Several years ago, the thought of the president of Argentina coming to stand in Jerusalem and saying he would move his country’s embassy there would have seemed like something out of a novel. Now, Javier Milei flies in, prays at the Kotel, hugs families of the hostages, and keeps saying that Argentina will stand with Israel—openly, firmly, without apology.

In my earlier essay, Israel and Latin America’s amnesia, I argued that much of the Latin American left has forgotten its own story: cheering on “resistance” everywhere while denying Israel exactly the kind of anti-colonial struggle Latin Americans celebrate in their own national myths. That essay was about memory and hypocrisy. This one is about opportunity.

Because something really has shifted.

Bolivia has elected a post-MAS president, Rodrigo Paz, who cited restoring relations with Israel as one of his administration’s first foreign-policy priorities. Paraguay has moved its embassy back to Jerusalem. Chile has recently elected José Antonio Kast, an unapologetic pro-Israel conservative whose national priorities are security, borders, and civilizational self-respect, not revolution by imported slogans. And Honduras, which has been wobbling and hedging over the past several years, elects Nasry Asfura, who, upon taking office, made his first foreign-policy visit not to Washington but to Jerusalem.

Lula, the Brazilian president who has been the Latin American left’s pin-up since long before the pink tide, is battered and faces an uncertain re-election. The jewel of the pink tide, Venezuela, the most successful exporter of chaos in Latin America, has experienced a development that even Latin America’s most original conspiracy theorists could scarcely imagine: Maduro is gone. Trump quite literally doordash’d him out of Caracas. The White House is calling it an extraction. Critics are calling it an abduction. What matters is not the name as much as the fact that the man who turned what used to be one of the world’s richest countries into a failed state is no longer sitting in Miraflores, and the post-Maduro order is open.

However, the hemisphere’s ideological nerve center was never really Caracas, but Havana.

Cuba is not just another dictatorship among the many that have blighted Latin America: it is the original factory where the romantic vocabulary of revolution was mass-produced, shrink-wrapped, and shipped out to every campus and guerrilla movement from the Río Grande to Tierra del Fuego. For decades, it trained cadres, coached security services, and taught generations of politicians how to rebrand failure as virtue and repression as “sovereignty.” It kept Marxism alive as a kind of secular religion long after its moral, intellectual, and economic bankruptcy should have made it unpublishable.

So if, at long last, Trump goes further—if he succeeds in ending the Castrist dictatorship itself—he won’t simply destroy one more regime. He will cut off the head of the snake that has been spreading its venom all over Latin America for far too long. The expulsion of Marxism from the hemisphere, a task long overdue, will, for the first time, be complete. And in that strategic and moral vacuum, it must not default again to China, Russia, or Iran—if Israel is alert enough to make itself a partner of choice.

In other words: the tide is turning. Latin America is not becoming a conservative utopia, as no region ever does, but the long pink wave is receding. Those who have lived through twenty-first-century socialism have learned that it does not bring justice, nor honor, but inflation, crime, and emigration. Across the continent, people face the simple injustice of hunger, not in search of new utopias but of the normal life lived in normal states.

For Israel, this creates a narrow but real opportunity for an axis of good in the Western Hemisphere, centered around Jerusalem–Washington–Buenos Aires and radiating outwards to Asunción, La Paz, Santiago, Tegucigalpa, San Salvador, and beyond.

If that scenario is serious, Israel has to stop treating Latin America like an afterthought in diplomacy.

For decades, Israel has gone to Latin America more or less braced for a punch: one government after another, throughout the years of the Cold War and the pink tide, parroted the old Soviet tale of “Palestine”—that Israel was the last white settler outpost and the PLO, and then the Islamists of Hamas, were the noble guerrillas. To be anti-Israel was fashion: Che on the T-shirt, keffiyeh wrapped around the neck, “Free Palestine” thrown into the speech—usually by people who had never in their lives spoken to a Jew.

We really had no plan in response, only bits and pieces: a drip-irrigation project in one country; one medical team after another coming on the second or third day after an earthquake; quiet security cooperation with the few capitals that still picked up the phone when Jerusalem called. And then, as reliably as the seasons, came another year of putting out fires at the UN.

Others treated Latin America as a prize, with Iran building influence in both Venezuela and the Tri-Border Area and Russia selling weapons. China bought ports, China bought mines, China bought 5G contracts, and China bought the soft power that comes with building the infrastructure in other countries. If you don’t believe me, you can see the answer on the voting boards in New York—or hear it in the ease with which anti-Israel slogans spill from the lips of any politician wishing to sound “progressive” from Mexico City to Buenos Aires.

With that being said, the game is changing. The same continent that gave us Chávez, Evo Morales, and Gustavo Petro has given us Milei, Kast, Asfura, and an entire generation of leaders whose first instinct is not to preach revolution but to make the state vaguely functional. They talk about borders, crime, inflation, sovereignty—all pretty dull terms until your supermarket shelves are empty or your bus home keeps getting robbed. Many of them are personally religious. For them, Israel is not a case study in a seminar about “whiteness,” but a small, besieged, hyper-connected country that fought off terrorism and survived a practice run with socialism.

That is a camp Israel can actually work with. But “working with” them has to mean more than warm communiqués and another smiling photo-op in front of the flags in some palace courtyard.

