Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Four Caribbean countries launch a free movement regimeWashington lifts sanctions on a former Paraguayan presidentand the U.N. demands answers on Nicaragua’s disappeared.
The Caribbean Community, known as Caricom, has long flirted with the idea of labor market integration and freedom of movement similar to that enjoyed by citizens of the European Union and Mercosur.
Last week, four of the bloc’s 15 member states took that step. Barbados, Belize, Dominica, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines inaugurated what they call a “full free movement” regime. The move “supports jobs, supports public services, and supports our future,” Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley said in a speech last Tuesday.
Since 2006, several Caricom states have allowed residency for citizens of the bloc who obtain skills certificates. But that system “did not always run smoothly, with delays in processing,” said Natalie Dietrich Jones, a migration expert at the University of the West Indies. The new program does not require special permits, though countries can turn people away if they are deemed a security threat or an excess strain on public services.
This is the second free movement regime to take effect within Caricom. Beginning in 2011, seven Caricom countries that are full members of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) implemented free movement for their residents, who now total around half a million people. Dominica and St. Vincent are already part of the OECS arrangement.
The Caricom regime that launched last week includes more people—almost a million—as well as a straightforward path for more countries to take part. “We expect other member states to join,” said Caricom official Wanya Illes, adding that she hopes the measure can reduce brain drain from the region.
The free movement scheme reflects a transformation in how Caricom has approached migration policy in recent years. In 2019, the bloc decided to work toward creating a joint migration policy during a meeting about security issues. But planning for the policy has now become part of conversations about the region’s economic growth.
Policymakers understand that “there cannot be any sustainable development in the Caribbean if migration is not part of the equation,” said Patrice Quesada, the International Organization for Migration’s regional coordinator for the Caribbean.
To refine its migration policy framework, Caricom is working with the International Labour Organization (ILO), which is advising countries on how to collect and understand data about both migration and jobs. “The key issue is to make sure that the benefits of migration outweigh any disadvantages,” the ILO’s Abdelmalik Muhummed said.
Some Caribbean countries have liberalized migration policy in recent years, only to tighten it again after difficulties managing new arrivals.
In 2018, Barbados removed a visa requirement for Haitians. But it backtracked the next year, with Barbados’s ambassador to Caricom telling local media at the time that a “large influx of persons” had “started to get a negative backlash from the Barbadian people.” (Haiti is also a Caricom member.)
In the years since, Caricom countries have warmed to the idea of free movement by observing its smooth rollout in the OECS, Quesada said. He added that many Caricom countries are likely taking a “wait and see” approach to the new policy. Jamaica plans to join the four-country regime in the future, Prime Minister Andrew Holness said this week, adding that the country still needed to refine some administrative policies.
Countries that join the program are required to provide certain public services to all residents, such as primary health care. Guyana, which is experiencing an oil boom, refrained from joining for now; senior officials there have said migration policies should prioritize locals for jobs.
Many in the business world seem to be on board with the new policy: The Caricom Private Sector Organization praised the free movement regime as “action-oriented leadership” and said it would make the Caribbean more competitive. Some businesses have already started new recruiting drives within the four participating countries.
The free movement scheme is noteworthy given recent border tightening by the United States and other countries in the Americas, from Argentina to Chile. Under President Joe Biden, Washington provided financial support to countries in the region to welcome migrants. But President Donald Trump largely cut that aid this year.
“For a lot of these countries, their support of immigration has come with foreign aid that now doesn’t exist,” said Jordi Amaral, a researcher and the author of Americas Migration Brief. “Caricom is doing something for itself, about itself, by itself.”
Sunday, Oct. 19: Bolivia holds a runoff presidential election.
Wednesday, Oct. 22: The United Nations Security Council is due to discuss Haiti.
