Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Brazil’s push for U.N. Security Council reform earns global backing in New York, Google rethinks its plans for a data center in Chile, and Mexico readies for its first female president.
Latin America’s Agenda Goes Global
Rich countries are finally catching up to Brazil. For decades, Brazil has been a prominent advocate for United Nations Security Council reform so that it better represents developing countries. That agenda had advanced little—until this year’s annual U.N. General Assembly summit in New York.
Last week, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield said the United States supports opening official negotiations to make the council more “inclusive, representative, and legitimate,” including adding permanent seats for two African countries and an elected seat for small island developing countries. Then, on Sunday, the overwhelming majority of U.N. member states approved a “Pact for the Future” that vowed to enlarge the council and address underrepresentation.
The moves may reflect declining global confidence in Western leadership during the last year. In January, the BRICS grouping added new members in an implicit rebuke of Western dominance in the international system. Countries have also repeatedly pushed back in U.N. forums against U.S. backing of Israel’s war conduct in Gaza.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said he spearheaded the Pact for the Future to try to show that multilateralism could still achieve progress despite today’s geopolitical divisions. The agreement “points to the direction we should follow,” Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said upon its approval.
While U.N. members broadly celebrated Lula’s push to reform global institutions, he didn’t receive universal praise at the General Assembly. During his opening speech on Tuesday, Lula did not mention Venezuela’s political and human rights crisis or the need to peacefully resolve it. To some observers, this omission amounted to a missed opportunity for the Brazilian president to demonstrate leadership.
The full range of Latin American foreign policy was on display in New York this week.
In his first U.N. General Assembly speech, Argentine President Javier Milei promoted the opposite of Lula’s vision. He denounced the U.N. as a “Leviathan” and criticized the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals as “socialist,” calling for countries to instead embrace free market principles. (Milei’s pro-market posture earned him an invitation to speak at the New York Stock Exchange on Monday.)
Milei’s remarks at the U.N. bolstered his credentials within the global far right, but they drew criticism from Argentine international relations scholars and climate experts. His speech was “an attack on the modern international order that the West has been trying to shape for three centuries,” political scientist Bernabé Malacalza wrote in Clarín.
Mexico did not send its leader to the event, which would have been the last General Assembly for President Andrés Manuel López Obrador before he leaves office next week. López Obrador has taken a reserved stance on the geopolitical debates of the day, preferring to deputize his foreign secretary, who attended this week instead.
Historians Tom Long and Carsten-Andreas Schulz argued in Foreign Policy this week that López Obrador’s position should not be confused with isolationism. Instead, they write, he holds fealty to a long-held Mexican foreign-policy tenet of noninterventionism.
Chilean President Gabriel Boric took a different tack, weighing in on human rights issues in Latin America and beyond. Venezuelans, he said, were facing “a dictatorship that is trying to rob an election, that persecutes its opponents, and that is indifferent to the exile not of thousands but of millions of its citizens.” Boric also discussed the war in Gaza, saying Hamas had committed “terrorism” and Israel, “genocidal conduct.”
Leaders addressed domestic issues in their U.N. speeches, too. That was especially true in the case of Brazil. Fond of touting his climate progress on the global stage, Lula somberly acknowledged the unusually high number of forest fires blazing across the country, which authorities have struggled to control.
In a more triumphant moment, Lula said governments “should not be intimidated by individuals, companies, or digital platforms that judge themselves above the law”—a nod to the ongoing showdown between Brazil’s Supreme Court and social media platform X. Last week, X conceded that it would comply with court orders to appoint a legal representative in Brazil and take down certain accounts, potentially clearing the way for it to be reinstated in the country.
Upcoming Events
Sunday, Sept. 29, to Wednesday, Oct. 2: Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele is expected to visit Argentina.
Monday, Sept. 30: The U.N. Security Council is due to discuss Haiti.
Tuesday, Oct. 1: Claudia Sheinbaum is inaugurated as president of Mexico.
What We’re Following
Google vs. Chile. Google said it will redraw its plans for a $200 million data center in Chile after environmental regulators questioned its first proposal over water use concerns. The case is an example of successful environmental regulation in the region and a warning that countries’ poor water management could clash with high-tech ambitions. Data centers use large amounts of water for their cooling systems.
