Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Bolivia and Chile mend ties with a historic state visit, hundreds of U.S. troops reportedly deploy to the region, and Meta is accused of favoring far-right posts in Brazil’s presidential campaign.

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Bolivia and Chile mend ties with a historic state visit, hundreds of U.S. troops reportedly deploy to the region, and Meta is accused of favoring far-right posts in Brazil’s presidential campaign.

Historic Right-Wing Rapprochement

Last week featured a historic moment in South American politics: The presidents of Bolivia and Chile held a state visit for the first time in more than 70 years. The two neighbors have had a territorial dispute for more than a century and severed official diplomatic ties in 1978, maintaining only consular relations since then.

In the Bolivian capital of La Paz on Oct. 16, Chilean President José Antonio Kast signed several new agreements with Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz. Kast said he pledged to work “step by step … toward the full normalization of our relationship.” Mining and critical minerals are set to form a key pillar of cooperation.

The two countries have been at odds since the War of the Pacific in the late 19th century, which ended with Chile gaining a chunk of land with ocean access that had previously belonged to Bolivia. Relations began to thaw in the past few years following a pair of international court decisions on the matter and the arrival of a moderate-left president in Bolivia in 2020, Luis Arce.

Arce’s hard-left predecessor, Evo Morales, had dug in his heels on the territorial dispute. But Arce was open to overtures from the leftist Chilean government of President Gabriel Boric, which worked to gradually collaborate on issues such as fighting crime in the border region, said Andrés Villar, who served as an official in Boric’s Foreign Ministry.

Today, both Bolivia and Chile have right-wing presidents, which makes rapprochement even easier. The leaders signed multiple agreements in La Paz last week. An ex-consul general for Chile in Bolivia told La Tercera that it was likely that full diplomatic ties could be restored before the end of Paz’s term in 2030.

Paz, for his part, said that landlocked Bolivia was not abandoning its demand for access to the ocean. But “more than our history, what’s important today is to resolve the present and future of our people,” he said. Paz accepted an invitation to visit Chile next year.

The two........

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