transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:02] Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

Speaker 2:
[00:18] Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Speaker 3:
[00:23] And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Speaker 2:
[00:25] Tracy, we're recording this April 7th, 10.30 in the morning. Of course, by the time this comes out, we have no idea what will be going on with the war in Iran. But one reason we may be in the war in Iran in the first place is because of, frankly, how smooth the operation went to remove Maduro, and Trump found a political partner he can work with in the form of Delcy Rodriguez in Venezuela.

Speaker 3:
[00:53] Yes. He seemed to enjoy getting access to a lot of oil from Venezuela. I guess the thinking is perhaps he tried to repeat that in Iran with so far varying degrees of success.

Speaker 2:
[01:05] Yeah. Maybe no success at all.

Speaker 3:
[01:07] Yes. I'm being facetious.

Speaker 2:
[01:09] Perhaps generous. But this idea that's like, okay, remove Maduro, and here is someone who was part of the government. Okay, you know what? We're going to be friends with the Americans now. We're going to play ball. Certainly don't want to. The next in charge didn't want to end up in the same person. He didn't want to end up in the same position. I almost frayed and slipped and said the same prison. Though that would have also worked, but didn't want to end up in the same position as Maduro. So okay, there's this partnership. But it also occurs to me, even setting this aside, doesn't it feel like we're in some golden ages, the right word, but there's so many iconic Latin American leaders right now. So obviously you have Delcy, and then you have Sheinbaum, and you have Javier Milei, and you have Lula, and of course Bukele. And so we sort of like are in a moment where there are several very high-profile LATAM leaders, all of which seem to be carving out their own lane in one way or another.

Speaker 3:
[02:09] Well, the other reason that Latin America is really interesting at the moment is because the Trump administration has basically said that after they're done with Iran in whatever way they're envisioning Cuba is sort of next in their sights, right? And we know that Cuba has been struggling because of high oil prices. I think we touched on it a little bit when we did some of our Venezuela episodes. But there's definitely a lot to talk about in terms of that region, what's going on with America and the war in Iran.

Speaker 2:
[02:38] Totally. So is LATAM going to be Bukeleified, is there going to be these extreme harsh illiberal crackdowns on crime? Is it going to be Delsified, are there going to be a lot of client leaders? Is there going to be a populous left wave if Sheinbaum is more successful, or Lula's ongoing success? Is it going to be Libertarian if things work out in Malay? Very interesting questions. Anyway, I'm very excited to say we have a perfect guest, someone who I've been reading for a long time. He has a great sub-stack called the Latin America Risk Report, that I really find to be essential reading. He is a founder of a company called Hxagon, non-resident fellow at the Stimson Center. We are going to be speaking with James Bosworth, goes by Bos, and knows a lot about LATAM politics. Bos, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

Speaker 4:
[03:27] Thank you for having me here. I'm a big fan.

Speaker 2:
[03:29] Thank you so much. What do you tell us? I've become a really big fan of your newsletter, and you have a pretty wide and deep understanding of LATAM, so what do you tell us a little bit about your background?

Speaker 4:
[03:39] I started a blog in 2004. It's what people did in the mid-2000s.

Speaker 3:
[03:43] The golden age of blogging.

Speaker 4:
[03:45] Exactly. It's sort of coming back now with Substack. It's exciting. So I started a blog in 2004 about Latin American politics, and I've been writing ever since, now 22 years. I migrated to Substack, I think, back in 2018. And really the newsletter is the main focus of my world right now. I publish almost every day for subscribers, and that's where I've come to focus. I studied abroad in Chile in college, and I've lived in Nicaragua, Mexico and Colombia, and I've traveled to the entire region except for Venezuela and Cuba. For some reason, I can't make it to those countries.

Speaker 2:
[04:17] One day.

Speaker 3:
[04:18] What does it mean to actually be a Latin America expert? Because this is one of the things I struggle with whenever we do, and we don't do them that often, but when we do these Latin American episodes, it's very tempting to talk about the region as like this monolith. And I wonder, is there an actual through line that you can identify through all these different countries, or what does it actually mean to say, you are an expert on this particular very large region?

Speaker 4:
[04:41] Yeah, no, I cover the whole region from Mexico to Argentina, and it is hard because every country has its own story, its own niche, its own issues, its own accent. And to that end, it can be difficult to deal with the region as a whole. One of the things I've seen just in the last now 14 months is this sudden shift by the United States. The United States has never mattered more for Latin American politics domestically. I mean, the United States has always been this regional hegemon that has overshadowed the region. But Latin America was often ignored by the United States. And all of a sudden, we have a Trump administration that has made the Western Hemisphere its focus. And you have this with the shield of the Americas Conference he did. You have this with the map that Pete Hegseth published last week, showing great North America going all the way down to Colombia and Venezuela. This sudden focus where the Trump administration is trying to find a through line has suddenly dropped everybody who has been a Latin America expert into the spotlight that we've never seen before. I mean, we were always the backwater as everyone dealt with the Middle East or dealt with Asia. And now we have a Trump administration that actually really does care except for when they get distracted by Iran.

