Carter's LatAm legacy

Jan. 6, 2025

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter died on Dec. 29, at the age of 100. Carter’s diplomacy in Latin America broke decisively with Cold War realpolitik interventionist policy in the putative U.S. backyard — instead demonstrating how a super power can be a moral beacon, a legacy that continues to impact rights work and diplomacy in the region.

“Opinion divided on the impact of Carter’s policies, compromised as they were by cold war tensions and the long history of the US’s imperial behavior in Latin America. But ordinary Latin Americans noted that Carter offered an interlude from the usual US swagger in their region in sharp contrast with those elected before and after him,” reports the Guardian.

The twin 1977 treaties to hand over the Panama canal to Panama came at great political cost in the U.S., but “by most accounts, the turnover of the canal improved U.S. relations in Latin America and stabilized the situation for U.S. shipping to avoid what many feared would be upheaval and even violence,” reports the New York Times.

Carter also relaxed sanctions towards Cuba that had been in force since 1962, supported secret talks and enabled limited diplomatic representation in both countries. (AFP)

The administration’s human rights policies towards Latin America were a marked change in a region where the U.S. supported violent dictatorships as part of its anti-Communist stance. “The notion that the political and civil rights of individuals before their governments could be in a country’s foreign policy, or even its national interest, was revolutionary,” writes Christopher Sabatini for Chatham House.

Carter tied U.S. foreign assistance to countries’ human rights record, a policy that led the U.S. to halt military aid to Argentina, Bolivia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, Paraguay and Uruguay, notes Samantha Power in the New York Times. “The Carter administration also opposed dozens of efforts to grant loans from international financial institutions to abusive regimes, promising relief only in exchange for concrete improvements.”

Carter invited Latin American leaders to the Panama Canal treaty signing. In that context, he met with Argentina’s de facto president, Jorge Videla, and pressured him regarding the regime’s policy of disappearances — one of several moves from his administration that contributed to reducing human rights violations by Argentina’s dictatorship. (National Security Archives)“The threat to suspend financing got the Argentine junta to agree to a 1978 visit by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which produced incontrovertible evidence of state-sponsored atrocities,” noted Will Freeman in Americas Quarterly in 2023.

Carter’s post-presidency work has also been critical to defending democracy and human rights in the region — a legacy remembered by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva last week: Lula recalled Carter's pressure on the military dictatorship in Brazil in the 1970s to release political prisoners. "Later, as a former president, he continued to campaign for the promotion of human rights, peace and the eradication of diseases in Africa and Latin America.” (ABC)

More Panama Canal

• Trump closed 2024 complaining about Chinese influence and shipping fees in the Panama Canal, and threatening to demand the return to the U.S. of the waterway — coincidentally days before the death of Carter, who considered that the treaty to turn the canal over to Panama was one of his greatest presidential achievements. (New York Times)

• Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, dismissed Trump’s threats, saying that “every square meter” of the canal would remain in Panamanian hands. Trump responded on Truth Social: “We’ll see about that!” (Guardian)

• An estimated 5% of global maritime traffic passes through the Panama Canal, the United States is its main user, accounting for 74% of cargo, followed by China with 21%. (AFP) Since the 2000 handover, the canal has become the centerpiece of Panama’s economy — generating about $4 billion in revenue each year, according to the Washington Post.

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Venezuela’s next presidential term starts on Jan. 10. President Nicolás Maduro maintains he won reelection last July and plans to swear in again on that day. The political opposition claims — and has presented internationally validated evidence — that Edmundo González Urrutia won July’s election by a landslide. Jan. 10 will mark a turning point for international efforts to mediate between Maduro and the political opposition, and comes just ahead of the inauguration of Donald Trump in the U.S. on Jan. 20.

González fled Venezuela to Spain last September, in the midst of intensifying government repression against dissidents and opposition leaders after the election. González is on an international diplomacy blitz ahead Jan. 10 — he has maintained he will be in Venezuela to assume office.

Yesterday he called on the military to recognize him as commander-in-chief.

It is unclear what will happen if he attempts to return to Venezuela. Last week the government offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to González’s capture, publishing his photo on wanted posters it distributed on social media and across Caracas.

