Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: A series of high-profile rulings impact elections in Brazil, Guatemala, and Venezuela; the Mercosur summit reinforces the bloc’s fault lines; and Colombia is shaken by a bombing in Ukraine.

Over the past week, courts and legal authorities issued a string of high-profile decisions related to elections in Venezuela, Guatemala, and Brazil. In Latin America, accusations—and evidence—of politically motivated court rulings are common, and the verdicts could impact electoral integrity in the region.

In Venezuela, the comptroller’s office announced last Friday that María Corina Machado, a former lawmaker and one of the country’s most popular opposition figures, has been barred from holding public office for 15 years and is therefore ineligible to run in the 2024 general elections. The comptroller cited Machado’s support for fellow opposition figure Juan Guaidó in his claim to be the rightful president of Venezuela beginning in 2019. In 2015, authorities had issued a yearlong political ban against Machado on grounds that she failed to declare some of her assets while serving in Venezuela’s National Assembly—claims she rejected at the time.

Machado immediately slammed the decision, calling it a “farse.” Countries including the United States also issued criticism. Even Colombian President Gustavo Petro—who has moved to normalize relations between Bogotá and Caracas—objected, tweeting that administrative authorities should not take away citizens’ political rights. Fellow opposition presidential hopeful and two-time presidential candidate Henrique Capriles had already been banned for 15 years in 2017 on grounds he disputed.

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and the opposition are currently deadlocked in frozen negotiations that the opposition hopes can secure conditions for the 2024 elections. If those talks resume, the opposition could attempt to negotiate lifting the political bans in exchange for international sanctions relief. But the clock is ticking, and the window for such deals won’t last forever, European Union foreign-policy chief Josep Borrell—who has encouraged a return to negotiations—wrote earlier this year. For now, Maduro appears to be doubling down on repression rather than offering concessions.

Another decision that caused a flurry of international condemnations in recent days was a Saturday order by Guatemala’s top court to suspend certification of the country’s June 25 election results following complaints from several political parties. The allegations of irregularities triggered a partial re-examination of votes at some polling places. The plaintiff parties were all opponents of anti-corruption party Seed Movement, which unexpectedly made it to the runoff election.

Election observers from the Organization of American States (OAS) and European Union said the vote should be respected; the United States and United Nations Secretary General António Guterres also voiced concerns about the ruling. By mid-week, a diverse chorus of local actors inside Guatemala added their voices to the protest. They included Guatemala’s chamber of commerce, a famous business mogul, a centrist presidential candidate, and an important Indigenous group.

As of Thursday afternoon, it was still not clear if the first-round results would be allowed to stand without a broad recount. Seed Movement candidate Bernardo Arévalo said at a demonstration against the ruling earlier this week that “we are not going to allow the will of the people of Guatemala to be cheated.”

The decisions from Venezuelan and Guatemalan authorities earned criticism from international watchdogs, who claimed the rulings threatened electoral integrity. In Brazil, meanwhile, a closely watched decision last Friday by the nation’s top electoral court prompted no such condemnation. By a 5-to-2 vote, the tribunal’s judges ruled that former President Jair Bolsonaro cannot run for public office until 2030 because he abused his power to undermine the credibility of Brazil’s electronic voting machines.

Bolsonaro spread unsubstantiated claims of fraud involving the machines before last October’s presidential election and stalled on publicly conceding defeat afterward. The particular case decided last week focused on his criticism of voting machines in a July 2022 presentation to foreign ambassadors, which was broadcast on public television.

Among Brazil’s mainstream legal community, few scholars spoke out against the ruling; the Order of Attorneys in Brazil has been rebuking Bolsonaro’s attacks on the voting machines since before the election. Many said the case was an appropriate use of the distinct powers of Brazil’s top electoral court, a body composed of a mix of Supreme Court judges, other federal judges, and Supreme Court-nominated lawyers.

“This was constitutional and necessary punishment,” conservative newspaper Estadão wrote in an editorial.

While dozens of lawmakers aligned with Bolsonaro signed a petition in his defense, the ruling did not prompt mass protests by his supporters. Some of Bolsonaro’s former high-profile allies, such as his former justice minister, Sergio Moro, remained conspicuously silent.

Brazil’s judiciary is not immune from the kind of political creep that seems evident in Venezuela and Guatemala. A justice that Bolsonaro appointed to Brazil’s Supreme Court voted in his defense in last week’s case, and new President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva recently nominated his former lawyer to become a Supreme Court justice. Other former presidents have also named political allies to the bench. Even so, in the electoral court ruling, Brazil’s judiciary showed more independence than the others that made the news this week.

