Foreign & Public Diplomacy

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: A deadly earthquake rattles Colombia, the United States threatens visa bans for Argentines doing business with Huawei, and the final season of One Hundred Years of Solitude drops on Netflix.

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: A deadly earthquake rattles Colombia, the United States threatens visa bans for Argentines doing business with Huawei, and the final season of One Hundred Years of Solitude drops on Netflix.

De la Espriella’s First Big Test

Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella had been in office for less than three days when a 7.4-magnitude earthquake hit the country on Monday.

The epicenter of the quake was in the Chocó department, which is located between Bogotá and the Pacific coast and lies on a few fault lines. Colombian officials said on Thursday that at least 273 people had died, while a civilian-created tally reported that more than 4,000 were still missing.

Earthquake response has dominated de la Espriella’s first days in office and led to global offers of support. But the new president was slow to embrace those overtures—highlighting a foreign-policy shakeup that he was already carrying out.

Because finding survivors is most likely in the first 72 hours after an earthquake, search and rescue specialists from across the world often travel to quake zones immediately after disaster strikes to help local governments, as they did following Venezuela’s June earthquakes.

Countries including Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Israel, Mexico, Peru, and the United States all offered assistance to Colombia early this week. But de la Espriella’s administration at first said that it sought help only with equipment, not personnel. That sparked domestic criticism; in some cities, untrained volunteer groups were struggling to try and rescue their trapped neighbors.

On Wednesday, Bogotá changed its tune, saying that it would accept search and rescue help from Ecuador, El Salvador, Israel, and the United States. Colombian officials said that those four countries were chosen because they were internationally certified. But commentators wondered whether the decision reflected de la Espriella’s sharp turn toward the Trump administration and its allies.

When de la Espriella took office, the United States announced a new $1 billion security partnership with Colombia and plans to carry out joint military operations on Colombian soil. Colombia also ended diplomatic ties with Cuba and Nicaragua and restored them with Israel—moves that hewed closely to U.S. positions.

What’s more, de la Espriella added Colombia to the small list of countries that recognize Moroccan sovereignty over the disputed Western Sahara........

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