North Americanism Turns 30

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: NAFTA—now USMCA—celebrates an important birthday, Chile brokers the first public-private deal of its national lithium strategy, and Pope Francis calls out Nicaragua in his New Year’s address.

The Not-So-Distant Nineties

NAFTA—the North American Free Trade Agreement, relaunched in 2020 as the decidedly less catchy U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA—came into effect 30 years ago this week, on Jan. 1, 1994.

NAFTA birthed North Americanism as not only an economic concept, but also, to a lesser extent, a political one. The deal removed trade barriers and boosted investment and cultural exchange among the three countries, self-styling the trio as economically dynamic and democratic at a moment when Mexican politics was showing signs of opening after more than 60 years of single-party rule.

NAFTA left both admirers and detractors across the continent. The treaty’s critics inside Mexico argued that the country missed out on development opportunities by opening too quickly to far-richer neighbors, and U.S. discontents lamented the loss of American manufacturing jobs to factories on the Mexican side of the border.

Perhaps the most visible resistance to NAFTA in Mexico was the anti-globalization Indigenous Zapatista movement, which had roots in a leftist insurgent movement that preceded NAFTA. The Zapatista movement is still active today.

The Zapatistas erupted into Mexico’s public consciousness with their marches and revolutionary manifesto. After 11 days of clashes with the government at the start of 1994, they reached a cease-fire and proceeded to set up communities in the jungle. While a 1993 Zapatista manifesto called for land and housing reform, the movement’s leaders soon added opposition to NAFTA and demands regarding Indigenous rights to their platform.

Former Foreign Policy editor in chief Moises Naím appraised the Zapatistas’ enduring influence in 2003, writing that they were among many movements across Latin America amplifying discontent with globalization. “The increased material well-being that was promised if Latin America embraced privatization, fiscal austerity, and free trade during the 1990s has yet to reach much of the region’s population,” he wrote, while the deepening of democracy “allowed individuals with similar interests to organize and gain a voice that had long been suppressed.”

The NAFTA anniversary has passed with little comment in U.S. media. But the treaty so reshaped Mexico that leading Mexican literary journalism magazine Nexos devoted an entire issue to taking stock of its lingering effects.

One somber take concluded that the deal fell short of Mexican officials’ promise that it would lead to economic “convergence” between the United States and Mexico. A more optimistic reflection pointed out that NAFTA allowed Mexico’s manufacturing sector to become connected to global value chains in a way that those in more protected economies further south, such as Argentina and Brazil, did not.

Less conventional analyses looked at how the U.S. educational background of top Mexican bureaucrats made them friendlier to a deal, as well as how NAFTA’s lifting of protections for Mexico’s domestic film industry weakened homegrown cinema opposite U.S. competition.

Compared to a previous period of high growth in Mexico, the years following the treaty seemed like “a lost opportunity,” former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, a godfather of NAFTA, told Nexos in an oral history piece that appeared in this month’s issue. That account, which includes a dozen former Mexican officials, explores how they negotiated the treaty and worked to sell it to the Mexican public—and is complete with the quibbles of high-profile NAFTA opponents.

In the post-Cold War, pro-globalization heyday of the 1990s—and in the wake of Mexico’s own devastating debt crisis—free trade and economic opening were the favored recipe for the country to regain its economic feet. Jorge Castañeda, who criticized some aspects of NAFTA and later became Mexico’s foreign secretary, told Nexos that one of the deal’s key shortcomings was how it removed Mexican industry protections without securing greater guarantees of U.S. and Canadian investment in return. Today, some Latin American countries, including Chile, are seeking to avoid such a course by securing foreign guarantees of investment or technology transfer in exchange for access to their critical mineral sectors.

The NAFTA talks also included a showdown between Salinas and former U.S. President George H.W. Bush about whether the deal could increase permissions for legal migration. “You want the free movement of all goods, but why not the free movement of the people who make those goods?” Salinas recounted challenging.

But Bush would not budge on the matter, instead offering another concession: The United States would not object to Mexico’s state control of its oil sector.

Fast forward 30 years later, and Mexico City is still often acquiescent to U.S. migration policy while Washington has limited some of its pushback to Mexico’s energy policies—despite strong criticism from some corners of U.S. and Mexican civil society. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s moves to expand state control over the electricity sector have rankled private U.S. and Mexican companies as well as environmentalists, who say a more privatized sector would be able to transition faster to clean energy.

