northward mobility. In 2022 and 2023, U.S. pressure led countries farther south, such as Costa Rica and Belize, to implement new requirements for migrants of certain nationalities to carry visas. At the same time, Washington introduced some new legal pathways for migration.

Lindon Peter, a resident of Arau village in Guyana, observes part of the country’s Essequibo region on Dec. 11.Roberto Cisneros/AFP via Getty Images

Oil politics is back. In 2024, Brazil and Guyana are expected to be among the countries in the world with the biggest increases in oil production. If Washington does not reimpose sanctions on the sector, Venezuela could experience a boom, too. New Argentine President Javier Milei has also said he plans steps that would increase shale gas production at the Vaca Muerta oil field.

On the other side of the environmental coin, Colombia’s abrupt stop to oil production—and attempts to craft a green industrial policy in its place—will be put to the test.

These shifts in oil production will impact countries’ financial bottom lines, environmental reputations, and—to varying extents—geopolitics. Guyana’s oil bonanza appears to have contributed to a recent threat by Venezuela to annex part of the country. Brazil may soon join oil cartel OPEC+ as an observer, bringing it in closer dialogue with the Middle East’s petrostates. Restarting Venezuelan oil production was a motivation for the recent thaw in U.S.-Venezuelan relations.

A decade-long period of high oil prices that began in the mid-2000s brought in huge windfalls for oil-exporting governments in Latin America, but many countries did not invest revenues well enough to prepare for the price slump that eventually came in 2015. Acting differently this time would be prudent—but is by no means guaranteed.

For Brazil in particular, the oil boom may strain the Lula administration’s alliance with famed conservationist Marina Silva, who is currently serving as environment minister. This month, Silva told the Financial Times that Brazil would need to consider putting a ceiling on its oil production. That’s at odds with state oil company Petrobras’s plans for the country to become the world’s fourth-largest oil producer by 2030.

A man displays a newspaper during a demonstration against the new government of Argentine President Javier Milei in front of the National Congress of Argentina in Buenos Aires on Dec. 21.Luis Robayo/AFP via Getty Images

Leadership changes. In June 2024, Mexico will hold a presidential election. While the once-every-six-years event will be closely watched, polls suggest few surprises—and a likely victory for Claudia Sheinbaum, López Obrador’s protégé. Sheinbaum served as the mayor of Mexico City until this summer, when she stepped down to run for president. Her comments so far suggest she would continue López Obrador’s flagship policies of increased support to poor Mexicans through cash transfers, hikes in the minimum wage, and expanded state control of the economy.

In a sense, Mexico’s leadership change is a red herring when trying to pinpoint the most consequential political shifts in the region next year. The leadership change most likely to shake up Latin American politics in 2024 is Argentina’s, under Milei.

The next few months will reveal the early impacts of Milei’s sweeping agenda to deregulate and privatize Argentina’s economy, a process that is well underway via executive actions to remove some import controls, fire public-sector employees, and devalue the currency. The coming year will also demonstrate how Milei’s reforms impact neighboring economies—as well as already-tenuous regional cooperation.