Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Haiti inaugurates a new interim leader, Bolivia readies for presidential elections, and the legacy of rock endures in Argentina.
Who Holds Power in Port-au-Prince?
Haiti’s political and security crisis entered a new chapter last week. Laurent Saint-Cyr, a wealthy businessman, took over the rotating leadership of the country’s transitional government.
Saint-Cyr represents Haiti’s private sector, while other council members come from civil society, government, and politics. Saint-Cyr is slated to stay in the position until a new president takes office in February following an election slated for November.
The latest political handover was tense. A coalition of gangs has expanded its presence in and around Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince since the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. As last week’s transition approached, gang leader Jimmy Chérizier—who is known by his nom de guerre, Barbecue—threatened to seize several buildings in a government takeover.
A U.S.-backed, Kenyan-led multinational security force stationed in Haiti said that it defeated a plot to “disrupt national stability and render the country ungovernable” early on Aug. 7. It’s been more than a year since the mission deployed to Haiti to help the police fight gangs, but it has far fewer reinforcement fighters and less money than planned.
Saint-Cyr acknowledged that current strategies to address Haiti’s insecurity were falling short and called for more international personnel and financial support for security forces. Whether due to manpower shortages or tactical failures, the security mission has not been able to significantly wrest back territorial control back from Haiti’s gangs.
More than 1.3 million people in the country of around 11 million are internally displaced, the highest number in the country’s history. Both gangs and the police have been accused of extrajudicial killings; the United Nations reported more than 870 cases of alleged human rights violations involving law enforcement officers between April and June.
Haiti is the least-funded plan of all of the U.N.’s humanitarian appeals this year, a U.N. official said this week. In addition to U.S. foreign aid cuts, other donors appear to have deprioritized the crisis. Around half of all Haitians are suffering from acute food insecurity. In June, the U.N. listed Haiti as one of the world’s worst hunger hot spots, alongside Gaza and South Sudan.
Some Haitians met Saint-Cyr’s arrival with skepticism. He is a member of the country’s business elite, which has often borne the brunt of public anger in recent years for accusations of corruption and concentrating resources outside of the hands of working-class Haitians.
Saint-Cyr pledged to “restore state authority” and said that security would be a top priority under his leadership, although he did not immediately provide policy details. As his appeal to foreign donors illustrates, what he can accomplish may depend on outside aid.
On Tuesday, the United States debuted its latest policy to address violence in Haiti, unsealing an indictment against Barbecue for sanctions violations. The U.S. State Department announced a $5 million reward for information that could lead to his capture.
A broader push to ramp up international security support to the country may be underway. The Organization of American States (OAS) is studying a potential $1.4 billion security and humanitarian support mission that would be backed by the European Union, Politico reported earlier this month.
OAS Secretary-General Albert Ramdin has called addressing the crisis in Haiti a “moral obligation.”
Upcoming Events
Saturday, Aug. 16: Tropical Storm Erin is forecast to approach Puerto Rico.
Sunday, Aug. 17: Bolivia holds general elections.
What We’re Following
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto and Peruvian President Dina Boluarte watch children waving flags of both of their countries before their meeting at the Merdeka Palace in Jakarta on Aug. 11.Bay Ismoyo/AFP via Getty Images
New trade deal. Indonesia and Peru signed a free trade deal in Jakarta this week as Dina Boluarte became the first Peruvian president to conduct a state visit to the archipelago. It was the latest move in Latin American countries’ gradual trade and political pivot to Asia. Lima expects its exports of products such as cocoa, blueberries, fertilizers, and zinc to rise as a result of the deal. Indonesia’s top exports to Peru are cars, shoes, and biodiesel.
Though the agreement could help Indonesia offset the pain from U.S. tariffs of 19 percent, it has been in the making since before U.S. President Donald Trump took office. It took just 14 months for negotiators to hash out the agreement. Indonesia has also applied to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which counts Peru as a member.
U.S.-Mexico relations. On Tuesday, Mexico conducted its second batch of high-profile inmate transfers to the United States this year. Twenty-six people accused on charges of links to cartels were moved to U.S. facilities.
The handover followed a New York Times report last week that Trump had ordered the U.S. Defense Department to prepare plans for military operations on foreign soil against cartels that Washington has designated as terrorist organizations.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum responded to the report, saying that a military “invasion” would be unacceptable, but that Mexico would continue to cooperate with the United States on security issues. U.S. concerns over drug trafficking are part of ongoing bilateral talks with Mexico that also cover tariffs, which the United States has paused until the end of October.
Argentine rock camp. Winter break has just wrapped up for many students across South America. In Buenos Aires, that means that rock camp did, too. Rock fever never died in Argentina. Though many of the country’s most famous balladeers are mullet-haired men, women are increasingly growing in the scene.
One volunteer-run workshop in Buenos Aires’s working-class outskirts caters to girls aged 7 to 16. The budding rockers at “Amplified Girls” took classes not only in guitar, voice lessons, and how to make a fanzine, but also in self-defense and the sometimes-overlooked history of women in rock and roll.
Volunteers came from Spain, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru as well as Argentina to help with the camp, Cenital wrote. They are part of a parallel form of international relations: the Girls Rock Camp Alliance, which stretches across the world.
The genre is here to stay in Latin America. “I’m so strong that your opinion doesn’t matter,” sang one nascent group—the Empowered Aliens—at the camp’s final show last month.
Question of the Week
Which of the following rock artists is not Argentine?
Café Tacuba is from Mexico.
FP’s Most Read This Week
- Why Everyone in Washington Is a ‘Realist’ Now by Michael Hirsh
- The Next Israel-Iran War Is Coming by Trita Parsi
- Trump’s State Department Reforms Are Necessary by Matthew Kroenig
In Focus: Bolivia’s Ballot
A poster calling for people to vote in the Bolivia’s presidential elections is pictured in La Paz on Aug. 12.Martin Bernetti/AFP via Getty Images
On Sunday, Bolivians will vote in the first round of an unusually wide-open presidential election.
Since the mid-2000s, politics in the country have revolved around the Movement for Socialism party of former President Evo Morales and opposition to its big-state policies. Morales served three terms and ran unsuccessfully for a fourth, later boosting a protégé to the presidency.
Morales has since split with his successor and is legally barred from running again. He has refused to endorse a candidate in this race, calling on his supporters to instead spoil their ballots. Bolivia is experiencing a deep economic crisis, with fuel shortages and more than 20 percent annual inflation.
It appears to be the perfect recipe for a right-wing opposition candidate to win. But divisions on the right and a large numbers of undecided voters have injected uncertainty into the race.
A swing to the right could significantly shift Bolivia’s foreign policy, which in recent years has embraced China, Russia, and Latin American regionalism. Bolivia fully joined the South American trade bloc Mercosur last year. A new president could also move to open Bolivia’s vast and mostly untapped lithium reserves, currently state-controlled, to more private development.
The two right-wing candidates who lead many polls, Samuel Doria Medina and Jorge Quiroga, have each run for president three times before. Doria Media is a businessman who styles himself after Argentine President Javier Milei, and Quiroga is a former bank official who served as vice president and briefly as president.
On the left, polling is less definitive, in part due to Morales’s call to spoil ballots rather than voting for an alternative leftist candidate. Sunday’s election will demonstrate the effectiveness of that move.