Latin America, US lawmakers bolster ties ahead of crucial election

Latin America is drawing attention from U.S. lawmakers eager to forge ties in an often-ignored region with growing geopolitical and economic clout. 

This month, bicameral groups visited officials in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and Guatemala, seeking to expand their footprint among regional powers at a crossroads after recent elections in the first two.

Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) led the delegation to Mexico, where lawmakers met with outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, and President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum, who in October will be inaugurated as the first woman and the first Jewish head of state in North America.

“Electing the first woman in the history of the country and not only that, a woman who is Jewish, in a country where the population is overwhelmingly Catholic — something's going on there. And I think it's good. I think it's encouraging,” Carper told The Hill.

Though Sheinbaum is López Obrador’s political mentee and his chosen successor, the two have distinctly different personalities and backgrounds.

“Sheinbaum’s election is an opportunity for Mexico to reengage with the U.S. Congress after years of neglect by the AMLO administration, who chose to focus almost exclusively on the White House and executive branch and at times openly attacked the Republican Party,” said Duncan Wood, president of the Pacific Council on International Policy.

Mexico’s disengagement with the U.S. legislative branch has been chronic: Diplomats often point out that in Washington, Mexico has the closest major embassy to the White House, while Canada’s, for contrast, is within sight of the Capitol.

And most Latin American countries, with the notable exception of Colombia, have also historically focused their Washington operations on the White House.

That focus on the executive branch carries a major risk — when administrations focus their diplomatic efforts on other regions, Latin American issues often fall off Washington’s radar entirely.

House Foreign Affairs Western Hemisphere Subcommittee Chair María Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) accused the Biden administration at a hearing this week of ignoring the region, while Brian Nichols, assistant secretary of State for Western Hemisphere affairs, defended the administration’s posture ahead of this weekend’s elections in Venezuela.

“In the last four years, President Biden and Vice President Harris have made it clear that Latin America is not a priority for this country,” said Salazar. “These decisions are disastrous for our economy, our national security, and the well-being of our allies. If we lose Latin America, we lose our home. Let’s wake up and defend our hemisphere.”

Biden in 2022 appointed former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) as his presidential adviser on Latin America; Dodd has linked up with leaders across the region, who favor closed-door talks with a U.S. agent close to the president.

Congress, an institution that likes to be wooed in public, has often prioritized its links to Europe, the Middle East and East Asia.

But Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Ben Cardin (D-Md.) last week led a congressional delegation to Argentina — with additional stops in Brazil and Guatemala — to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the 1994 bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA), where 85 people were killed and more than 300 injured.

“When I went to Argentina the first time for the 10th anniversary of AMIA, there were no — I don't remember any delegations from Congress or actually from the global Jewish organizations. It was mainly [the American Jewish Committee (AJC)] and maybe one — today, there were about 500 people from all over the world,” said Dina Siegel Vann, director of AJC's Arthur and Rochelle Belfer Institute for Latino and Latin American Affairs.

Ironically, the newfound prioritization of the AMIA attack and the high-level guest list for the anniversary were due both to a normalization of Judaism in the deeply Catholic region and to rising antisemitism across the globe.

Argentine President Javier Milei, a populist libertarian who was raised Catholic and took office in December, has taken a public interest in Jewish mysticism and said he could convert.

His newfound passion for Jewish religious rites has meshed well with his public support for Israel in the war against Hamas — a position not shared by many Latin American leaders — but it’s also allied him with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who last month granted Milei the Order of Freedom to honor the Argentine president’s support of Ukraine amid the Russian invasion.

For Democrats such as Cardin, Milei’s pro-Ukraine hawkishness is common ground with a foreign leader who has openly praised former President Trump and connected with U.S. and European ultraconservative movements.

“We got an extremely warm welcome from him, we hit it off. I mean, he — he is very pro-U.S. I don't see him as a partisan figure. I think, as I told him, and I told the ambassador, he says things that are very appealing to the Democrats — very strongly in favor of Ukraine, sees this as we see it,” Cardin told reporters on a call Tuesday.

Latin American leaders have historically shied away from taking sides in geopolitics, partly because the region is relatively isolated from hot spots and partly because of a lingering distrust for U.S. and European international aspirations.

But Latin America is taking on a new geopolitical importance not only as a source of natural resources and migration, but as a target for Russian influence and Chinese investment in the Western Hemisphere, and in Mexico’s case, replacing China as the United States’s top trading partner.

“We're working to reduce our reliance on trade with China, and to encourage nearshoring and just trade, which strengthens the economy of countries like Mexico and south of there. And by strengthening their economies, it provides an incentive for people who live in those countries to the south to continue to live in those countries, to work in those countries and stay there and raise their families, rather than trying to make it across the border [to] get into to the to the U.S.,” said Carper.

While Milei’s pro-Western approach is unlikely to catch on among his colleagues in the region, particularly leftist leaders including Sheinbaum, Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva or Chile’s Gabriel Boric, three decades of free trade between the United States and Mexico have proven that the U.S. and Latin American countries can peacefully share those economic incentives.

Experts say foreign adversaries such as Russia and Iran are looking to rekindle U.S.-Latin American distrust, and to sow instability in the Americas through any means necessary, including by fanning antisemitism.

Director of [National Intelligence Avril Haines "several weeks ago identified Iran as being responsible for stoking antisemitism in campuses and beyond, and they have clear evidence that's happening. And that's also happening in Latin America,” said Siegel Vann.

“We also have Russia. Let's remember that Mexico has been identified also as a country that has a lot of Russian spies and, you know, and there's even a Russia-Mexico friendship caucus in Congress, in the Mexican Congress, even after Ukraine.”

With the U.S. election looming, some officials in Latin America are bracing for a potential second Trump presidency, and a few like Milei — ideologically aligned and geographically isolated from Trump — could benefit from a like-minded character in the White House.

Sheinbaum, an avowed leftist who’s not as transactional as López Obrador, would likely suffer more headaches co-managing a 2,000 mile border and an $800 billion trade relationship with Trump.

“Obviously, Claudia would do better with Harris — a continuity of Biden’s policies — than with Trump, who attacks Mexico as part of his populist campaign." Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), the GOP's vice presidential nominee, "noted how Trump uses the easy path of finding foreign culpability in the problems of the working class in the United States,” said Roberta Lajous, a former Mexican diplomat and fellow at the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute.

Carper, who is not seeking reelection, said the U.S. election could determine whether the two neighbors build on 30 years of integration or whether that progress stops cold.

“I think the likelihood for building in a positive way on the great progress we've made in improving our relationships, deepening our economic interest, I think with Kamala as president, and with President Sheinbaum, I think they will only get better. President Trump, I don't know. I'll be generous, I'm just not very encouraged that the progress that we've been making for years now, is likely to continue, and we need for it to continue, both countries need for it to continue,” said Carper.

Updated at 5:43 pm.