How Latin America Can Survive an Age of Turmoil

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Brian, good to see you. Thank you for joining me in this pretty astonishing moment for all of us.

BRIAN WINTER

It’s been a wild ride.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

It sure has. We ran dozens of pieces in Foreign Affairs in the months ahead of the election and in the transition trying to anticipate key dimensions of Trump’s second term foreign policy, but I really can’t think of one that has proved more prescient than the one you wrote, which is all the more notable because I think it struck most readers as a bit surprising and counterintuitive at the time. It was called “Latin America Is About to Become a Priority for U.S. Foreign Policy.” We’ll of course get to that piece and why you foresaw what you foresaw and what we’ve seen since. But before we get sucked into the Trump vortex, I want to step back a bit and consider Latin America’s trajectory on a longer timeline.

You’ve written a slew of great essays for Foreign Affairs over the past few years, and reading back through them last night with great pleasure, I was struck by an observation you made in a 2022 piece about Lula’s return to the presidency in Brazil. The argument focused on the lack of new ideas and new vision in a region that was struggling at the time. As you put it, there was a preference for “nostalgia and shopworn ideas instead of fresh leadership and forward-looking policy.” And it was fundamentally about the kind of disappointing trajectory of a region that, 15 years ago, seemed like it really was entering a confident new era of growth on its own terms, of a commitment to democracy, of new geopolitical relevance, of new solutions to old problems of inequality and violence.

It was really supposed to be Latin America’s moment, and instead, so much of the region—obviously generalizing across a lot of different countries, some of which bucked this trend—but much of the region certainly fell back into stagnation, and violence, and social unrest, and political friction. As you look at that arc of recent history, what did the hopes get wrong, what happened, and where did that leave the region before Trump’s return if we step back a bit?

BRIAN WINTER

Well, Dan, I’m happy to tell you that things have been looking up at least a little bit lately. The region has kicked into a slightly higher gear of economic growth. It has recovered more quickly than any of us expected from the disruption of the pandemic, remembering that Latin America was hit particularly hard during those years, not just in terms of deaths per capita, but also in terms of economic damage. Only the Eurozone shrank more in terms of its economy during those years, and Latin America has proved more resilient than many people believed, and there were specific reasons for this. I mean, the region is a source of the minerals and energy resources that the world needs, key to the climate transition, and so on.

So, that said, the challenges are still there, particularly when it comes to organized crime, which is not a new issue when it comes to Latin America, but it’s one that has gotten worse in many ways over the last ten, 15 years, primarily because of an expansion in the cocaine trade. The amount of cocaine being produced in the world has more than doubled in the last 15 years, according to the United Nations. That has filled the pockets of cartels. It has allowed them to diversify into other areas like illegal gold mining, extortion, cargo theft, other things. So that’s one reason, for example, why we’re seeing the rise of politicians like Nayib Bukele who are really dedicated to taking on this problem head-on. So in some ways the region has made some progress, has shown some resilience, but yeah, in others, big challenges, as well.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Just to linger on your point about cocaine, I’m struck that I think most people would assume fentanyl would be the bigger source of instability and corruption because it’s what we focus on here. That’s not, in fact, the case when you look at the region as a whole.

BRIAN WINTER

Look, fentanyl’s bad too, but cocaine is unparalleled as a revenue producer. And part of what has changed in the last ten, 15 years is not just the sheer volume that’s being produced, but where it’s going. 25 years ago, when I first started following the region as a journalist, it was a truism that most of the cocaine flowed north to the United States and to Europe. Today, Latin American countries themselves have become a big consumer market. We’ve seen a lot of growth in Asia as well, and part of the reason—listeners to this podcast may remember these terrifying images that came out of a television station in Ecuador last year, last January—and part of the reason those were such a shock was because Ecuador was one of these countries in the region that had never had these kinds of problems before, at least not on that scale, but because of the way these shipping routes have changed, because of how the map of demand has shifted, Ecuador is now sadly the country in South America with the highest homicide rate.