Chile is angling to be a tech hub in South America. The government has allocated funding to its start-up scene and is finalizing plans for a major undersea fiber-optic cable to Australia.
Kenyan President William Ruto is greeted by Kenyan police officers as he arrives at Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Sept. 21.Clarens Siffroy/AFP via Getty Images
Ruto visits Haiti. Kenyan President William Ruto visited Haiti last weekend for the first time since Kenyan police forces deployed to the country in June to lead a multinational security mission. Progress has been slow; only a small number of personnel from Jamaica have joined the 400 Kenyan officers. Ruto said 600 more Kenyan forces were on their way, while other countries have collectively pledged more than 2,000 more.
The United States was a major organizing and funding force behind the Kenyan-led mission in Haiti. The intervention received U.N. endorsement, but it has not been classified as a U.N. peacekeeping mission so far. The United States recommended that change this month, which Haiti’s interim president echoed in his U.N. General Assembly address on Thursday.
Folk of the future. For the first time, a song from Chile’s official national genre of cueca—a folk music tradition often featuring an accordion and a harp—has topped the list of the country’s 50 most streamed songs on Spotify. Cueca is often played at national holidays, such as last week’s Independence Day. The holiday partly explains the listening boom for Entremares’s “A Tu Lado,” but even in past years, the genre never registered as this popular.
The traditional dance for cueca includes waving handkerchiefs in the air, circling one’s partner, and stomping boots. Boric did exactly that last week on Independence Day, when he made his first public appearance with his new girlfriend, who danced alongside him.
The rise of cuenca on Chile’s Spotify rankings parallels a similar trend in Mexico, where folk songs are increasingly popular with Generation Z. Mexican megastar Peso Pluma frequently dips into regional Mexican folk music.
Question of the Week
One of Chile’s most famous cueca musicians of all time was ethnomusicologist Violeta Parra, who drew from several other genres. Which famous 1966 Parra song was covered by Argentina’s Mercedes Sosa, Brazil’s Elis Regina, and the United States’ Joan Baez?
FP’s Most Read This Week
- The Hezbollah Pager Explosions Are More Dangerous Than You Think by Howard W. French
- How Does the U.S.-China ‘Cold War’ End? by Lili Pike
- Will Hezbollah Choose to Keep Its Word—or Its Arsenal? by Hanin Ghaddar
In Focus: The Crossover to Claudia
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum attend a military parade for Mexican Independence Day in Mexico City on Sept. 16.Carl de Souza/AFP via Getty Images
Dignitaries from throughout the Western Hemisphere will fly to Mexico City for Claudia Sheinbaum’s presidential inauguration on Tuesday.
Outgoing President López Obrador has been the opposite of a lame duck in his last few weeks in office, taking advantage of an unusual monthlong window where he had a larger congressional majority to push through legislation on his wish list. Mexico’s newly elected Congress took office on Sept. 1, a month prior to Sheinbaum.
Among these reforms, a sweeping judicial overhaul has attracted the most attention. But it’s not the only pillar of López Obrador’s controversial legacy that Sheinbaum will have to navigate.
On Wednesday, Mexican lawmakers greenlit a plan to bring the National Guard—a force created by López Obrador for mostly policing functions—under military control. Security experts have warned against such a move, and Mexico’s Supreme Court blocked it in 2022.
Experts say the military operates using battlefield logic and is less trained to respect civilian rights than a civilian police force. In Mexico, where impunity is high, the military is known for its lack of transparency. López Obrador expanded the military’s role in public security; during his term, total homicides were 45 percent higher compared with the number under his predecessor.
Mexican authorities’ struggle with insecurity was visible in the northwestern state of Sinaloa this month, where more than 50 people have been killed and more than 50 have gone missing as rival cartel factions clash.
Although Sheinbaum is a member of López Obrador’s party, there are indications that she will have a more evidence-driven approach to security policy. In her former post as Mexico City mayor, she oversaw a drop in homicides.
“Conversations I’ve had in recent weeks with analysts in Mexico portray a president who is prepared to take on the security challenge with more than happy rhetoric and press conferences,” the Latin America Risk Report’s James Bosworth wrote of Sheinbaum this month.