María Corina Machado, a political opposition leader who has remained in hiding in Venezuela, called for mass protests on January 9, the day before the inauguration. "This day will be recorded in history as the day Venezuela said: enough!" she said in a video shared on X.

González visited Uruguay this weekend, followed by Argentina, and will stop in Panama and the Dominican Republic. González is headed to Washington this week, where he said he will meet with lawmakers and U.S. President Joe Biden.

The U.S. has recognized González as the victor of the election, but it is unclear what stance it will take after Jan. 10. The 2019 recognition of the parallel government of Juan Guaidó on Venezuela failed to advance democratization in Venezuela.

This week U.S. Republican Senator Bernie Moreno said that Trump would work with Maduro “because that's who's going to take office,” and that the U.S. focus must be on deterring illegal drug trafficking and forcing Venezuela to accept deportees.

(Bloomberg, AFP, AFP, El País)

“It seems that Maduro is leaving the door open for a more pragmatic approach from the Trump administration,” said Laura Dib, a Venezuela expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, told Al Jazeera.

More Venezuela

• Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero has called on concert halls and music promoters to cut ties with her country’s world-renowned youth orchestra in response to Maduro’s alleged electoral theft last year. (Guardian)

Regional Relations

• Deportations will be a major issue in regional diplomacy this year: Honduran President Xiomara Castro threatened to push the U.S. out of a decades-old military base in her country’s territory, if Trump carries out threatened mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. (New York Times)

• Mass deportations would also have economic effects: “But over decades, an entire ecosystem has developed around irregular migrants from Mexico and other countries. They’ve not only become critical to sectors of the U.S. economy, such as agriculture and construction. They’ve grown into an engine of development and a social safety net for villages back home,” notes the Washington Post.

• An Argentine judge ordered the arrest of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega over his alleged "systematic violation of human rights," reports AFP.

• Chilean President Gabriel Boric visited a U.S. research base in Antartica — reportedly the first time a sitting Latin American president has set foot on the continent. He said the trip was meant to reaffirm his country’s “claim to sovereignty” over its part of Antartica, reports AFP. The New York Times reports that competition for influence over the continent is slowly heating up.

Ecuador

• Ecuadorean officials confirmed that incinerated bodies found on Christmas Eve belong to the four children missing since early December. The so-called Guayaquil Four — Black boys aged between 11 and 15 and residents of a poor neighborhood of Ecuador’s largest city — had been detained by the military. The case poses a major challenge to President Daniel Noboa’s war on drugs, ahead of his February re-election bid. (Guardian)

• Ecuador bet big on hydropower, but has been left in the dark by a climate-change induced drought — an example of how global warming is challenging the fossil fuel alternative. (New York Times)

El Salvador

• El Salvador’s National Assembly overturned the country’s landmark ban on metals mining, a move championed by President Nayib Bukele, whose government has persecuted five environmental leaders. (Guardian)

Trinidad and Tobago

• Trinidad and Tobago’s government declared a state of emergency on Dec. 30, in response to a spate of murders that culminated a year of unprecedented violence: 623 murders in a country of 1.5 million people, making the Caribbean country one of the most deadly in the region. (Guardian, Guardian, New York Times)

Haiti

• Two reporters and a police officer were killed at a Christmas Eve news conference in Port-au-Prince to announce the reopening of a public hospital that had been closed for nine months because of gang violence. More than two dozen journalists caught in the ambush were trapped for two hours triaging seven wounded colleagues before they were rescued, reports the New York Times.

Regional

• “High incarceration rates in Latin America – the region with the world’s fastest-growing prison population – are exacerbating tuberculosis in a region that is bucking the global trend for falling incidents of the disease,” reports the Guardian.

Mexico

• A Mexican immigration agent was allegedly murdered by a group of migrants after he asked to see their identification papers — a rare episode, reports the New York Times.

• The Regional Center for Human Identification in Mexico’s Coahuila state aims to find and identify victims of violence, offering families rare closure in a country marked by tens of thousands of disappearances, reports the New York Times.

• Mexico City mayor Clara Brugada’s political career is built on a utopian vision for poor urban neighborhoods, “which could be replicated across Latin America and undo decades of neglect,” reports the Guardian.

Panama

• Rising seas and tourism are testing the cultural resilience of Panama’s Indigenous Guna - Guardian