Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Jamaica petitions the United Kingdom for slavery reparations, Argentina renews its claims to the Falkland Islands, and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio tours South America.

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Jamaica petitions the United Kingdom for slavery reparations, Argentina renews its claims to the Falkland Islands, and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio tours South America.

Redressing the ‘Gravest Crime’

Olivia Grange, Jamaica’s minister of culture, gender, entertainment, and sport, traveled to London this week to file what the island called a first-of-its-kind petition to King Charles III.

The petition asks the highest court of appeal for Commonwealth countries to issue a decision on whether the British trafficking of enslaved Africans to Jamaica from the 17th to 19th centuries was unlawful—and whether the United Kingdom owes financial reparations.

The petition made no specific monetary claim, though a lawmaker from Jamaica’s ruling party previously estimated that the U.K. owes Jamaicans around $10 billion. The Jamaican government has the right to lodge such a demand because it is a member of the Commonwealth, itself a vestige of the colonial era. Charles is still Jamaica’s head of state.

Jamaica’s petition is backed by the rest of the Caribbean Community, or Caricom. Caribbean countries have played a leading role in the growing global movement for reparations. Since 2013, a Caribbean reparations panel has been refining its list of financial and symbolic demands to redress the harms of slavery.

In March, Caribbean nations backed a successful United Nations General Assembly resolution deeming the trafficking of enslaved Africans as the “gravest crime against humanity” and calling for reparations payments. Argentina, Israel, and the United States voted against the resolution, while the U.K. and European Union countries abstained.

Then, in June, Caribbean leaders including Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley attended a conference in Ghana that demanded a formal apology for slavery. They also asked for reparations measures, such as debt relief, from countries involved in the slave trade.

Jamaica’s reparations push is nonpartisan. The country’s conservative prime minister, Andrew Holness, who has otherwise taken a center-right stance on economic matters and worked closely with the International Monetary Fund, last year called the petition to the British crown a “watershed moment for Caricom and the broader global........

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