And so I know that sometimes to outside people it can seem like, “Oh, this is just part of the kind of background in Latin America, this is something that’s always happening,” but there have actually been major changes over the last ten, 15 years.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So you mentioned President Bukele of El Salvador. Since you wrote that piece in 2022, two leaders who do seem new in some sense, seem to have in certain ways new ideas about how to handle problems in their countries, have emerged on the scene and become kind of dominant in some ways in how we look at the region. One of those is Bukele in El Salvador, who has a very hardline approach to security, very much cheered on by the Trump administration, and then also Javier Milei in Argentina, who is, to put it mildly, a very idiosyncratic libertarian whose aggressive cost-cutting has been cheered on by Elon Musk and the DOGE crowd.

BRIAN WINTER

The chainsaw.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Exactly. And also rails against gender ideology and woke ideology and all of that. I’m curious how you see these two leaders, why they rose to prominence, and whether they are reshaping the region and its politics, again, in the moment leading up to Trump.

BRIAN WINTER

Well, in recent years, we’ve seen an ascendant right wing in Latin America, as we have in so many other places, including Europe and indeed the United States. And there’s a temptation sometimes to look at these countries as almost local franchisees of the Trump movement, of the MAGA movement. And I think that there’s some areas where, for example, Javier Milei thinks very differently about tariffs than Donald Trump does. But there are a lot of things that unite not just Milei and Bukele, who you mentioned, but leaders like Rodrigo Chaves in Costa Rica, like Santiago Peña in Paraguay.

There’s a broad and growing conservative movement in Latin America that wants to take a tough line on security, reflecting general populations that are just fed up with living in fear, that have seen what has happened in El Salvador, which in some ways is problematic when it comes to what it means for independent institutions and things like due process. But lots of people in Latin America see the results, which is an El Salvador that has been completely transformed, with a homicide rate that is down more than 80 percent, and by some measures is now the safest country in the entire Western hemisphere, in terms of at least the homicide rate.

And so I think people are grasping at that kind of solution, even when in many cases they don’t want a carbon copy, they don’t want the exact same thing for themselves. There’s also, in some countries, a real passion for this idea of a smaller state. Latin America is a big and diverse region, as you know, Dan, more than 20 countries. Some countries have quite large states like Argentina, like Brazil, in terms of how much they collect in terms of their GDP, whereas other countries have smaller states, like Mexico, and so maybe a DOGE for Mexico is not a great idea. Maybe they need to go in the other direction.

But I think that these ideas, of becoming more efficient, of having less taxes, appeal in Latin America in part because it’s also a region where the gig economy, the independent worker has gained a lot of cultural currency over the last couple of years. It’s changed so much from when I first started following the region, when labor unions were sort of the core of those societies. Today, the unions don’t resonate as much; people want to be able to drive an Uber, to start their own business, and that’s another reason why these right-wing messages have really caught on in unexpected ways.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So the other global dynamic that seemed to present a huge opportunity to the region, again, going back before the last couple of weeks, was this kind of shift in supply chains and what is often called friend-shoring, this desire to bring supply chains closer to home, to de-risk away from China. All of that seemed to present an opportunity economically, especially to Mexico and Central America, but also to other parts of the region. Did you see ways in which that opportunity was being taken advantage of by economies? Was that a kind of positive dynamic economically in, again, the years before these tariffs that we’ve seen in the last week?

BRIAN WINTER

So, look, this whole question of global supply chains is kind of shifting under our ground as we record this. Who knows what it’ll be like tomorrow? I will say that with this "liberation day," the tariffs that Donald Trump announced were, on balance, not as bad for most Latin American countries as people had expected. I mean, let’s be clear, there are concerns all over the region about the possibility of a global recession, big disruptions because of what President Trump announced, but actually most big Latin American countries ended up with the minimum ten percent tariff. It was funny, I thought, when I first saw the numbers, I thought, “Well, this reflects that we’ve got people in the White House who understand that these Latin American nations are worthy partners, especially if you want to reduce your dependence on China, and you believe that you still need lower cost labor to be part of your supply chain.”

