Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Copper prices soar amid growing global demand and U.S. tariff threats, Colombia and Ecuador have a trade spat, and Mexico’s president makes an unusual demand of a K-pop group.

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Copper prices soar amid growing global demand and U.S. tariff threats, Colombia and Ecuador have a trade spat, and Mexico’s president makes an unusual demand of a K-pop group.

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Latin American policymakers have long pitched potential investors and geopolitical partners on access to mineral riches. The region is home to many raw materials that are essential to the green transition, including lithium, which is used in batteries.

In recent years, the region’s lithium deposits have attracted investments and attention from the United States, Europe, and China. Lithium prices jumped more than sixfold from 2021 to 2023 amid a supply crunch, but they have since returned to prior levels.

Now, one mineral of the moment is copper. Due to global electrification and rising power usage, worldwide demand for copper is expected to outstrip supply by 30 percent by 2035, Jonathan Price of Teck Resources told FP’s Ravi Agrawal last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

The Trump administration also imposed tariffs on some copper products in 2025 and said it might adjust them in 2026. As companies around the world stockpiled copper in anticipation of the levies, its price jumped to a record high this month.

Regardless of Trump’s eventual tariff, future global demand bodes well for the biggest copper-exporting countries, many of which are in Latin America. Chile was the world’s top exporter of raw copper in 2024 at more than $31 billion, followed by Peru. Brazil and Mexico also each exported at least $3 billion of the mineral that year, ranking fifth and sixth globally, respectively.

The copper price spike “is probably the best macroeconomic news we’ve had in recent times,” Chilean economist Cecilia Cifuentes said at an event in Santiago earlier this month. During a period of elevated copper prices from around 2005 to 2013, Chile’s and Peru’s economies boomed.

In Chile, right-wing President-elect José Antonio Kast is preparing to take office in March. He has pledged to slash regulations across the economy. Chile’s council of mining companies expects that the country’s copper output could rise in the........

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