Ifs, Ands, and Buts
Dear Readers,
Over the holidays, GlobalPost is collaborating with our sister publication, World Politics Review, to bring you special coverage of the key geopolitical issues facing some of the major regions of the world in 2025.
Today, James Bosworth takes a look at Latin America.
We wish you happy holidays and best wishes for the New Year.
Your GlobalPost Team
NEED TO KNOW
Ifs, Ands, and Buts
LATIN AMERICA
Many political and business leaders in Latin America are looking ahead to 2025 with concern over what they believe are some worst-case scenarios that could result from US President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
For example, if Trump follows through with his promise to deport millions of Latin Americans currently in the US back to their countries of origin, the societal impact would be immense. If he follows through on his promised global trade war – including the threat of imposing 25 percent tariffs on all goods from Mexico – the economic pain would likely create a regional recession. If the new administration launches military operations against criminal groups in Mexico, it could create new interstate tensions without resolving the massive security challenges the region faces.
All these “ifs” represent major challenges for countries in the region seeking to plan out their scenarios for next year.
Nobody knows whether Trump will attempt any of those policies or, if he does, whether their scale in practice will match his rhetoric. Once implemented, their real-world impact could turn out to be quite different from what is expected.
While Trump promised such big changes in his first term, those policies, when enacted, did not transform into the worst-case scenarios that many of the United States’ international partners feared. It’s also possible that Trump’s second term will be hit by a “black swan” event similar to the pandemic that derailed his first term. So, while the apocalyptic scenarios are concerning, it is hard for regional leaders to quantify exactly how concerned they should be, given all the unknowns.
Meanwhile, though many of Latin America’s political and business leaders are concerned, the regional reaction is far from uniform. Argentine President Javier Milei and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, for example, are celebrating the incoming Trump administration and are eager for him to implement his agenda. Both men believe they and their countries will benefit economically and diplomatically from a Trump administration far more than they did under President Joe Biden.
Other center-right politicians around the region, while less openly enthusiastic, are content to embrace Trump. They will find ways to cooperate with his agenda, trading assistance on the logistically challenging deportation scheme – by accepting the return of third-country nationals whose governments refuse to cooperate, for instance – for other policy goals. And some business leaders dismiss the possibility of a tariff and trade war altogether and look forward to what they believe will be a more pro-market administration in the United States.
Meanwhile, barring the mass deportations and punishing trade war scenarios, the economic horizon is looking pretty good for much of Latin America in 2025. For most countries, inflation is under control, and economic growth should come in slightly higher compared with 2024.
Even so, most of the continent remains in an anti-incumbent and anti-establishment mood, angry at what many perceive as corrupt governing elites who fail to deliver for their populations. Polling across Latin America shows that citizens’ anger and disappointment with democracy remains high throughout the region. Another year of good – but not great – economic growth will not be enough to reverse the tide of this populist anger.
That’s already been the case in recent years. From 2018 through 2023, nearly every presidential election in the region was won by an opposition political party. The predictable exceptions to that wave in 2024 were due to politicians – Bukele in El Salvador and President Luis Abinader in the Dominican Republic – and movements, for example, Mexico’s Morena Party, that brought President Claudia Sheinbaum to power this year – that have successfully redirected citizen anger toward the traditional political elites of the past as represented by their leading opponents.
The elections on the calendar in 2025 are expected to continue the region’s anti-establishment trend, meaning the only way incumbent presidents can hope to win is to position themselves as anti-elite outsiders.
The year will begin with what promises to be a close election in Ecuador, where President Daniel Noboa is running for reelection after less than 18 months in office after winning a shortened term in a snap election. Noboa’s chances depend on whether he can portray the country’s many current problems as being the fault of former President Rafael Correa, the patron of his opponent, Luisa González.
Later this year, Bolivian President Luis Arce will struggle in his bid for reelection, as former President Evo Morales attempts to challenge him from the left from within a fractured ruling party, while several centrist and right-wing opponents hope the resulting divisions give them an opportunity. In Honduras, President Xiomara Castro wants to hand off power to a chosen successor, Defense Minister Rixi Moncada Godoy. In Chile, President Gabriel Boric has spent much of his time in office struggling with low approval ratings and an inability to pass his agenda. He is barred from running for consecutive reelection, and the expectation is that one of his right-wing opponents will succeed him, with the possibility that Chile will be the latest Southern Cone country to embrace a populist outsider.
