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Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Brazil hesitates on BRICS expansion, Uruguay readies for a presidential election, and blackouts plunge Cuba into darkness.
Although Brazil is the first country in the BRICS acronym, it is not the most powerful member of the group. It has a smaller economy than those of Russia, China, and India, and it also lacks nuclear weapons. But because for years BRICS remained small and exclusive, adding only South Africa, Brazil enjoyed internal influence.
That could all change as BRICS experiences a growth spurt. Four countries joined the group in January—Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates—with more in line. China has long sought to expand BRICS to boost its influence, and the group’s growing use of non-dollar currencies became more attractive to some countries in the wake of Western sanctions on Russia.
Cuba and Bolivia are reportedly on the list of 13 new BRICS partner countries announced Wednesday, as well as NATO member Turkey, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Partner status is not the same as full membership in BRICS, but it could be a doorway to it in the future.
While growing interest in BRICS accession increases the group’s clout, expansion also stands to diminish Brazil’s sway. Not only that—the addition of U.S. antagonist Iran complicated Brazil’s longtime claim that the bloc was “not against anyone,” as Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira said this week, but rather in favor of correcting inequities in the international system.
“At present, the group is torn,” Jorge Heine and Ariel González Levaggi wrote this week in Foreign Policy. “China and Russia would like to build it into an anti-Western entity, while Brazil, India, and South Africa would prefer it to take a stance closer to nonalignment.”
At this week’s BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia, Brazil moved to flex the remaining muscle it has in the group, working to block the addition of Venezuela as a partner country. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and senior members of his government personally attended the summit to lobby for entry, which Russia and China backed.
Excluding Venezuela from BRICS was Brazil’s most direct diplomatic rebuke of Maduro on the world stage since Venezuela’s disputed July presidential election. Brazil does not recognize Maduro’s victory, while Venezuelan election authorities say Maduro won, without citing evidence.
The Lula administration realizes that “cautiously supporting democratic change in Venezuela, even if incrementally, is far more aligned with Brazil’s long-term interests than maintaining outdated ties,” Felipe Krause and Gabriel Brasil wrote this month in Foreign Policy.
Speaking to O Globo after the summit, Brazil’s top presidential foreign-policy advisor Celso Amorim cast Brazil’s work to exclude Venezuela as a matter of “broken confidence.” He said, “They told us something”—that Maduro would produce evidence of his election win—“and it wasn’t done.”
Meanwhile, Folha de São Paulo reported that former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff received endorsement from BRICS to stay on past her current term as president of the bloc’s New Development Bank (NDB), which was due to end in 2025.
The Shanghai-based bank is arguably the group’s most concrete initiative in its nearly two-decade history. Although most of the NDB’s loans are denominated in dollars, the bank set a target last year of increasing local currency loans to 30 percent of its portfolio.
Rousseff and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva have endorsed the bloc’s goal of diversifying its financial transactions away from the dollar. Progress toward that goal is slow; BRICS countries are just beginning to study the possibility of a cross-border payment system using digital currencies that could substitute for the SWIFT system.
Rousseff’s positive standing is good news for Brazil, which will chair BRICS as its rotating president next year. That means Brazil still has a key window of influence to shape the group.
Sunday, Oct. 27: Uruguay holds presidential and legislative elections.
Wednesday, Oct. 30, to Thursday, Oct. 31: G-20 education ministers hold talks in Brazil.
Thursday, Oct. 31: G-20 health ministers meet in Brazil.
A police officer is pictured at the venue where the 2024 U.N. Biodiversity Conference, or COP16, is set to be held near Cali, Colombia, on Oct. 17.Joaquin Sarmiento/AFP via Getty Images
COP16 in Colombia. The city of Cali, Colombia, on Monday began hosting two weeks of United Nations biodiversity talks, the first such event since a landmark 2022 deal signed in Montreal that was billed the “Paris Agreement for nature.”
Signatories to that deal agreed to preserve 30 percent of land and water by 2030, among other goals. That is compared with some 17.5 percent of land and 8.4 percent of seas being protected today, according to conservation group WWF. Delegates to the Cali talks will wrangle over conservation plans and how to fund them.
