Can the OAS Protect Peru’s Democracy?

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: The Organization of American States eyes democratic backsliding in Peru, Guyana’s president defends his country’s oil boom, and a new book festival in Bolivia highlights Indigenous literature.

OAS Watches Peru’s Political Drama

Last Friday night, police raided Peruvian President Dina Boluarte’s home as part of an anti-corruption investigation. Prosecutors allege she failed to report her assets and illegally obtained expensive Rolex watches and a Cartier bracelet. The “Rolexgate” scandal sparked an impeachment vote against Boluarte on Thursday, which she survived thanks to allies in Peru’s Congress.

Meanwhile, those allies are moving forward with a controversial push to remove judges from a panel that oversees electoral integrity in Peru—one of numerous attacks on the country’s democratic institutions under Boluarte, who was appointed in December 2022. Organizations such as Amnesty International have also accused her administration of human rights abuses against anti-government protesters.

Regional and global watchdog groups have issued statements of concern over Peru’s democratic backsliding. Freedom House ranked Peru as the country in the Americas where democracy declined the most in 2023. Last month, Human Rights Watch called for “ongoing attacks on judicial independence in Peru” to be addressed by the Organization of American States (OAS), which has pushed back against democratic erosion elsewhere in the region.

The OAS, a 34-nation forum headquartered in Washington, debates and monitors issues related to democracy, human rights, security, and social and economic development in the Western Hemisphere. The OAS secretary-general, Luis Almagro, has already spoken out against the Peruvian Congress’s moves against what should be independent judicial bodies.

Democratic backsliding is notoriously difficult to combat, but the OAS proved effective in January in naming and shaming attempts by Guatemala’s political elite to block President Bernardo Arévalo from taking office. Although local Guatemalan activists and foreign governments such as the United States were part of those efforts, Arévalo said last week that the OAS’s work was “fundamental” to his triumph over threats from a “powerful minority.”

The success of the OAS in Guatemala has helped refurbish the 75-year-old organization’s reputation after a period of sharp divisions and accusations of irrelevance. In 2001, OAS nations signed on to a joint charter pledging to uphold democracy. But later in the 2000s, some South American countries criticized the OAS as being too beholden to U.S. influence and created smaller, separate forums for themselves.

When Colombia and Venezuela had a bilateral crisis in 2010, it was one such body, Unasur, that mediated between them, rather than the OAS. But the new groups’ heydays were short-lived: Today, Unasur and similar organizations are weak or defunct.

During the Trump administration, the United States pushed hard for other OAS members to adopt its hard-line regime-change policy on Venezuela, stoking fierce resistance from some countries. “The OAS will not survive in constant contention, vexation and division,” Antiguan diplomat Ronald Sanders wrote in 2020.

Under U.S. President Joe Biden, Washington has generally sought more consensus at the OAS. “The very angry rhetoric toward the United States, I haven’t heard in a while,” said Stella Krepp, a historian at the University of Bern and an OAS expert. It appears that “the willingness to engage in lots of different countries has increased, including in the United States, after Trump,” she told Foreign Policy.

Krepp said countries’ apparent reengagement in the OAS could be because alternative organizations “are all kind of faltering.” Current U.S. officials say their positions at the OAS are also agnostic of political ideology. “Whether the government is of the right or left, we remain faithful and consistent to the values as expressed in the Inter-American Democratic Charter and the OAS Charter,” U.S. Ambassador to the OAS Francisco Mora told Foreign Policy.

Fresh off Arévalo’s inauguration in Guatemala, the OAS has seen a morale boost. Washington chairs a new 19-country working group examining ways the organization can promote democracy, including through civic education and efforts to include marginalized communities in political debates. Brazil is spearheading a push to make negotiations at the OAS more transparent.

In the Guatemalan presidential transition, the OAS “shine[d]” and “demonstrated its continuing relevance,” Sanders, the erstwhile critic, wrote in January.

Still, threats to Peru’s judiciary await. Gradual democratic erosion is “more difficult to read, to assess, and to respond to” than a single electoral crisis, Mora said. But an OAS stand might make a difference. So far, the U.S. Embassy in Lima’s engagement on legislative intervention in the National Board of Justice, which helps select judges and election authorities, has led some lawmakers to back down, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Will Freeman wrote this week.

“External pressure can fragment Peru’s anti-democratic coalition,” Freeman told Foreign Policy.

Upcoming Events

Friday, April 5: Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa meets with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Ottawa.

