For Latin America, 2025 Will Be About Accountability - Guest Post World Politics Review by James Bosworth

For Latin America, 2025 Will Be About Accountability World Politics Review For Latin America, 2025 Will Be About Accountability A protest in Quito, Ecuador. A protester stands in front of a police cordon during a protest against the policies of Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa, in Quito, Ecuador, Nov. 21, 2024 (Sipa photo by Veronica Lombeida via AP Images). By James Bosworth Many political and business leaders in Latin America look ahead to 2025 with concern over the worst-case scenarios that could potentially result from U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s imminent return to the White House. If Trump follows through with his promise to deport millions of Latin Americans currently in the U.S. back to their countries of origin, the societal impact would be immense. If he follows through on his promised global trade war—including the threat of imposing 25 percent tariffs on all goods from Mexico—the economic pain would likely create a regional recession. If the new administration launches military operations against criminal groups in Mexico, it could create new interstate tensions without resolving the massive security challenges the region faces. It is all the “ifs” in the preceding paragraph that represent the major challenge for countries in the region seeking to plan out their scenarios for next year. Nobody knows whether Trump will attempt any of those policies or, if he does, whether their scale in practice will match his rhetoric. Once implemented, their real-world impact could turn out to be quite different from what is expected. While Trump promised similarly big changes in his first term, those policies when they were enacted did not become the worst-case scenarios that many of the United States’ international partners feared. It’s also possible that Trump’s second term will be hit by a “black swan” event similar to the pandemic that derailed his first term. So, while the worst-case scenarios are concerning, it is hard for regional leaders to quantify exactly how concerned they should be, given all the unknowns. Meanwhile, though many of Latin America’s political and business leaders are concerned, the regional reaction is far from uniform. Argentine President Javier Milei and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, for example, are celebrating the incoming Trump administration and eager for him to implement his agenda. Both men believe they and their countries will benefit economically and diplomatically from a Trump administration far more than they did under outgoing President Joe Biden. Other center-right politicians around the region, while less openly enthusiastic, are content to embrace Trump. They will find ways to cooperate with his agenda, trading assistance on the logistically challenging deportation scheme—by accepting return of third-country nationals whose governments refuse to cooperate, for instance—for other policy goals. Meanwhile, some business leaders dismiss the possibility of a tariff and trade war altogether and look forward to what they believe will be a more pro-market administration in the United States. Barring the two worst-case scenarios of mass deportations and punishing trade wars, the economic horizon is looking pretty good for much of Latin America in 2025. For most countries, inflation is under control, and economic growth should come in slightly higher compared to 2024. Yet, most of Latin America remains in an anti-incumbent and anti-establishment mood, angry at what many perceive as corrupt governing elites who fail to deliver for their populations. Polling across Latin America shows that citizen anger and disappointment with democracy remains high throughout the region. Another year of good but not great economic growth will not be enough to reverse the tide of this populist anger. From 2018 through 2023, nearly every presidential election in the region was won by an opposition political party. The predictable exceptions to that wave in 2024 were due to politicians—Bukele in El Salvador and President Luis Abinader in the Dominican Republic—and movements—the Morena Party that delivered victory to President Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico—that have successfully redirected citizen anger toward the traditional political elites of the past as represented by their leading opponents. Most of Latin America remains in an anti-incumbent and anti-establishment mood, angry at what many perceive as corrupt governing elites who fail to deliver for their populations. The elections on the calendar in 2025 are expected to continue the region’s anti-establishment trend, meaning the only way incumbent presidents can hope to win is to position themselves as anti-elite outsiders. The year will begin with what promises to be a close election in Ecuador, where President Daniel Noboa is running for reelection after less than 18 months in office due to having won a shortened term in a snap election. Noboa’s chances depend on whether he can portray the country’s many current problems as being the fault of former President Rafael Correa, the patron of his opponent, Luisa Gonzalez. Later in the year, Bolivian President Luis Arce will struggle in his bid for reelection, as former President Evo Morales challenges him from the left from within a fractured ruling party, while several centrist and right-wing opponents hope the resulting divisions give them space to win. In Honduras, President Xiomara Castro wants to hand off power to a chosen successor, Defense Minister Rixi Moncada Godoy. In Chile, President Gabriel Boric has spent much of his time in office struggling with low approval ratings and an inability to pass his agenda. He is barred from running for consecutive reelection, and the expectation is that one of his right-wing opponents will succeed him, with the possibility that Chile will be the latest Southern Cone country to embrace a populist outsider. Across all of these countries, insecurity remains a top concern, and in many of them homicide rates are too high and still rising. New and reformed criminal groups have emerged in the past decade that profit not only from cocaine, but also from illicit gold mining, human smuggling and extortion, a trend that Will Freeman at the Council on Foreign Relations refers to as “reorganized crime.” These groups share many of the same characteristics as their predecessors but have found ways to corrupt and control state authorities in ways that make rooting them out more difficult. From the Sinaloa Cartel bribing former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez and sparking a gang war in Ecuador to Brazil’s PCC assassinating a Paraguayan prosecutor in Colombia, these groups cross borders with impunity, bringing violence and corruption with them. Separate, but related, is the fact that nonviolent crime is an increasingly commonplace experience for Latin Americans in general. In fact, if asked what the biggest threat they face is, many Latin Americans would probably answer, Getting mugged in the street. In other words, insecurity is both a big-picture geopolitical risk as well as a day-to-day ground-level threat. The other risk that many citizens would point to is the wild weather from the past year. Floods ravaged Brazil in early 2024, killing almost 200 people, displacing a half-million more from their homes and causing over $3 billion in damage. Then drought and heat hit South America. Rivers dried up. Fires damaged forests in many countries. And electricity from hydroelectric power became scarce, leading to power outages and more political outrage. The odds of climate change bringing more calamities in Latin America in 2025 seem high, given that the prospect of too much or too little rain has become an annual threat to most countries across the hemisphere. Amid all the uncertainty, one thing seems clear: The challenges Latin America will face in 2025 won’t be solved in 2025. Indeed, they can’t be. Relations with the U.S., discontent with democracy, organized crime and climate change are issues that require years if not decades of work to resolve. Yet dealing with their short-term impact often impedes the long-term solutions that are needed. Latin America’s winners next year will be the leaders and societies that can figure out how to move away from immediate crisis management to formulate and adopt strategies that can solve those bigger challenges over the many years to come. Unfortunately, patience is in short supply, for both voters and politicians. James Bosworth is the founder of Hxagon, a firm that does political risk analysis and bespoke research in emerging and frontier markets, as well as a global fellow at the Wilson Center’s Latin America Program. He has two decades of experience analyzing politics, economics and security in Latin America and the Caribbean.