Panama Picks a New President

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Panama elects a controversial new president, floods pummel southern Brazil, and Netflix bets big on a Colombian production.

Panama Goes to the Polls

In the past three decades, Panama has generally outpaced its Latin American peers in economic growth. Its economy grew by an average of 5.9 percent annually between 1990 and 2019, driven in part by revenues from the Panama Canal. The country, a logistics hub, has also experienced booms in civil construction and mining.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, however, Panama has entered more uncertain political and economic terrain. A drought has reduced activity in the Panama Canal. Increasing numbers of migrants traveling through the Darién Gap, Panama’s jungle border with Colombia, have strained humanitarian services. Last year, authorities shuttered the country’s most profitable copper mine, which accounted for an estimated 3.5 percent of Panama’s GDP in 2021.

Sunday’s general election may have delivered Panama a new leader, but many voters are skeptical that he can find lasting solutions to the country’s problems. The winner, José Raúl Mulino, was a stand-in candidate for former President Ricardo Martinelli, who was disqualified due to a money laundering conviction. (Outgoing center-left President Laurentino Cortizo was barred from running due to a ban on immediate reelection.)

Martinelli governed Panama from 2009 to 2014, during an economic boom. Despite his legal woes, many Panamanians remain loyal to Martinelli. Mulino, who served as Martinelli’s security minister and referenced the economic abundance of Martinelli’s tenure on the campaign trail, earned around 34 percent of votes on Sunday—enough for victory in Panama’s one-round presidential race.

Mulino’s closest competitor was anti-corruption outsider Ricardo Lombana, who received around 25 percent of votes. Candidates from more traditional parties trailed further behind. The most unusual result came in Panama’s legislature, where independent candidates collectively won more seats than any political party. This, paired with Lombana’s success, suggests that many Panamanians are hungry for an anti-corruption agenda.

However, their cohort wasn’t big enough to chip away at Mulino and Martinelli’s support base at the presidential level. For Panama’s top office, “corruption won, but democratically,” renowned Panamanian salsa musician and politician Rubén Blades fretted on his blog on Sunday. International observers celebrated that Panama’s election was free and fair. Mulino met with Cortizo on Tuesday afternoon to begin planning the handover.

In comments since being elected, Mulino pledged to reunite the country and improve access to jobs and safe water. He has generally held center-right economic views. Owners of the copper mine that Cortizo’s government shuttered late last year are optimistic that Mulino could take a different stance on the matter; they issued a public statement saying they looked forward to talks.

Mulino refrained from commenting publicly on the mine during the campaign. But he did speak up in ads about stopping illegal immigration. In one interview, he committed to “closing” the Darién Gap; migration experts have warned that such a move is logistically unviable.

One question that remains is whether Mulino will pardon Martinelli. Currently, the former president is holed up in the Nicaraguan Embassy, where he was granted political asylum, in Panama City. Mulino visited him there on election day.

Upcoming Events

Sunday, May 19: The Dominican Republic holds general elections.

Wednesday, May 22: The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development hosts a conference on economic and trade policies in Latin America.

Sunday, June 2: Mexico holds general elections.

What We’re Following

U.S. policy watch. On April 30, Time published a lengthy interview with former U.S. President Donald Trump. Then, on Tuesday, U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan gave a speech about U.S. policy toward Latin America. Together, the two events offered clues as to what either outcome of this year’s U.S. presidential election might mean for the future of Washington’s policy toward the region.

Speaking with Time, Trump repeated his pledge to impose a 10 percent tariff on goods from all foreign countries, adding that he would introduce a 100 percent tariff on cars built at plants run by Chinese companies in Mexico. (Such moves would typically require congressional approval.) Trump also said he would be willing to use the U.S. military to conduct mass deportations of millions of people living illegally in the United States.

Separately, Rolling Stone reported this week that Trump has privately endorsed plans to deploy covert military squads into Mexico to assassinate drug bosses.

Sullivan, for his part, addressed a Council of the Americas event in Washington on Tuesday, providing an overview of U.S. President Joe Biden’s policies toward the region that included a pledge to make the Americas the “most economically competitive region in the world.” (Trump’s policy advisors have also pushed a nearshoring agenda, but Biden has not pledged equivalent tariff hikes.)

