CWA # 2232
The World This Quarter
Latin America (Apr-Jun 2026):
The 'Right' Electoral Tilt, Upswing in Venezuela-India relations, and Argentina's Energy Rise
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Dattesh D Parulekar
11 August 2026
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The second quarter in Latin America saw the electoral politics shifting towards the right, the visit of Venezuela’s acting president to India, and the focus on bilateral energy relations, rise in Argentina’s oil production, and the 17th Conference of Defence Ministers of the Americas, where the US emphasized the “Donroe Doctrine.” The quarter also witnessed Mercosur announcing the launch of negotiations, with Japan.
1. Electoral Politics Oscillating ‘Right’
If the political regime typology, spanning the epoch of the late 1990s into much of the 2000s, was epitomized by the proverbial “Pink Tide,” symbolizing a pivot to populist left-leaning dispensations across Latin America, then the trans-continent can currently, fairly be described, as having swung into a ‘Right-tilt’ in recent years, marked by the rising tide of conservative and far-right leaders helming key countries viz., Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Peru and more.
The recent victories of President-elect Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia in June and newly sworn-in President Keiko Fujimori in Peru (July), have reinforced this evolving entrenching trend. Riding the crest of iron-fisted pledges to alleviate surging crime, bolster weakening economic fundamentals, and arrest irregular migration has led to wringing electoral endorsements. This also translates into hitching their policy preferences to the Trump bandwagon, with both Espriella and Fujimori announcing their intentions to join the US-led “Shield of the Americas” initiative, besides, indicating a potential mirroring replication of Trump-minted policies, across socio-economic realms.
With Trump doubling-down on recapturing ceded space across the Western hemisphere, with the penchant to avail every instrument in the tool-box, and Espriella in particular, underscoring his desire to see Washington return, to country shores with Plan Colombia 2.0, a throwback to when the US wielded military bases and deployed extra-judicial subversive actions, the regional politico-ideological fault-lines, point to greater internal rancour and dysfunction, amidst the trenchant US-China geostrategic contestation in the Americas.
Colombia under former left-winger Gustavo Petro became the 22nd country in the LAC (Latin America and the Caribbean) region to sign on to the Chinese BRI in 2025. Peru, amidst a spate of political instability and witnessing a slew of short-stint Presidents, became the landing point to the Chinese constructed Chanqay port, whose dynamics seek to fundamentally shake-up seaborne Latin America–Asia Pacific trade logistics trajectories. How the newly saddled incumbents in Bogota and Lima given their predominantly extractive commoditized economic profiles, navigate this geopolitical minefield, is going to be intriguing to discern.
Notwithstanding, all eyes are now on the big prize–the October Brazilian Presidential election, with tensions rising, as Lula’s regime proscribes specific US officials from sojourning, citing informed suspicions of electoral-interference and influence-peddling, in favour of challenger, Senator Flavio Bolsonaro.
2. Venezuelan leader dials into Delhi
Long years ago, populist leftist President Hugo Chavez had sojourned to India, in a visit that was clothed in high symbolism, involving an open-top car parade through the streets of Kolkata, West Bengal, in a sign of kindred Communist solidarity and adulation. Since then, while no Presidential sojourn, either again by Chavez or his handpicked successor Maduro fructified, even though Venezuelan VPs and Foreign Ministers have been on periodic visits.
The visit of Acting-President Ms. Delcy Rodriguez Gomez in early June 2026, though lacking substantive outcomes in terms of agreements, the five day working visit was calibrated, in terms of its political-import, policy-pertinence, and soft-power affinities, endeavouring to lay the foundation for cemented broad-ranging institutionalised equations. The Interim President’s five day working visit to India, having been announced by the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is indicative of Venezuela’s current condition of sovereign-supplicance.
With the Hormuz Straits crisis, strategic diversification, in favour of less restive geographic coordinates, remains New Delhi’s top-tier priority, in the context of import-destinations for fossil fuels. Venezuela, beholding more captive oil than Saudi Arabia, constitutes a major potential hub for regularised sourcing by India, Venezuela is the third largest oil importer and the fourth biggest exporter of refined crude products. With Venezuela enduring browbeating US sanctions and a pincer-like dependency on China for much of the 21st century, India often reckoned it prudent, to keep ties with Caracas narrowly focussed but markedly tepid, even as it progressively crafted a wider South American and broader regional strategic engagement. Now, with the US exerting a vice-like grip over Venezuelan crude flows and pressing countries like India to explore systematized energy relations with itself and Venezuela, and with India’s Russian sourcing coming under tangible prospect of hard-hitting wide-ranging US proscription, New Delhi is actively courting Caracas to underwrite its energy security; pivotal to domestic and global macroeconomic stability.