Across all of these countries, insecurity remains a top concern, and in many of them, homicide rates are too high and still rising. New and reformed criminal groups have emerged in the past decade that profit not only from cocaine, but also from illicit gold mining, human smuggling, and extortion, a trend that Will Freeman at the Council on Foreign Relations refers to as “reorganized crime.” These groups share many of the same characteristics as their predecessors but have found ways to corrupt and control state authorities in ways that make rooting them out more difficult. From the Sinaloa Cartel bribing former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández and sparking a gang war in Ecuador to Brazil’s PCC assassinating a Paraguayan prosecutor in Colombia, these groups cross borders with impunity, bringing violence and corruption with them.
Meanwhile, a separate but related issue is that lower-level crime is an increasingly commonplace experience for Latin Americans in general. In fact, if asked what the biggest threat is to them personally, many Latin Americans would probably reply it is getting mugged. In other words, insecurity is both a big-picture geopolitical risk as well as a day-to-day threat.
The other risk that many citizens would point to is the wild weather of the past year. Floods ravaged Brazil in early 2024, killing almost 200 people, displacing a half-million more from their homes, and causing over $3 billion in damage. Meanwhile, drought and heat hit South America. Rivers dried up. Fires damaged forests in many countries. And electricity from hydroelectric power became scarce, leading to power outages and more political outrage. The odds of climate change bringing more calamities in Latin America in 2025 seem high, given that the prospect of too much or too little rain has become an annual threat to most countries across the hemisphere.
Amid all the uncertainty, one thing seems clear: The challenges Latin America will face in 2025 won’t be solved in 2025. Indeed, they can’t be. Relations with the US, discontent with democracy, organized crime, and climate change are issues that require years if not decades of work to resolve. Yet dealing with their short-term impacts often impedes the long-term solutions that are needed.
As such, Latin America’s winners next year will be the leaders and societies that can figure out how to move away from immediate crisis management to formulate and adopt strategies that can solve those bigger challenges over the many years to come. Unfortunately, patience is in short supply, for both voters and politicians.
James Bosworth is the founder of Hxagon, a political risk analysis firm that conducts bespoke research in emerging and frontier markets, and also a global fellow at the Wilson Center’s Latin America Program.
Read more of World Politics Review’s in-depth global affairs coverage here.
THE WORLD, BRIEFLY
The World, Briefly section will return on Jan. 3, 2025.
DISCOVERIES
Ocean Overachiever
One particular humpback whale was last spotted in 2017 in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Colombia. Now, the whale has popped up in the Indian Ocean near Zanzibar, East Africa, a distance of at least 8,077 miles, and astonishing scientists for it.
A typical migration route for humpbacks is around 4,971 miles, making this epic journey close to double that of most whales.
Was it a quest for love? A hunt for food? Scientists aren’t sure, according to a new study, published last week in the journal Royal Society Open Science, which recorded the whale’s journey, the longest migration ever recorded for a single whale.
The study’s authors utilized a platform called Happy Whale, cofounded by Ted Cheeseman, co-author of the study and marine biologist at Southern Cross University in Australia. The platform allows scientists, researchers, whale watchers, and members of the public, to contribute their whale sightings, according to CNN.
The database uses artificial intelligence to match the individual shapes and patterns of humpback whale tails in the photos, thus mapping their movements around the globe, the BBC wrote. “When (whales) dive, they lift their tails, and anyone taking a picture of their tail can record the identity of the animal,” Cheeseman told CNN.
Humpback whales can be found in all oceans around the world and have some of the longest migrations of any mammal. The species annually swim long distances from tropical breeding grounds to feeding grounds in cooler waters.
Even so, Ekaterina Kalashnikova from the Tanzania Cetaceans Program told the BBC that the whale’s journey was “truly impressive and unusual even for this highly migratory species.”
The scientists think that the whale’s unusual migration route might be due to climate change depleting food stocks, or an odyssey to find a mate.
For example, one theory is that climate change is depleting the abundance of the tiny shrimp-like krill that the whales feed on, forcing them to travel further to find food.
Another theory is that whales may be venturing into new breeding grounds as their populations recover through global conservation efforts from commercial whaling that decimated their numbers. According to Cheeseman, the whale had likely been in competition with other males for mates in Colombia, and it’s possible he traveled to find a less aggressive environment.
Meanwhile, this whale migrated between two distinct breeding stocks in different oceans with remarkable precision, researchers said.
“Our dogmatic thinking is that (whales) always go to the place where they came from,” Ari Friedlaender, professor of ocean sciences at the University of California, who was not involved in the study, told CNN. “But there has to be some movement where you get some (animal) explorers that decide, for whatever reason, to follow a different path.”