If Latin America really matters to us, we need to start behaving like it does. That means putting in political capital, not just sending pleasant delegations and nice brochures. Milei shouldn’t be the only player with true skin in the game, inventing the “Isaac Accords” from his own prize money. Jerusalem has to come up with something in return: regular meetings with the very highest echelons of power; three-way meetings with Washington and key Latin American capitals; public diplomacy in real Spanish and Portuguese that doesn’t stop at the Jewish community center and the foreign-policy panel but speaks directly to the people who actually flip governments—middle-class families, evangelicals, tired urban voters who have had enough of fear.

Then comes that in which Israel has had an edge. In Latin America, the issues are not just abstract nouns in policy papers. They are gangs and cartels, broken borders, dried-up rivers, rolling blackouts, hospitals that run out of everything except patients. We cannot and should not try to export the entire Israeli security model in a crate. But we could build a network to detect and deal with transnational crime and Iranian proxies, protect borders and cyber networks, and train police forces and courts to do their job against organized crime and pervasive corruption.

Look at Mexico, where the gap between foreign policy posturing and domestic realities has become almost cruelly obvious: President Claudia Sheinbaum can denounce Israel from a podium, but moral theater abroad doesn’t do much to pacify cartels at home. The Jalisco raid that killed CJNG leader “El Mencho” was a serious, intelligence-driven operation that got US support. And within hours, the country went dark with cartel retaliation: roadblocks, burning vehicles, closed cities, and ordinary Mexicans told to stay indoors. Do you want to understand what “transnational crime” looks like when it hardens into parallel sovereignty? That’s it. The kind of threat environment where Israeli know-how—intelligence fusion, counter-network targeting, hardening critical infrastructure—isn’t a brochure line, but a real, planned asset.

On the civilian side, everything is much more prosaic; with drip irrigation, you can still grow food when the rain stops. Desalination means water still comes out of the tap after the river has turned into a muddy ditch. Israeli emergency medicine means that the ambulance ride is not automatically a death sentence. For a Latin American mayor or health minister, this is not a cliché about the “start-up nation,” but the difference between coping and collapse. And when those lessons come from Israel rather than a Chinese loan office or an Iranian “cultural center,” it changes whose interests are seen as most relevant on the ground there. In turn, it makes it easier for a president to explain to their own people why they chose Jerusalem over Tehran.

We can’t just cling to one or two “good friends” and hope that they don’t lose the next election. The point is not to have a good president; it’s to have a camp. An axis of good with Jerusalem, Washington, and Buenos Aires at its center is not a slogan for a conference banner; it is a way of giving that camp shape. Washington brings sheer weight and a very simple interest: not letting its own hemisphere drift into the hands of China, Russia, and Iran. Milei’s Buenos Aires had the courage to break with half a century of Peronist and “anti-imperialist” reflexes. Israel brings technology, intelligence, and a survival story that sounds familiar to countries that remember juntas, car bombs, states of siege, and curfews. Around that triangle, you can pull in Paraguay, Honduras, El Salvador, a post-MAS Bolivia, and Chile, another anchor state preparing for Kast’s inauguration. That is not fantasy cartography. It’s a map with half of it already drawn, just waiting for someone to finish.

Of course, there is a cost. Leaning publicly toward this Latin American right will anger parts of the left. But here, too, we should stop pretending. You do not alienate a government that has recalled Israel’s ambassador, has recognized a “State of Palestine” from the river to the sea, and has accused Israel of genocide while turning a blind eye to the torture camps of Cuba and Venezuela. It is one thing to keep a working channel, but quite another to pretend that those regimes are in any way morally equivalent to democracies.

That still doesn’t mean giving up on the idea of a normal, non-hysterical left. One can hope that, one day, Latin America’s left remembers it was made to stand up for the workers and the poor, not to simp for burqah-enforcing, gay-executing jihadists in Tehran and Gaza while giving solemn lectures about women’s and minority rights. A left that really cares about unions, welfare, and civil liberties should be sickened by the theocracies and terror movements it now romanticizes.

But policy cannot be written in the conditional tense. It has to be built on the alliances that exist. Right now, those alliances are with governments and movements that speak the language of law and borders, sovereignty and Western civilization, and that are willing to publicly say that the Jewish state belongs to that civilization and deserves to live.

In Israel and Latin America’s amnesia, I wrote that instead of being a colonial enterprise, Zionism was a decolonial one. It is a Jewish version of the same story Latin America tells about itself: a people that threw off an empire and took back its land. The question today is whether, as the region slowly sobers up from its socialist hangover, Israel is ready to be a serious partner for those who are rediscovering that story and applying it in their own politics.

The window is open. It will not be open forever. Lula could still win in 2026. Milei is beset by economic and political sabotage. Paz will be fought tooth and nail by secured interests. Kast will inherit a country that wants security yesterday and will judge him harshly if he cannot deliver. Venezuela’s future is unwritten. The post-Maduro era could still curdle into a new remake of the old regime. And Cuba, unless Trump finally decides to end the farce, can still operate as the hemisphere’s oldest propaganda machine, smuggling yesterday’s poison into tomorrow’s politics.

Future historians will write one of two stories. Either they will say that, in the mid-2020s, a bloc of pro-Western, pro-Israel governments emerged in Latin America and Jerusalem seized the moment to help cement a new democratic right from the pampas to the Andes and beyond. Or they will say that Israel was too busy chasing European abstentions and photo-ops in Davos to notice that, in Spanish and Portuguese, a generation of allies was calling our name.

An axis of good is sketching itself on the map. It is up to us whether it remains a sketch—or becomes the backbone of a new partnership between Israel and a Latin America finally waking up from its amnesia.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)