Though speculative, PM Modi is expected to undertake a maiden visit to Venezuela. Notwithstanding, the energy commercials within the relationship, ties have the potential to blossom, coalesced around other viable complementarities in terms of Indian corporate investments into allied Venezuelan extractive sectors (minerals and metals), besides, leveraging Indian cost-effective and democratised offerings for Venezuelan nation-building and strategic capacitation, in the socially beneficent realms of agri-and-animal husbandry, healthcare-and-wellness infrastructure, education and capacity-building training, digitalisation ecosystem, civilian-space technologies, administrative and institutional support, etc. The publicised devotion of Madam Rodriguez to Sathya Sai Baba and frequent callings at his Ashram in years gone by, borne out by similar reverence from other ministers, adds further spiritual spunk.
4. Rise of Argentina as the Oil-Gas Loop of Latin America
Argentina’s oil production has soared on the back of the Vaca Muerta Shale Fields, breaking new records. Oil output is expected to clock 1.5 million bpd by 2030, with natural gas, expected to surge over 6 billion cubic feet, per day. The Vaca Muerta is regarded as one of the most promising unconventional oil and gas finds, reposed of an estimated 16 billion barrels of oil and a staggering 308 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The Vaca Muerta shale formations, are regarded to be superior to their US counterparts, harbouring greater efficiency and enjoying longer productive lifespans, with breakeven costs pegged, at USD 36-45 a barrel. With sulphur content under 0.5 per cent, it’s considered more propitious for refining petroleum products, compared with other South American peers. India discovered Argentine LNG possibilities only more recently, but which has served as an important lifeline, since the breakout of hostilities in the Hormuz.
In this regard, India’s Adani Ports securing the decadal contract to provide marine services for Argentina’s first LNG contract is instructive. With an investment to the tune of USD 70 million, the project in its first phase, envisages production of 2.45 MT of LNG annually, equivalent to approximately 28 cargoes per year, making it Argentina’s first operational LNG export project. The project comports with the bilateral deal with India, which envisions annualised LNG exports in the vicinity of 10 million tonnes, starting 2027.
5. ‘Donroe’ Doctrine at Defence Summit
US Under Secretary of Defence for Policy Elbridge Colby, standing-in for his boss Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at the 17th Conference of Defence Ministers of the Americas, courted controversy through inflammatory characterisation of drug cartels and allied terror outfits punctuating the Latin American landscape, as the “ISIS of the Western Hemisphere”, which reminisced George W. Bush’s phrase to unsavoury regime countries, as constituting the “Axis of Evil.” In language that was nothing short of condescension reeking of Monroe styled imperialism in Donroe mould, Colby sought to disabuse notions of US interests in Latin America, stemming from desire for geographic aggrandisement or resources corral, but instead, from security spaces and defence choices enabling “negative externalities spilling into the US.” Imposing the proverbial “three asks” of the regions’ sovereigns, Colby firstly emphasized the imperative for ramped-up national defence spending, beyond the meagre 1 per cent of GDP, and upwards in-ranges embraced by the Europeans, holding-up the Peruvian act of acquiring US F-16s, as a potential template to be replicated. Furthermore, he insisted upon Latin American countries taking greater ownership, over protecting critical infrastructure and strategic assets, viz., mineral and energy resources, and public utilities infrastructure, from being ensnared by non-hemispheric adversarial powers. Besides, he underscored the full latitude that Washington enjoyed and consequently arrogated to itself, to deploy any instrumentality, whether vide partner-led joint-kinetic operations with regional militaries or even unilaterally, if warranted.
6. South American Strategic Autonomy rolls on
The influential South American trade grouping ‘Mercosur’ (Southern Common Market) has announced the formal launch of negotiations, with the world’s fourth largest economy Japan for an economic partnership agreement, that would eventually morph into a free trade area, hemming-in 400 million people and a composite USD 7 trillion GDP economy. This follows the successful conclusion of protracted negotiations with the EU, which wound down earlier this year and resulted in provisional operationalization of the deal, since 1 May 2026. With Mercosur announcing definitive plans, to close out an expansive economic arrangement with Canada, and proactively exploring one with China, not to mention continuing discussions on elevating the Preferential Trading Agreement with India, to a full-fledged FTA, it’s nothing short of a robust and resolute autonomous pushback against Trump tariffs, as also a cogent signal of a mutually beneficent shaping Global North-Global South cooperative compact across trade, investment, technology and higher-order migration regimes.
About the author
Dr Dattesh D. Parulekar is an Assistant Professor at the School of International and Area Studies, Goa University.