It turns out that that was not how this formula was invented. We now know that the reason that many Latin American nations or most Latin American nations ended up with the minimum tariff is because most of them, with the exception of Mexico—the United States has a trade surplus with these countries, so that’s why. But in practice, if you’re building up big tariff walls around not only China, but countries like Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia, and you have smaller tariffs for Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, that’s an opportunity for the countries of the Americas. That’s an opportunity for nearshoring, and it’s one that people have been talking about for years. I know it’s one that people in the Trump administration also see some utility in, and so we’ll see whether it comes to fruition or not.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And Mexico, despite its trade deficit, was exempted from that round of tariffs. They have obviously been hit before, but there were no new tariffs slapped on last week.

BRIAN WINTER

That’s right, and the Mexicans were also breathing a sigh of relief. It’s been widely commented that Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has put on a master class in how to negotiate with President Trump in a way that is both respectful, that attends to the needs of the United States when it comes to controlling illegal immigration and controlling fentanyl, but also firm. She hasn’t folded in the way that some other leaders around the world have. And so, at least so far, as we record this, Mexico has not faced the disaster that some people feared it would.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So we’ve already been sucked into the Trump vortex despite my best efforts, so let’s—

BRIAN WINTER

It’s inevitable.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

That’s right, let’s get into it. And let’s turn to the piece you wrote a little bit before he was inaugurated for his second term. You, of course, noted that Latin Americans had complained for decades about American neglect and every single presidential administration has essentially been charged with not paying enough attention to the region. I think you even dug up a Foreign Affairs essay from 1973 that was lodging that complaint, and it’s been true since. Most people in the foreign policy world were fixated on what Trump’s policy toward China or Ukraine or the Middle East it might turn out to be, but you recognized what many of us missed: that Latin America would turn out to be really one of his central priorities, something that he would talk about more than many of those other headline-grabbing geographies in his early days, whether it was the Panama Canal or Mexico, also other Western Hemisphere countries like Canada and Greenland. What were you seeing that most of us missed in that run-up to the inauguration?

BRIAN WINTER

Well, look, I think that President Trump was elected for several reasons, among them to reduce inflation, but also to reduce illegal immigration and reduce the flow of drugs in the United States. And particularly on those second and third priorities, Latin America is absolutely key, and he then began staffing his administration with people who know Latin America exceptionally well. There’s the case of Marco Rubio, with whom most people are familiar. He is the son of Cuban immigrants, he speaks perfect Spanish. He’s also done the work: he’s traveled the region, he knows who the leaders are. He is, as I wrote in that Foreign Affairs piece, probably the best connected official on Latin America at such a high level since Nelson Rockefeller in the 1970s, when he was Gerald Ford’s vice president.

But it’s not just Marco Rubio. Secretary Rubio’s number two at the State Department is Christopher Landau, who was Donald Trump’s ambassador to Mexico during his first term, is the son of a longtime, widely admired U.S. diplomat, went to high school in Asunción, Paraguay, and speaks Spanish that I openly envy as someone who did not grow up in the region. You also have people across the government who come from South Florida with all of the day-to-day exposure to Latin America and Latin American policy priorities that that implies, so this is an administration that knows Latin America, that sees it as a priority, not just in foreign policy, but in domestic policy.

That said, Dan, I mean, none of us have a crystal ball. I think it’s still, sitting here, really not clear whether Mexico and other countries will over time be treated more as partners, as allies, or as problems, and I think that reflects some ideological splits within the administration itself. And so I’m watching just as carefully as everybody else trying to figure out where this goes from here.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Just to focus on the second of those priorities that you mentioned, immigration: I think much of the debate tends to focus on policy in the U.S. and deportations, and asylum, and temporary protected status, and all of the political and social effects of those policy moves here. As you look at the region, though, what was driving the levels of migration that we’ve seen in the last few years that proved to be such a political liability for the Biden administration?

BRIAN WINTER

Well, I’ve already spoken at some length about the growth and organized crime, but there are also some specific countries, and at the top of the list is Venezuela. I mean, we’ve seen an exodus of more than eight million people from Venezuela over the last decade. It’s one of the biggest exoduses of people anywhere in the world since World War II. Most of them have gone elsewhere in South America, but hundreds of thousands came here to the United States. That said, it’s not just Venezuela. Cuba has also hemorrhaged people over the last five years. This is another issue where people can almost tune out and think, “Oh, yeah, there have always been problems in Cuba.” Well, consider that about an estimated 20 percent of the Cuban population has left in the last five years. That’s an extraordinary figure.

