Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Colombia elects a far-right firebrand as its next president, an earthquake shakes Venezuela, and health researchers praise Uruguay’s marijuana policy.
True to polls, far-right businessman and lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella won Colombia’s presidential election on Sunday. He is the latest in a string of right-wing, U.S.-aligned candidates to be elected in Latin America. U.S. President Donald Trump was vocal about Colombia’s vote, endorsing de la Espriella on social media.
Last week, U.S. immigration authorities detained a Colombian immigrant based in the United States who had publicly criticized de la Espriella. A U.S. State Department memo cited the immigrant’s political speech while laying out grounds for his deportation, the New York Times reported.
Meanwhile, some Democratic U.S. lawmakers published an open letter calling for an investigation into connections between the president-elect and apparent shell companies in the United States. (De la Espriella lived in Miami for years and is a U.S. and Italian citizen.)
De la Espriella has vowed to work closely with the Trump administration, joining its Shield of the Americas anti-gang initiative and saying that he will reprise the Plan Colombia security cooperation agreement. He also promised “the construction of megaprisons, an end to peace talks with armed groups, and an all-out war against criminal organizations,” Christina Noriega wrote in Foreign Policy.
There are a few uncertainties hanging over de la Espriella’s agenda, however. One is the fact that his margin of victory was some 250,000 votes, less than a percentage point ahead of left-wing candidate Iván Cepeda, who conceded on Wednesday. Cepeda received more votes than outgoing left-wing President Gustavo Petro did when he was elected in 2022.
Colombia is polarized along almost exactly the same geographic breakdown that defined the 2022 election, according to Michael Weintraub, a political scientist at the University of the Andes. The country’s left wing picked up support in a handful of rural districts and lost it in some urban ones.
Perhaps perceptive of his slim margin of victory, de la Espriella said in his victory speech that he would respect the rights of Colombians who did not vote for him. That was a step back from his aggressive campaign rhetoric, in which he pledged to “disembowel” political opponents.
De la Espriella’s party lacks a congressional majority, with Colombia’s Congress split fairly evenly among left-wing, right-wing, and centrist or ideologically ambiguous lawmakers. Still, the president-elect has suggested that he will enact his security and economic agenda by signing executive decrees. On foreign policy, the he has more leeway.
De la Espriella’s entry into the Shield of the Americas may make the informal group Washington’s preferred venue for convening with Latin American leaders. U.S. officials have also engaged through the Organization of American States (OAS), which—unlike the Shield of Americas—includes Canada and other governments that have voiced resistance to Trump’s policies, such as Brazil and Mexico.
However, Trump has not earmarked funding for the OAS next year, suggesting that it could lose support from its biggest donor. Trump’s ambassador to the organization said it should be more active at countering drug cartels and criticized its human rights work as ideologically driven. The Trump administration has reportedly removed several top U.S. diplomats stationed at the OAS.
The OAS’s annual assembly was held this week in Panama. Its secretary-general did not mention the indirect U.S. threats to the organization during his main speech, instead praising new funding from observer states in Europe. Multilateralism “is a requirement for our survival,” he said.
Friday, June 26: The United Nations Human Rights Council discusses Venezuela.
Wednesday, July 1: The deadline for the completion of a review of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
Cuba’s reforms. Cuba’s legislature approved what it said were more than 100 market-friendly reforms last week, including new permissions for private businesses to operate on the island and for private investors to buy stakes in them.
Details about the regulations are sparse, but they appear to be major concessions from the country’s communist government as it faces U.S. pressure to liberalize. Despite the new policies, the United States imposed even more sanctions on Cuba this week. This time, the targets included a powerful military-owned company and a member of the Castro family.
A U.S. State Department statement called Havana’s announcements “superficial smoke signals from the Cuban regime.”
Uruguay’s marijuana record. Uruguay’s cannabis legalization and regulation policies stand out globally because they have not triggered a significant spike in use of and addiction to the drug, according to a new paper published in the journal Lancet Psychiatry.
In Uruguay, nonmedical marijuana is only dispensed in limited settings, such as clubs for smoking. That’s in contrast to Canada and some U.S. states, where companies have often been allowed to commercialize the drug aggressively—and where marijuana use disorders have become more common.
One rationale for legalizing marijuana goes beyond preventing addiction. Many countries have chosen to decriminalize the drug because of the disproportionate way that jail sentences for small-scale drug charges have been meted out to nonwhite communities.
The Lancet paper did not delve into that aspect of Uruguay’s policies. But it suggested that the way that countries legalize marijuana—not just whether they do it—matters.
Uruguayan midfielder Maximiliano Araujo celebrates with teammate Sebastián Cáceres after scoring his team’s first goal during the 2026 World Cup Group H football match between Uruguay and Cape Verde at the Miami Stadium in Miami, Florida, United States, on June 21. Patricia De Melo Moreira/AFP via Getty Images
World Cup stats. Data shows just how strong soccer culture is in some of the Latin American countries playing in this year’s FIFA Men’s World Cup. In Argentina, baby name records show that there was a boom in “Diegos” and “Lionels” born in the country in the years after both Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi rose to fame—the 1970s and the 2000s, respectively.
Uruguay, meanwhile, has produced the most famous players per capita in the world, according to Argentine sociologist Daniel Schteingart. He compared data on world-famous soccer players with national populations.
In Foreign Policy, Diana Roy and Gil Guerra crunched the numbers on where members of this year’s national teams were born, revealing migration patterns. When Haiti first played in the World Cup in 1974, most of the squad was born inside the country. But the majority of today’s team was born abroad. The shift reflects how repeated crises in the country have driven emigration.
Only one Haitian national team player, Woodensky Pierre, is currently based in the country. What team does he play for?
Violette
Leon
Valencia
Real Hope
Based in the capital of Port-au-Prince, it is Haiti’s top soccer club.
First responders attend to a damaged building after a magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck Venezuela and other regions in the Caribbean, seen at Los Palos Grandes in Caracas on June 24. Edilzon Gamez/Getty Images
Two powerful earthquakes with magnitudes measuring more than 7 on the Richter scale rocked an area west of Caracas, Venezuela, on Wednesday night, collapsing buildings and testing the interim government’s capacity to respond to emergencies. As of midday Thursday, authorities had reported more than 180 deaths.
Emergency response services have been hollowed out in Venezuela amid the country’s long-running economic crisis. Even though oil investment is starting to return, it is far from restoring the country’s public medical system to precrisis strength.
The United States and other regional countries pledged to send aid to Venezuela. One of the quakes was the country’s strongest in more than a century, with tremors felt as far away as Brazil. Venezuela sits above where the Caribbean and South American tectonic plates meet.
Before the natural disaster, Venezuela’s attention this week had focused on political maneuvers by the opposition. Opposition figure Dinorah Figuera returned to Venezuela after eight years in exile, and the United States offered her its blessing to participate in negotiations toward a democratic transition.
Figuera had lived in Spain since participating in the failed 2018-19 effort to urge Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to hand over power to opposition figure Juan Guaidó. Like Guaidó, Figuera was an elected member of Venezuela’s opposition-controlled legislature at the time.
Figuera told reporters last week that she returned to Venezuela at the invitation of the U.S. State Department, which also issued a formal statement praising a meeting last Thursday between her and Jorge Rodríguez, the brother of interim President Delcy Rodríguez.
Figuera and Rodríguez’s agenda includes strengthening Venezuelan electoral authorities, with an eye toward holding an eventual election, though no date has been set.
