Latin America Politics General Thread

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Bukele has been going hard after any NGO that has to do with democracy, human rights, media freedom, etc.

Ironically, this is straight out of the Ortega playbook after 2018. They pretty much eradicated all NGOs including organizations that had nothing to do with politics (Operation Smile?). These totalitarians don't want any civil organizations to influence citizens in any way.
 
It seems that Ortega was himself channeling Putin and even Mugabe (Zimbabwe) in the purging of NGOs -- certainly the right-wing governments of the Cold War were super-selective of who they permitted to do work (and where) though there are so many accounts of those brave people defying those regimes to provide for the poor.

Nicaragua is such a sad case -- so much energy laid out and blood spilled to be back in the clutches of an authoritarian.
 
That's an interesting read. I would quibble on some things, but tend to agree with most of the diagnosis (though curiously not the headline). Think this is a cautionary tale...be careful what you wish for. Our shift from a two-party system that alternated power for 50 years gave rise to a multiparty system that has become fragmented with every electoral cycle. In this next election we have 20 presidential candidates:the debates will be a tough watch (we had 26 candidates last time and it was a shit show). We will Riley have congressional reps from a dozen parties in our Legislative assembly, making it that much harder to build consensus and govern.

Our current president is barred from seeking immediate election, but he has designated a candidate who may install him as Chief of Staff (which would give him immunity from some allegations). He has adopted some strategies from the Trump/Bukele playbook: going after the press, flaunting conventional norms, making an enemies list, refusing to work with the opposition, weekly press conferences the he goes after his critics, etc. The rumor is that the US state department has helped him out by stripping visas of some of his political opponents. We'll see how the next election goes, but I don't think CR democracy is close to capitulating (much more concerned about the US).
 
"Last month, Javier Milei, Argentina’s flashy libertarian leader, arrived in New York City not with his trademark chainsaw, but with his hat in his hand. He left with a stunning pledge from the U.S. government to loan $20 billion to stop a run on the peso that threatens to wreck Milei’s pro-market revolution.

For the United States, there is no economic logic to the rescue, to be ironed out at Milei’s Oval Office meeting on Oct. 14. Indeed, President Donald Trump and his Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, hardly hid the ideological motivations behind the risky bailout of Trump’s “favorite president.” That is unfortunate, because there is a foreign policy case for lending Argentina a hand, though perhaps not one stuffed with hundred-dollar bills.

The Trump administration’s formal reason for the bailout is that Argentina, in Bessent’s words, is “systemically important” to the U.S. economy. It obviously is not. Argentina buys just 12 percent of its imports from the United States. Last year, U.S. goods exports to the country totaled a meager $9.1 billion, compared to $334 billion to neighboring Mexico, the last country to receive a similar U.S. rescue package, in 1995. Yet another economic collapse in Argentina would hardly reverberate in the United States, 5,000 miles away.

The more likely explanation for the rescue — Trump’s admiration for Milei — is an even less persuasive reason to hazard so much taxpayer money. Milei has gone to great lengths to befriend Trump and portray himself as a far-right fellow traveler. He visited Mar-a-Lago to congratulate the president-elect last November, and later was one of just two world leaders on stage at Trump’s second inauguration. His recent trip to New York was his twelfth to the United States since his swearing-in in December 2023.

Milei is a celebrity on the Make America Great Again circuit. In February, he headlined the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, where on stage he delivered a chainsaw to Elon Musk, a symbol of Milei’s fight against Argentina’s profligate public spending and bloated bureaucracy. In December, he hosted the conservative gathering in Buenos Aires, where Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara, was among the speakers.

Like the Trump administration’s fondness for the far-right Alternative for Germany, the National Rally in France, Nigel Farage of the United Kingdom, and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, its support for Milei reflects largely ideological interests. Bessent has said the United States should help conservatives win elections in Latin America, and suggested U.S. companies shared his hope for a “positive” outcome in Argentina’s Oct. 26 midterms. Trump went further, writing on Truth Social that Milei had his “Complete and Total Endorsement for Re-Election.”

None of that was lost on the opposition Peronists, a party that already viewed the United States with suspicion. In the 1940s, U.S. Ambassador Spruille Braden’s opposition to the original Peronist helped secure the election for Juan Perón, who campaigned under the slogan, “Braden o Perón.” This time around, Peronist leader Cristina Kirchner has described the promised $20 billion U.S. loan as a campaign contribution for Milei.

