Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Some Latin American countries expand cooperation with partners in Africa, hundreds more troops ready for a deployment to Haiti, and a Miami trial pulls back the curtain on Venezuela’s lobbying efforts in the United States.
Colombia hosted two international forums last week: a leaders’ summit for the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the first-ever CELAC-Africa High-Level Forum.
CELAC was founded in 2011 as a space for regional leaders to discuss their affairs without the presence of the United States and Canada, which are members of the older (and better-resourced) Organization of American States.
Latin America is currently dominated by leaders intent on signaling positive relations with U.S. President Donald Trump, and the CELAC summit was—perhaps unsurprisingly—sparsely attended. Only four leaders from the region showed up: those of Brazil, Colombia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Uruguay.
The CELAC-Africa event was more noteworthy. It attracted Burundian President Evariste Ndayishimiye, who is also serving as the rotating chair of the African Union, and showcased recent policy evolutions for some Latin American and Caribbean countries.
Around 1 in 4 Latin Americans identify as being of African descent. Seeking to acknowledge this shared history to pursue broader south-south cooperation strategies, a few Latin American governments have sought to boost their political and business ties to African countries in recent years.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro is one figure at the forefront of these efforts. Petro and Francia Márquez, the country’s first Black vice president, have prioritized an explicit Africa strategy that has seen Colombia’s bilateral trade with Algeria, Nigeria, and Senegal roughly double—and increase twentyfold with Ethiopia—since 2022, albeit from low starting points.
Petro and Márquez have also opened embassies in Ethiopia and Senegal and launched cooperation projects with additional countries regarding sustainable agriculture and shipping logistics. Their administration established a “very different baseline for our relationship with Africa,” said Jerónimo Delgado-Caicedo, an African studies professor at the Externado University of Colombia.
Meanwhile, Mexico launched a chamber of commerce in Nigeria last year and is in talks with Ghana about that country’s plans to open an embassy in Mexico. Brazil grew its trade with African countries by some 11 percent in the last three years and opened an embassy in Rwanda. Since 2020, Barbados has opened an embassy in Ghana, and Suriname has done so in Morocco.
Most of these recent Latin American pushes toward Africa were advanced by left-wing leaders. The Caribbean has been more politically agnostic toward the continent: The Caribbean Community and the AU held joint summits in 2021 and 2025.
Though Latin America-Africa relations are growing, they are not at their highest point in history. The so-called pink tide of the late 2000s produced a bigger spurt of cooperation, led by leftist governments across Latin America that were intent on promoting south-south solidarity.
A 2009 summit in Venezuela attracted dozens of leaders from Africa and South America. Around that time, Brazil worked to revive plans for a South Atlantic “zone of peace” security arrangement between Latin American and African countries that was first floated two decades earlier.
The region’s swing to the right helps explain the low participation in this year’s Africa-Latin America forum, according to Renata Albuquerque Ribeiro, a political scientist and researcher at the State University of Rio de Janeiro.
Still, it would be a “basic error” to assume that south-south cooperation has been restricted to the left, Ribeiro said. Brazil’s right-wing military dictatorship sought out political relationships across the global south, spurred in part by the need to seek partners for oil trading and exploration following the 1973 oil shock.
The current surge in enthusiasm for Latin America-Africa ties could prove lasting if it is baked into government structures, Ribeiro said. The opening of embassies, rather than easy-to-cancel cooperation programs, is one such example.
Colombia’s pivot to Africa has resulted in institutional changes in multiple government bodies, such as the foreign ministry, Delgado-Caicedo said. He argued that some of that capacity would remain even if Colombians elect a right-wing president in May.
Friday, March 27: The U.S. House of Representatives holds a hearing on Latin America after the U.S. ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Sunday, April 12: Peru holds presidential elections.
Friday, April 24, to Wednesday, April 29: Colombia hosts a conference about transitioning away from fossil fuels.
Drug strike hits dairy farm. After the New York Times visited a site in Ecuador where the U.S. and Ecuadorian militaries said they bombed drug traffickers this month, the newspaper reported that the strike actually hit a dairy farm and that three of its workers said they were tortured by Ecuadorian security forces before being released.
The report reflects one of the few instances where U.S. claims about anti-drug strikes can be scrutinized by independent reporters. Dozens of those targeted in recent U.S. attacks have been killed at sea. In response, the U.S. Defense Department said it does not discuss targeting data, while Ecuador said it found evidence that drug traffickers used the farm but did not share it.
Children play soccer in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on March 21.Clarens Siffroy/AFP via Getty Images
