America Votes: What It Means for Latin America
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Hi, I'm Ravi Agrawal, Foreign Policy's Editor-in-Chief. This is FP Live. Welcome to the fourth episode of our special series, America Votes, What It Means for the World. After covering the Middle East, Europe and Africa, we're turning our attention to the region closest to the United States itself, and that's Latin America.

This is a part of the world that includes America's biggest global trading partner. That's Mexico, by the way. And then going south from there, it takes in Central America, the Caribbean, and all of the countries on the continent of South America, from big countries like Brazil to smaller ones like Belize. This is an important part of the world.

The question is how US presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris actually differ on their policies towards it.

Well, you know the drill. Joining me today are two terrific guests. Catherine Osborne is a Brazil-based journalist who writes FP's weekly Latin America Brief, and Moises Naim is the chief international columnist for El País. He served as Venezuela's Minister of Trade and Industry from 1989 to 1990, but most importantly for this audience, he's a former editor-in-chief of FP and a friend of the magazine.

Remember, we've still got that special discount going just for two more days. Go to foreignpolicy.com slash subscribe, type in the code FP100 at checkout and get $100 off your first year of the magazine. That is FP100, no spaces, for $100 off the offer lasts just for two more days. Do not miss out. Okay, let's dive in. Marzez and Catherine, welcome to FP Live.

Thank you. Thank you for having us. It's such a pleasure. So, Catherine, I'm going to start with you. Broad strokes. If you are living in Sao Paulo or Santiago, pick your big city. How do people contrast the two candidates' policies towards Latin America? Interestingly, both candidacies, either the candidates themselves or their advisors, say they would support closer economic ties with Latin America as part of de-risking from China.

In Trump's case, it's more his advisers who are saying this. But of course, Trump's tariff proposals would make that very complicated. When it comes to their record, Latin Americans remember Trump's policy toward the region as kind of lopsided in that it was extremely focused on certain countries, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Mexico, and on certain issues like immigration and the U.S.-Mexico trade relationship.

it was an America first policy and that it reached for tools in the foreign policy toolkit without really taking into account concerns from countries in the region about their side effects, particularly sanctions.

And with the Biden-Harris administration, policy has included more countries and more issues. So it's focused more on economic partnerships. It's been more reciprocal when it comes to hearing Latin American concerns on things like sectoral sanctions, on the flow of guns from the U.S. to the region. When it comes to immigration, it's incorporated concerns from the region too.

Biden and Harris were also more involved in diplomacy to shore up electoral integrity in Latin America, whereas when the Trump administration saw an anti-democratic scenario, they would reach for other tools, which even included threats of regime change. So those are a little bit of the differences in, I think, tone and tactics that have marked at least their records in the past.

Moises, let me bring you in. I'm wondering if you agree there. And there are, of course, some areas where there are similarities, just as there are differences that Catherine has pointed out. Everything that Catherine said is correct and part of the story and part of the analysis. But you started out saying that Latin America is a very important region. Well, that's not the case. It's important just because of its two main exports, which are drugs and people.

But in general, you know, years ago I wrote an article about the lost continent, which was Latin America. And I cited what a very senior policymaker in the United States told me about Latin America when I told him about how irrelevant it seemed.

You guys in Latin America are not competitive, you're not an economic powerhouse as India or China. You don't have nuclear power, poverty is dire but nothing compared to Africa and Asia. You don't have religious terrorism.

you're highly indebted, you're not competitive, not even as a threat to the United States. And we're always as a superpower, very busy with other emergencies. So when the day starts and the president receives the daily brief from his intelligence,

services, Latin America seldom figures. I am just providing this as a context for the conversation. Let's not make it sound more elaborate than what it is. Yeah, and where it is, that's great context. Some of what you're saying is also good news, right? I mean, there are parts of the world that top the presidential daily briefing and not for good reasons. And so in a sense, maybe that's a good thing. But I get the lament.

