Brazil Pivots to Asia

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva visits Japan and Vietnam, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio heads to the Caribbean, and Colombian poet Andrea Cote Botero gains new recognition.

 Japan Hosts Brazil’s Lula for State Visit

This week, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva became the first world leader hosted for a state visit in Japan since 2019. The trip was a sign of both countries diversifying their geopolitical ties as the United States becomes a less predictable partner.

Brazil is home to the world’s largest Japanese diaspora, and over the years, the two countries have worked to grow trade and jointly advocate for an expansion of the U.N. Security Council. Even so, Lula said this week that the relationship “does not match the size of our economies” and set a goal of boosting annual trade from $11 billion to $17 billion.

During Lula’s four-day visit, Brazilian and Japanese officials signed 10 bilateral agreements and committed to holding leader summits every two years. Lula pledged to work toward a Japan-Mercosur trade deal, while Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba agreed to send an expert mission to Brazil to study the possibility of opening Japan’s markets to Brazilian beef exports.

Lula’s trip showcased Brazil’s diplomatic practice of active nonalignment, or multialignment. As U.S. President Donald Trump champions protectionism, Brazil has leaned into this approach. Though its relationship with China gets wide attention, Brazil has also expanded ties with other Asian countries, including Vietnam, Singapore, and Indonesia. Lula traveled on to Vietnam after Japan.

In purely economic terms, Brazil sees increasing ties with Asian countries as a hedge against the risk of tariffs from the United States, its No. 2 trade partner.

The partnerships span other issues, too. Lula’s administration will host this year’s annual U.N. climate conference, and Japan’s government argues that climate stewardship is a mark of global leadership. Japan regards Brazil as both a “major partner” and a “major power” on climate, Japan’s deputy chief of mission in Brazil, Tomoaki Ishigaki, told Foreign Policy.

Though some countries may be tempted to follow Trump’s lead in backing down from climate commitments, Japanese officials have repeatedly said that they want Brazil’s climate conference to succeed. While Washington froze support for rainforest protection in Brazil this year, Japan and Brazil signed a new pledge this week to work together on climate projects.

Beyond climate, Lula and Ishiba said they both stood for democratic values—a foreign-policy priority for the United States that appears to have slipped under Trump. But as Lula traveled abroad, the fragility of democracy was underscored back home, where Brazil’s top court voted to try his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, on accusations of plotting a coup.

It’s still too early to say whether partnerships such as Brazil and Japan’s can sustain multilateralism through a turbulent year. At the very least, the countries are positioning themselves to do more bilateral business.

“Given the very fluid global economic and political environment, there’s a strong incentive for both parties to collaborate even further,” Ishigaki said.

Upcoming Events

Friday, March 28: U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visits Mexico, where she will meet President Claudia Sheinbaum and Foreign Secretary Juan Ramón de la Fuente.

Saturday, March 29: Lula concludes his state visit to Vietnam.

What We’re Following

Peru is set for elections. On Tuesday, Peruvian President Dina Boluarte called presidential and legislative elections for April 2026. Boluarte became president after Pedro Castillo, under whom she served as vice president, was impeached in December 2022. Given Boluarte’s deep unpopularity, many doubted whether she would reach the end of her term in July 2026.

Boluarte cannot run for reelection because of term limits. But her slightly early election announcement could turn attention away from her own performance, political analyst Rosa María Palacios said on a La República news program.

Early polls suggest a fragmented field for the presidential election, with longtime political fixture Keiko Fujimori—the daughter of a hard-line former president—and right-wing Lima Mayor Rafael López Aliaga ranking among the most popular potential candidates.

Some Castillo allies are expected to run, while other groups on Peru’s left and center-left are in talks about fielding a unified ticket, former Castillo administration official Anahí Durand wrote earlier this month.

A sculpture of a hand holding an oil drilling rig is seen outside the state-run oil company Petroleos de Venezuela S.A. in Caracas on Feb. 26.Pedro Mattey/AFP via Getty Images

Trump’s tariff threats. On Monday, Trump threatened 25 percent tariffs on all U.S. imports from countries that buy Venezuelan oil. China was Venezuela’s top oil buyer last year. While the United States has recently experimented with secondary sanctions—blacklisting entities that supply Russia’s war effort, for example—the type of tariff that Trump proposed would be a new and potentially more sweeping measure.

Trump said the threat was a response to a range of Venezuelan actions, including “purposefully” sending people who he alleged were gang members to the United States. It is not first U.S. attempt to play hardball over migration with Caracas. After the United States sent Venezuelan migrants to a maximum security prison in El Salvador this month, Venezuela began accepting U.S. deportations again.

Poetry prize. Colombian poet Andrea Cote Botero is the most recent winner of the Casa de América prize for poetry from the Americas, awarded by the Spanish government. Cote’s body of work often explores themes of migration, including her aunt’s journey from Colombia to the United States.

Cote, a professor at the University of Texas, El Paso, told El País this month that she embraces Spanglish with her student writers, as it is “a reflection of our journey and our evolution, of the historical moment.” (All the more amid “the removal of Spanish from official [U.S. government] documents,” she added.)

In one of Cote’s most famous poems, addressed to her aunt, she wrote, “Is this bright, / hard, polished stone of rage / the land that we were promised?”

Question of the Week

FP’s Most Read This Week

• Is America a Kleptocracy? by Jodi Vittori
• The Horror Inside the Salvadoran Prisons Where Trump Is Sending Migrants by Noah Bullock
• China Is No Climate Savior by Seaver Wang and Vijaya Ramachandran

In Focus: Rubio’s Caribbean Tour

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio boards a plane bound for the Caribbean, seen at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on March 26.Nathan Howard / Pool / AFP via Getty Images

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is visiting Guyana, Jamaica, and Suriname this week in his second trip to Latin America since taking office. Though Rubio’s first visit to the region was largely devoted to securing agreements for countries to accept U.S. deportees, this time, he has suggested a greater focus on economic partnerships.

In Jamaica, Rubio said that he would work with U.S. agencies to promote nearshoring in the country, though no concrete deals were announced. Rubio told the leaders of Barbados, Jamaica, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines that he would consider their concerns about Trump’s policies, including cuts to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which monitors Caribbean hurricanes.

The Caribbean leaders also criticized the U.S. State Department’s warning last month that it would issue visa restrictions on foreign government officials involved in programs to facilitate Cuban doctors’ work in their countries. Though Rubio has said the programs “basically operate as forced labor,” the three Caribbean leaders rejected that characterization.

“We follow all the international conventions when Cubans come here,” St. Vincent Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves said. Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley said the country “could not get through the [COVID-19] pandemic without the Cuban nurses and the Cuban doctors.”

Rubio traveled on to Guyana, which has become one of the world’s biggest per capita oil producers. Trump’s special envoy to Latin America, Mauricio Claver-Carone, said that the United States envisions a security cooperation agreement with Guyana akin to those with Gulf states. In Guyana’s neighborhood, “regional threats” would include Venezuela, which claims the Guyana-controlled Essequibo region as its own.

Other U.S. officials kept migration at the top of their regional agenda this week. On Wednesday, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visited the Salvadoran prison housing migrants deported from the United States and threatened to send more.