Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Mexico holds judicial elections, Haiti’s interim government hires a U.S. mercenary service, and an Ecuadorian grandma gains a global online following.
Mexico Remakes the Courts
On Sunday, Mexico became the first country in the world to begin the process of electing all of its judges, including those on the country’s Supreme Court. The election has transformed the top court, which will now be stacked with judges who have ties to Mexico’s ruling Morena party. That outcome appears to confirm critics’ fears that the election could erode judicial independence.
The idea of electing judges has been controversial since former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador first formally proposed it last year. López Obrador echoed the broadly held public sentiment in Mexico that the country’s justice system is ineffective; a 2023 study found that more than 90 percent of crimes such as homicides and disappearances go unsolved.
López Obrador may have also had more personal motivations. Throughout his six-year term, he developed hostility toward the Supreme Court, which was one of the biggest checks on his government and struck down several of his desired reforms.
But López Obrador’s proposed solution for Mexico’s judiciary—nationwide popular elections for judges—alarmed rule-of-law experts and international investors. His judicial overhaul, passed during his last month in office last September, loosened requirements for becoming a judge and gave government committees a hefty role in vetting candidates.
The sheer number of candidates in the June 1 election meant that it was difficult for voters to make informed decisions. Depending on the district, ballots often included hundreds of candidates vying for multiple positions.
Some voters took cues from electoral cheat sheets distributed around the country. Although the documents were of unclear origin, they often favored candidates aligned with Morena. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said that they were not an official party product and ordered the electoral authority to take action against them.
Many Mexican opposition leaders, meanwhile, called on people to boycott the vote. The election saw low turnout of around 13 percent. Some voters spoiled their ballots or voted blank.
In all, more than 2,600 judges were elected. Of the nine Supreme Court justices chosen, three were already sitting members appointed under López Obrador and at least three previously worked for Morena politicians. In comparison, López Obrador only nominated five to the previous court, which had 11 justices instead of nine.
The election produced Mexico’s second-ever Indigenous president of the top court—Hugo Aguilar, a lawyer from the southern state of Oaxaca and former official in López Obrador’s government. (The first Indigenous head of the court was Benito Juárez, who served more than 150 years ago and then became president.)
To critics, Mexico’s election downgraded judicial independence—and thereby a key check on executive power. Though opinion surveys suggest that around half of Mexicans approved of the election, the process was excoriated by local and international business elites, bar associations, and democracy experts. Key trade partners such as the United States and Canada also voiced concerns.
When he was still a senator last year, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio signed a bipartisan statement warning that Mexico’s judicial overhaul could violate the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which calls for fair legal treatment of business between the three countries.
Now that the overhaul has been implemented, it could disadvantage Mexico during a review of the deal that is due to occur next year or sooner. (Some experts argue that the Trump administration has also violated the treaty with its tariffs.)
Sheinbaum has maintained that the judicial election makes Mexico more democratic. And some Mexican political observers have argued that the Morena-linked judges elected to the Supreme Court are not monolithic and could defy the party in the future, as analyst Viri Ríos wrote in Milenio and pollster Jorge Buendía said in comments to Bloomberg.
To others, the damage is done. Lawyer Emiliano Polo wrote in Foreign Policy last week that the judicial reform was “Mexico’s most profound and damaging political shift in decades.” Journalist Alex González Ormerod wrote in The Mexico Political Economist that uncertainty around the judicial overhaul “has arguably affected the Mexican economy more than even the return of Donald Trump to the [U.S.] presidency. It has frozen investments and cooled growth forecasts.”
On one point, there was more consensus among observers: By sitting out the election, Mexico’s opposition missed a chance to fight for political space. They emerged from the judicial election with less influence, while Morena now has even more.
Upcoming Events
Friday, June 6: Argentine President Javier Milei visits Italy before traveling on through Europe and to Israel.
Friday, June 6, to Monday, July 9: Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva visits France.
What We’re Following
The future of the OAS. Outgoing Organization of American States (OAS) Secretary-General Luis Almagro issued a warning as he departed his position last week, telling the Financial Times that the worst thing that can happen to Latin America “is to be forced to choose” between the United States and China.