That for economic reasons, Latin America isn't higher up on the agenda. But Marz is the other thing that often tends to be the issue that comes up in the United States when people even think of Latin America as immigration. That too doesn't always come up in the right way.

Rightly so. And you're absolutely right. And so when you look at the numbers in terms of investments from the part of the United States and USAID that were required to create more jobs and personal safety in places like Central America, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, it peanuts. It's not that important and it can make a difference and it can be the most powerful tool

much more powerful than the wall. If you provide people with opportunities to have jobs, to feel safe when they go into streets, that the children are getting a basic education, that there is water, electricity, if you only get that, you immediately reverse the pressures that are expelling people and exporting people to the United States.

But there will always be a problem that no wall will contain, which is the gap between salaries and incomes between one of the wealthiest, if not the wealthiest nation in the world, and some of the poorest.

So when you have that gap, you know, and people are desperate to have a life, it's going to always be part of the debate. And you will hear things like, you know, what we have heard from the campaign, for example, about the wall and everything that...

Catherine, it strikes me that the immigration debate, which has in many ways been central in the presidential race this year, it has two parts. So we often talk about keeping people out a lot, but there's also the question of mass deportations of the people who are here in the United States, so undocumented workers. Trump has often said he wants to deport millions of people out.

And that raises several questions. Where these people go? They have to go somewhere. It also raises the question of what happens to remittances back to their home countries, which are deeply dependent on work in the United States. Talk to us about the differences between the two candidates there. The Biden-Harris...

administration and the Harris campaign has not proposed this mass deportation. So this is a huge concrete difference between their proposals. And while Trump has referenced mass deportations of millions of people, because it is complicated legally, logistically, and diplomatically, because other countries have to accept people back, Trump and J.D. Vance have acknowledged that they're probably not going to be able to deport

as many people as they want to. J.D. Vance has said in an interview, when someone pushed back, he said, okay, let's start with 1 million. And there are all sorts of implications of that. There are economic implications for the U.S. economy. Economists from the Peterson Institute of International Economics have estimated that

deporting 1.3 million people could cause US GDP to fall to 1.2% below baseline by 2028. So this is something that of course Trump never mentions, but he does appear more determined to carry out something like this than last time around. He's been planning for it more specifically. He's been referencing really the only kind of past

campaign of this size very specifically. So those are some implications on the side of the US economy for that. And then obviously, diplomatically, it produces all sorts of tensions with other countries in the region.

Moises, you've been covering this particular issue for so long, and there's an element of racism, I think, here as well. I'm thinking of the context in which various Latin American groups are often brought up, and this is mostly by Trump. He's called Mexicans rapists. He's stoked fears about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, Venezuelan immigrants in Colorado. I'm curious how

these characterizations play out in those parts of the world, whether there's a cognizance across Latin America about the way in which racism is playing a part in the campaign trail and whether there are significant differences between the candidates here. Yes, and that's part of the story now. I am Venezuelan and now we have become part of the campaign and part of the Trump speeches and rallies.

And of course, it's offensive is, and as Katherine said, and gave the numbers, you know, agriculture and agriculture in the United States will suffer significantly. And therefore, prices of produce and other agricultural commodities will go to the roof.

There is an important interesting story behind this which is that if you ask some of, not all Hispanics are against Trump, in fact there is a group of them that like Trump and what he says, these are typically refugees from countries in Latin America where socialism

created havoc in the economy and society. And so they like somebody that offers them the alternative to that, what they had known in their own country and therefore are for Trump. But then when you race with them, have you heard what he says about Hispanics and all that? They say, no, that doesn't matter because he's not going to do it. We don't believe that he can do it. He will not do it. It's just going to be for show.

So, the point here is that his migration policies are going to be more rhetorical than practical.

