South America Archive

Lately, elections in Latin America are making people squirm in Washington. For foreign policy old-timers, victories by leftist candidates have conjured images of Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Others are haunted by memories of more recent bogeymen, such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine deepened these anxieties, fueling fears that the region’s ideological pendulum is swinging in President Vladimir Putin’s direction. But more than a month into the war, those fears have proven to be unfounded. Indeed, if anything, Latin America’s response to Putin’s brutality reinforced shared hemispheric values with the United States, suggesting that […]

Over the past decade or so, the Kremlin has endeavored to exploit Latin America’s internal divisions and its differences with the United States with the purpose of building a beachhead of diplomatic and strategic support in a region geographically close to the U.S. The success of that project is now being put to the test in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Three weeks into the ensuing war, there is little evidence that Moscow’s efforts to woo Latin America have yielded any significant benefits. In fact, if anything, they look like a failure. The Kremlin has spent billions of dollars […]

If the global scramble to replace Russia’s oil in the wake of its Ukraine invasion had occurred a few years from now, instead of today, diplomats would be turning not only to Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela for potential new sources of oil, but also to another, perhaps unexpected country: Guyana, a minuscule South American nation that is now in the process of becoming a petroleum powerhouse. In the history of the world, few moments­ like this—in which an impoverished country suddenly discovers that it possesses untold wealth—have ever occurred. And yet, that’s what happened in Guyana in 2017, when ExxonMobil […]

Across Latin America, countries have come a long way in building democratic institutions. Most hold competitive and inclusive elections, for example. But the pervasive presence of organized crime and corruption has made progress in other areas, like the rule of law, difficult, leaving trust in the state almost nonexistent in many parts of Latin American. Kevin Casas-Zamora, secretary-general of the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, joins Peter Dörrie to discuss these issues, as well as the region’s reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, given Moscow’s attempts over the past two decades to strengthen its ties to Latin […]

Almost 6,500 miles separate Caracas from Kyiv, but the protracted political crisis in Venezuela, with its attendant humanitarian emergency, is not immune to spillover from the war in Ukraine. As if Venezuela’s challenges were not already sufficiently hard to resolve, the progressive build-up of geopolitical tensions over recent years has produced a fresh layer of complexity, highlighted as never before by Moscow’s threat to expand its presence in the Americas in retaliation for NATO moves in Europe. But can foreign powers, despite their deepening adversarial stance elsewhere, somehow harness their efforts to facilitate a solution in Venezuela? In January, as […]