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Latin America & Caribbean
President-elect Donald Trump attends the America First Policy Institute gala at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, on Nov. 14, 2024.
25: President-elect Donald Trump took aim at Canada and Mexico via Truth Social on Monday, posting about his plan to charge the countries — currently America’s No. 1 & No. 2 trading partners, — a whopping 25% tariff on all products entering the US. The tariff would be enacted on Jan. 20, 2025, Trump said, and would “remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!” He then posted that he would charge China, where the precursor chemicals to fentanyl are made, “an additional 10% tariff, above any additional Tariffs, on all of their many products coming into the United States of America.”
49: Uruguay’s left-wing opposition leader Yamandú Orsiwon the small South American country’s presidential election with 49% of the vote in a neck-and-neck runoff contest on Sunday. It was yet another rebuke of an incumbent party — the theme of many global elections this year — but not to worry: Uruguay is remarkably stable, and Orsi is a moderate with no radical plans.
1: One crew member died on Monday when a DHL cargo flight crashed during its attempted landing in Vilnius, Lithuania, with surveillance video showing a huge ball of flames as the plane went down. Lithuanian officials said they could not rule out whether Russia played a role in the crash, following months of suspicions over Moscow’s possible role in other cases of sabotage against the German shipping giant. Germany, meanwhile, is sending investigators to Vilnius to aid with the probe.
3: Human Rights Watch has determined that an Israeli drone strike that killed three journalists in Lebanon last month was most likely a deliberate attack on civilians, which is a war crime. More than 3,500 people in Lebanon have died amid Israel’s invasion, and more than 1 million have been displaced from their homes in the 5.3-million-strong country.
300: Asylum applications in Ireland have spiked 300% so far this year – with a fourfold increase from Nigeria – compared to last. The rise has been driven by tougher immigration stances in the UK, including a quixotic plan to house asylum-seekers in Rwanda. The uptick is becoming a political issue in Ireland, with voters increasingly concerned by the impact of increased migration on scarce housing.FILE PHOTO: A Kenyan police officer walks in front of an armoured personnel carrier during a joint operation with Haitian police, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti July 29, 2024.
Haiti’s government was not amused on Friday after French President Emmanuel Macron wascaught on camera calling the island nation’s leaders “morons” for ousting their former prime minister amid escalating gang violence. Macronalso blamed Haitians for “letting drug trafficking take over,” sparking outrage in the former French colony.
The comments have led to renewed demands for reparations for payments Haiti made to France back in 1804. The bill was to account for so-called “lost property,” including slaves, after the country declared independence. Activists claim the payments amounted to over $100 billion and engendered a cycle of perpetual economic and political instability.
Violence has again reached crisis levels. Armed gangs control over 85% of the capital of Port-au-Prince and have attacked prisons, police stations, and the city’s international airport, whichwas closed for the second time this month after gangs fired at passenger planes. This cut off food aid to a populationwhere nearly 6,000 people are starving and 5.4 million are experiencing crisis levels of hunger.
Despite hopes for change, the latest UN-backed security mission led by Kenya has failed to stem the violence. At least 108 suspected gang members were killed over a three-day peroiod last week, and Doctors without Borders has suspended operations in the country. The US pushed for a full UN peacekeeping mission at the Security Council last week, but Russia and China opposed the mission.Mexico's President Claudia Sheinbaum speaks, on the day of the 114th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution, in Mexico City, Mexico November 20, 2024.
The lower house of Mexico’s Congress approved the text of a constitutional proposal to scrap oversight bodies on Wednesday, a first step in the ruling Morena party’s goal of eliminating autonomous institutions and consolidating power.
The change is just the latest in a series of reforms begun under former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and carried out by his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum. Plans include overhauling the energy sector and judicial system, and guaranteeing a minimum wage that stays above inflation.
The bill passed by the lower house moves agencies overseeing government transparency, telecommunications, antitrust, energy, education, social policy, and other regulators under the jurisdiction of the executive branch, removing their institutional autonomy. It passed 347–148 and only needs one vote to pass the Senate before the legislative period ends on Dec. 15.
Sheinbaum backs the proposal, arguing that regulators are inefficient and that eliminating them will save taxpayer dollars. But her party has put forward a compromise to appease critics: decentralized agencies to ensure that antitrust and communications regulators remain independent, even as they are absorbed under the executive’s umbrella. The compromise is also meant to ensure the constitutional changes don’t contradict the terms of the trade deal with the US and Canada — which requires Mexico to have independent oversight bodies — ahead of renegotiations in 2026.