We’ve seen similar dynamics from Haiti, similar dynamics from some of the Central American countries, and people migrate for reasons that are sometimes complex. Sometimes it’s not just conditions on the ground, but just the hope of a better life, the fact that they already have family members in the United States. Perhaps over the last 40 years or so of high migration levels, we’ve established a kind of critical mass where everybody in certain countries, everybody has a cousin or a family member or an aunt in the U.S., and they hear about how good it is. That era now seems to have drawn to a close. And the implications for Latin America are huge, not only in terms of what it means for remittances, but potentially in terms of people coming back because they either can’t get in through the southwest border anymore or because they’re facing pressure to deport.

I have many friends who are part of the Latin American community here in New York City, and I’ve heard many cases of people in the last weeks and months deciding to just leave. And this includes people who are part of the working class, and it also includes people who are part of the professional class—different dynamics in both cases, but I think we’re just starting to understand what the implications of that for the region will be as well.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

On its own terms, Trump’s immigration policy does seem to be working. We can argue whether it has the right objectives and whether the tradeoffs are worth it, but it does seem to be stopping the flows at the southwestern border and leading to this exodus, which you and I would probably see as a bad thing for United States’ competitiveness and vitality, but Trump obviously see it differently. As you see the region trying to respond initially to both the pressures of people returning and also the moves that Trump has made to put pressure on them, how do you assess the different responses in this policy area specifically?

BRIAN WINTER

Well, I think there’s been concern from a lot of leaders around Latin America that the deportations or the return of people happens in a dignified and humane way. And we saw this huge episode back in January, when Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, ordered the halt of a plane that was mid-flight, a deportation flight that was bound for Colombia, based apparently on conditions, reports that he had seen about how Brazilian deportees were actually put on a military plane, not allowed access to the bathroom, and so on. And that appears to have been the trigger that prompted President Petro to order that plane to turn around. This unleashed a huge short-lived crisis in which President Trump essentially threatened Colombia with everything under the sun, including financial sanctions that would have ground the Colombian economy to a halt. President Petro and his government immediately backed down, due in part to an effort by the Colombian business community, as well as all parts of the Colombian political spectrum, to find a way out.

And I mention this because it was important not just for Colombia, but for countries all over Latin America, and perhaps the world. They saw that this was an issue on which President Trump would not be deterred. And you look at the polling in the United States on approval of President Trump’s different policies, and in his management of the economy, for example, even before all these tariffs, you had more people disapproving than approving. But on President Trump’s handling of migration, this is where he gets some of his best marks from the U.S. public. Point being, he seems to have a lot of domestic support for this.

And I think that as a result of that episode and their reading of the political tea leaves, I think you have Latin American governments on left, center, and right, pro-U.S., anti-U.S., all now doing their level best to accommodate the United States when it comes to this issue of migration. That includes the Mexican government, in terms of how they have deployed 10,000 troops, extra troops of their National Guard to the border to try to control the movement of people from Central America and elsewhere. But really, countries all over the region have determined that they’re going to not stand in the way because nobody wants to be behind the eight-ball in the same way that President Petro briefly was.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

The other thing that seemed quite surprising early on the administration was the focus on the Panama Canal. Did that surprise you as it did the rest of us? And what did you see driving both the Trump obsession with it and the Panamanian response?

BRIAN WINTER

I mean, it’s funny. I spoke to so many people, Dan, for that article that I wrote for Foreign Affairs, including people who had been part of the first Trump administration, trying to figure out what to anticipate for policy toward Latin America. The phrase “Panama Canal” never came up. And look, I think that this—different, perhaps, from tariffs and migration—this neo-expansionism that President Trump outlined in his inaugural address was not really part of his campaign. Or if it was, I certainly missed it. And so you’ve seen surprise from the Danes, from the Canadians, and certainly from the Panamanians.

