Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: U.S. President Donald Trump intervenes in the presidential election in Honduras, Bolivia’s new leader announces his economic agenda, and the United States escalates its pressure campaign against Venezuela.
U.S. Foments Tensions in Honduras
U.S. President Donald Trump has waded into domestic politics in Brazil and Argentina this year, and now it is Honduras’s turn.
The country held a presidential election on Sunday. It is currently led by the leftist Libre party, which took over in 2022 following 12 years of right-wing rule under the National Party. Last week, Trump endorsed National Party candidate Nasry Asfura and suggested that he would cut U.S. aid to Honduras if Asfura lost.
Last Friday, Trump also said he would pardon the most recent National Party president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was jailed in the United States on a 45-year drug trafficking sentence. In Trump’s announcement of the pardon, he reiterated a call for Hondurans to vote for Asfura.
Trump formally pardoned Hernández on Monday, saying that the former president was subject to a political “witch hunt” and that “a lot of people in Honduras” called for the pardon. Right-wing U.S. political strategist Roger Stone later said he had urged Trump to pardon Hernández.
Asfura was narrowly leading another right-wing candidate, Salvador Nasralla, as of Thursday afternoon. The vote count was not unfolding smoothly: The digital system for tabulating results halted on Wednesday in an incident that Honduran election official Cossette López-Osorio called “inexcusable” on social media.
Disputed elections are common in Honduras, and Trump’s intervention heightened political tensions. Libre candidate Rixi Moncada said on Monday that she might not accept the results due to U.S. interference. On Thursday, Nasralla called for an investigation into the vote-counting glitches. By Thursday afternoon, Moncada was trailing Asfura and Nasralla by around 21 and 20 points, respectively.
An Asfura or Nasralla victory could lead Honduras to reverse several Libre policies, such as a 2023 switch to diplomatically recognize China instead of Taiwan and a campaign to rein in low-tax, low-regulation economic zones favored by the cryptocurrency sector.
It is still unclear whether Trump’s endorsement of Asfura affected voter behavior. Some Hondurans said they shied away from the National Party out of distaste for Trump’s pardon of Hernández. Others were drawn toward Asfura because they want their government to have a positive relationship with the United States.
What is already clear is the fundamental contradiction in Trump’s approach to Latin America. Despite his administration’s declared commitment to halting drug trafficking in the Western Hemisphere—its stated rationale for a bombing campaign against small boats in the region—organized crime experts overwhelmingly agree that pardoning Hernández weakens those efforts.
Mike Vigil, a former Drug Enforcement Agency head of international operations, told the Guardian that pardoning Hernández “shows that the entire counter-drug effort of Donald Trump is a charade.”
Even U.S. Rep. María Elvira Salazar, a staunch Trump supporter, said on Monday that she would not have pardoned Hernández and agreed with a characterization of him as a “thug.”
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, the White House issued an official statement on Trump’s Latin America policy that reaffirmed a commitment to the Monroe Doctrine—the 19th-century concept that said the United States would push against other countries’ influence in Latin America.
The White House statement also announced a new “Trump corollary” to the doctrine. It states that “the American people—not foreign nations nor globalist institutions—will always control their own destiny in our hemisphere.”
Upcoming Events
Friday, Dec. 5: A U.S. Trade Representative hearing on the review of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement wraps up.
Thursday, Dec. 11: The Nobel Peace Prize holds a forum in Oslo that is due to honor this year’s laureate, María Corina Machado.
Sunday, Dec. 14: Chile holds a presidential runoff election.
What We’re Following
Paz’s first steps. Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz, who took office in November, made clear last week that his pro-market reforms would be conducted gradually—rather than with shock therapy like that of Argentine President Javier Milei. Paz hopes to pull Bolivia out of a financial crisis.
Rather than seeking a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—which often comes with strict requirements to cut deficits—the Paz administration is negotiating at least $9 billion in new loans from sources such as the World Bank and the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean, Economy Minister Jose Gabriel Espinoza said last week.
Bolivia also announced the end of a wealth tax and a tax on financial transactions, aiming to make doing business easier. The Paz administration plans to cut government spending by 30 percent in 2026, though not mandated by the IMF. It also said it would widen permission for the use of cryptocurrencies, which Bolivians have used to hedge against the volatility of the boliviano.