Hard Numbers: Adani’s alleged big bribe, Ortega wants to promote his wife, Australians want teens off social media, Trump expands into knock-off guitars
Supporters of India's main opposition Congress party hold placards during a protest against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, after he was indicted in New York over his role in an alleged multibillion-dollar bribery and fraud scheme, in New Delhi, India, November 21, 2024.
250 million: The US Department of Justice charged Indian billionaire Gautam Adani for his alleged role in a yearslong bribery scheme, which included promising $250 million to Indian government officials for solar energy contracts. Adani is a key ally of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and the opposition Indian National Congress is calling for a parliamentary investigation into the affair.
2: Nicaragua may soon have two presidents if Daniel Ortega’s proposal to elevate his wife to a “co-president” position passes the legislature, which is likely. The couple will also see their terms expanded to six years from five, deepening Ortega’s control over the small Central American state.
16: Teens under age 16 in Australia may soon find themselves kicked off social media if a bill in parliament banning children from sites like TikTok, Facebook, or Snapchat passes. The bill has wide support, and research showed 95% of Australian parents and caregivers said online safety was their toughest parenting challenge.
10,000: Feel like overpaying for a guitar? Donald Trump has just the axe for you, complete with his signature, for just $10,000. You’ll get an imitation of a Gibson Les Paul, with some MAGA imagery and Trump’s scrawl, to add to your collection of Trump merch like the Bible, golden sneakers, marked-up watches and, of course, cryptocurrency.
World leaders assemble for a group photo at the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on November 19, 2024. The gathering was overshadowed by Donald Trump's impending return to the White House.
At the G20 gathering this week in Brazil, a key question emerged: Has Donald Trump already cowed world leaders, two months before he even takes power? It certainly seems like it.
The G20 leaders arrived in Rio de Janeiro to deliver their best ideas for how, collectively, to solve urgent global problems like poverty, climate change, inequality, and war.
These summits are always a little about the old ultra-verbiage, sure, but they are also meant to burnish the legitimacy and importance of multilateral approaches to global challenges.
This time, the G20 got Trumped. Loudly. The president-elect’s America First 2.0 agenda hung over the proceedings like the fearsome black cloud in Don Dellilo’s novel White Noise.
How do we measure the Trump cloud’s impact? Just look at the summit’s final communiqué, the pre-negotiated summary these gabfests always release. They merit attention not only for what they say, but also for what they don’t. This time, what it didn’t say was a lot.
Take Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, for example. With Kyiv now using Western-made long-range missiles, and Putin responding by hinting at a nuclear response and flinging larger and larger missiles of his own, the communiqué’s authors played dentist, carefully extracting any teeth that might nip at the Russian leader, who of course did not attend.
“We highlight the human suffering and negative added impacts of the war with regard to global food and energy security, supply chains, macro-financial stability, inflation and growth,” it said, clearly using the secret diplomatic formula for verbal vanilla. If that alone weren’t enough for the toothless, it continued by calling for “the promotion of peaceful, friendly, and good neighborly relations among nations.”
No mention of Russia by name.
No mention of the illegal invasion.
No reminder that Putin continues to slaughter civilians and wreck critical infrastructure.
Nothing about human rights abuses.
This alone was a triumph for Putin as he eagerly awaits the return of Trump, who ran in part on questioning support for Ukraine and pledging to end the war in “24 hours.”
No one saw this more clearly than Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“G20 countries are sitting in Brazil. Did they say something?” he asked. “Nothing.”
The impotence of the G20s Ukraine statement was probably best summed up by a man who is himself hanging by a thread politically these days: German Chancellor Olaf Sholz, who muttered, “It is too little when the G20 cannot find the words to make it clear Russia is responsible.”
Too little.
That might be the epitaph of this pre-Trump G20.
Knowing that Donald Trump will not continue support for Ukraine, and highlighting the truth that the Global South has never supported the US and EU’s hardline views of the Russian invasion, the G20 slinked away from calling out Moscow, just as they did last year. This signals that a Trump-brokered ceasefire, which will likely give Russia much of what it wants in terms of Ukrainian territory and neutrality, looks much more likely.
But Ukraine was just the start of the smallness.