Through coincidence, I was actually in Panama the day after President Trump’s inaugural address when he said explicitly that he wanted to take the canal back. And honestly, the reaction that most people had was just confusion, because this was a case where their president, President Mulino, is a strong ally of the United States. This is a right-wing figure who had previously been foreign minister and who saw himself as a fellow traveler who took office, even before Trump was elected, vowing to crack down on migration bound for the United States through the Darién Gap, which is in Panama. So this is one example where people in the region have been caught off guard, and even today, as we record this, President Trump continues to say that he wants the canal back. And the reaction that you hear from people in Panama, as well as elsewhere around the region, is just disbelief. They say, “We don’t quite understand what this is about.”

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

As you look at, again, with apologies for generalizing across a complicated and large region, as you look at the different sets of responses, how do you make sense of the different options that leaders are choosing, the different camps when it comes to a relationship with Trump?

BRIAN WINTER

I’ve broken these countries down into three main groups. The first one is fellow travelers. As I explained, President Trump has many leaders in the region who are fully on board with what he’s doing, who see him as a partner on issues like security, but also just as a part of a fraternity that they also want to be a part of. This group includes President Milei in Argentina, President Bukele in El Salvador, but also leaders like the Bolsonaro family in Brazil, figures on the Colombian right, on the Chilean right. This group is probably bigger than most people outside Latin America expect it to be. They think back to 2015, when President Trump began his campaign talking about how Mexico is not sending its best people, and perhaps it’s hard for them to believe that Trump would have so much political support in Latin America, but he really does.

And for these leaders, they might not be happy about the tariffs, but they see power not just in terms of who they export to, but how many likes they get on social media, how much engagement they get. And this is where a photo with Trump or a video with Trump can just turbocharge them. And I would add for this first group that the upcoming electoral calendar in Latin America favors this group. If we look at—Daniel Noboa, who’s currently the president of Ecuador, may lose his upcoming election; it’s not clear—but if you look at the elections in Chile later this year, the right is strongly favored. You look into 2026, at Colombia and Brazil, it’s easy to imagine conservative, Trump-aligned leaders winning in both those cases. So a year and a half from now, we could have a Latin America that is significantly more aligned with President Trump than it is today.

The second group is the silent skeptics. These are leaders like Lula in Brazil, Gabriel Boric in Chile, President Petro, who I mentioned, in Columbia, who have, let’s say, existential doubts about what President Trump is doing—but note the word “silent.” Because of this episode with President Petro that happened back in January, everyone is doing their level best to stay off President Trump’s radar. These are leaders that in many cases are trying to diversify their foreign relationships when it comes to investment in trade. I would note that President Lula was just on an Asia trip where he went to Vietnam and Japan, but I would also note that on that trip, he did not visit China as he might’ve done if he was trying to really send a message or provoke the United States. And I believe that it’s possible, at least, that China was left off that agenda because, again, Brazil does not want to appear too prominently on the U.S. radar.

Other leaders have done this too. President Boric of Chile was just in India, for example, and the MERCOSUR, which is the South American trade bloc, is advancing once again on its long-delayed trade agreement with the European Union, which many of us thought was dead in the water, but now, with everything that’s been happening on the tariff front, suddenly looks a lot more attractive to people on both sides, to the Europeans and to the South Americans.

And then the third group, Dan, is kind of a worried middle. In Latin America, as elsewhere in the world, this middle is not the dominant group; it’s smaller than it used to be, but these are center-left, center-right leaders who—they’re on board with some of the things that President Trump is doing, but concerned about the impact on their economies and so on.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

But it sounds like everyone has learned from the Petro episode early in the administration that there’s no benefit, there’s no way to kind of stick your neck out and challenge Trump.

BRIAN WINTER

Yeah, nobody wants to directly confront this government right now, and it’s hard to blame them.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So a group you didn’t mention is the rogue actors, in terms of U.S. foreign policy at least. Marco Rubio is someone you would expect to be spending a lot of time on Venezuela and Cuba and Nicaragua. That has not been a particularly prominent part of U.S. policy thus far. Do you see a strategy emerging? Is there anything you can discern in what we’ve seen thus far when it comes to how the administration will treat those cases?