The Zapatistas have not survived the 30 years as well as the trade deal. Amid rising violence related to organized crime—another product of Mexico’s intertwinement with its northern neighbor—the group’s commander announced in 2023 that it was dissolving its self-run townships in southern Mexico.

This year, both Mexico and the United States will elect new leaders. When top-polling Republican Party candidate Donald Trump was president, he spearheaded NAFTA’s renegotiation. Thanks also to his Mexican and Canadian counterparts, the deal now includes stronger labor and environmental protections. It’s a reminder that North Americanism is still in evolution.

Upcoming Events

Sunday, Jan. 14: Bernardo Arévalo is inaugurated as president of Guatemala.

Sunday, Jan. 28: Mexico’s presidential campaigning season officially beings.

Sunday, Feb. 4: El Salvador holds legislative and presidential elections.

What We’re Following

One less BRIC in the wall. The administration of Argentine President Javier Milei announced last Friday that it will reject an invitation to join the expanded BRICS grouping of nations, which until this month included Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. All of the other countries invited to join at last year’s BRICS summit, held under Milei’s predecessor Alberto Fernández—Ethiopia, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—accepted their invitations and officially joined on Jan. 1 of this year.

Milei’s foreign minister has said that Argentina will prioritize working toward starting its accession to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) group of mostly-rich Western countries. But Buenos Aires has a ways to go before it reaches the required thresholds related to stability and regulations in its banking system, among other requirements. Nearby Brazil and Peru are also in the OECD accession process.

A lithium deal in Chile. Chilean President Gabriel Boric’s national lithium strategy, announced last year, dangled the possibility of granting new mining permissions for private firms that struck partnerships with state-backed companies. The first such deal was announced last week. According to a draft arrangement, state copper company Codelco and private miner SQM will explore an untouched part of Chile’s Atacama salt flats, with Codelco retaining a just-over-50 percent stake of control.

The draft agreement lays the ground for the two firms to retain mining permissions in the area through 2060. Though some in Chile’s private mining sector were hesitant about the new policy favoring public-private partnerships, U.S.-listed shares of SQM rose when the deal was announced.

People celebrate as they watch New Year’s fireworks at Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro on Jan. 1.Tercio Teixeira/AFP via Getty Images

A symbolic celebration. As part of a longstanding tradition to welcome in the new year, many Brazilians—religious and secular alike—wore white on Monday and spilled onto beaches in a symbolic nod to Afro-Brazilian sea goddess Iemanjá.

Iemanjá’s designated holy day is technically Dec. 29 in Rio de Janeiro and Feb. 2 in Bahia: on those days, white-clad devotees attended separate ceremonies in her honor and cast offerings into the sea. The New York Times documented this year’s Rio ceremonies, which featured traditional dances and altars in the sand.

Over the decades, secular partiers on New Year’s Eve have embraced some of those religious traditions as well, wearing white and jumping over seven incoming waves for good luck. Iemanjá’s color is now the unofficial uniform of New Years, even as adherents of Afro-Brazilian faiths such as Candomblé and Umbanda still face marginalization in the country today.

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In Focus: The Church v. Nicaragua

Pope Francis waves to an assembled crowd in St. Peter’s Square from the window of the Apostolic Palace during the Angelus prayer at the Vatican on Jan. 1.Andreas Solaro/AFP via Getty Images

Pope Francis used his New Year’s Day address to talk Latin American politics, condemning the ongoing crackdown against Catholic leaders in Nicaragua. “Bishops and priests have been deprived of their freedom,” he said, referencing a string of detentions that finally hit one of the last spaces of open dissent in Nicaragua: the church.

According to Nicaraguan lawyer and researcher Martha Patricia Molina—the author of a study entitled “Nicaragua: A Persecuted Church?”—18 church leaders, including bishops, priests, and seminarians, were jailed in the country under the government of President Daniel Ortega as of Tuesday.

Francis has tried on several occasions to mediate a political opening in heavily Catholic Nicaragua, but his papal envoy was expelled in 2022, and the Vatican closed its office in the country in March 2023. Vatican officials told Reuters that Nicaragua’s ongoing crackdown reminded them of Cold War-era persecution of the church by many Eastern European communist countries.

Nicaragua’s hardened autocracy is the subject of frequent denunciations at forums such as the Organization of American States and by rights groups such as Amnesty International. But the status quo shows few signs of changing—and is not the main focus of diplomatic efforts by the region’s biggest countries.

Still, Francis sought to raise Nicaragua’s profile this week. “I hope the path of dialogue can be followed to overcome difficulties,” he said.