Speaker 2:
[05:50] Am I wrong in my sense that setting aside the fact that, okay, the US is maybe pivoting more towards its literal backyard, although apparently not, there are a lot of iconic Latam leaders right now and each seem to have a lane. And what's interesting is, you know, you hear over time, it's like, oh, there's going to be a pink wave in Latin America or blue wave, whatever. There are really many and they all seem quite distinct to me and they all seem like serious political powerhouses within their countries.

Speaker 4:
[06:18] I think we have seen an interesting wave of leaders. And you referenced there the pink tide, right? Which occurred in the 2000s. You had Hugo Chavez and Lula de Silva and the whole wave of left-wing leaders, some of them democratic, some of them autocratic. And you then get a shift towards the center and towards the right and then back towards the left. And now we're back towards a pivot to the right, but it's a pendulum. It goes back and forth over time. And the thing with the pink tide in the 2000s was there was a clear divide between Hugo Chavez and Lula de Silva and the autocrats and the Democrats. And today we have divides within these right-wing leaders. I've called it the orange shift, the leaders who have aligned themselves with Trump over time. And you have this, you know, Bukele is a security populist. You have Milei, who's more libertarian and focused on austerity. You have a group of them who are technocratic and actually quite good at what they're doing. Abinader and Dominican Republic is doing an amazing job. And you have a group that is sort of populist and wacky in their own way. And I think Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, his son Flavio is now running for office, you know, sort of fits that mold where he, you know, he tried to model himself very much on Donald Trump and that sort of right-wing populism that exists. So you do get these, even though there's a shift to the right and there will be a shift back to the left, it's a pendulum, you do have a sense here that there's a division within this group. They're not all a monolith.

Speaker 3:
[07:37] So when the US went into Venezuela, how did that end up, I guess, affecting some of these previous Trump alliances or existing Trump alliances? How did leaders actually react to that?

Speaker 4:
[07:50] They were surprisingly supportive of the operation. And actually, Latin American citizens, going to the Bloomberg Atlas poll that was published, the Latin American citizens were relatively positive about it as well. The thing is, nobody liked Nicolas Maduro. He had stolen the election in 2018, he had stolen the election in 2024, he had generally burned the entire left in terms of their support for him over time, and the right had never liked him. So everyone was happy, both leaders and citizens, to see Nicolas Maduro gone. Delcey Rodriguez is hard for Latin America to understand now, because she was around before Nicolas Maduro. She was one of the five most powerful leaders in Venezuela for the decade prior to Maduro's removal, and she was always, I don't want to say moderate, she's part of the corrupt elite, she trafficked in drugs, she stole billions of dollars, she's put people in prison, but she is more moderate compared to Nicolas Maduro or Díaz de Alcabey or some of the other Chavistas who are out there, and she is pragmatic, she's always been willing to cut a deal with anybody, and she's cut this deal with Trump to maintain power in Venezuela in a way that defies what was the US policy previously, which was attempting to get to some removal of the Chavistas and democratization in Venezuela. I think leaders across the spectrum are having a hard time viewing how they should understand Delci-Rodriguez, and at the same time, they also see an opportunity, because they know if Delci-Rodriguez can cut a deal with Trump, then anyone can cut a deal with Trump. And so Delci-Rodriguez has shown the benefits of cutting a deal with Trump, and also what the costs are if you defy him in terms of what happened to Nicholas Maduro. And everyone having seen that is now going to move forward, understanding that and trying to cut new deals with Trump.

Speaker 2:
[09:34] I definitely want to talk about these new deals with Trump, the sort of ripple effects of this action. But one thing that strikes me as interesting about this, and maybe a novelty, is that leaving Venezuela under the control of Delci does not strike me as like probably what the Venezuelan diaspora would have wanted, right? I imagine going back, there is sort of this clear idea that's like, no, we want to go back to the pre-Chavez era. We want to have something that looks more democratic and liberal, et cetera. This seems to be Trump's modus operandi, which is like, he doesn't like a lot of the same people that they don't like and whatever, but it does not seem particularly important to him that it's like, oh, they now quickly hold fair elections and so forth. And this seems like sort of a, is this a novelty or is this sort of standard MO with respect to US foreign policy in Latin America?

