Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: The leaders of Brazil and Mexico attend the G-7 summit, Bolivia celebrates a syncretic religious festival, and Nicaragua remembers its first female president.
Lula, Sheinbaum Convene in Canada
Two Latin American leaders attended this week’s G-7 summit in Kananaskis, Canada: Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum.
Lula is a familiar face at the G-7. He was in his first term as president when the grouping of wealthy countries, then-known as the G-8, was beginning to expand its annual dialogues to include guests from developing nations in 2003. At the time, the group was responding to criticism that it had become too exclusive.
Lula has generally used his G-7 appearances to call for a greater role for the global south in international politics. At the 2003 summit, he argued for the creation of a fund to fight world hunger. Though the idea did not make it into that year’s official communiqué, a similar proposal became a reality in 2024, when Lula hosted the G-20 summit in Rio de Janeiro.
Other ideas that Lula defended at past G-7 summits were endorsed more quickly. He called for rich countries to remove agriculture subsidies that Brazil viewed as unfair competition, an issue that was mentioned in the 2008 summit declaration. And he voiced support for a robust deal to fight the climate crisis well before the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015.
This year, Lula suggested that wealthy countries should increase their climate funding to poorer ones and that all countries should tax their super-rich residents more. In a positive signal for Lula’s agenda, ahead of the G-7 summit, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney agreed to attend the United Nations climate conference in Brazil in November.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, another G-7 guest, also sought a meeting with Lula, a shift from his past criticism of the Brazilian president’s attempts to mediate an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine. However, the meeting was canceled due to what Brazil attributed to a delay in events.
Though Lula has been a regular guest of the G-7, Sheinbaum was attending her first summit. Mexico’s president has been frequently invited to the G-7 since 2003. But Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, never attended a summit. Sheinbaum took office last October.
López Obrador’s absence from the summits was part of his broader reluctance to travel abroad or invest much time in diversifying Mexico’s foreign relations beyond traditional partners, such as the United States and a handful of Latin American countries.
Even though Mexico and Canada negotiated a trilateral trade pact with the United States under López Obrador, Mexico-Canada relations became more strained by the end of his term, former Canadian and Mexican diplomats said on a recent webinar hosted by the Canadian Council for the Americas.
“At the end of the day, it’s Canada’s relationship with the U.S. and Mexico’s relationship with the U.S., which is always going to take precedence over the trilateralization of the agenda,” former Mexican diplomat Arturo Sarukhan said.
Sheinbaum’s trip to Alberta marked a clear break from López Obrador. “In an interdependent world, no country can isolate itself,” she said during a summit session. Sheinbaum held bilateral talks with the leaders of Canada, Germany, India, and the European Union. She was also due to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump before he left the gathering early; the two later spoke by phone.
Carney said that it was “immediately clear” based on Sheinbaum’s G-7 participation that Mexico should be “at the center of international cooperation.” Sheinbaum responded by giving the Canadian prime minister a soccer ball decorated with Indigenous Mexican art, in honor of next year’s FIFA World Cup, which will be co-hosted by Canada, Mexico, and the United States.
Although Carney did not mention “our third co-host, the other president” by name, he said that they “are totally aligned in our excitement, enthusiasm for the beautiful game.”
Upcoming Events
Saturday, June 22: São Paulo hosts the world’s biggest LGBTQ+ pride event.
Wednesday, June 25, to Friday, June 27: The Organization of American States hosts its annual assembly in Antigua and Barbuda.
What We’re Following
Local leaders stuck in Israel. The Israel-Iran conflict that escalated last week has highlighted a relatively low-profile Israeli diplomatic strategy toward Latin American countries. Local officials from Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Guatemala, and Uruguay were temporarily stuck in Israel amid the fighting, which shut down the country’s main international airport.
The Latin American officials had traveled to attend a security expo. The Brazilian officials’ itinerary also included meeting with victims of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack and their families, the Intercept Brasil reported. As some Latin American leaders criticize Israel’s war conduct in Gaza, Israel has sought to further public diplomacy at the subnational level.
Last year, Israel named Lula persona non grata after he said Israel was committing genocide in Gaza and compared its actions to the Holocaust. Many Brazilian mayors on the latest trip hailed from Brazil’s opposition.
Many of the Latin American leaders have since managed to depart via Jordan. Though Brazil’s foreign ministry worked to safely extract the mayors, it also made a point to say they had disobeyed its travel advisory by visiting Israel during a war.