BRIAN WINTER

I wrote in the Foreign Affairs piece back in December, Dan, that Venezuela policy was a bit of a mystery. That still seems to be the case, although the contours are taking shape. Look, Venezuela is a humanitarian tragedy. It’s also a very difficult policy problem. We have seen, just in the last eight years, we’ve seen U.S. policy go from maximum pressure to some kind of negotiations, and now maybe we’re headed back to maximum pressure again. But I think despite the best, and, I think, good-faith efforts of people in both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, the Maduro dictatorship is still in power even after the election last July, even after the Maduro regime stole that election, denied the result that later filtered out to the world.

No government is a monolith. The Trump government is no exception. I think you have different groups within the Trump administration who want different things. There is a group that believes that this is a dictatorship that needs to be toppled and favors things like sanctions to accomplish that goal. But then you have another group that believes that actually the top priority is immigration, and if you pass new sanctions on Venezuela, all that will do, in their view, is lead to another exodus of people, many of whom will inevitably show up at the U.S. southwest border. And so I think what we’re seeing, at least from the outside in, is an administration that’s trying to figure out how they reconcile those different priorities.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let’s linger on China for a moment. I was fascinated by the point you made about leaders going to Asia and skipping China, which a few years ago, I imagine would’ve been a kind of automatic stop for them. You wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs a few years ago, at a time when the Biden administration was at least attempting to put in place a relatively accommodating policy toward the region where you wrote, and I’m quoting you here, “There is one emerging consensus on which many Latin American politicians on both the left and the right surprisingly agree: in the escalating global confrontation between China and the United States, their countries should pursue a truly independent or nonaligned path.” There must be debates in regional capitals right now about whether it’s time to move from nonaligned to leaning toward Beijing, but at the same time, that’s something that would likely attract attention that would not be particularly helpful to them from Washington. How do you see those debates playing out? Do you see the Chinese role shifting in the face of changing U.S. policy?

BRIAN WINTER

Dan, I speak to leaders all over the region on left, center, and right, and all of us have favorite questions that we ask people, and I tend to ask the question, “What keeps you up at night” And in recent years, the almost unanimous answer to that question was having to choose between Washington and Beijing, having to choose between China, which has become the number one or number two trading partner for virtually every country in the region, with the exception of Mexico, or the United States, which remains the biggest investor in Latin America, and of course a country that is very connected in family, cultural ties, and elsewhere.

Sitting here today, two months into the Trump administration, I think that debate is still happening. I think people sense that it’s shifting under their feet, that a moment where they might have to make that decision or make more of a commitment to one side or another might be coming. Maybe we’re not quite there yet. There have been some analysts who have argued that President Trump’s actions so far may be driving countries more into the arms of China. I question that. I don’t underestimate the importance that China has gained in terms of trade and investment over the last 20, 25 years. I mean, it’s astounding. But it’s also true that Chinese foreign direct investment has been dropping globally over the last couple of years, and this perhaps reflects things that are happening within China itself, rather than conditions on the ground in Latin America or anywhere else. And I also hear from the private sector all over Latin America that they really want to maintain ties with the United States. They’re not ready to go all-in on China.

Now, when I think about the risks from President Trump’s approach right now, actually, Dan, I think more of Canada. I think of how President Trump’s actions and words have taken a country that was perhaps among the strongest U.S. allies and trading partners, and have completely turned upside down the Canadian election. And I look at Latin America, with all the history of U.S. interventionism going back more than a century, some of that muscle memory is there, and I wonder if perhaps the big risk is not necessarily pushing countries into the arms of China, but in really turning domestic politics in some of these countries upside down, like in the Brazilian election next year, if the Trump administration tries to put its finger on the scale, that could produce an unexpected reaction.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

There are so many specific countries and leaders that we could spend another hour talking about, but I want to focus on a couple that you’ve done some outstanding reporting on in places where you’ve lived over the last couple of decades. The first of those is Brazil, which you just mentioned. It seems like it should be a pretty good moment for Brazil in some ways. The economy is not doing so badly, the kind of geopolitical shifts seem like they should be relatively advantageous for Brazilian foreign policy, at least under Lula. And yet Lula himself is struggling and seems like he’s likely not to see a successor that he would approve of. If anything, a kind of Bolsonaro-like movement may return. What is accounting for Lula’s struggles, and is it not inevitable, but is it likely that you will see someone more like Bolsonaro return? This is a point you alluded to earlier.