It was a justice appointed by the center-right former President Michel Temer, after all, who became the figurehead of judicial efforts to rein in Bolsonaro’s attacks on election integrity. Last Friday, Justice Alexandre de Moraes said that the ruling against Bolsonaro would affirm “faith in democracy.”

Saturday, July 8: Lula and Petro meet to discuss Amazon rainforest protection in Leticia, Colombia.

Monday, July 17, to Tuesday, July 18: Leaders of EU and Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) countries attend a summit in Brussels.

Sunday, August 13: Argentina holds primary elections.

BYD in Brazil. Chinese automaker BYD announced on Tuesday that its first electric car factory outside of Asia will be in the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia. The site being considered was formerly home to a Ford plant, which closed in 2021 amid a post-pandemic economic slump and company restructuring. BYD said it plans to invest over $600 million in the industrial park, which is due to begin operations by 2024. It will produce hybrid and electric cars as well as processed lithium and iron phosphate for international export.

The announcement comes amid Brazilian efforts to attract Chinese investment in its manufacturing and green tech sectors. The Bahian state government offered tax benefits to BYD similar to those it had offered to Ford, Folha de S. Paulo reported. The new complex is projected to generate 5,000 new direct jobs.

Bolivian deforestation. A new report released by the World Resources Institute last week revealed that Bolivia had the third-largest area of primary tropical forest in the world cut down in 2022, after Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Around 9 percent of total global primary rainforest lost last year occurred in Bolivia, according to the study.

Unlike in Brazil, where most deforestation is illegal, Bolivia’s government allows farmers in some cases to clear forest land to secure land titles, Marlene Quintanilla of the Fundación Amigos de la Naturaleza told the New York Times. Much of the land cleared in Bolivia is used for soy farming.

Colombians in Ukraine. Colombians experienced the war in Ukraine in a newly personal way when a famous writer, a journalist, and a former official who was involved in the peace process with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) were wounded in a Russian bombing in the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk on June 27.

The writer and former official were in Ukraine as part of a Latin American civil society campaign to bring visibility to Russia’s war in the country. They were traveling with Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina, who was more severely hurt in the attack and died over the weekend. The events caused Petro—who has voted against Russia at the U.N. General Assembly but has resisted joining the Western sanctions campaign against Moscow—to issue his first vocal statement condemning Russian attacks on civilians.

Héctor Abad, the writer, wrote a deeply personal account in his column in El Espectador on Sunday, in which he told of starting to read one of Amelina’s novels while she lay in the hospital. It features a dog that looks to the past and children who look to the future, he wrote—wishing Amelina could survive to see the future the children in her book hope for.

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On Tuesday, all four leaders of the Mercosur customs union countries—Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay—met for the first time since 2019 in the Argentine city of Puerto Iguazú; Bolivia also attended the summit as a guest. Summits were held virtually in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic, and Bolsonaro skipped the 2022 meeting; Lula, who was inaugurated in January, took over Mercosur’s rotating presidency from Argentina this week and has vowed to unify the bloc during his six-month tenure.

No such unity was immediately on display, however. For one, Mercosur is divided on how to respond to the political crisis in Venezuela. Both Uruguayan President Luis Lacalle Pou and Paraguayan President Mario Abdo Benítez—who are conservative—spoke out against the new ban on Machado, the Venezuelan opposition candidate, with Lacalle Pou saying the bloc should give a “clear signal” on the matter. Lula and Argentine President Alberto Fernández—leftists—said they favored dialoguing with Maduro about conditions in the country.

Uruguay also refused to sign Mercosur’s joint communique for the third consecutive year, expressing a desire for the bloc to cut trade deals more quickly and with more partners.

The finalized-but-yet-unsigned trade deal with the European Union is one such agreement. Lacalle Pou called for concluding it without major alterations, while Lula and Fernández criticized a March EU side letter that would require goods traded between the two blocs to be consistent with stricter environmental requirements. Argentina’s foreign minister slammed the side letter as “protectionism,” while Lula said that it introduced a negative dynamic of “mistrust and the threat of sanctions.”

In recent weeks, Lula has also criticized the draft deal’s provisions on government procurement, which would give European companies more chances to compete with Brazilian companies for government contracts on mass purchases for items such as military uniforms and school supplies. Still, the deal currently includes plenty of exceptions in this area, CNN Brasil’s Daniel Rittner wrote last month.

If Mercosur is to make a counterproposal to the EU side letter, the EU-CELAC summit later this month could be an ideal venue to do so. Spain just took over the EU Council presidency on July 1, and left-wing Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has been enthusiastic about increasing Europe’s ties with Latin America. But he faces uncertain prospects in July 23 snap elections.