Speaker 4:
[10:31] That's a great question, because in some ways it is the old MO of how the United States operated, right? If you go back to the 1950s, 60s, 70s, the Kirkpatrick Doctrine in the 1980s, the US was happy to have its friendly dictators who they backed. And so Trump has sort of pushed back at times to previous eras. He looked back to the Teddy Roosevelt era and the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. He has looked at the 70s and 80s and US support for various dictatorships as a positive effort for US influence in the region. It does strike back. To your question about the Venezuelan diaspora, this is not necessarily what they wanted. They want a return to democracy. And there are people out there waving their hands in the air and furious at the Trump administration. But most of them are pretty happy. And they're pretty happy because they've seen change in Venezuela. You have new problems in Venezuela, new problems are better than being stagnated under the Maduro regime. And to that end, they understand that this is a process and it's going to take time. So people are holding out hope that there will be some sort of transition. The question is how long? And I think this goes to a challenge with the Trump policies versus the Delci policies. Marco Rubio has laid out a plan, which is stabilization, recovery, democratization. But Delci Rodriguez has an unwritten plan, which is stabilization, recovery, consolidation of power. Those first two steps are the same. It's just in the third step, they diverge. And we don't know which plan we're actually following right now. We're following the one towards democratization and the one towards consolidation of power. The Venezuelan diaspora is looking for how to handle this question. And if they get to democratization, that's where they're happy. But they understand it's going to be a process.

Speaker 3:
[12:27] Okay, so if we fast forward to today, April 7th, have things changed in terms of the perception of the Trump administration in Latin America, given the situation in Iran, where higher oil prices would be expected to push up prices for a lot of Latin American countries? And again, I realize, not talking about a block of completely similar countries, some of them are oil exporters, some of them are importers. Are things changing now?

Speaker 4:
[12:54] Things in Latin America are changing. I don't think that the average citizen points to the Trump administration as the reason to blame for prices increasing. But take Chile, for example. José Antonio Cost is the new president in Chile. And just came into power a month ago. He's already seen a drop of 15 points in approval rating. He was sitting at about 55% when he was inaugurated. Today, he's closer to 40%, according to multiple polls. And that points to the problem of rising diesel prices in Chile and the fact that he has refused to subsidize those fuel costs. Across Latin America, rising costs matter to the population. They matter here. You feel inflation in the United States, but when you live in a poorer country, you spend a larger percentage of your family's income on rent, transportation and food costs. And so when you see rising transportation costs and rising food costs, all of a sudden people feel this suffering more. And so you're seeing leaders across all of the political spectrums face a challenge in terms of politics. You're seeing Gustavo Petro in Colombia, there's a Colombian election coming up in a few months. They face a problem. Javier Milei's approval ratings are down below 35 percent. I mean, all of these leaders are facing problems. They don't blame Trump for it necessarily, but it's clearly partially Trump's fault for having gone to war with Iran and had the Strait of Hormuz shutdown.

Speaker 2:
[14:08] It seems like a global phenomenon that basically you get elected and then your approval rating starts to plunge. Sheinbaum's holding up well. Isn't Mexico sort of the exception here? And isn't she still fairly popular, like a year or whatever after the election?

Speaker 4:
[14:22] There are a few leaders who are holding up well. Two worth talking about are Sheinbaum and Bukele. So let's start with Sheinbaum. Claudia Sheinbaum is still sitting somewhere in the mid 60s, according to approval.

Speaker 2:
[14:34] She's extraordinary in a modern democracy.

Speaker 4:
[14:36] And Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, her predecessor, spent most of his time in office well above 60 percent approval as well. Part of it goes to the economic support that she has provided her political base. And the Morena party is built around a system of economic support that looks a lot like the old pre in Mexico from decades in the past. But she's also, she's taken the populism that Omlo, her predecessor, had and moved it towards a technocratic management in which you've actually seen security improve inside of Mexico, despite all the images of violence the day El Mencho was killed. Security has improved over the last year while she's been in office. And the economy is still meandering. The economy is not growing strong, but the economy in Mexico hasn't grown strong for 20 years. So this isn't a new phenomenon that she's facing.

Speaker 2:
[15:20] And then what about the Bukele? You said he's the other one whose popularity has held up.

Speaker 4:
[15:25] Yeah, his popularity is probably in the 60s or 70s. Nayib Bukele came into office and cut a deal with the MS-13 to reduce the amount of violence in the country. He's also implemented a mono-dura policy. It's led to the arrest of 2% of the adult population. He has cracked down on his political opponents. He sent the military into the Congress. He has arrested civil society leaders, arrested political opponents. But there are places in San Salvador today that you can walk that you could not have walked 10 years ago. People are very appreciative of the security improvements in El Salvador. And for that reason, Bukele's approval rating has held up despite all of the potential criticisms. Bukele does have a weak spot. It's the same weak spot as everybody. It's the economy. The economy in El Salvador is not growing. He's not getting the foreign direct investment that you would think. For years, people said, if you could only fix security, then investment would flow in to a country like El Salvador. The security is fixed under Bukele, and investment's not flowing. And part of it's that Bukele did this via corrupt deals and a Mano Dura policy. He hasn't done this via rule of law. And if a leader can arrest 2% of their adult population, they also don't have to follow the contracts that they sign. And private businesses just don't trust Bukele to be a good leader as a place they should invest.