BRIAN WINTER

Yeah, so polls show Lula’s approval rating is down about 12 percentage points just this year, which puts him somewhere in the upper 30s or the low 40s, which in the scheme of things globally, those aren’t terrible numbers. And it reflects the fact that overall, Brazil’s doing okay. It’s an economy that has outperformed expectations in recent years. It’s grown more than three percent. This year, it will probably grow closer to 1.5 percent or two percent, but those aren’t terrible numbers. But food inflation is up, people are feeling nervous about their standard of living, and a lot of Brazilians see a leader who is aging and perhaps somewhat out of touch with what’s happening in the country. Stop me if you’ve seen this movie before. There are parallels here with what happened in the United States and with President Biden, and Lula is coming up on 80 years old. And so there’s a dynamic there.

It’s also true that Brazilian society, like a lot of others, it’s becoming more conservative. This is a country that, in the span of a generation, has gone from seven percent of its population was evangelical Christian back in the 1980s; that number is 35 percent today. That is a massive social change in a relatively short period of time. And Brazil’s national statistics institute believes that the evangelicals could actually be a majority within a decade. And so the politics reflect that. That is one of the factors that explains the election of Jair Bolsonaro back in 2018, and it’s one reason why a conservative could win in the election in 2026. Now, it’s unclear whether Lula will run for office again, but if he does, he will face a strong challenge from the Brazilian right.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You also mentioned Claudia Sheinbaum earlier as an example of a leader who seems to have figured out how to address Trump. She’s also making a pretty striking effort to address some of the persistent challenges of Mexico, both on the economic front and on the security front. How do you assess the progress in those areas, leaving aside the Trump dynamic, though it’s of course very dominant in each of those?

BRIAN WINTER

Polls in Mexico show that this is one of several Latin American countries that places security as the top challenge. And Claudia Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was very popular; had approval in the 60s or 70s at various points of his administration; made a lot of progress on things like social programs, on helping pensioners and the working class; did not have an effective policy when it came to security. Famously called his program “abrazos, no balazos,” which meant “hugs, not bullets”; believed essentially that confronting the cartels only caused more violence, only made things worse. That approach over his six years in government did not produce the intended result.

It was always somewhat clear that President Sheinbaum, who has always been aligned with former President López Obrador, was seen by Mexican voters as a protege. It was clear that she had different ideas when it came to security, that she favored a tougher approach. She was always likely to come in and do things differently. Some people believe that because of the pressure from President Trump, that this has given her the opportunity, perhaps the political cover, to take an even tougher approach on public security. And so far, this is one reason why she is even more popular than López Obrador, with an approval rating above 80 percent in some polls. She’s seen by Mexicans as a leader who is responsibly handling the confrontation with the United, trying to find some sort of exit strategy, if you will, that will ultimately be favorable to Mexico, but who also understands the deep security challenges, which are not just about homicide. They’re about extortion, they’re about cartels who control swaths of territory, who require people to make payments just to live their daily lives.

The challenge is immense. It’s not clear that the Mexican state will ultimately have enough resources to take on these very powerful cartels whose pockets are filled with billions of dollars from American consumers and from other countries who consume the drugs, but I think Mexicans so far are giving President Sheinbaum a lot of credit for trying to take a more confrontational approach with these groups and not just do kind of a live-and-let-live thing.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

When it comes to fentanyl, specifically, the dimension of this that will get the most attention from Washington, does she have a clear strategy? Is there a theory of the case for how this could work? Many people have noted just how challenging this is given the tiny volumes of fentanyl that come across in huge volumes of legal trade.