Moises, if I can continue there for a second, you seem to be referring to the Hispanic community, the Latino community in the United States. But I'm curious how this plays out in those countries that they came from in South America. And one thing that strikes me as interesting here is we sometimes reflexively think that there is opposition to Trump in other parts of the world that he name-checks.

often in a way that is not flattering. But a potential Trump presidency also opens up some opportunities for these countries that, you know, sometimes look for a more transactional American approach that shakes things up.

And that clashes with his emphasis on putting tariffs, you know, because one of the few things that the United States can do and can do well and quickly is to spur investment by creating, hoping that these countries will create conditions for investment and trade. But his rhetoric, Trump's rhetoric and that of his campaign is not one of creating growth or opportunities in Latin America. There's very little of that.

It's essentially when Venezuela or Mexico or Brazil are mentioned, they're mentioned in the context of a highly conflictive relationship. One important test is going to be what happens with Mexico that just has a new president

And it's going to be very interesting to see how they're going to manage one very important bilateral relationship, but still in the land of incognito. We don't know what they're planning to do. We'll come to that in a bit. I want to bring up democracy and America's sort of defense of it around the world as another big ticket issue and how potentially Harris and Trump might differ.

So Guatemala had elections late last year. This is a part of the world where Harris, even as vice president, took a stand in trying to defend the democratically elected candidate. Trump's envoy there took a different approach, trying to support the candidate who did not win but wanted to stay in power. Catherine, can you explain what happened there and also what it tells us maybe of the different approaches of the two candidates?

This is a big distinction between the two candidates when it comes to Latin America, which is a region where the Biden administration has been very consistently committed to actions to shore up electoral democracy. And they've had some success cases. They've worked with other countries in the region as well through the Organization of American States.

But in Brazil and in Guatemala, there were moments where U.S. pressure helped dissuade anti-democratic actors who were trying to reject the results of a presidential election. In Guatemala's case, a candidate won the election. The incumbent and his candidate were trying to raise doubts about it.

And the Biden administration diplomats were working behind the scene, essentially trying to beat back those efforts to reject the results, while at the same time, a former Trump administration official was working in the opposite direction. And, uh,

You know, it foreshadows, I think, how much the candidate sees prioritize this issue, how they view the issue. And even in Haiti, which is a place where the Biden administration has supported a more of a security kind of military first approach. They've also said it's important that there is some sort of democratic forward movement about a leadership change in the country in a way that the Trump administration has not signaled it would prioritize in the same way.

I want to move to trade policy. Marz, as you already hinted at this when you mentioned Trump's proposed tariffs, but what are the clear differences we know of between Trump and Harris on how their trade policies would impact relations with Latin American countries? Latin America is essentially an exporter of commodities and minerals, especially minerals and agriculture.

And so anything that has important has to do with commodities and prices and exports and tariffs are going to touch very, very sensitive issues. They talk about it, but never in the context of creating jobs. The notion that the United States can play a role through its diplomacy, through its AID efforts, through a variety of ways.

That is never as paramount as what he says in the case of Trump about migrants and migration or drugs.

The Harris campaign has been very careful, very cautious, not very strident. There is not a presence. First of all, it would be wrong to send the signal that there are intense negotiations and exchanges and meetings about what the US should do with Latin America. There are occasional sessions, but mostly this is irrelevant. This is not part...

it would be wrong for us to send the signal that this is an important part of the story of the American election of 2024. Sad but true. What about climate change, Catherine?

Trump, of course, pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accords. The Biden-Harris administration went right back in. It strikes me that this is an issue that affects many Latin American countries. Not all of them have, however, the same approach towards combating the climate crisis. How do Harris and Trump differ and what are the outcomes we should keep an eye out for?

The Harris and Biden administration has shown itself to be more willing to invest in efforts to shore up forest protection and other types of environmental resiliency in these countries. And interestingly, the country's

will be increasingly important exporters of minerals for the green energy transition. And both Trump and Harris understand this, understand that potential U.S. access to those minerals is important, especially as China increases its export restrictions on critical minerals and rare earths.