Speaker 3:
[16:41] If we go back to Delcey for just a second, one thing that it feels kind of hard to ascertain as an outsider is like, is she actually aligned with Trump or is she just very good at sort of being strategic in her dealings with him?

Speaker 4:
[16:55] She is a person willing to cut deals with everybody. In some ways, she's like an AI. She just agrees with everybody when she talks to them. And so people for years, prior to Maduro's removal, there were oil companies and Venezuelan debt holders who would say that they had a source inside the Venezuelan government. It was always Delcey. And they'd be talking to her and she'd be telling them everything that they wanted to hear. She's telling Trump everything he wants to hear. In some ways, she must just be a pragmatic politician and she's playing the odds correctly. And yet I have to say she's aligned because no leader has given Trump more. At this point, Venezuelan oil is sold via US companies and routed via US government bank accounts and then the US government sends a monthly payment to Delce Rodriguez and her government. The fact that the US now controls Venezuela's oil is a callback to colonialism in some ways. It's a shocking development. And so she is aligned because she's going along with this scheme and it's benefiting her and she's clearly, her government is making money on this.

Speaker 2:
[17:58] That's pretty extraordinary. I didn't quite realize what the arrangement was. Trump perhaps had this fantasy that Iran would be as easy as Venezuela. The top guy disappears, suddenly the next. It's clearly has not gone like that at all. And what I'm curious about was like by the end of the Maduro era regime, had any sort of ideological, like the revolutionary ideological impulse, had it just sort of completely given way in your view to this sort of, you know, what people would call a corrupt gangster state such that there was nothing left worth fighting for, like ideologically at that point?

Speaker 4:
[18:38] I mean, nothing worth fighting ideologically, but lots to fight for in terms of resources.

Speaker 2:
[18:43] Well, that's what I mean, though, right? But like, I'm not an expert on Iran at all, but I think there, it seems like the people we've talked to believe like, no, there are quite a number of people seriously invested in Iran's ideological project and the post revolutionary like impulse and so forth. By this point in the Maduro regime, is it all just basically everyone sort of out materially like trying to, there's no personal spoils.

Speaker 4:
[19:10] There are far fewer ideologically.

Speaker 2:
[19:12] There are still real like socialists and like who like.

Speaker 4:
[19:16] There are very few of them at this point. The people who used to consider themselves left wing Chavistas, many of them voted against Nicholas Maduro in the 2024 election. If you look at the voting results coming from the poorest neighborhoods of Caracas, they still voted for Amundo Gonzalez in 2024. The people who used to be Chavistas turned on Maduro because Maduro failed, because it is one of the biggest economic collapses in history, and people went hungry for years due to lack of food. There are people who remain ideologically left wing, but they're not part of the government anymore. To the extent that there are any of them in the government, they're lower players. They haven't played the political game to move up the ranks. And so it's basically gangster vs. gangster, or an alliance of various mafia groups within the government. You know, Delcy Rodriguez controlling one, and potentially, right this moment, the strongest sphere of the groups within this administration.

Speaker 3:
[20:13] I want to go back to something you said earlier on the orange drift in general, and the idea that leaders don't blame Trump for a rise in oil prices, which I kind of get. I can't imagine that it would be politically beneficial to say something outright, that the spike in energy prices is due to Trump. But for the general population, why don't they draw that connection between Trump and a higher cost of living?

Speaker 4:
[20:41] For most of Latin America, despite what I said earlier about the fact that US politics has become critical for all of Latin American politics, if you're an average voter in Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, you aren't thinking about the US every day. You're thinking about your bread and butter issues. To that end, you always blame all politics as local, and you blame your local politicians for what is occurring. I don't think that people have necessarily made the big narrative leap between what Trump is doing, Trump's alliances with various leaders in their countries and the cost of living going up. But they do blame their own leaders for the cost of living going up. Whether or not it's their fault, they get the blame. It's just traditional politics in any country and how it functions.

Speaker 2:
[21:27] We haven't really talked about Brazil yet, but I'm looking at a chart on the terminal. The misery index, sort of a crude measure, is just add the unemployment rate to the inflation rate. The Brazilian misery index is basically like at the lowest in, I think, over 20 years. Inflation seems very mild and the labor market is very solid, probably counter to some of the fears like, okay, the socialist is coming back or the left wing populi- I don't know, how does Lula himself characterize his ideology?

Speaker 4:
[21:58] Lula was always a socialist, right? He was a union leader, you know, he fought the dictatorship in the 1980s.

Speaker 2:
[22:05] Yeah. Things seem to be going very well there.

