Last week, Nicaragua canceled its deal with a Chinese company to build and manage a canal that stretches across Central America, ending a decade-long saga. Despite this development, China’s influence in Nicaragua has never been greater, in large part due to the diplomatic isolation of President Daniel Ortega’s autocratic government.
Name-calling among Latin America’s leaders has reached the level of schoolyard smears and taunts, but with far more significant implications. It has resulted in recalled ambassadors and crumbling diplomatic relations. And it has made the longstanding dream of regional integration seem more distant than it has been in decades.
The movement seeking reparations for slavery and colonialism has so far been met with minimal buy-in from the former colonial powers that benefited from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But engaging with calls for reparations could be a powerful diplomatic gesture that those nations could offer to the Global South.
