Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and his Mexican counterpart, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, don’t agree on much when it comes to foreign policy, even if they sometimes exhibit similar populist styles. Bolsonaro is a right-wing firebrand who rails against “socialism” and was a close regional ally of former U.S. President Donald Trump. As for AMLO, as Lopez Obrador is known, despite his fiscal and social conservatism domestically, he tends to lean left internationally. He is friends with Cuban President Miguel Diaz Canel and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, and he provided asylum to former Bolivian President Evo Morales in 2019 when Morales fled [...]
This week’s Summit of the Americas, hosted by U.S. President Joe Biden in Los Angeles, would have been a challenging affair under the best of circumstances, given the wide-ranging crises the hemisphere faces. But poor planning by the Biden team and the region’s changing political landscape combined to make the summit a diplomatic fiasco. The run-up to the gathering was dominated by a controversy over the guest list, amid rumors that Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua would not be invited due to their nondemocratic governments. Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, or AMLO, along with several Caribbean leaders threatened to boycott, [...]
In the run-up to the troubled ninth Summit of the Americas taking place this week in Los Angeles, Uruguayan President Luis Lacalle Pou, whose center-right government has been one of the most consistently aligned with U.S. policies in the region, strongly criticized the Biden administration, asserting that it lacks a vision for Latin America and mistakenly sees the hemisphere’s diverse countries as all having the same problems and needs. Lacalle Pou’s candid remarks demonstrate the principled consistency of a government that is often overlooked by, but increasingly important to Washington, at a time when Latin American governments are increasingly turning to partners that are [...]
