BS Summary: This article contains 39 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Authority, Post Hoc (False Cause), and Ambiguity (Equivocation), with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 26% saturation with 638 hits. Analysis detected 3,971 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,453 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 49.9% and a BS Rank of 49% (8,668 of 17,004 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 51.00% of the article peer group.
Welcome back to *Foreign Policy*’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Regional **oil exporters** show resilience amid the Strait of Hormuz crisis, Honduras rethinks its plans to **recognize Taiwan**, and Argentina advances to the **World Cup final**.
Latin America’s Petroleum Power
Disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz caused by the Iran war have underscored the economic muscle of a handful of Latin American countries that are experiencing oil export booms, including Argentina, Brazil, and Guyana.
The region’s relative geopolitical neutrality and distance from the conflict has made its oil more attractive to global buyers during the crisis, part of a rewiring of energy sales that International Energy Agency Executive Director Fatih Birol described in *Foreign Policy* this month.
While energy importers are hurting, some South American oil exporters have announced positive economic numbers.
Last week, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) projected that Brazil’s growth this year would be 0.5 percent higher than it had calculated in April.
That is despite U.S. tariffs, which Washington said this week that it will hike to 25 percent on many Brazilian goods.
Though the IMF did not issue updates on Argentina or Guyana, April estimates suggest that their economies will grow by 3.5 percent and 16.2 percent this year, respectively.
Argentina paid off a $4.3 billion chunk of its foreign debt last week, defying doubters of President Javier Milei’s economic overhaul; in June, inflation slowed to its lowest level in 10 months.
“The oil prices are definitely helping Argentina’s macro position,” said Luisa Palacios, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
Because oil is sold in dollars, the exports have allowed Argentina’s central bank to increase its dollar reserves.
But oil exporters that also import large amounts of natural gas, such as Mexico and Colombia, have not reaped the same financial benefits.
After Brazil’s oil exports also initially rose at the start of the conflict, the Brazilian government took a unique approach.
In mid-March, it slapped a 12 percent tax on oil exports to subsidize fuel for domestic users.
The exports fell, but so too did inflation—an important metric in an election year.
Brazil’s export tax has triggered a debate in the country.
A handful of oil companies are challenging the measure in court, calling it illegal and saying it worsens the investment climate.
Some environmentalists, meanwhile, are calling on the left-leaning government to use its newfound comfort with taxing fossil fuels to help fund the green energy transition.
The climate group 350.org has urged lawmakers in the governing coalition to include such taxes in a bill that was introduced in May but had no luck, according to the organization’s Brazil director, João Cerqueira.
“Our idea is to treat this as a priority issue,” he said, noting that President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said last year that he wanted to use oil sector money to fund the country’s energy transition.
In 2024, less than 0.2 percent of Brazil’s oil royalties and other fees paid to the government were spent on environmental and climate-related projects, according to the Institute for Socioeconomic Studies, a Brasília-based think tank.
Whether it’s to help pay back foreign creditors or to help control domestic oil prices, Latin America’s net energy exporters are feeling their political power in this moment of global economic strain.
Amid such a fossil fuel boom, it may seem that there is no momentum in Latin America’s energy transition.
But if energy sales help Latin American countries achieve macroeconomic resilience, that could help their transitions move forward, Palacios said.
In shaky economies, banks usually charge higher interest rates, which makes it harder to roll out green investments.
Even though Milei is far from a climate hawk, the economic upside of renewables is clear enough to Argentines that two Buenos Aires-based power companies that work with green energy are vying to be the country’s first IPOs on the New York Stock Exchange since 2019.
It’s not only oil sales that are moving forward in the region, Palacios said—electrification is, too.
Upcoming Events
Friday, July 17, to Friday, July 24: Talks to develop rules on deep-sea mining continue at the International Seabed Authority in Kingston, Jamaica.
Sunday, July 19: Argentina faces Spain in the FIFA Men’s World Cup final.
Monday, July 20: The United Nations Security Council discusses Haiti.
What We’re Following
U.S.-Cuba talks.
Former Cuban President Raúl Castro’s grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, told *USA Today* last week that Cuba’s leadership authorized him to negotiate with the United States about changes on the island.
Many observers have interpreted this as Rodríguez Castro’s attempt to position himself as something like a Cuban equivalent of Venezuela’s acting leader, Delcy Rodríguez, who held quiet talks with the United States ahead of the Jan. 3 ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Rodríguez Castro’s statement comes as the economic crisis in Cuba extends and an increasing number of U.S. lawmakers speak up about it.