So both campaigns acknowledge this, but they have different approaches. So the U.S. has made several visits from diplomats during the current administration and said, we want to work with you to help build up your domestic green mineral industries in a way that the Trump administration hasn't signaled it's entered in. And Trump is more interested, I think, in conventional technologies.

energy resources in Latin American countries. Brazil and Guyana are opening up a bunch of blocks for oil exploration right now. I think that might be more of interest to a Trump presidency than some of these green minerals.

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Andres Martin Lopez Obrador

the former president of Mexico said that he woke every day and said, I'm not going to fight with the United States. I will not going to fight the United States. I need to have a harmonious relationship.

So that may be the case, but in practice, the fact of the matter is that the relationship is more stable than it was before it was renegotiated in the North American Free Trade Pact with Canada. This is the USMCA. Yeah, the USMCA. But we don't know. It would all depend if, as you know, historical precedent is that the leaders appointed by the predecessors

eventually break with them. And so we don't know if that's going to happen. If not, they will continue. Mexico has been an extreme case of what I have called the political necrophilia. Necrophilia is this passionate love for cadavers and attraction to cadavers. Latin America has a widespread bout of that, but not

never, nowhere more than in Mexico, in which attachment to wrong ideas that have been tried and tested once and again in that country, in different countries, in different moments, with different contexts, with different politics, they always end in blood, sweat and tears.

But yet, here we go again. And Claudio Sheinbaum, the new president, has already said that she was going to stick with these policies. We already have evidence of what is happening to Mexico's economy, to Mexico's poor people. And all are a result of political necrophilia, the embrace of wrong ideas, of bad ideas that haven't tried and tested and always fail.

That's such a great new term. Moises, you're a coiner of new terms. I'm going to bring up another term you coined shortly after, that is mini-laterals, which you coined, I think, in Foreign Policy's pages. But before we get there, Catherine, there's another country that has a new leader, new-ish leader, Argentina, Javier Millet, and his rise has been fascinating to watch. It's

Hard to describe him, really. He's mercurial. His political views are all over the map. How would Trump or Harris approach a leader like him? I think we will see actually a lot of continuity with the U.S.-Argentina relationship, regardless of who becomes president. And that is because of these critical minerals that we were just talking about.

Currently, the U.S. has a more left-leaning administration, but even so, the fact that Argentina under Millet is opening up a bunch of its lithium deposits for international exploration has caused a huge rush of U.S. public and private sector interest in the country. And you might think that Millet, who...

self-styles himself after Trump in a lot of ways, might have a difficult relationship with the United States, but those business deals and ties have been moving along quite healthily in the past couple of months. So I think that even though you might suppose that a Millet and a Trump would get along better, there's actually a lot of business being done right now. There is the possibility that

if Trump returns, he would empower candidates and figures in other countries and give them a boost. So if we kind of know that in Argentina there's going to be continuity, I would suspect that the camp in Brazil who are fans of Bolsonaro might get a political boost from a second Trump administration just as another sort of proof of concept that this far right is popular and can govern.

Moises, we have to mention Venezuela, where you're from. You know, this is a country that's had a steady sort of economic slide downwards. There's also Cuba neighboring it, which is going through massive electricity outages of late. Talk to us a little bit about how America has approached them and contrast the candidates again.

You are correct in bunching together Venezuela and Cuba, even if one is one of the is the country with the largest reserves of oil in the world, while at the same time Cuba has a complete blackout because they don't have any energy.

So that is a contrast that tells, is very revealing and very telling about a lot of things. The case of Venezuela specifically in terms of the politics is that of tragedy and a miracle. Tragedy is having taken a country that had a malfunctioning, bad functioning democracy and destroyed it. And we have now a very brutal, torturing autocracy. And

The miracle is that all of a sudden the opposition that had been fragmented and incompetent and in some cases even corrupt discovered itself with a leader that is a world-class leader, Corina Machado.

who is by far the most popular leader in the country and that is sidelined by the government and mistreated and she's in hiding. She was not allowed to run and yet she managed to create an organization that led to an outcome that nobody was expecting. That's a miracle. So there is a tragedy and there is a miracle on

January 10 there is the swearing in of the new government that she endorsed and it's not clear

He is in exile, forced exile in Madrid and it's not clear who is going to anoint who to the presidency, but that is going to be a turning point. And the United States has shown an interest, but at the same time it co-existed with a very limited diplomatic deployment of the top assets that the United States can muster and it did it in this case.

