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The biggest boom of late across Latin America has been in cross-border insults. Presidents of all stripes seem to relish nothing more than trading barbs.
“Murderous terrorist”, “ultra-conservative fascist”, “lapdog of imperialism”, “Hitler” — the insults the region’s leaders have hurled at on one another spare few blushes. Javier Milei, Argentina’s libertarian leader, even called Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s supporters a “small-penis club”.
This ideologically fractious region, which used to divide along predictable left-right lines and revere the principle of non-intervention in each other’s affairs, has descended into all-out personality conflict.
The examples are legion. When the leftwing presidents of Brazil and Colombia questioned socialist Venezuela’s decision to ban the main opposition candidate from running in July’s presidential election, Jorge Rodríguez, president of Congress, told them to “shove your opinions up wherever there is space”.
The disputes can have ugly consequences too. In several cases, the insults have triggered the suspension of diplomatic relations or the withdrawal of envoys.
Last week Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa escalated a spat with López Obrador by ordering police to storm Mexico’s embassy in Quito, violating diplomatic protocols.
“I don’t think there’s been this many insults, shouting matches and recalls of ambassadors in the region for a long, long time,” said Mexico’s former foreign minister Jorge Castañeda. “It’s a bit of a free-for-all with everyone against everyone.”
Populist politicians surfing a tide of social media support are part of the problem. Once elected, they see no reason to throttle back on the vitriolic abuse of opponents, a tactic which works well on the campaign trail.
The fight between Ecuador and Mexico escalated after López Obrador suggested Noboa’s election victory was fishy. Ecuador’s hot-headed 36-year-old leader responded by expelling Mexico’s ambassador.
López Obrador then granted political asylum to a fugitive former Ecuadorean vice-president sheltering in Mexico’s embassy in Quito, Jorge Glas. For good measure he described Noboa’s government as “fascists”. Hours later, Ecuador ordered police to force their way into the diplomatic mission and forcibly extract Glas.
The war of presidential insults could not have broken out at a worse time. Latin America is confronting a daunting range of problems: mushrooming organised crime, worsening climate change, record illegal migration and persistent economic stagnation.
“With such nasty name-calling and impetuous actions by a number of the region’s leaders, it is hard to be optimistic that real advances will materialise,” said Michael Shifter, a former president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think-tank.
The bodies created to bring the region together are dysfunctional. The Organization of American States, dominated by the US and led by a combative conservative secretary-general Luis Almagro, is unpopular with Latin America’s socialist leaders.
Celac, the Latin American and Caribbean community created with the help of Venezuela’s late Hugo Chávez, is loved by the left but shambolic: its recent statement praising Vladimir Putin’s “convincing victory” in Russia’s presidential election was subsequently disowned by 10 member states.
No surprise, then, that trade between Latin American countries is so low. It languishes at about 20 per cent of the region’s total trade, compared to nearly 50 per cent in east Asia.
What should be a golden opportunity — the “nearshoring” of production from China to nations near the US — risks being wasted. It is not easy to assemble a chain of suppliers from countries that trade insults, rather than components.
Other regions collaborate more effectively.
Alejandro Werner, director of the Georgetown Americas Institute, recalled how during his time as a senior IMF official during the pandemic “the African delegations would present a specific list of joint requests, while Latin America never had a common position”.
“The style of these populist governments gives them little space for foreign affairs,” he adds. “Everything comes from the leader and the cabinet is there to execute, rather than to propose policy.”
The big concern is this nasty turn in regional politics reflects a generation of leaders more preoccupied with petty point-scoring than with the serious business of government and international negotiation.
One former Latin American finance minister put it bluntly: “I can’t remember a time when the region was as badly governed as it is now.”
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