The language on the Israel-Gaza war was a boilerplate call for a two-state solution and more humanitarian aid, without a mention either of the Hamas-held hostages, the Oct. 7 attack, or the 40,000 dead in Gaza. The statement on a global billionaire tax — a decades-old idea that was particularly dear to summit host and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — was equally eye-glazing: “We will seek to engage cooperatively to ensure that ultra-high-net-worth individuals are effectively taxed.” OK … and then what?
Perhaps the only real positive was the launch of the Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty, in order to deal with the stunning fact that over 733 million people face food shortages every year. That could mean microfinance, food programs, and investment in sustainable food production. It is a good thing to see countries sign on to this even if the failure to eradicate hunger and poverty is, sadly, perennial.
Watching the leaders try to spin the summit’s accomplishments was like watching Rafael Nadal retire from tennis: a once-powerful champion reduced to swatting at balls he can’t reach, limping off the court to applause not for what he just did, but for what he no longer can do.
Like Nadal, these leaders know they are ceding the world to a new champion for the next four years, and they still have no idea what to do about it, except duck, stall, evade, and suck up.
Was there any pushback from these multilateral champions against a world shifting toward strongman isolationism, tariffs, and an American president who will begin the great retreat from the global stage of cooperation?
Not much.
The next G20 will be very different from this one, where leaders gazed up to see Rio’s famous Christ the Redeemer statue overlooking their meeting.
At the next one, they might need to find the Patron Saint of Lost Causes.
A man rushes past members of security forces during clashes between gangs and security forces, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti November 11, 2024.
The UN Humanitarian Air Service is scheduled to restart flights to Haiti on Wednesday, a week after several planes attempting to land at Port-au-Prince airport came under small arms fire. The attacks wounded a flight attendant and resulted in the US Federal Aviation Administration banning all commercial flights to the island nation for a month.
Despite the arrival this summer of a Kenyan-led international force to help Haitian National Police push back against growing gang violence, the gangs have continued to sow chaos. The UN estimates that 20,000 people fled Port-au-Prince over the course of four days of fighting last week, and on Monday, an attack on the affluent suburb of Petion-Ville — as safe a place as you’ll find in the capital — resulted in at least 28 deaths. Women and girls are being victimized through the systemic use of sexual violence by the gangs, and medical providers have reported a “worrying increase” of such attacks this year, with some areas seeing 40 rape victims seeking treatment daily, just a fraction of the total.
Police are far from blameless: Doctors Without Borders says cops attacked one of their ambulances on Nov. 11, tear gassed the paramedics, held them captive, and summarily executed at least two patients, who the police said were gang members. There is chaos in the corridors of power, as GZERO reported last week, with erstwhile Prime Minister Garry Conille forced out of office and accusations of corruption flying in the transitional presidential council.
Is there hope? Not much. The resumption of aid flights may help some Haitians avoid acute hunger but will do little to end the violence. We’re watching for another 600 Kenyan troops to be deployed this month as promised, and to see whether other countries that have pledged forces follow through. We’re also following US efforts to transform the Kenyan-led mission into a proper UN peacekeeping operation before the Trump administration takes power in late January.
Hard Numbers: India’s capital struggles to breathe, Honduran villages cut off, Greece puts a dent in its debt, Tiger King begs Trump for job
A ragpicker searches for garbage as he walks through railway tracks on a smoggy morning in New Delhi, India on November 4, 2023.
1,700: At least 1,700 communities in Honduras have been isolated by flooding caused by Tropical Storm Sara, which dumped nearly 20 inches of water over four days in the north of the country. At least nine bridges were destroyed and 19 more damaged, complicating efforts to reach the affected communities.
5 billion: Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said his government plans to pay down at least $5.3 billion dollars in debt in 2025, well ahead of schedule, thanks to strict fiscal discipline. Greece still has the highest debt-to-GDP ratio in the Eurozone, but has markedly improved since the country’s debt crisis a decade ago.
21: Joseph Maldonado-Passage — much better known as “Joe Exotic” from the bizarre 2020 Netflix hit documentary “Tiger King” — asked President-elect Donald Trump to pardon him from his 21-year prison sentence for attempting to arrange the murder of his tiger rival Carole Baskin. (It’s a hell of a doc). That’s not all: the feline enthusiast also wants to join Trump’s cabinet as the director of the US Fish and Wildlife service.