In the meantime, host country Colombia has an awkward dilemma on its hands. President Gustavo Petro’s administration has promoted a policy under which rebel groups holding talks with the government contribute to forest protection.
In late 2022, the powerful Central General Staff group worked to curtail tree-slashing in regions it controlled as a goodwill gesture while peace negotiations progressed. But now, the group’s talks with the government have foundered, and deforestation in those areas is on the rise.
Cuba’s power cuts. Cuba’s long-simmering economic crisis escalated dramatically over the weekend, when four nationwide blackouts hit the country in a 48-hour period. The power cuts stem from years of underinvestment in the country’s electric grid. They coincided with the arrival of Hurricane Oscar; six people were reported dead as a result of the storm by Tuesday.
Blackouts “aggravate all the other aspects of the crisis,” political scientist William M. LeoGrande wrote this week in Foreign Policy. “Water pumps can’t deliver a reliable water supply. Food acquired at great expense, both in terms of money and time waiting on lines, spoils in the refrigerator.”
The power failures also stand to further damage the Cuban government’s legitimacy. Blackouts contributed to the island’s surprise protest explosion in July 2021. Demonstrations were reported this week, although Cubans also appeared wary of the repression that followed the 2021 marches.
Illustrating migration. Last week, Boom—a new digital outlet for Latin American reporting and opinion—published a comic explaining how the U.S. humanitarian parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans works. The Biden administration program has allowed more than half a million people to enter the United States since 2022.
The comic follows two fictional Venezuelan migrants, Juan and Vanessa. Their life stories were based on interviews and research by the authors, Jordi Amaral and Fernando Garlin Politis.
Juan is middle-class, and Vanessa is working-class. Although both suffer from Venezuela’s economic and political crisis, only Juan has the social network to make it to the United States through the parole program, which requires that migrants have a U.S. sponsor. The comic ends with an illustration of how parole could become more equitable.
Lula is the only sitting president of a BRICS country who was also president when the group held its first summit. What year was that?
2007
2008
2009
2010
The meeting was held in Yekaterinburg, Russia. The group was still called BRIC at the time; South Africa joined in 2010.
Uruguayan presidential candidate Yamandú Orsi poses for a picture with a supporter at a rally during a May Day commemoration in Montevideo, Uruguay, on May 1.Santiago Mazzarovich/AFP via Getty Images
Uruguay goes to the polls this weekend for presidential and legislative elections. Voters will also weigh in on two referendums, one that could allow nighttime police raids in response to rising concerns about crime and another to expand pensions—as well as the state’s role in them.
Center-right Uruguayan President Luis Lacalle Pou is nearing the end of his five-year term with high approval ratings—and without the major scandals that have rocked politics in neighboring countries. However, he cannot run for reelection due to term limits.
While left alliance candidate Yamandú Orsi leads polls, he seems unlikely to receive more than 50 percent of votes in the first round. If he does not, Orsi will head to a Nov. 24 runoff with Lacalle Pou’s chosen successor, Álvaro Delgado, who is polling second. That contest could be tight. Polling in third but gaining ground is conservative candidate Andrés Ojeda.
Uruguay’s next president will affect regional politics on matters including trade and democracy, though the top candidates do not differ much on these matters.
Lacalle Pou has been a vocal advocate of the Mercosur customs union opening up more to international trade. He even said Uruguay would break Mercosur’s rules to pursue its own trade deal with China. While bilateral Uruguay-China trade talks have not moved past the exploratory phase, Mercosur signed a new deal with Singapore last year and is now weighing one with Japan.
Delgado has signaled faithfulness to Lacalle Pou’s pro-liberalization stance within Mercosur, while Orsi supports moving at the same speed as other member countries. He said he would support Mercosur reaching a collective trade deal with China rather Uruguay acting unilaterally.
On democracy, both candidates have referred to Venezuela’s Maduro-led government as a dictatorship. Orsi’s position sets him apart from some Maduro-friendly members of his leftist coalition and puts him in line with Chilean President Gabriel Boric, a leftist leader in the region unafraid to vocally denounce Maduro’s human rights violations.