Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Regional politicians vie for the United Nations’ top job, Peru’s election count continues, and progressive leaders attend a summit in Spain.

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Regional politicians vie for the United Nations’ top job, Peru’s election count continues, and progressive leaders attend a summit in Spain.

Latin American Leaders in the Spotlight

Political heavyweights from Latin America and the Caribbean sat for marathon hearings at the United Nations headquarters in New York City this week, answering questions about how they aspire to head the organization as its next secretary-general. Per an informal U.N. custom, the next organization’s next leader should hail from the region.

Candidates include Rafael Grossi, the Argentine director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet; and former Costa Rican Vice President Rebeca Grynspan. Bachelet and Grynspan have both also led U.N. agencies. Only one contender, former Senegalese President Macky Sall, is from outside the region.

“There’s a long history going back deep into the Cold War of Latin American officials playing senior roles around the U.N. system,” said the International Crisis Group’s Richard Gowan. While there is some skepticism toward the organization on the Latin American right, he said, generally “it’s a region that is seen as being amongst the U.N.’s most reliable supporters.”

The election may stretch all the way into December, when outgoing Secretary-General António Guterres’s term expires, and countries could still nominate other candidates. The General Assembly has traditionally endorsed whichever contender first earns approval from the five permanent members of the Security Council, which each hold veto power, according to Gowan.

At this relatively early point in the race, Grossi “is widely considered the front-runner,” J. Alex Tarquinio wrote in Foreign Policy on Wednesday. Grossi has won support across Argentina’s fractured political spectrum and has acted as an interlocutor between warring states such as Russia and Ukraine on nuclear issues.

In his home country, “he is an example of the success of an old school of Argentine diplomacy” prior to an ideological turn under far-right President Javier Milei, said Torcuato di Tella University scholar Juan Gabriel Tokatlian. “His know-how has lots to do with matters of war and security.” For years, Grossi has overseen IAEA reporting on Iran’s nuclear stockpile.

Some analysts, including Gowan’s colleague Daniel Forti, have argued that the U.N. should get “back to basics”........

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