Columbia, as we continue our rapid fire around the region, Catherine Gustavo Petro, another leader with a combative style on Twitter or X. Could be interesting to see how that plays out if Trump wins. Contrast again with Harris.

Yes. And this is, as Moises mentioned earlier, some countries in the region are lucky because Trump hasn't signaled much interest in them. He hasn't talked a lot about Colombia in his campaign in the same way that he has Mexico or Venezuela or some of these other countries.

And we're about to see how talented a negotiator President Gustavo Petro is because his rhetorical style could indeed be a trip wire for the bilateral relationship. Colombia is one of the biggest recipients of U.S. aid in the region. So I think it will be important for Petro to be able, or not, we'll see, to navigate this skillfully.

Colombia is right now going through a change in its drug policy that the United States has so far more or less gone along with, even though it's a change from the war on drugs of decades past. It's changing up its attitude towards oil drilling, towards environmental protection. So again, if Trump

understands it to be a more adversarial relationship, there could be consequences for how the US flexes all of that economic aid that's going toward Colombia. And Petro might be able to learn from some other leaders who have had relative successes in dealing with Trump in the past.

We were talking about Lopez Obrador earlier, and he actually sometimes was effective as a bargainer with Trump when he was able to concretely say, you know, this is what I'm offering you. You could argue that Mexico ended up giving up a lot in those situations. It made concessions around immigration, but it was able to stake out some successes and

Mm-hmm.

Marce, Catherine mentioned the war on drugs and I'm curious how a rise in crime, transnational crime, is an issue that you have been looking at. And again, how do you think that plays into US policy towards the region? Well, the United States is very good at exporting its anxieties and also its patterns of behavior that are counterproductive.

So, Latin America is a victim of the tolerance for guns of all kinds and the numbers are staggering, the numbers of the trade in guns between the United States and the rest of the world, but specifically in Latin America. That is, it has a government, state-centered dimension, but it's also up to non-governmental actors that are, you know, organized criminals.

It used to be that many of these organized crime figures operated outside the government. Now they have taken governments inside. In a lot of countries they are wielding an enormous importance. And there is a whole issue of crime, a wave of crime just throughout the region. If we see countries like Chile that never suffered from high levels of

of criminality as also being swung by criminals, Argentina, Peru of course, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and they are all, you know, there is a, the cartels, the Mexican cartels are now joined forces with the local cartels and the local cartels have gone global.

"El Tren de Aragua" is the name of a cartel from Venezuela that is operating in the United States and is the source of all the comments that President Trump has about the country. So crime and criminality and organized crime operating in cahoots with governments is a big issue and very often in the next few years

United States diplomats and negotiators will be sitting across the table from people with deep ties with organized crime.

Definitely something to keep an eye on. Catherine, you're usually based in Brazil, that's where you live. You're not there today, of course. But it strikes me that we've talked very little about Brazil in this conversation so far. I'm also curious with the way in which BRICS, this is the group of countries that once only included Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, now includes Iran and Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia and others.

I'm curious how you think about this group and its leanings, which seem to be becoming a little bit more anti-Western rather than purely just a grouping that was about economies of the future, and where Brazil fits into that from a foreign policy perspective.

Yes, and it's very much connected to the election because Trump has also threatened 100% tariffs on countries that are trying to shun the dollar. He didn't stipulate what exactly that means yet, but if it's any countries that are trying to increase their trade in non-dollar currencies,

It includes the BRICS, which are trying to do this through their development bank. Brazil holds the rotating BRICS presidency beginning next year. And as you mentioned, the group includes countries that are more and less democratic, more or less aligned with democracy.

