Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Left-wing lawmakers from across the hemisphere hold a strategy session in Uruguay, Mexico reacts to the U.S.-Canada trade war, and the race for the next United Nations secretary-general moves forward.

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Left-wing lawmakers from across the hemisphere hold a strategy session in Uruguay, Mexico reacts to the U.S.-Canada trade war, and the race for the next United Nations secretary-general moves forward.

Shadow Governments Convene

For years, right-wing politicians from across Latin America have gathered at the U.S. Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and spinoff events in the region. This visibility helped elevate the far right across the Western Hemisphere. Once-fringe CPAC speakers have become national leaders, including Argentina’s Javier Milei and Chile’s José Antonio Kast.

While right-wing leaders currently dominate democratic politics in the Americas, a different set of gatherings is trying to boost the hemisphere’s left. Last weekend, the Panamerican Congress held its third annual meeting in Montevideo, Uruguay. The event featured politicians from Canada to Chile and showcased mounting pushback to U.S. President Donald Trump’s interventionist doctrine for the region.

Aside from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, the region’s left-leaning leaders have generally tempered their criticism of Trump. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum have spoken up for national sovereignty, but they have been open to dialogue to try to remove U.S. tariffs—and to preempt U.S. military action on their territories.

Further from the international spotlight, however, progressive lawmakers are resisting what Trump has termed the “Donroe Doctrine.”

U.S. lawmakers have held hearings to question the Trump administration’s boat strikes. Argentine lawmakers have staged inquiries into the opaque terms of Milei’s recent economic agreements with Trump. And in Ecuador, campaigning from opposition lawmakers helped public opinion coalesce against a proposal that would have allowed U.S. military bases in the country. The prospect was defeated in a national referendum last November.

In countries with right-wing leaders, “the progressive opposition’s main tools are their national legislatures,” said Chilean lawmaker Gonzalo Winter, who attended the Panamerican Congress. He argued that the gathering was important “in order to build a more familiar relationship between lawmakers of different countries.”

CPAC Latin America events have........

© Foreign Policy