Speaker 4:
[22:08] They are. And I mean, every time Lula has been elected, markets have panicked. If you go back to his original election in 2002 and his reelection in 2006, markets panic when Lula gets elected. And if you had put an investment down on the day Lula was inaugurated in any of his three terms so far, you made money. Brazilian markets have done very well under Lula and he has defied expectations every time. And yet the Brazilian markets hate Lula de Silva and they are convinced that he is the one who is going to take down their government. But as you said, inflation is reasonable, employment is up, and they just had their most secure year in 10 years in terms of public security and the amount of crime and homicides. He's had a very successful 11 and a half years in office across three terms. And yet markets are convinced that this time is different and if he gets re-elected this year, something's going to go wrong. It just seems unlikely. He's constantly defied the expectations.

Speaker 2:
[23:03] So there is that Flavio Bolsonaro's, how is his political popularity? Are the polls vindicating the strong economic situation for him?

Speaker 4:
[23:13] At the moment, Flavio Bolsonaro is gaining in the polls and Lula has seen a small drop in the polls in recent months. But part of this relates to various scandals. It feels like every time Lula comes up for election, there is some sort of scandal. In this case, there's what's called the Banco Moster scandal, but various corrupt officials were bribed by various businesses. This has happened every time Lula has faced an election. And once again, he's going to have to dig himself out of this hole. And yet, as the expectations for Lula's re-election have gone down, if you look at where Polymarket is, it's down today versus six months ago. Six months ago, I thought Lula could be beat by a real candidate. Lula has received the election that he wants. He has a two-way race between himself and Flavio Bolsonaro. He couldn't ask for a better opponent. And Lula has proven to be a great politician in the past. So this is the election that he wants. And I think my belief is that he's much more likely to be re-elected than not.

Speaker 3:
[24:08] So Lula is like, he's sort of starting to make some noises about imperialist America or like, colonial ambitions on the part of the Trump administration. Does that strategy land at all domestically within like Brazil?

Speaker 4:
[24:23] Lula is an old school leftist. And to that end, Lula is always going to criticize the United States for various colonial ambitions and how the United States treats Latin America. He's done this for his entire career.

Speaker 3:
[24:37] But now he might have a case. Just throwing that out there.

Speaker 4:
[24:40] Well, part of it was Lula has criticized Trump for years. And then they went and hugged it out at the UN late last year. And they've had some phone calls and they've gotten along better. And now they're not getting along as well anymore. The Brazilian population doesn't care, right? In general, the old Cold War narrative of how the left versus the right function, it's not where people are voting. One concern here is that the Trump administration is targeting Brazil's financial sector, right? They've put tariffs on Brazil. There's a Section 301 investigation on PICS, which is one of the most innovative financial transfer systems in the world that the Brazil Central Bank runs. And 93% of Brazilians use PICS. It's used for about half of all financial transactions in Brazil. And so it's possible here that they don't care about Trump's colonial ambitions in Venezuela, but if Trump hurts Brazil's economy by attacking PICS or by putting tariffs on certain issues, that will play well for Lula and that could be a benefit for his election. Across recent elections, a lot of candidates have received a Trump bump, right? Trump endorsed the candidate in Honduras and he ended up winning. Brazil is the one country where it may not work for Trump, where you may see an anti-Trump bump because of the way that Trump is attacking Brazil's economy. Brazilian voters are going to feel that in their pocketbooks and it's going to cause them to push away from Flavio Bolsonaro.

Speaker 2:
[25:59] What is Bolsonaro's, who's his base? Because I'm looking at the Polly market, it's very close, 42 to 38% odds. So it's like kind of a clean flip. But like, what is the core base of the Bolsonaro's?

Speaker 4:
[26:13] So they have a couple of different bases, but evangelicals are a core base, as is agribusiness. They also have a core base, you know, Brazil, like any large country, and Brazil is huge, right? It has various geographic bases. Their base is much more in the south of Brazil versus Lula's long term base has been in the Northeast.

Speaker 2:
[26:45] You hit a piece several months ago about Bukelefication, and to what degree are we seeing this being replicated? This sort of extreme strongman anti-crime. You mentioned that the security situation in Mexico has improved, but that's clearly a very different model. It's like a very different thing. To what degree is this spreading? It's like people or countries' willingness to like sort of sacrifice democracy and other things for a very meaningful change in the crime situation.