Four Democratic legislators visited Cuba last week, and one compared the U.S. fuel blockade on the country to a “silent Gaza.”
Democrats have generally signaled more willingness than Republicans to engage with the Cuban government.
Rep.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez met quietly with Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel in 2023, Jonathan Guyer wrote in *Foreign Policy* this week.
Honduras wavers on Taiwan.
Honduran President Nasry Asfura’s administration is distancing itself from a campaign trail promise to drop the country’s 2023 diplomatic recognition of China in favor of formal relations with Taiwan.
U.S.
President Donald Trump backed Asfura ahead of his November election, in which both leading candidates made pro-Taiwan pledges.
But Foreign Minister Mireya Agüero said this month on an interview show that the government’s decision will not be based on campaign promises and that Honduras had not opened formal talks with Taiwan.
Any such decision would need to be made with an eye to consequences for Honduran exporters, Agüero added.
Seven countries in the Americas diplomatically recognize Taiwan, including a handful in the Caribbean and Central America as well as Paraguay.
Washington has generally looked favorably on this position.
Agüero said the decision would be based on Honduras’s national interest and not determined by the United States.
Argentina prevails over England.
Argentina faces former colonizer Spain in the FIFA Men’s World Cup final on Sunday in New Jersey.
But the matchup is not as symbolically loaded as its semifinal battle against England on Wednesday, which the Argentine team—nicknamed the *Albiceleste*—won 2-1.
Argentina and England have a soccer and political rivalry that stretches back decades.
Observers of Argentine politics might know that the 1986 World Cup quarterfinal between the two came after the Falklands War between the two countries.
In that game, Argentine star Diego Maradona scored a goal with his hand that would not have survived today’s video assistant referee process.
But the two countries’ history goes back even further.
Britain invaded present-day Argentina in the early 19th century, and British migrants had enormous influence in the beginnings of Argentine soccer culture—so much so that top Argentine club team names, such as Racing and Boca Juniors, still include English words.
The countries’ intertwined story includes myriad bitter moments.
During the 1966 World Cup, which England ultimately won, an Argentine player said he was denied an interpreter to understand the referee and refused to follow a command to be sent off the field.
England’s manager later called Argentine players “animals.”
This long history helps explain some of the animosity on the soccer pitch on Wednesday night—and Argentina’s drive to come from behind to win late in the second half, a trend for the team at this year’s tournament.
If they can do it one more time, they will be back-to-back world champions.
Question of the Week
Which of the following countries recognizes Taiwan?
Haiti
Barbados
Nicaragua
Latin America and the Caribbean is the region that accounts for the largest number of Taiwan’s official diplomatic partners.
FP’s Most Read This Week
* **Ukraine Finally Has a Theory of Victory.
Will It Work?
** *by Christian Caryl*
* **Marco Rubio Burned Down the House to Fix a Sink** *by Amanda Klasing*
* **Why We Know More About China’s Next-Generation Fighters Than America’s** *by Sam Roggeveen and David Vallance*
In Focus: Venezuela’s Information Gap
A little more than three weeks after Venezuela’s June 24 earthquakes, efforts to calculate the damages remain clouded by an information gap.
On Wednesday, Venezuela’s government said that at least 2,95 people had died in the 7.2 and 7.5 magnitudes tremors rupturing seconds apart beneath the state of Yaracuy.
It has not issued estimates of how many people remain missing after the disaster, who could also be lying dead under rubble.
A rescue according to independent open-source platforms estimates that the number totaled almost 50,000.
A United Nations official on Monday said the organization planned to send 10,000 body bags to the country.
The U.N.
Development Programme (UNDP) estimated that the earthquakes caused $6.7 billion in direct physical damages alone, with the broader costs of economic disruption likely to be much higher.
That figure captures only housing and economic assets; it excludes infrastructure, broader economic disruption, and the long arc of reconstruction.
That number is on par with post-disaster reconstruction.
The IMF projections after January’s update put Venezuela’s annual GDP growth at $111 billion, the biggest economic contraction during peacetime in modern history.
That makes emergency borrowing difficult.
Caracas is currently attempting the largest sovereign debt restructuring in history, a process so fraught that it lacks institutional framework and does not adequately know what it has, especially when it comes to rare earths, that companies have long tried and mostly failed to unlock.