Monday, April 8, to Monday, April 22: Venezuela is set to host the latest round of peace talks between the Colombian government and the National Liberation Army rebel group.

What We’re Following

Training troops for Haiti. Canada’s and Jamaica’s militaries have begun training security forces from the Bahamas, Belize, and Jamaica to prepare them for a mission in Haiti. The exercises, held in Jamaica, are due to run through April. Meanwhile, Haitians are still working to establish a transitional governing council after acting Prime Minister Ariel Henry’s announcement last month that he planned to resign once such a body was formed.

Conspicuously absent from the training exercises is Brazil, whose army led the military component of a United Nations peacekeeping mission active in Haiti from 2004 to 2017. At the time, Brazil aimed to demonstrate regional leadership. But the mission was tainted by reports of sexual abuse and contributed to the militarization of Brazilian politics, the Getulio Vargas Foundation’s Oliver Stuenkel wrote in Foreign Policy this week.

Brazil is reluctant to send forces for the new U.N.-backed deployment.

Lithium lapse. Argentina has suspended plans to open its first state-backed lithium battery factory. The plant was due to start operating late last year, but President Javier Milei appears to have deprioritized government-run factories in its lithium supply chain in favor of more simple export-oriented projects, sources told Rest of World.

Argentina is currently the world’s fourth-largest lithium producer, and global demand for the mineral is projected to grow amid the green energy transition. Some of the first orders at the now-suspended factory were already placed: Residents of an island near Buenos Aires were due to receive battery-powered electricity in lieu of gas generators, their current energy source. That retrofitting project is now on hold.

An Aymara Indigenous woman walks on an empty street in El Alto, Bolivia, on March 23.Aizar Raldes/AFP via Getty Images

New cultural hub. The Bolivian city of El Alto hosted its first international book festival last month. The event showcased the city’s famed Indigenous culture and literature. El Alto has attracted increasing international attention as a literary hub in recent years, stealing some of the limelight from the cities of La Paz and Santa Cruz, wealthier urban hubs where the artistic class tends to hail from the country’s elite, El País reported.

El Alto “has become the unofficial capital of Bolivia,” El País’s Marco Avilés wrote. In addition to literature, it’s known for its architecture; some upwardly mobile Indigenous residents live in brightly colored homes adorned with geometric shapes. The homes—known as “cholets,” a play on “chalet”—are another sign that El Alto’s Indigenous culture is on the rise.

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In Focus: Guyana’s Oil Boom

Guyananese President Irfaan Ali takes part in a bilateral meeting with Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Georgetown, Guyana, on Feb. 29.Keno George/AFP via Getty Images

A contentious BBC interview with Guyanese President Irfaan Ali went viral this week. The small South American country is experiencing a major offshore oil exploration boom; in 2023, it was the world’s fastest-growing economy for the second consecutive year. The BBC reporter questioned Ali about the environmental implications of embracing oil production.

Ali snapped back: “Guyana has a forest, forever, that is the size of England and Scotland combined, a forest that stores 19.5 gigatons of carbon, a forest that we have kept alive.” He added: “This is the hypocrisy that exists in the world. … Are you in the pockets of those who destroyed the environment through the Industrial Revolution and are now lecturing us?”

Many observers celebrated Ali’s comments, saying he was standing for developing countries. But others said the clash is not so straightforward. In countries such as Guyana, environmental journalist Amy Westervelt wrote, “transnational companies and state-owned oil companies that control the value chain” are getting rich from oil and gas, “not the countries where the resources happen to be located.”

The contract Guyana brokered with ExxonMobil to drill a key portion of its oil reserves earmarks a notoriously low amount of money for government royalties. The International Monetary Fund called the contract “too generous to the investor.”

In a 2022 interview, Guyanese oil journalist Kiana Wilburg told Foreign Policy that “there is still a lot about the fundamentals of the industry that Guyanese citizens are not aware of.” Since then, the terms of Guyana’s ExxonMobil contract have remained the same. But a lawsuit has moved ahead in Guyanese courts alleging that environmental authorities allowed fossil fuel companies to get away with inadequate insurance policies for environmental damage.

Last May, a Guyanese judge wrote in a ruling that “inertia and slumber” at the country’s Environmental Protection Agency had “placed the nation, its citizens and the environment in grave peril.” The judge ordered ExxonMobil’s local subsidiary to guarantee that it would cover the costs of cleaning up any environmental disaster, a ruling that the oil firm is currently appealing.

Correction, April 5, 2024: This newsletter has been updated to better characterize the purview of Peru’s National Board of Justice.