From the start of the 2016 election campaign, it was all too clear that a Donald Trump presidency would bring dramatic and destabilizing changes to U.S. foreign policy, especially in Latin America. Candidate Trump publicly pummeled the region, fulminating about “rapists” and drug traffickers crossing from Mexico, and vowing to build a wall to keep Central American migrants from “invading” the United States. The rhetoric was jarring in itself, but it was even more startling because it represented such a sharp departure from President Barack Obama’s administration, when even the most critical measures or sanctions came wrapped in diplomatic language. [...]
Latin America and Japan are often thought of as only loosely connected, through a patchwork of free trade agreements and people-to-people ties. But this summer, Chile finalized a deal that indicates a significant convergence of geostrategic interests between Japan and the Americas. After much deliberation, Chile chose an undersea route, backed by Japan, for the first direct fiber-optic cable link between South America and the Asia-Pacific. The Japanese proposal traverses 13,000 kilometers from Chile across the Pacific Ocean—more than 8,000 miles—eventually connecting with existing undersea cables between Japan and Oceania. The new trans-Pacific route would utilize a link between Japan [...]
On Sept. 2, Paraguay’s conservative president, Mario Abdo Benitez, cleared his schedule to fly north to a forest on the edge of a ranch in the province of Concepcion. There, around 220 miles from the capital, Asuncion, he posed for photographs—a handgun visible at his side—in a camp belonging to the Paraguayan People’s Army, or EPP, an armed group with barely 50 members. A combined military-police task force, known as the FTC, had just concluded a “successful operation,” Abdo Benitez posted on Twitter. Soldiers had shot dead two EPP fighters, he announced, and were closing in on the others, who [...]