But other companies that are interested in the Venezuelan ecosystem will hold off a little bit because they might be worried that a national strategy could change things significantly for them, she said.
With Venezuelan elections looming in October, a potential political switch has injected even more uncertainty.
The earthquake showed that without genuine democratization and a real technification of Venezuelan institutions, the boring, unglamorous machinery of a state that actually functions, there will be no reconstructed Venezuela.
There will only be a more broken one: more tents, more rubble, and more reason for the rage already gathering in its streets.
When U.S. forces seized Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro on Jan.
3, Washington did not hand power to opposition candidate Edmundo González, the real winner of Venezuela’s fraudulent 2024 election.
Instead, U.S. officials thought she would be a disciplined and technocratic administrator willing to govern under U.S. tutelage and open Venezuela to foreign investors, per *The New York Times*.
But those efforts have failed.
Moreover, Maduro’s Venezuelan paramilitaries are prepared to respond to riots but not the main threat of natural disasters, Ángel Rangel, a former head of Venezuela’s civil defense agency, told local journalists on Saturday.
She also noted bitterl, confronted, and even beaten security forces that allegedly tried to steal relief and money found in the ruins.
Rodríguez has been widely criticized for inviting rescuers to a ceremony rather than allowing them to continue working in La Guaira and meeting with disaster victims while wearing a Moncler jacket worth more than $1,000.
The earthquake was the first real stress test of that proposition.
It failed.
All the while, Caracas is filling with tents as thousands of displaced people from zones destroyed or compromised by the earthquakes, both in the city and from La Guaira, move into public parks and squares.
This is just the beginning of a broader crisis: The country has no credit, negligible insurance, and a population far too poor to self-finance its recovery.
A state in that condition does not rebuild quickly; it accumulates ruins, misery, and lawlessness.
When Maduro’s government last conducted an official census in 15 years, making post-disaster accounting difficult.
More than 200 websites remained blocked when the earthquakes hit, and the government only partially restored access to information channels after organizing civil society and the U.N.’s fact-finding mission in the country.
Influencers turned their feeds into real-time hubs, amplifying calls for help and sharing missing person reports.
What’s App groups and Instagram accounts did the work that the Venezuelan government ministries could not.
No government response teams have reached some of the worst-hit areas, and no functioning state system for missing persons.
The Pan American Health Organization found that Venezuela’s foreign and morgue services had collapsed and that its casualty tracking was inadequate.
Some buildings in Caracas collapsed, while the nearby coastal city of La Guaira was practically flattened.
Hundreds of these units were severely damaged or even collapsed.
And although older buildings may not have been modernized according to construction codes, with some units perche-d on soft sediment, they were never built with the intention of withstanding earthquakes.
Add to that the physical vulnerability was a state stripped by years of mismanagement and systemic corruption by Maduro’s Chavista predecessors.
Civil protection units had no equipment; hospitals were drained of medicine and running water; and state institutions were hollowed out of staff, resources, and any semblance of professional management or strategic planning.
Around 70 percent of the country’s roughly 28 million people lived in poverty before the tremor.
The earthquake showed that without genuine democratization and a real technification of Venezuelan institutions, the boring, unglamorous machinery of a state that actually functions, there will be no reconstructed Venezuela.
There will only be a more broken one: more tents, more rubble, and more reason for the rage already gathering in its streets.
That figure captures only housing and economic assets; it excludes infrastructure, broader economic disruption, and the long arc of reconstruction.
A state in that condition does not rebuild quickly; it accumulates ruins, misery, and lawlessness.
When Maduro’s government last conducted an official census in 15 years, making post-disaster accounting difficult.
More than 200 websites remained blocked when the earthquakes hit, and the government only partially restored access to information channels after organizing civil society and the U.N.’s fact-finding mission in the country.
Influencers turned their feeds into real-time hubs, amplifying calls for help and sharing missing person reports.
What’s App groups and Instagram accounts did the work that the Venezuelan government ministries could not.
No government response teams have reached some of the worst-hit areas and no functioning state system for missing persons.
The Pan American Health Organization found that Venezuela’s foreign and morgue services had collapsed and that its casualty tracking was inadequate.
Some buildings in Caracas collapsed, while the nearby coastal city of La Guaira was practically flattened.
Hundreds of these units were severely damaged or even collapsed.
And although older buildings may not have been modernized according to construction codes, with some units perche-d on soft sediment, they were never built with the intention of withstanding earthquakes.
Analysis
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