Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Latin American countries head to COP28 with green energy ambitions, Venezuela holds an unusual referendum, and the debate on global taxation takes a new stage.

Go Green or Go Home

COP28, the United Nations climate conference, just kicked off in Dubai, and several Latin American countries have arrived with a renewed swagger.

At last year’s conference, Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva attended days after winning a presidential election. He vowed to restore Brazil’s global reputation for climate stewardship by reducing the Amazon rainforest destruction that soared under his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro. Now, Lula has the numbers to prove he kept his word: In Brazil, Amazon deforestation between August 2022 and July 2023 was 22.3 percent lower than the year prior. Brazil isn’t alone in this success: Destruction of the forest also fell during the year to date across Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru, watchdog group Amazon Conservation told Reuters this week.

Lula and Colombian President Gustavo Petro—who often uses the U.N. platform to tout his environmental ideals—are both in attendance, as is Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, whose plans for funneling more climate finance to low-income countries have garnered worldwide praise. Meanwhile, Cuba was elected leader of the G-77 group of developing nations, which often act together as a negotiating bloc in the COP forum.

For many in Latin America and the Caribbean, however, COP28 won’t necessarily be a victory lap. Argentina’s president-elect, Javier Milei, has called climate change a “socialist lie” and reportedly sent no one from his presidential transition team to the conference. Regional giant Mexico is one of many countries in the area that have yet to announce a net-zero goal.

Even Brazil’s record is more complicated than Lula would like to admit. The country is in the midst of a major oil drilling expansion and on Thursday announced it was considering accepting an invitation to join the oil exporters bloc OPEC+.

At this year’s conference, Lula hopes to position himself as a climate leader—despite his country’s oil ambitions—by improving rainforest protection and boosting Brazil’s renewable energy generation.

“If Saudi Arabia is the world’s most important producer of oil and gas, in 10 years Brazil will be known as the Saudi Arabia of green energy,” Lula said on a visit to Riyadh on Wednesday.

However, it will be difficult for Brazil to achieve that on its own. Latin American countries’ high interest rates and lack of accessible finance are holding them back from receiving the investments needed to reach their renewable energy goals, the International Energy Agency (IEA) wrote in a November report.

Latin America is often touted as a potential green energy powerhouse because of its abundant sunshine and wind resources. But the key word is “potential.” Due to high interest rates, the IEA calculated that financing costs make up almost 60 percent of the cost of solar plants that reached final investment decisions in Brazil in 2021, compared to 30 percent in China and 25 percent in Europe. Even in Chile, a financially prudent regional leader in solar energy, the IEA said that, based on current policies, the country will only be able to install around half of the amount of wind and solar capacity it has pledged to by 2050.

If Latin American countries want to speed up the installation of renewables, they do have some options at their disposal. One promising step would be to switch up their subsidy policies. Brazil, for instance, gave more subsidies to fossil fuel companies and consumers in 2021 than the fossil fuel sector paid the government in royalties, according to the Institute of Socioeconomic Studies. Another option is to streamline permitting for wind and solar technologies. Permitting delays have slowed their rollout in Colombia, industry sources told me.

But at the end of the day, fulfilling the region’s green energy potential—or even just meeting countries’ existing targets—will take tens of billions of dollars of additional investment by 2030, the IEA calculated. That cannot be met by national budgets alone; it requires action from wealthy countries, private investors, and powerful financial brokers such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. If COP28 can amplify and simplify the investment process, it will be important progress.

Ahead of the conference, Latin American countries have contributed to debates on green finance for the developing world. Mottley’s climate finance plan, the Bridgetown Initiative, has been publicly praised by COP28 president Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber. In Dubai, Chile and Germany are launching a club of developed and developing countries to cooperate on funding decarbonization. And Brazilian and Colombian officials will participate in a side event on debt and climate.

As Latin America’s still unfulfilled green energy ambition shows, the success of Dubai’s COP will be defined not only by climate targets, but by securing the money to pay for them.

Upcoming Events

Friday, Dec. 1: Brazil assumes rotating presidency of the G-20.

Sunday, Dec. 3: Venezuela hold referendum over the disputed territory of Essequibo.

Thursday, Dec. 7: Brazil hosts a leaders’ summit for Mercosur customs union countries in Rio de Janeiro.

Sunday, Dec. 10: Javier Milei is inaugurated as president of Argentina.

What We’re Following

A man walks by a mural campaigning for a referendum to ask Venezuelans to consider annexing the Guyana-administered region of Essequibo in the 23 de Enero neighborhood in Caracas on Nov. 28. Federico Parra/AFP via Getty Images

Venezuela-Guyana tensions. On Sunday, Venezuela will hold an unusual referendum: Voters will say whether they agree with the administration’s stance that a large chunk of neighboring Guyana belongs to Venezuela.

