The Year in Review 2025

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief, and happy holidays.

This week, we’re looking back at the biggest stories of the year, including the U.S. revival of the Monroe Doctrine, the United Nations climate summit in Brazil, and global recognition for Venezuela’s pro-democracy movement.

The biggest single event to affect Latin American foreign policy this year was U.S. President Donald Trump’s January inauguration. Under his watch, the United States has launched an aggressive strategy to reshape the Western Hemisphere.

The new U.S. National Security Strategy this month made explicit what Latin American countries experienced throughout the year. Washington is putting resources toward efforts to stop migration, levying tariffs on countries that it says have unfair trade practices, deploying military assets against alleged drug trafficking, and rewarding political allies.

The United States has also cut foreign aid and aimed to punish political adversaries.

Latin American leaders responded in a variety of ways. Some, such as Colombian President Gustavo Petro, pushed back vehemently and experienced further U.S. retaliation. Others were more moderate, including Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who offered compromises on some—but not all—fronts.

And a few leaders embraced Trump: Argentine President Javier Milei won a whopping $20 billion support package for the peso that helped boost his party in midterm elections.

The United States repeatedly intervened in Latin American countries’ domestic politics and threatened their economies. This played out most prominently in Brazil, where Washington tried to meddle in the trial of former President Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally.

But for the most part, the politically divided region did not respond to Trump with a united voice. Deportation deals, as well as responses to tariffs and threats surrounding strategic assets such as the Panama Canal, were largely conducted bilaterally.

One exception was the March election of Surinamese politician Albert Ramdin to lead the Organization of American States (OAS). Though Ramdin was not explicitly anti-Trump, his opponent had signaled a strong alignment with the White House.

After Washington had threatened to pull support from the OAS in the first half of the year, Ramdin worked to unite all OAS members, including the United States, around a common goal: strengthening the international response to Haiti’s political crisis. The U.N. Security Council went on to approve the OAS-backed plan in September.

Latin American countries have also responded to Trump’s policies by seeking to expand ties with other nations, including on trade. Much of this diversification focused on Asia, going beyond just deepening relations with China.

Peru signed a trade deal with Indonesia. Chile held four rounds of talks toward a free trade deal with India. South American bloc Mercosur signed a trade deal with the four-country grouping of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland, as well as a strategic partnership agreement with Japan.

Mexico is preparing to host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in 2028 and in recent months stepped up trade coordination with Canada. Both countries are parties to a North American trade agreement with the United States with an uncertain future under Trump.

In the year through September, Canada grew as an export destination for Mexican goods. In the year through November, China similarly grew as an export destination for Brazil.

Perhaps most significantly, Latin America and the Caribbean are finishing out the year with around 2.4 percent GDP growth—largely in line with regional growth since the COVID-19 pandemic and ahead of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) projection in April that the region’s 2025 growth would be a mere 2 percent.

When the IMF raised its forecast for the region in October, officials at the fund cited multiple factors, one of which was that Latin American countries maintained strong exports to trade partners across the world.

The dramatic U.S. crackdown on immigration hit Latin Americans hard this year. These measures included the effective end to the asylum process at the U.S.-Mexico border, the termination of protections from deportation for certain Latin Americans inside the United States, and new travel bans that extended to the family members of U.S. legal permanent residents.

The United States rewarded countries that cooperated with its policies, such as El Salvador, which imprisoned people whose deportations are being challenged in U.S. courts. It’s likely that Venezuela’s continued acceptance of U.S. deportees is a bargaining chip in its dramatic standoff with the United States. Meanwhile, due to U.S. aid cuts, countries such as Mexico and Colombia are responding to an influx of migrant returnees without financial support from the United States.

Amid these shifts, four countries in the Caribbean Community went against the grain and liberalized some of the bloc’s internal migration permissions. Officials acknowledged regional anti-migrant sentiment but said economics and the need for workers spoke louder.

This year, Colombia chaired an overtime session of U.N. biodiversity talks that began last year, and Brazil hosted the U.N. climate conference known as COP30. Despite moments where the summits appeared gridlocked or at risk of breaking down, both ended with progress.

At the biodiversity conference, countries agreed to steps including a road map to mobilize $200 billion per year by 2030 to protect nature. At COP30, countries agreed to moves including tripling the funds available for adaptation finance by 2035.

Colombia and Brazil were also protagonists in a push at COP30 to require countries to make plans for shifting away from economic dependence on fossil fuels. Though the issue was not codified in the summit’s final agreement, countries pledged to advance it in the coming months. Colombia and the Netherlands are hosting an international conference on the matter in April.

Venezuelan opposition leader and 2025 Nobel Peace Prize recipient María Corina Machado attends a press conference in Oslo, Norway, on Dec. 11.Rune Hellestad/Getty Images

The Nobel Peace Prize returned to Latin America this year, with María Corina Machado recognized for leading the Venezuelan opposition through last year’s elections and her ongoing work toward democratization in the country. Under the leadership of Machado and her allies, Venezuela’s pro-democracy movement has demonstrated tenacity and tact in the face of repression.

This year, Machado has also managed a difficult balancing act as the Trump administration uses increasingly aggressive tactics to apply pressure on the authoritarian government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The United States has broadcast readiness for military action against the country.

That is a step too far for some members of the opposition—and it is viewed with alarm by regional neighbors that have spoken out against Trump’s deadly strikes on alleged drug boats that began in September. Washington has not produced specific details about the more than 100 people it has killed in such strikes in the region this year.

Latin American music had another strong year, with reggaeton artist Bad Bunny dethroning Taylor Swift as the most streamed artist of 2025 on Spotify.

So, too, did Latin American film and television. Argentina’s The Eternaut, an adaptation of a beloved sci-fi comic book, became Netflix’s most streamed non-English-language series soon after its release in April.

At the Venice Film Festival, Ecuador’s The Ivy and Mexico’s On the Road won awards in the Horizons section for new trends in world cinema. Brazil’s I’m Still Here won a Golden Globe for best female actor in a drama and an Academy Award for best international film—the first-ever Brazilian film to do so.

More recently, another Brazilian film, also about the country’s 1964-85 military dictatorship, has attracted buzz on the festival circuit. The Secret Agent is now nominated for three Golden Globes and shortlisted for the Oscars.

In Foreign Policy last week, Lucas Iberico Lozada wrote that though the two films differ tonally—I’m Still Here is stately, while The Secret Agent is zany—both juxtapose “the menace and paranoia of the dictatorship with the sexual and psychedelic liberation of Brazil’s revolutionary tropicália cultural movement.”

They also “offer up a more nuanced portrait of authoritarianism than the typical Hollywood fare,” Iberico Lozada wrote.