Speaker 4:
[27:19] First off, lots of leaders wish they were Nayib Bukele because every leader wishes they had 60 or 70 percent popularity. Right. And so a lot of political leaders have looked towards Bukele and Bukele's security populism as a model for how to run for office. And it has succeeded, right? Daniel Noboa was elected in Ecuador based on a security populism message. We saw in Costa Rica, President Fernandez, who's going to be inaugurated soon, won in part on a security populism message. She brought Bukele into the country and there was an event with Bukele during the campaign. And yet El Salvador is tiny. El Salvador is smaller than the Mexican city of Chiapas. And it's a very small population and it's hard to replicate what Bukele did, both in terms of the huge number of arrests, as well as the deals that he cut with the one very large gang in MS-13, in a country like Ecuador where there's 22 different gangs and a much larger population. And so Daniel Noboa, we've seen crime go up and we've seen Noboa's popularity go down despite a security populism effort, despite bringing in US special forces to help target the cartels in Ecuador. It's not working. And so while it works as a campaign strategy elsewhere, it has not worked in terms of a security strategy wherever it's been implemented by politicians.

Speaker 3:
[28:31] I want to step back in history for a second because you mentioned the Monroe Doctrine earlier and Joe and I have gotten into disagreements in our daily newsletter, which everyone should subscribe to, about whether or not a Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the Donrow Doctrine actually exists. I mean, I think he clearly has some ambitions on the region, which happened in full display since Venezuela and might be even more apparent if Cuba comes into his sights next. But what's your take on the Trump administration's ultimate ambitions towards this particular region?

Speaker 4:
[29:09] There's a few points here. One thing, if you look at how the Trump administration functions, I've never seen a US administration function in a way where I'm doing the individual level of analysis, where I'm having to pick through what does Pete Hexer think, what does Marco Rubio think, what does JD Vance think. I never during the Biden administration had to ask what Kamala Harris thought versus what Secretary Blinken thought. That was never an issue. And so having to pick through the various individual pieces of the Trump administration and what each person believes and what aligns them and where their disagreements are is a fascinating exercise that I did in Venezuela when I looked at Delci Rodriguez and Nicolas Maduro and Díaz Alcabello. I never had to do this with the United States until now. But what aligns them in part is every single one of them believes that they are at war with the cartels. And so they are convinced that military power is necessary to defeat the drug cartels. Now this is not the best idea, but it is something that every single one of them believes. And so they are going to war with the cartels, and they're bringing together any leader who is willing to use military power to target the cartels as part of their agreement. The other thing that unites them is Donald Trump and whatever Donald Trump decides. And this is why I don't think there's a doctrine, because Donald Trump is very much focused on how Trump gets along with Milei, how Trump gets along with Bukele. It's a person-to-person relationship, not a state-to-state relationship. And so when the next president comes to power, another Democrat or Republican, and they ask themselves, what would Trump do? Well, I mean, tweet something out at 2 a.m. But it doesn't really tell you what direction Trump would go in in a lot of cases. It's all about his individual deals and relationships with these presidents. And so there's no doctrine. There's no direction moving forward for a future president to follow necessarily.

Speaker 2:
[30:55] This is really interesting. You know, I forget who said it. There's versions of this conversation that are happening with regards to Europe, right? And they're like, OK, do we just have to wait out a few more years and we go back to the old United States we've known for a long time? Is there permanent rupture, et cetera? But it is interesting to think about, like, all of these conversations, the degree to which the US is going to be a partner for military force and fighting the cartels, et cetera. Like, this just might not exist in three years or whatever the election is. And so, like, to some extent, as you say, like, none of this is like real planning, is it?

Speaker 4:
[31:32] No, it's very much, it is on Trump's whims on any given day plus whatever.

Speaker 2:
[31:36] And it's like, this is the part that other people say around the world, is like, the entire world is essentially trying to plan for the future by guessing, like, what a few hundred thousand people in Michigan and Iowa and Wisconsin are going to vote one year each year.

Speaker 4:
[31:51] But one of the big differences between Latin America and the rest of the world here is that you have had this orange shift in Latin America. You have this group of leaders who have allied themselves with Trump and formed a bloc or a coalition. They all showed up in Florida a few weeks ago for the Shield of the Americas conference that Trump put on because they canceled the Summit of the Americas conference that has gone on for decades. And so these leaders have aligned themselves, but this shift in Latin America has a drop dead date. It ends in January, 2029 when Trump leaves office. And it's not clear what replaces it when it goes away.

Speaker 3:
[32:28] Well, OK, on that note, 2028, assuming that Trump doesn't get a third term or find some way to get a third term, what happens to all of these alliances?

Speaker 4:
[32:38] Well, I think we're already going to start seeing that shift to the pendulum again, right? Latin America has gone back and forth from left to center to right and back over and over again across decades. And Latin America is going to already be shifting back by 2029, 2030. And we're going to see an election cycle where these leaders start losing power, not because they are allied with Trump or not allied with Trump, but simply because that's how the political pendulum plays. And we are in a fairly long term anti-incumbent cycle, both in Latin America and in much of the world. And so I don't expect these leaders to last in either event, but it's not clear what follows. I think it's really important for US policy. If Trump has done one thing right, it's the focus on the Western hemisphere. I actually, I've always wanted to see a focus on the Western hemisphere, and I would be really excited to see a future US administration play out what it looks like to focus this much on the Western hemisphere, but do so with a more benevolent take in terms of using the military force a little bit less and trying to improve people's lives a little bit more.