Ending the region’s trade with China would yield “a very violent regional economic disaster,” Almagro said. Even so, the Trump administration appears to be trying to push back against Chinese economic engagement in Latin America.
Almagro, who is Uruguayan, had a front seat to the thorniest episodes of regional diplomacy in the past decade. After aligning with the first Trump administration’s hard-line position against the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in 2018, Almagro was expelled from his leftist political coalition in Uruguay.
The OAS’s incoming secretary-general, Albert Ramdin of Suriname, is now faced with balancing U.S priorities with those of Washington’s Latin American neighbors.
The national flags of Taiwan and Guatemala are seen outside of the Presidential Office Building, where Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te was scheduled to receive Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo, in Taipei on June 5.I-Hwa Cheng/AFP via Getty Images
Regional start-ups get attention in Asia. Colombian electromobility start-up Unergo and Chilean corporate automation start-up Rocketbot were selected to participate in a Taiwanese government-supported training and networking program for young companies that wrapped up late last month at Taiwan’s National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University.
Unergo facilitates charging and battery swaps for electric motorcycles and cars. Rocketbot offers automated digital systems for a range of different companies and announced that it was expanding operations in Asia following the training program.
Historically, Latin American start-ups have grown in the Western Hemisphere rather than in Asia. Though the governments of Chile and Colombia do not maintain formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan, many of the countries that do are in Latin America and the Caribbean. Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo visited Taipei this week.
Unconventional influencer. Not all social media stars are young and hip. Last month, popular website TasteAtlas featured a video from Ecuadorian cook Nievita Zambrano, a grandmother from the coastal province of Manabí who has tens of thousands of followers on YouTube. Zambrano was making cheesy cassava bread, or pan de almidón.
Ecuador tapped Zambrano to be its representative last year at the international Meeting of Ibero-American Cooks. Zambrano’s videos share what she calls the “flavors and secrets of the countryside,” including chicken with peanut sauce cooked in banana leaves, lobster and shrimp soup, and sweets made from the pechiche fruit. Her grandson Yeiko manages her online presence.
Question of the Week
Which of the following is not a traditional soup from Latin America and the Caribbean?
It comes from Romania.
FP’s Most Read This Week
- How Russia Responds to Ukraine’s Drone Attack Depends on Trump by John Haltiwanger
- Putin Is a Gambler, not a Grand Master by Anastasia Edel
- Actually, Trump Has a Coherent Vision by Thomas Carothers
In Focus: Haiti’s Crisis, Privatized
A burnt-out car is seen during a protest against insecurity in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on April 16.Clarens Siffroy/AFP via Getty Images
As multinational forums such as the United Nations show scant progress toward combating Haiti’s security crisis, the country’s interim government has turned to private security contractors, the New York Times reported last week.
A company run by Erik Prince, whose firm Blackwater acted in the Iraq War, has reportedly begun providing services in Haiti. These include drone attacks on suspected gang members. Human rights defender Pierre Espérance told the Times that the drone attacks have killed more than 200 people since March.
Hiring Prince’s contractors “sets a dangerous precedent for the future of international peacekeeping and security,” Christopher Sabatini and Robert Greenhill argued in Foreign Policy this week, calling Haiti’s crisis “a microcosm of the failures of the current global system.” They wrote that Russia and China’s blockage of a U.N. security mission in Haiti undermined their claims to lead the global south.
Still, Sabatini and Greenhill continued, there was still space and time for different countries—including Kenya, which currently leads a multilateral mission to Haiti, and others in the global south—to step up and make a medium-term commitment to Haiti’s security.
Haitians got more ominous news on Wednesday night, when Trump added them to his list of 12 nationalities barred from entering the United States under a new travel ban. Already, the Haitian diaspora had been exasperated with the Trump administration for stripping Haitian migrants of protections from deportation.
Rubio, who was born in Florida to Cuban immigrants, “should know better,” Miami doctor Arthur Fournier wrote in the Miami Herald earlier in the week.