Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: The leaders of Brazil and Mexico attend the G-7 summit, Bolivia celebrates a syncretic religious festival, and Nicaragua remembers its first female president.

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: The leaders of Brazil and Mexico attend the G-7 summit, Bolivia celebrates a syncretic religious festival, and Nicaragua remembers its first female president.

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Two Latin American leaders attended this week’s G-7 summit in Kananaskis, Canada: Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum.

Lula is a familiar face at the G-7. He was in his first term as president when the grouping of wealthy countries, then-known as the G-8, was beginning to expand its annual dialogues to include guests from developing nations in 2003. At the time, the group was responding to criticism that it had become too exclusive.

Lula has generally used his G-7 appearances to call for a greater role for the global south in international politics. At the 2003 summit, he argued for the creation of a fund to fight world hunger. Though the idea did not make it into that year’s official communiqué, a similar proposal became a reality in 2024, when Lula hosted the G-20 summit in Rio de Janeiro.

Other ideas that Lula defended at past G-7 summits were endorsed more quickly. He called for rich countries to remove agriculture subsidies that Brazil viewed as unfair competition, an issue that was mentioned in the 2008 summit declaration. And he voiced support for a robust deal to fight the climate crisis well before the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015.

This year, Lula suggested that wealthy countries should increase their climate funding to poorer ones and that all countries should tax their super-rich residents more. In a positive signal for Lula’s agenda, ahead of the G-7 summit, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney agreed to attend the United Nations climate conference in Brazil in November.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, another G-7 guest, also sought a meeting with Lula, a shift from his past criticism of the Brazilian president’s attempts to mediate an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine. However, the meeting was canceled due to what Brazil attributed to a delay in events.

Though Lula has been a regular guest of the G-7, Sheinbaum was attending her first summit. Mexico’s president has been frequently invited to the G-7 since 2003. But Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, never attended a........

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