Brazil’s Post-Disaster Vote

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Brazil holds municipal elections after a string of climate disasters, Colombian authorities launch an investigation into the president, and Panama adds new protections for Venezuelan migrants.

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Brazil has been hit by multiple natural disasters exacerbated by climate change in recent months.

In late April and early May, flooding in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul killed more than 180 people. August registered the highest number of Amazon forest fires in 14 years, with smoke blanketing major cities such as São Paulo. The country’s worst drought on record has also drained the water in Amazon tributaries that are normally important shipping and passenger channels.

So when Brazil held municipal elections last weekend, environmentalists watched closely to what extent the issue of climate change would come up.

They were left mostly disappointed. While the mayoral contest in Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul, featured a discussion of flood control in its televised debate, typically “climate was a campaign nonissue” skirted by media interviewers and candidates alike, said Claudio Angelo of the Brazilian nonprofit Climate Observatory.

In recent days, Brazilian climate experts have mulled why. Some city council and mayoral candidates are financially supported by activities that profit from deforestation, such as logging and mining, Agência Pública reported. Reporters found that in several areas with high deforestation—and thus wildfires—leading politicians tended to be silent about forest stewardship.

Brazil’s largest political parties generally do not tout climate consciousness as a top issue. The party that appears the closest to doing so is the ruling Workers’ Party. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has promoted forest protection and green energy in international forums. But Lula governs in a coalition with centrist and conservative parties and has embraced fossil fuel exploration domestically.

To Angelo, a former science editor at Brazil’s newspaper of record, Folha de S. Paulo, climate was discussed so little in the campaign in part because “mainstream media tries to replicate the conversations that are happening on social media,” rather than journalists trying to orient the news cycle around policy questions.

In the country’s biggest mayoral races, Angelo said, “we saw coverage of the candidates’ takes on what’s happening in Venezuela”—an often polarizing topic in Brazil but one largely divorced from municipal policy—“and we saw coverage of one candidate hitting another with a chair,” but little climate change coverage.

The issue was not totally absent from the election, however. To raise its profile amid environmental disaster, a group of more than 300 city council candidates from different parties that dubbed itself the “climate caucus” took a pledge to work for climate-conscious policies once in office; 57 were elected. They include the group’s founder, Marina Bragante, who will be São Paulo’s first-ever city councilor from the small environmentalist party Sustainability Network.

The caucus’s elected officials will soon meet to decide their next steps, Bragante said. She would propose a “library of bills” for climate adaptation and mitigation. “If we propose a bill here in São Paulo, it could be replicated by others in the caucus in other cities,” she said.

Some municipal elections are not over yet: Several cities will hold mayoral runoffs later this month, including Belém, the city due to host next year’s United Nations climate conference. There, a center-right candidate will face off against a candidate from the party of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is known to downplay climate change.

Monday, Oct. 21, to Friday, Nov. 1: The U.N. Biodiversity Conference takes place in Cali, Colombia.

Tuesday, Oct. 22: The U.N. Security Council discusses Haiti.

Tuesday, Oct. 22, to Thursday, Oct. 24: Lula is due to attend the BRICS summit in Russia.

Corruption cases. Colombian election authorities voted on Tuesday to open an investigation into alleged campaign finance irregularities in President Gustavo Petro’s 2022 election bid. His former campaign manager, Ricardo Roa—the current president of Colombia’s state oil company—was also put under investigation.

Roa denied wrongdoing, while Petro said the investigation amounted to a “coup” attempt against him—a claim he has used before in response to unfavorable news.

In Ecuador, meanwhile, a judge on Monday ordered 30 people to be tried in a sweeping corruption and drug trafficking case known as “Metastasis.” Those who will take the stand include judges, prosecutors, and law enforcement officials. The probe is part of Ecuador’s strategy of increasing investigations in the fight against organized crime.

Separately, the U.S. State Department announced visa bans on former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa and his Vice President Jorge Glas on Wednesday. Washington alleges that during their tenure, the two politicians accepted bribes from companies in exchange for positive treatment in government contracts. Correa said in a post on X that Interpol had rejected a past request to arrest him for the case in question.

X returns to Brazil. Brazil lifted its five-week suspension of X on Tuesday after the company complied with court orders to take down certain accounts that authorities flagged as damaging to democratic integrity. It also met other requirements, such as paying outstanding fines.

CEO Elon Musk originally called Brazil’s actions censorship, although he has complied with similar takedown orders in other countries, including India. X said this week that it would continue to defend freedom of speech “within the boundaries of the law.”

Colombian creole. On Friday, the annual drum festival kicks off in San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia, the first free African town in the Americas. Previously enslaved people founded Palenque in 1619, more than 200 years before the abolition of slavery in Colombia in 1852. They fought off attempts at recapture and made deals with colonial Spanish authorities, and later Colombian authorities, to maintain their autonomy.

Palenque has maintained a unique creole language, known as Palenquero, to this day. Workshops about the language will take place over the weekend alongside drum presentations and concerts from Colombian and international artists. Linguists have called Palenquero the only Spanish-based creole language in Latin America. (Haitian creole is French-based.)

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Panama issued a decree last week meant to ease life for Venezuelan migrants living in the country. For the next six months, Venezuelans will be able to use expired passports for purposes such as cashing checks and renewing driver’s licenses.

Passport renewal has become more difficult for overseas Venezuelans amid their country’s political crisis. Panama cut diplomatic relations with Venezuela in late July, citing a lack of transparency in the country’s recent presidential election, and Caracas subsequently suspended flights between the countries.

In other countries, Venezuelan consular services—if they exist—are often delayed. Panama’s waiver is just one example of the many executive actions countries in the Americas have taken to allow displaced Venezuelans to work and access public services.

Linking migrants to host countries’ labor markets has become a major focus of Western Hemisphere diplomacy in recent years, as I wrote on Wednesday in a deep dive for Foreign Policy. Countries are swapping strategies for how to best ensure that migrants benefit host economies and vice versa.

In Ecuador last week, representatives from 19 Latin American and Caribbean countries gathered to compare notes on how to better integrate migrants into the labor force. The United States, for its part, has touted work permissions that come with legal migration pathways as an incentive to coax people away from migrating illegally.

Some analysts have described the Biden administration’s migration strategy as “carrot and stick.” That approach is at risk as the U.S. presidential election approaches: “The Trump administration was all stick,” Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America said.