Guyana’s current boundaries are internationally recognized, but Venezuela has long claimed the Essequibo region—which makes up roughly two-thirds of Guyana—as its own. Venezuela relaxed its objections in recent decades, as South American neighbors and its ally Cuba backed Guyana’s claim to the land. But the decadesold dispute was revived after highly valuable oil was discovered off Guyana’s coast in 2015. Diplomatic tensions are now running high in South America, which has not had a major interstate war in almost a century.

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s scheduling of the referendum is seen largely as a measure to rile up nationalism ahead of next year’s elections; even as their support for Maduro lags, many Venezuelans—even those in the opposition—believe that Essequibo is theirs. Guyana, for its part, has asked the International Court of Justice to intervene to block Sunday’s vote. Officials also have not offered a timetable or specific steps on how they would turn the Essequibo region into a Venezuelan state and grant area residents citizenship should voters approve the proposed measures. Current troop movements do not suggest a Venezuelan invasion of Guyana is imminent, according to security analyst Andrei Serbin Pont, but it’s a definite increase in discursive temperature.

Noboa’s first scandal. Millennial businessman Daniel Noboa was sworn in last Thursday as Ecuador’s next president. Only days old, his administration is already dealing with scandal over disputes between Noboa and his vice president, Verónica Abad.

Frictions between Noboa and Abad, who is further to the political right, were visible in the final days of the campaign when the pair stopped appearing together publicly. Soon after the inauguration, Abad said in an interview that she disagreed with Noboa forming an alliance with Ecuador’s leftist Correísmo movement in order to govern. She also said that she would comply with Noboa’s instructions to travel to Israel and serve in a newly created diplomatic post, telling reporters that she was doing so in order to avoid accusations of abandoning her duties. “They are sending me far away,” she added.

The rift underscores both the persistent power of Correísmo, as well as the low amount of scrutiny that presidential and vice-presidential tickets received in a snap election that focused, above all, on security policy during a rising homicide wave.

A decade of indie music. Bolivian music critic Javier A. Rodríguez-Camacho’s new book, Witnesses to the End of the World, reviews largely Spanish-language indie pop and rock albums released across Latin America, Spain, and the United States between 2010 and 2020. The book covers a decade in which music blog culture gave way to streaming services and their algorithms as the key vehicle for discovering new music. In choosing the decidedly old-school format of a book of album reviews, Rodríguez-Camacho aimed to return to a more traditional style of celebrating music, he told Pitchfork.

By the end of the decade, Latin American indie music was reaching larger and larger audiences, and the collection of reviews brings to life cultural hubs in Chile and Argentina whose sounds gained audiences farther afield. With greater global popularity, indie lyrics increasingly embraced topics that could resonate more internationally, he said. But no matter how popular they became, the singers never lost their local accents.

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In Focus: A Global Tax Treaty

Dockers and union members take part in a global protest with a banner reading “Make Amazon Pay” against U.S. e-commerce giant Amazon, in downtown Santos, Sao Paulo state, Brazil, on Nov. 26, 2021.Nelson Almeida/AFP via Getty Images

Latin American states—especially Colombia—played a major role in rallying support at the United Nations for last week’s passage of an African-led resolution on global taxation.

Colombian economist José Antonio Ocampo, who until April served as the country’s finance minister, helped advocate for the resolution in its early stages, along with a group that includes former Argentine Finance Minister Martín Guzmán and Chilean experts Magdalena Sepúlveda and Ricardo Martner. Ocampo held up Colombia’s own successful tax overhaul during his tenure as important proof that getting closer to tax justice is possible with enough political will. Colombia, Brazil, and Chile also co-organized Latin America and the Caribbean’s first summit on fairer global taxation earlier this year.

The U.N. vote was the latest act in a long-running debate over which international forum should handle rulemaking on global taxation. Historically, such rules have been hashed out at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a group of mostly wealthy countries. In 2021, responding to global criticism that multinational firms were getting away with paying very few taxes in a “race to the bottom” for tax-free jurisdictions, the OECD facilitated a deal between nearly 140 countries that requires them to implement a minimum tax of 15 percent on large multinational firms. The deal also stipulated that countries where firms do not have physical locations but sell their products can also tax those firms.

But the second part of that agreement has still not come to fruition. This failure matters for poorer countries, including those in Latin America, where multinational firms often operate but are not physically located. The passage of the U.N. General Assembly resolution sets new precedent for the United Nations—which is more globally representative than the OECD—to be the forum where such a treaty is discussed. This resolution “is a call to attention for the world to construct multilateral solutions on the basis of truly multilateral principles,” Ocampo and co-authors wrote in El País ahead of the vote.