Speaker 3:
[33:41] This is the other thing I want to ask you, because at the very beginning of this conversation, you talked about how we're at this moment where America actually seems to matter for much of the Western hemisphere, and that wasn't necessarily the case for some time previously. Why do you think that, I guess, retreat from the region in some sense happened?

Speaker 4:
[33:59] I think that for the United States, Latin America just wasn't quite the same priority, and we were worried. There was a global war on terror where we found ourselves in the Middle East and South Asia, and then there was this pivot to Asia because we do see a rising China. To the extent that we focused on Latin America in the 2000s and the 2010s, across the 2000s, there's this whole issue of what's going on with Al Qaeda and Hezbollah in Latin America, and then across the 2010s and early 2020s, it's, oh my gosh, China is in Latin America, and we really have to work. But Latin America was always placed in context of whatever the other geopolitical issue of the moment was. It was unfortunate we should have been focused more on Latin America as a region, not as a competitor to China or a source of potential terrorism, but because the region matters. No region in the world matters more to US security and US prosperity than the Western Hemisphere. Our alliance with Mexico as well as Canada is critical to the future of the world, and we need to make sure that we get the USMCA negotiations right. Latin America is connected to the United States via populations, via culture, and we should be trying to boost that over time, not withdrawing from Latin America. So for that reason, I think it's incredibly important that whoever comes next continues to be focused on Latin America, but pivots a bit in terms of what the tone is.

Speaker 2:
[35:16] I'm glad you brought up China, because that's where I was going to go next. I have not done a lot of traveling throughout Latin America, but I was in Guatemala a couple of years ago. My mother lives in Guatemala. And one of the things that I noticed, there are a lot of Chinese cars on the road. Not many BYDs, but even the electric ones, but some of the older models, and they're probably pretty affordable. I imagine this is the case across Latin. I bet there's BYDs and others all over the place. I also know that China has made a lot of agriculture investments in Brazil specifically, and that there's a lot of trade going on, and maybe they're probably gonna buy more soybeans from Brazil, et cetera. But on the other hand, you think about some of the economic stagnation that, say, Mexico has experienced, it seems at least plausible that part of it is the sort of re-reshoring of industrial activity that might have gone into Mexico, going into China instead. You know, there's this conversation that happens in the US and Europe. It's like, oh, is China gonna eat our industrial lunch across anything that we had strengthened? How much is that conversation happening in Latin America where it's like, okay, maybe it's a good trading partner, et cetera, buy cheap cars, but also this fear that their industrial development is going to be stymied in some way by the powerhouse of, you know, I remember I had a cab driver in Mexico, and he was complaining that sombreros were made in China now, et cetera. How much anxiety is there around that?

Speaker 4:
[36:43] I think there's a lot of anxiety. China is the number one trade partner for most of Latin America, not for Mexico, but for most of Latin America. But China buys Latin American commodities. They buy soy and pork from Brazil, they buy copper and iron from Chile and Peru. China buys commodities and they push back cheap goods that undermine any effort by Latin America to move up the value chain. And in some ways, this is historical, right? This is the model that Spain implemented in Latin America in the colonial era. It's how the United States treated Latin America throughout the 20th century. And in many ways, China is just speed running all of the errors that Spain and the United States made, but in a much shorter time frame across a few decades in the 2000s now. I think that Latin America has some real concerns in terms of China pushing cheap goods into Latin America and not really providing the technology transfers, not really providing the skill sets necessary for Latin America to boost its own economies. It's fantastic for Chile's economy that China buys all of this copper and yet Chile would much rather sell China tech goods. And so I think that there's an element here in which Latin America knows that China is necessary for its markets. And Chinese investment, so to go to a slightly different point here, Chinese investment in Latin America when they've gone and done infrastructure investment, there have been failures in terms of the dam that they built in Ecuador is full of cracks. And when they go and they invest in some of the construction projects, they bring their own people in, so it doesn't necessarily provide as many jobs for Latin America as it should. So Latin America definitely sees the negative impacts of Chinese investment. China is a reality. China is going to be buying goods from Latin America because Latin America provides those goods and China is the market. So there's no way that China doesn't interact with Latin America, but figuring out how Latin America can have more fair trade with China is incredibly important for the region. And from the US standpoint, we're not going to push China away from Latin America. There's going to be a relationship between China and Latin America, but we should want a level playing field so that Chinese companies can't bribe their way into public contracts and so that Chinese infrastructure projects don't undermine the region's infrastructure and energy grids. So there are ways that we can push for better behavior from China without thinking that China is going to be blocked out from the region.