China, Iran, which just became a new member. So we know that it's a group that the new presidential administration in the US will be watching regardless of which one it is. In many ways, Brazil is not only the geographical, but it's the geopolitical Southwest. It's both part of the West and part of the global South.

And if Trump becomes president, I imagine Brazilian officials would have a tricky balance because they'll want to try to emphasize their ties to the West to avoid being hit by sanctions or tariffs meant for geopolitical adversaries, which might become more difficult depending on the direction that BRICS takes. While they'll also probably want to strengthen their trade and investment ties to the global South precisely to be ready if there's any kind of cooling of economic ties from Washington.

Moises, I mentioned earlier that you started using this word mini-laterals, which is sort of the opposite of multilaterals, smaller groups of countries that are nimble, try to conduct their business in smaller alliances rather than bigger ones, which they view to be as not as productive.

I bring that up in the context of Latin American foreign policy more generally and how, in your opinion, with US foreign policy being seen as not entirely productive for various parts of the world, we're seeing the rise of blocks. We just mentioned BRICS, but there's the Global South.

I'm curious where the continent of South America and then Latin America more broadly, where they fit into a global system that seems to be fracturing along the lines of blocks a little bit.

Yeah, that's a great question. The coining of the minilateralism concept was not related to Latin America as you already know that. It is essentially recognizing that the system in which you try to bring together 190 something countries and put them in a room and hoping that they will get an agreement, that has proven to be non-functional. It has been a source of frustration.

But then if you look at the big problems, the big global problems that no country can solve acting alone, you know, you pick problems like terrorism, like migration, like intellectual property, like financial regulations. There are very important things that can be achieved by a small number of countries. You don't need 194 countries in order to pass legislation or rules or norms.

that can be followed by 12 leading countries that create the problem and have to be part of the solution. So the notion is that, you know, identify a problem, identify who are the main players, get them together in a room and ask them to solve the problem as a first step and then have others being able to join if they can and if the conditions are appropriate. So that is the concept.

It's unclear how, you know, the alliances and then the capacity to build and rule and govern with alliances, both domestic and international, are going to define in the future. Countries that are able to do that and create coalitions and alliances of people that normally don't like each other but manage to create that, these countries are going to grow and are going to have more political and economic stability.

All the countries like the United States that are gridlocked most of the time, that have a hard time making decisions that are transcendental, that are important, that they just specialize in kicking the ball and not creating results. So in the future, countries that are able to manage, to create and manage alliances are going to prosper and countries that are going to be gridlocked in needs to make politics that impairs their capacity to act as a trusted ally are going to stagnate.

That's a great point to end on. So much here and so much that we did not get a chance to discuss, but that's why we'll have to have you back. Catherine Osborne is the writer of FP's weekly Latin America Brief. If you haven't signed up yet, please do. And Moises Naeem does many things and wears many hats, but for this group, he is the former editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy. I thank you both.

And that was Catherine Osborne, who writes FP's weekly Latin America Brief, which I urge you to subscribe to, and Moises Naim, formerly Venezuela's Minister of Trade and Industry, and also formerly in my role as Editor-in-Chief of Foreign Policy.

Thanks for tuning in to hear another episode of our special election series, America Votes, what it means for the world. Come back tomorrow when we will explore how the two different candidates would manage one final region, a really important one, and that's Asia. As always, if you have guest suggestions, feedback or ideas, we're at live at foreignpolicy.com.

FP Live, the podcast is produced by Rosie Julin and the executive producer of the show is Dana Schoen. I'm Ravi Agrawal. I'll see you next time. European politics. It's complicated, right? Luckily, there's a podcast that helps make sense of it. It's called The Europeans. Every week we break down the biggest stories in European politics. Can I disagree slightly with the premise of your question? Go for it. I think some European leaders may actually prefer Donald Trump.

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