BRIAN WINTER

Well, Dan, seizures of fentanyl are up. There have been some record high seizures. President Sheinbaum also made the Trump administration quite happy by extraditing almost 30 major cartel leaders a couple of weeks ago. And so people in Washington are happy with this, but to your question, and I remember when fentanyl first started rising in popularity several years ago, and I heard someone said, "The drug war is over now, we just don’t know it." And what they meant by this was because the quantities were so inconceivably small where a shipping container of fentanyl would be enough to supply U.S. demand, I think, for a period of several years, this old strategy of detection and seizure simply may not be effective. I don’t know what the alternative is. It’s clear that we need solutions to the fentanyl epidemic in the United States, but as to whether these kinds of tactics can be effective over time beyond just generating headlines and giving diplomats things that they can point to as examples of success, I think is less clear.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let me go to one more country that you’ve done a lot of work on, and that’s Colombia. You mentioned Gustavo Petro earlier, and his interactions with Trump. Colombia, if you went back, not that many years, was seen as the kind of great success story of US policy in the region starting with Plan Colombia under President Clinton, and the kind of trajectory of a country that seemed like it was going to fall apart—it was kind of a failed state in the 1990s and early 2000s— to looking like a success story, that has started to backslide in some worrying ways. How do you understand that trajectory and how worried are you about the course of Colombia at this point?

BRIAN WINTER

Colombia, I think, is one of many countries where you have to take the longer-term view and look at the movie, not just the photo. I have seen in many countries, in the 25 years that I’ve been doing this, unexpected progress, solutions to problems that none of us believed were possible. And Colombia is an example of this. I mean, back in the early 2000s, for example, when former President Álvaro Uribe was inaugurated in 2002, his inauguration was shelled with mortar fire from the FARC, from the guerrilla group, and 17 people were killed. Diplomats who attended that inauguration had to literally run for their lives.

Since then, it’s not, today, a perfect place by any stretch of the imagination, but homicides have fallen a lot, the state now controls vast areas that it did not before, and it feels fundamentally like a different country. Some of that progress has been put in question. Critics of President Petro accuse him of taking his eye off the ball when it comes to security. President Petro did have a peace strategy called Total Peace, but its implementation has been more difficult than he expected. There’s a lot of frustration in Colombia over both that as well as the economy, and that’s one of the reasons why it seems that the right may be in a position to come back and win when they have presidential elections next year.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

In the face of all of these dynamics, there’s been a lot of hand-wringing in recent years about the state of democracy in the region given inequality and organized crime and everything else. You’ve seen, I think, kind of different levels of support for democracy over the years in polling. Do you worry about the state of democracy in Latin America?

BRIAN WINTER

I think we have some very strong democracies in Latin America, places like Argentina and Chile. Chile has a tradition where the votes are counted very quickly, and then once the result is declared, the two candidates appear on television together while one congratulates the other. Uruguay is another country where democracy is very strong. Brazil is a country that has an electronic voting system that works quite well, and where they count the votes in a question of hours, not a question of days. As an American, it can be very humbling to see all of these examples.

That said, Dan, the threats that democratic institutions are under throughout the West and throughout the world are well-known. I think that there’s always this temptation, and I feel like watching, again, not just Latin America, but the whole world, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s this thing inside of us as human beings that wants to follow a strong leader, that wants to tune out all the other noise and all the other infighting, and just follow that person. And I think history, and particularly the 20th century, taught us that that’s actually quite destructive in many cases, that we need countervailing institutions, we need checks and balances in order to prevent some of those horrors from happening—wars, bad economic decisions, and so on. And maybe we’re going through a phase now where we have to relearn some of those lessons and we can look to countries in Latin America. Many of the countries that I mentioned have enormous challenges when it comes to their economy and crime, and so on, but they continue to illuminate a path and be good examples of how democracy can and should work.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I’m struck by how many Latin American friends in the last few months have texted me saying something like, “Now you know what we’ve been living with for our entire lives.” I have one friend in Ecuador in particular who about once a week texts me and says, “This is the American caudillo, and I hope you’re enjoying it.”

BRIAN WINTER

Again, I think it’s a universal thing. I think it’s part of the human condition, and none of us are immune to it.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Brian, thank you so much for doing this. People can read your work at Americas Quarterly, the excellent magazine you edit, which happens to be across the street from Foreign Affairs, and we will look forward to having you back in our pages before too long, I hope.

BRIAN WINTER

It’s been fun. Thanks, Dan.