To fight organized crime, Sullivan pledged law enforcement partnerships and efforts to crack down on gun trafficking; to address migration, he said Biden believes in “stronger and humane” border enforcement and an increase in legal migration pathways.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida visits a monument commemorating Japanese immigration to Brazil in São Paulo on May 4.Nelson Almeida/AFP

A Japan-Mercosur moment? Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida visited Brazil and Paraguay last week, touting the possibility of a free trade deal with the South American customs union Mercosur. In addition to Brazil and Paraguay, the group includes Argentina, Bolivia, and Uruguay; it signed its first trade deal with an Asian country—Singapore—in December.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Paraguayan President Santiago Peña voiced support for a possible deal with Japan. Kishida’s overture comes amid frustrations over a long-stalled agreement between Mercosur and the European Union.

In Brazil, Kishida signed dozens of memorandums of understanding, including one between the two countries’ export promotion agencies. Brazil is home to the largest Japanese diaspora in the world, and Kishida spoke about those ties on a visit to a cultural center in São Paulo’s Japanese neighborhood of Liberdade.

Despite the bonhomie, by the end of Kishida’s visit there was no sign that Lula had been successful in his long-running mission to get Japan to open its market to Brazilian beef exports. “Please take Prime Minister Fumio to eat steak at the best restaurant in São Paulo so that … he starts importing our beef,” Lula said during the leaders’ joint press conference.

Netflix news. Last month, Netflix released the trailer for its largest-ever Latin American production: One Hundred Years of Solitude, an adaptation of Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez’s magnum opus. A sprawling set depicting the fictional town of Macondo at three points in time has been constructed around six hours outside Bogotá, where the Spanish-language show is being filmed under the direction of Colombia’s Laura Mora and Argentina’s Álex García López.

The series, due to be released later this year, reflects how Netflix has managed to outperform its U.S.-based streaming competitors. The platform has left companies such as Warner Brothers and Disney in the dust in part by betting big on non-English-language content that tells stories specific to their local contexts.

Latin America, with its some 700 million-strong population and high television viewing rates, was an early part of that international production strategy, Bloomberg reported. Additional new Netflix shows from the region include a biopic about a star Formula 1 driver being filmed in Brazil and a science fiction series currently under production in Argentina.

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In Focus: Brazil’s Floods

An aerial view of floods in Eldorado do Sul, in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, on May 9.Nelson Almeida/AFP via Getty Images

Unusually heavy rains last week have plunged the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul into the worst extreme weather event in its history. The deaths of at least 107 people from flooding and mudslides were recorded by early Thursday. The business district of the state capital of Porto Alegre was submerged under several feet of water, as was the city’s international airport, where flights were canceled through the end of the month.

An initial government response package of more than $9 billion was announced Thursday, with damage costs expected to rise. The disaster was a scenario about which scientists have long cautioned. A climate adaptation plan commissioned by Brazil’s presidency a decade ago warned of increased flooding in Rio Grande do Sul, where several rivers drain into the Atlantic Ocean.

However, the document was shelved soon after being produced, and its recommendations went largely ignored. The state’s government and its federal lawmakers have a record of dismantling environmental protections.

The ongoing El Niño weather phenomenon, which typically brings heavy rains to Rio Grande do Sul, is partially responsible for the scale of the devastation in the state. But a long-term trend of higher temperatures has made the rain more dangerous, in this case overwhelming a dam system that had been designed to contain floodwaters.

The combination of El Niño, climate change, and local natural resource mismanagement is subjecting other parts of the region to extreme events as well. Bogotá and Mexico City are currently experiencing water shortages. In Mexico, high temperatures have led to rolling blackouts across the country.

Public outcry over such disasters has the potential to be politically explosive. Hopefully, it can be constructive, Brazilian journalist Bernardo Mello Franco wrote in O Globo: “Politicizing the climate tragedy is necessary,” as “political choices give origin to increasingly frequent extreme events.”