Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Mexico makes a memorable exit from the World Cup, the United Nations debates U.S. sanctions on Cuba, and Colombia’s presidential transition falters.
Sunday night marked the grand finale of Mexico’s 2026 FIFA World Cup. The Mexican national team went out fighting in a 3-2 loss to England in what was also the last game of the tournament hosted on Mexican soil.
For Mexican fans and visitors, the mood before and during the match was electric. Although many in the country had mixed feelings ahead of hosting the tournament, Mexico caught soccer fever as the national team delivered multiple victories without conceding a single goal, including its first win in a knockout stage game in 40 years.
That June 30 match over Ecuador featured goals by stars Julián Quiñones—a Black Colombian-born, naturalized Mexican who is changing the way the country thinks about national identity—and Raúl Jiménez, who was back at elite performance following a life-threatening skull fracture in 2020.
After the victory, more than a million people packed the streets of Mexico City. A catchphrase went viral among fans: “¿Y si sí?”—which roughly translates to “What if we can?” Though the prospect of Mexico winning the entire World Cup seemed slim, the expression was true to the optimism of the moment.
The tournament “gave Mexico back the collective joy that it had been missing so much,” journalist Alejandro Domínguez wrote in Milenio. While ticket prices meant that spectators in the stadiums were disproportionately wealthy, “the streets, in contrast, served as the meeting point for everyone,” he wrote.
International soccer critics gave similarly positive reviews of the atmosphere in Mexico. The Athletic’s Jack Lang wrote that the games hosted in Mexico were “its best experience, its dislocated heart,” and that Mexico City’s historic Azteca Stadium “provided a blueprint for what big-tournament matches like [the Mexico-England game] should look like.”
Despite some travelers’ worries, cartel violence in Mexico did not interrupt the tournament. More disruptive were activists denouncing forced disappearances and calling for higher wages; authorities generally allowed them to demonstrate but not immediately around stadiums.
Another factor that failed to emerge at the World Cup was political unity between the three North American hosts. Instead, the Trump administration announced that it would trigger annual reviews of the three countries’ free trade deal, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, who has responded calmly to U.S. President Donald Trump’s past provocations, dialed up her rhetoric against the United States in the last few weeks. She supported a bill that allows for election results to be overturned in cases of foreign interference and pledged legal action after the fatal shooting of a Mexican immigrant in Houston by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.
Sheinbaum’s response to Trump even drew a comparison with the Mexican national soccer team. Just as the Mexican squad shed its “‘colonial chip,’ the notion that we are condemned to lose,” author Jorge Zepeda Patterson wrote, the Mexican government has responded “firmly and unequivocally when the imbalance between the two countries threatened to turn into abuse.”
Zepeda Patterson was referencing Mexico’s fierce style of play in its final game. Though Mexico lost on Sunday against England, it fought hard until the end of the match. Colombia similarly drew 0-0 against Switzerland in its Tuesday knockout game before losing in penalties—a more honorable exit than Brazil’s 2-1 loss against Norway on Sunday.
Meanwhile, Paraguay—which was eliminated from the tournament in a 1-0 loss to France on Saturday—continued to make headlines this week after a senator from the country launched a racist string of online attacks against French star Kylian Mbappé, prompting condemnation from both French President Emmanuel Macron and Paraguayan President Santiago Peña.
There is only one Latin American team left standing: Argentina. Though the defending world champions played slowly at points in the tournament, they proved on Tuesday that they should not be written off, coming back from a 2-0 lead by Egypt and scoring three goals in 13 minutes.
Saturday, July 11: Argentina plays Switzerland in the World Cup quarterfinals in Kansas City.
Monday, July 13, to Friday, July 24: The International Seabed Authority convenes in Kingston, Jamaica, to negotiate rules for deep-sea mining.
Tuesday, July 28: Keiko Fujimori is inaugurated as president of Peru.
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Eduardo Rodríguez Parrilla addresses the United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters in New York on Sept. 27, 2025. Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images