G-20 postgame. The recent G-20 summit in South Africa focused on several themes that Brazil also promoted in its presidency of the group last year, especially the negative impacts of heavy debt burdens for developing countries and how international institutions such as the IMF might better handle them.
Though the United States boycotted the summit amid tensions with South Africa, all of the G-20 countries that participated, except Argentina, signed off on a declaration that vowed work to address these concerns.
To some extent, the G-20 summit showed the sticking power of efforts to elevate a global south agenda on the world stage. Since 2022, reforms at multilateral development banks that were prioritized during the G-20 presidencies of Indonesia, India, Brazil, and South Africa have increased those banks’ lending capacities by an estimated half a trillion dollars.
But the U.S. boycott and Argentina’s dissent also displayed the risks to the influence of the G-20 forum. The United States, which took over the rotating presidency of the G-20 on Monday, has wiped South Africa’s summit declaration and coverage of its presidency from the forum’s website.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum attends a presentation about the FIFA World Cup 2026 in Mexico City on Nov. 10.Cristopher Rogel Blanquet/Getty Images
The art of soccer. To coincide with next year’s FIFA World Cup, hosted by Canada, Mexico, and the United States, Mexico City’s Museo Jumex will open an exhibit of contemporary art devoted to the sport, it announced last week. The exhibit will feature works by some of Latin America’s most prominent visual artists of recent decades as well as newly commissioned pieces.
Confirmed in the artist lineup are Argentina’s Marta Minujín, who in 1977 painted a giant bikini-clad woman reclined across a soccer stadium, and Mexican group Tercerunquinto, which is set to assemble an art installation from bleacher stands.
The works probe soccer’s connections to both ancient and contemporary Mexican culture, such as in a video by Melanie Smith and Rafael Ortega in which Mexican public school students display a giant mosaic of an Indigenous artifact in the capital city’s Aztec Stadium. In addition to being a “playful force,” soccer has “critical and political dimensions,” the museum said.
Question of the Week
Dec. 1 is the anniversary of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which governs the use and scientific exploration on the continent. Which Latin American country is among the original signatories?
In South America, Argentina and Chile were original signatories to the treaty. Brazil later became a consultative member.
FP’s Most Read This Week
- Why China Didn’t Do a ‘Kissinger’ to Split Europe From America by Gabrielius Landsbergis
- Trump’s Venezuela Fixation Is Not About the Oil by Keith Johnson
- Can Chinese Authoritarianism Stay Smart? by Jennifer Lind
In Focus: Venezuela Watch
A view of the Caracas skyline taken at dawn on Sept. 12.Federico Parra/AFP via Getty Images
Trump’s pressure campaign against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro continued this week, with new reports of negotiations meant to convince Maduro to leave power.
Amid escalating domestic pushback to U.S. boat strikes that some legislators warned could have been unlawful, Trump hinted in a cabinet meeting on Tuesday that he could mobilize part of the 15,000-person U.S. military deployment in Latin America to launch land strikes in Venezuela.
On Sunday, Trump also acknowledged he had a direct conversation with Maduro. The Venezuelan leader confirmed on Wednesday that the two spoke on the phone in November, calling the conversation “cordial.” Reuters reported that Maduro listed conditions for him to step down, including amnesty for his family and sanctions removal for dozens of officials. Trump reportedly refused most of the requests.
On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that Joesley Batista, a Brazilian meatpacking magnate with business in Venezuela, flew to Caracas last month to conduct discreet talks aimed at convincing Maduro to leave. The Trump administration was aware of Batista’s travel plans to Caracas, though Batista’s family holding company said that he “is not a representative of any government.”
Batista is no stranger to political overtures. Earlier this year, he flew to Washington for a direct meeting with Trump to try to persuade him to lower tariffs on Brazil. Batista’s company owns a Colorado-based chicken producer, which gave $5 million to Trump’s inauguration committee.
If Batista’s mission to Caracas had Brazil’s informal blessing, it could represent a hardening of Brazilian policy toward Maduro since last year’s disputed Venezuelan presidential election. Although Brazil never recognized Maduro’s purported victory, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has generally refrained from harsh criticism. Trump said he and Lula had a “great talk” this week.
So far, Venezuelan civilians are bearing much of the impact of the U.S. pressure campaign: Repeated U.S. warnings of potential military action in Venezuelan airspace led several carriers to cancel flights to the country.