Latin America hedges its bets amid US disinterest

Latin American leaders are sharpening their anti-American rhetoric as attention north of the border is increasingly pulled to other matters.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has prolifically thrown barbs at the United States in his last year in office, accusing Mexico’s biggest trading partner of everything from financing a coup against him to bearing responsibility for drug violence in the country.

And Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel called the U.S. embargo on the island “an act of genocide” earlier this month.

The United States, meanwhile, has mostly decided to ignore the provocations.

“There’s been too little bandwidth, too little agency in Washington towards the hemisphere for quite some time now,” said Arturo Sarukhán, a consultant who served as Mexico’s ambassador to the United States from 2007 to 2013.

For most countries in the region, the lack of U.S. attention can be frustrating at times but far from existential.

Mexico and Cuba, the two Latin American nations physically closest to the United States, are disproportionately exposed to changing political winds in the United States, while many of their peers are relatively insulated by distance and increasing global commerce with China.

That exposure is reciprocal: Cuba plays a unique role in U.S. politics, while commercial and financial borders between Mexico and the United States have become increasingly blurry.

For Mexico, a country that traded more than $800 billion in goods with the U.S. in 2023, the short-term shake-ups of Democratic and Republican administrations have been a key factor in giving López Obrador space to pick fights with the regional heavyweight.

López Obrador came into power in 2018, forced to deal with a Trump administration dead set on controlling migration, even if that meant risking the economic pain of trade wars. He’s leaving office dealing with a Biden administration willing to publicly overlook other issues as long as migration is contained and trade flows smoothly, avoiding inflationary spikes.

“On the U.S. side, we have had some relatively calm years with Democrats, which could perpetuate themselves if Kamala Harris wins, but we have the risk that if Trump wins and we all of a sudden have to again deal with a rather confrontational northern neighbor, aggressive — because we know that the rhetoric, even if he doesn’t implement any measures against Mexico, the rhetoric will be adverse. That obviously adds to the problems of instability and uncertainty, and that is completely negative,” said Joan Domene, a Mexico City-based senior economist at Oxford Economics.

According to an economic analysis written by Domene, the potential for a trade war under former President Trump would disproportionately affect Mexico, while other Latin American countries such as Peru and Brazil — less linked to the U.S. and more dependent on commodities exports than Mexico — “could even benefit from the trade reordering by 2029.”

But domestic political whiplash is only one factor that explains why the region’s leaders are publicly touting their independence from — or hostility toward — the United States.

“It’s a series of factors. Some of them are structural. They’ve been going on for quite some time now, at least for the past two, three administrations,” said Sarukhán.

“Obviously, the Trump administration made things worse, because the relationship with the hemisphere was basically predicated on a muscling Mexico into outsourcing U.S. immigration enforcement policies. And then the second piece of agenda towards the hemisphere was focusing on Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, for purely, I think, at the end of the day, for mainly electoral, domestic electoral reasons of you know, Florida being in play both in 2016 and in 2020 for the Republicans.”

That left countries such as Uruguay and Costa Rica, eager to strengthen their trade ties to the United States, waiting in line as U.S. officials dealt with hotter issues.

And the hottest issue for U.S. foreign policy experts has been China, particularly its expansionist moves in the South China Sea.

“I think that’s a huge irony, that with all this almost maniacal, monothematic focus on China and the geopolitical, geo-economic challenge that China poses to U.S. long-term interests, that the U.S. seems to have been looking just in one direction, when China has been in the past decade or so, really deepening its footprint in the Americas,” said Sarukhán.

That Chinese footprint has reduced the risk of alienating the United States for commodities exporters including Brazil and Colombia, countries whose presidents both marked their distance — along with López Obrador — from the Biden administration’s condemnation of apparent electoral fraud in Venezuela.

“You’ve got that misalignment between priorities that certain countries in the Americas are looking for in their engagement with the U.S. and priorities that the U.S. is defining as the drivers of its engagement with the Americas,” said Sarukhán.

“And then there are in particular, I think, missteps by the administration [like the] elections in Venezuela. And more importantly, the relationship with Mexico, despite the fact that we all know, we’re all adults and we all know that the Biden administration’s agenda has been predicated on ensuring Mexican support on immigration and therefore not wanting to antagonize the Mexican government on other issues related to the agenda.”

López Obrador has spearheaded massive constitutional changes in his last month in office, including a reform to subject all of the country’s judgeships to popular vote.

The reform package, supported by President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum, has generated some backlash from U.S. officials, but by and large Washington has steered clear of direct criticism.

“This effort by President [López Obrador] in the last months of his presidency seems like an effort to protect his party and reduce the independence of judges,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who chairs the Western Hemisphere Foreign Relations Subcommittee, told reporters in Spanish on Wednesday.

But if the United States has looked the other way amid potentially worrying new developments in the region, it also kept up old habits.

In Cuba’s case, both short-term political fluctuations and long-term strategic posturing have created a catch-22 situation for the United States, which is now unwilling to lift economic sanctions on the island but remains wary of the migration caused by economic distress.

Following a politically risky policy of rapprochement during the Obama administration — a risk that preceded the Democrats’ last presidential and Senate wins in Florida — the United States under Trump and President Biden returned to a policy of seeking regime change through sanctions.

“We were both willing to make gestures and concessions to move forward. Cuba fulfilled and has fulfilled all the commitments we made, all of them. And the United States has failed to fulfill most of them,” said Cuban Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Carlos Fernández de Cossío.

“We know the Trump government came to power with the stated objective of going against those commitments. Now, the Biden government came to power with a different message from Trump. However, in practical terms the fundamental stamp of Trump’s position — which is the policy of what he called maximum economic pressure — the Biden government has applied it with surprising loyalty.”

Post-Trump, Cuban officials have made their priority removal from the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism.

A week before leaving office, Trump included Cuba in the list, leaving Biden a hot potato: He could either choose to appear soft against the communist regime, or implement the sanctions that further spurred migration from the island.

Biden chose the latter, adding a layer to an embargo that has molded Cuban political life for 65 years.

“However independent we feel and want to be, our political system does have close ties to the hostility of the United States. It’s a political system built to defend itself from the clear and open hostility of the United States. In different conditions it could be different. It won’t be while we have the United States with the capacity and the intent to influence every detail of Cuban life. It’s a system for protection,” said Fernández de Cossío.