Brazil’s critical minerals. China has tightened rare-earth export controls in recent months, underscoring how important it is that countries have diverse suppliers of the critical minerals. Brazil has the world’s second-largest rare earth reserves after China, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, and Lula says the country is working to expand production.
But that is up from a very low baseline: In 2024, Brazil was responsible for less than 1 percent of global rare-earth mining production, while China was the source of around 70 percent.
Brazil’s national development bank is among the government actors working to ramp up investment in the critical minerals sector. Last week, the bank announced it had selected 56 mineral projects to receive special financing, including 10 involving rare earths; others focus on lithium, graphite, copper, and silicon.
Together, the projects represent over $8 billion in investment. Companies involved hail from countries including Australia, Brazil, Canada, and the United States.
Dancers of the Diablada fraternity perform during the Jesús del Gran Poder religious festival in La Paz, Bolivia, on June 14.Aizar Raldes/AFP via Getty Images
Syncretic religious festival. Last Saturday, Bolivians celebrated the annual festival of Jesus of Great Power, which mixes Catholic and Indigenous Andean traditions with elaborate costume parades and dancing in the streets.
Its origins lie in a painting of Jesus displayed in the 1600s at a Catholic chapel in La Paz, which is Bolivia’s capital today. Eventually, La Paz residents began holding ceremonies in honor of the depicted Jesus’s supposed ability to grant miracles.
Although tens of thousands of people participate in the event annually, this year’s festivities were more subdued in the wake of deadly political demonstrations in Bolivia. Six people died in clashes between supporters and opponents of former President Evo Morales in recent weeks. Parades during the festival featured a black ribbon of mourning and calls for peace.
Question of the Week
In addition to rare earths, another mineral important to the energy transition is copper. Chile has Latin America’s largest copper reserves. Which country has the region’s second largest?
Mexico comes in third, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
FP’s Most Read This Week
- How the Israel-Iran War Might End by Iselin Brady and Daniel Byman
- Israel Can’t Be a Hegemon by Stephen M. Walt
- Israel Is Going for the Death Blow on Iran by Steven A. Cook
In Focus: A Mother of Modern Nicaragua
Nicaraguan President Violeta Chamorro arrives at the National Stadium in San José, Costa Rica, on May 8, 1990. She was there to attend the inauguration ceremony of Costa Rican President-elect Rafael Ángel Calderón Guardia.David Ake/AFP via Getty Images
Last week, Nicaragua said it would sever ties with the United Nations refugee agency, months after doing the same with the International Organization for Migration. The moves added to the slow drip of international isolation and political repression that have defined Nicaragua under authoritarian President Daniel Ortega.
But the death of former Nicaraguan President Violeta Chamorro last Saturday recalled visions of a different time in the country’s history.
Chamorro became politically active in the late 1970s, when she stepped in to run a newspaper that was opposed to Nicaragua’s Somoza dictatorship following the assassination of her husband, who was its editor in chief. The dictatorship ruled from 1936 to 1979, when the leftist Sandinista rebels overthrew Somoza.
Chamorro served for a few months as part of the Sandinista provisional government, but she soon departed amid opposition to the Sandinistas’ Marxist direction and concentration of power. During the 1980s, the Sandinistas fought off armed resistance by U.S.-backed rebels in what is known as the Contra War.
In 1990, Chamorro ran as a unity opposition candidate against Ortega, who represented the Sandinistas. She won a surprise victory and went on to serve a six-year term, helping move the country past civil war and opening the door to more pluralistic politics.
As president, Chamorro oversaw the disarmament of former rebels and established more diverse international relationships, including with the United States. Her administration was followed by two different center-right presidents before Ortega was elected in 2007. He has remained president ever since.
When Chamorro’s daughter, Cristiana, tried to run against Ortega in 2021, she and several other opposition candidates were barred; the Ortega administration later stripped Cristiana of her Nicaraguan citizenship.
Chamorro and her four children lived outside of Nicaragua in the years before her death; her funeral was held in Costa Rica. Another one of her children, journalist Carlos Chamorro, said at the funeral service that his mother’s life served as an example of “hope.”
But in a grave sign for the political climate inside the country, he said, several Nicaraguan priests refrained from mentioning Chamorro’s name during Sunday services because they had been warned by confidantes that they could face consequences for doing so.