A combine harvester harvests a soy field in Lobos, Argentina, on April 29, 2022.Juan Mabromata/AFP via Getty Images
Soybean war. Tensions over soybeans have caused pushback in the United States against the Trump administration’s offer to bail out Argentina. China has reduced its normally hefty purchases of U.S. soybeans as part of a trade dispute with the United States and is looking to both Brazil and Argentina to compensate for U.S. losses.
China’s purchases of Argentine soybeans jumped dramatically in recent weeks after President Javier Milei removed an export tax on soy as part of his deregulation agenda. U.S. farmers were not happy and have urged Trump to reach a deal with China to up its U.S. soybean purchases, which could cut into some of Brazil’s and Argentina’s revenues.
Last month, an Associated Press photographer captured a text message about the situation on U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s phone that appeared to be from U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. “This is highly unfortunate” and “gives China more leverage on us,” the message read.
That pressure did not seem to dissuade Bessent as of Thursday, when he posted on social media reinforcing U.S. support for Argentina and saying that Washington had just bought Argentine pesos.
Nicaragua’s disappeared. A United Nations panel of experts last week called for Nicaragua’s government to clarify the fate of 120 people reported disappeared in the country since 2018.
The Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances said many people who went missing were “perceived as dissenting with official positions.” Managua has not replied to the group’s questioning since 2018, the experts said, nor did it immediately respond last week.
In August, a federation of Nicaraguan human rights groups reported that there were at least 73 people detained for political reasons in the country, but almost half do not appear in any public court database.
The disappearances have sped up in the last two years, the New York Times reported. In August, authorities returned the bodies of two missing prisoners to their families without official explanations for their deaths.
AI honorees. Innovators in Mexico and Brazil are part of Time’s new list of 100 people shaping artificial intelligence. In Mexico, Tecnológico de Monterrey professor Paola Ricaurte Quijano leads the Feminist AI Research Network. She has issued recommendations to the Mexican government, the U.N., and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on refining AI policy to better serve marginalized groups.
In Brazil, pharmacist Ana Helena Ulbrich worked with her brother, data scientist Henrique Dias, to develop an AI program that identifies potential errors in medical prescriptions. The program is now used by more than 200 Brazilian hospitals and health centers. Ulrich said the program is not meant to override human supervision, which should have the final word, but improve it.
Which country is not a full Caricom member?
Suriname
Trinidad and Tobago
Bermuda
Grenada
It is an associate member of Caricom, along with Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Curaçao, and Turks and Caicos.
Former Paraguayan President Horacio Cartes.Norberto Duarte/AFP via Getty Images
A major U.S. policy reversal toward Paraguay this week highlighted the country’s efforts to align with Trump. Although the United States has long looked favorably on Paraguay’s diplomatic recognition of Taiwan, bilateral relations worsened under Biden as part of a U.S. anti-corruption drive.
In 2022 and early 2023, the United States slapped a visa ban and sanctions on former Paraguayan President Horacio Cartes, saying that he blocked a probe into international organized crime in order to shield himself. Cartes’s protege Santiago Peña was elected president in mid-2023; Peña has claimed that the sanctions against Cartes were motivated by false information.
Following Trump’s 2024 election victory, and even before his inauguration—which Peña attended—Paraguay moved its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem in an echo of Trump’s policy.
Paraguay has since hosted a satellite edition of the Conservative Political Action Conference, agreed to take third-country deportees from the United States, and been among the few countries to vote with the United States and Israel on a multiple UN resolutions this year related to the war in Gaza.
On Monday, the United States lifted sanctions on Cartes, with a State Department spokesperson telling Reuters that they were “no longer required to incentivize changes in behavior.”
Beyond Paraguay’s alignment with Washington in global forums, the sanctions reversal also reflects a change in U.S. security policy toward Latin America, political analyst Julieta Heduvan told Paraguay’s NPY radio.
The Biden administration viewed corruption in the region as something that “caused instability and led to migration or organized crime,” she said, while the Trump administration has deprioritized that approach and instead focused on action against what it has labeled “terrorism.”