Whatever the real reason for the rescue — and it will likely be a Treasury line of credit — it is unlikely to help very much. In the short term, it calmed investors and reduced pressure on Argentina’s currency. On Monday, Bessent met in Washington with his Argentine counterpart, amid renewed market instability in Buenos Aires. But most economists say the bigger problem is Milei’s unwillingness to devalue the peso — a policy that helped vanquish inflation, but has slowed economic growth, depressed exports, and made it tougher to build up hard currency reserves to repay the country’s sizable debt, more than $450 billion. Milei also needs to build greater public support for his reforms. Voters are increasingly annoyed by rising joblessness and budget cuts that have led to higher prices for buses, electricity, and natural gas. A corruption scandal involving Karina Milei — the president’s sister and chief of staff, whom he compares to Moses — did not reassure voters. As a result, the libertarian party lost badly in local Buenos Aires elections last month, triggering the run on the peso."

cont.
 
...The Trump administration’s ideological cheerleading, and the riskiness of the bailout, have made it easy to ridicule, by both liberals and conservatives. Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren urged Trump to stop “giving away our money to his corrupt buddies.” Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley criticized any bailout of a country that supplies China with soybeans to make up for the food it no longer buys from U.S. farmers.

The irony is that Trump could have made a foreign policy case for supporting Argentina that might have won bipartisan support. After all, the United States has few friends in the region these days. The three largest countries — Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia — are led by leftists who are mistrustful of U.S. power. Virtually every leader in Latin America, regardless of party, favors nonalignment in the U.S.-Chinese rivalry.

That is not true in Argentina. Even before the last U.S. election, Milei had plainly stated his alignment with the United States, and his low opinion of China. In his presidential campaign, Milei criticized Argentina’s decision to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a source of infrastructure finance, insisting that he would not make deals with “communists and murderers.” Last year, he welcomed President Joe Biden’s secretary of state to the Casa Rosada, Argentina’s presidential palace. Democratic and Republican lawmakers have also met with Milei in Buenos Aires.

Admittedly, Argentina is a not a serious player on the international stage. Nor is it relevant to the White House’s biggest interests in the region, slowing migration and fighting cocaine and fentanyl traffickers. Still, it is an increasingly valuable partner. The country has huge reserves of lithium and copper, critical ingredients for batteries. It is also a consequential battleground for U.S.-Chinese competition. Under previous governments, Argentina allowed China’s military to open a space base in the country; flirted with the possibility of buying Chinese fighter jets and a Chinese nuclear power plant; and considered giving China special access to the strategic Straits of Magellan at the southern tip of the continent. To ride out its last debt crisis, Argentina tapped a Chinese line of credit.

The United States will rely on Argentina’s support even more in the coming months. The new U.S. defense strategy will reportedly prioritize the Western Hemisphere, a pivot that would be tough without at least one big country laying out the red carpet. There are few alternatives available. Trump alienated President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva by imposing a 50 percent tax on imports from Brazil as punishment for the prosecution of Bolsonaro for plotting a failed coup d’état. In late September, the State Department revoked Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s visa after he criticized the United States during a visit to the United Nations. Trump is reportedly considering bombing drug cartels in Mexico over the objections of the Mexican government. He might also invade Venezuela to depose its strongman leader, Nicolás Maduro, whose unpopularity with his neighbors might not be enough to overcome the unpopularity of U.S. military interventions.

Finally, though Milei’s Make America Great Again credentials are unquestionable, his commitment to control spending, rationalize monetary policy, and pursue pro-market reforms is mostly in line with bipartisan U.S. regional priorities. Should those ideas achieve the broad appeal of Lionel Messi or the late Pope Francis, other Argentine exports, it would help stabilize Latin America and create opportunities for U.S. firms.

None of this necessarily argues for a financial rescue that could very well end with Argentina defaulting on U.S. taxpayers. The country is on its twenty-third International Monetary Fund bailout, a global record. After its last economic meltdown, in 2001, the U.S. government and U.S. bondholders were among the creditors it stiffed. That could happen again should Axel Kicillof, the influential Peronist governor of Buenos Aires province, end up succeeding Milei.

Nevertheless, greater cooperation with Argentina, including U.S. mining and energy investments and reduced trade barriers, would rightly reward Milei’s sensible economic strategy and foreign policy partnership, and demonstrate the dividends for regional leaders who wager on Washington in great-power competition."


warontherocks.com

When Ideology Writes the Check: Washington’s Risky Bet on Argentina

Last month, Javier Milei, Argentina’s flashy libertarian leader, arrived in New York City not with his trademark chainsaw, but with his hat in his hand.
warontherocks.com


Benjamin Gedan, Ph.D., is a foreign policy fellow at the Latin America Studies Initiative at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Previously, he was responsible for Argentina as a South America director on the National Security Council staff in the White House and at the State Department.
 
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