Speaker 3:
[39:04] I realize we mentioned Cuba at the top of this conversation and we haven't really dug into it very much, but actually I just learned before we started recording this episode that you're a certified super forecaster. So I feel like I should be asking you questions in odds terms.

Speaker 2:
[39:18] About the future.

Speaker 3:
[39:18] In probabilities. Yeah. All right. So odds on regime change in Cuba.

Speaker 4:
[39:23] So I would say odds that Cuba finds itself aligned with the Trump administration, which is a little different than regime change, are close to 70 to 80 percent right this moment within the next 12 months. Now, I think that the Trump administration will want to see Diaz-Canel leave power because they're very focused on the person on top, and they're going to head on a pike to show that they got some sort of what Trump would call regime change. I don't think the Cuban Communist Party is going away in this, right? We're going to see a deal that's very similar to Venezuela in which the people who are empowering Cuba are largely the same people who are in power today, but they decide to work with the Trump administration. One of the long-term trajectories in Cuban history here is the fact that Cuba has always had a patron to help rescue them from US sanctions, right? So it was the Soviet Union during the Cold War and it was Venezuela during the 2000s. All of a sudden, the US is going to be the savior for Cuba from US sanctions. Trump is using US sanctions as a coercive tool to force Cuba to cut a deal with the United States and arguably, he's going to be successful. This is a much easier operation than Iran in many ways because the Cuban regime is corrupt and because the Cuban regime, I think, is eager to cut a deal to help rescue their economy and make sure that they can maintain power and they don't just preside over a failing state.

Speaker 2:
[40:45] Milei, we haven't talked about him. Has the libertarian miracle happened? This is one of these things where I don't ever read on any of this, but I see people who are like, you know, hardcore Milei stans. They say, look, inflation is absolutely plunged. Which measures of inflation do seem to have collapsed? And then you have others say, oh, but it's because they're just burning through their reserve balances and it's unsustainable, et cetera. To my mind, you know, setting aside inflation metrics, the question is like, will Argentina improve as like a place where people want to invest and do business, which is slightly adjacent. But what's your read on the success of the Milei project?

Speaker 4:
[41:24] Milei is being graded on a curve in the sense that when he came into office, inflation was 200% and now inflation is down to 30 to 35% at the moment. It's good.

Speaker 3:
[41:35] Everything is relative.

Speaker 4:
[41:37] But 35% inflation is insane, right? I mean, it means that you have no reason to save money. And it's not, and despite some predictions that it may get down to 20 or 25% this year, given the Strait of Hormuz crisis, we're much likelier to be closer to 40 or 45% than we are to 25% by the end of this year. Milei has managed over the course of the past few months to increase foreign reserves a little bit. He's gained, the past four months, he's seen a pop in foreign reserves. But that comes from an amazing agricultural season that they've had.

Speaker 2:
[42:10] Yeah, this is, I mean, this is like what I want to get at, which is like, I'm sure we could record hours and hours of episodes on what is the deal with Argentina. And I know there's a lot of, what is it about Argentina's economy? Then what a weird situation. And setting all that aside, and I don't want to have that debate right now, it's like, whatever that pathology is, that seems to create all these issues that span decades, has he changed the political economy of the country in such a way that it could resemble the sort of moderately wealthy Latin American economy that people aspire to be towards?

Speaker 4:
[42:48] I think this is where politics overrides economics, in the sense that Milei is reveling in the fact that he lives in this polarized society, and he gets to point at the Peronists, who are the people who have crashed Argentina's economy multiple times, as this big threat. If the Peronists take power, Argentina will crash again. And he's basing a lot of his political support on how awful his opponents are. Unfortunately, what investors fear is the Peronists coming back to power. And so Milei is hyping the one thing that could cause Argentina to crash again. As soon as the Tinkerbell effect stops and people stop clapping and believing in Milei and think that the Peronists might come back to power, Argentina's economy will crash. This is what we saw in 2019 when Macri was president and then the Peronists suddenly won a primary. All of a sudden Argentina's economy plunged and then the Peronists managed to win the election because the economy was bad. We could see a repeat in 2027 of what we saw in 2019. Milei's popularity right now is below 35 percent. As soon as people think the Peronists might come back to power, it's not going to go well for Argentina's economy. It's not going to go well for Milei. Argentina needs a sustainable economic agenda that crosses political parties. As long as everyone thinks, oh, this party could be the party that saves Argentina, and this is the party that destroys Argentina, but we live in a political pendulum that goes back and forth, Argentina's economy is going to continue a boom bust cycle. And so we are in the boom part of a boom bust cycle right now, but nobody should mistake that for not being part of within that boom bust cycle.

Speaker 2:
[44:21] This whole democracy thing, I don't know, it seems like a real problem. Wherever you look, US too, it's like you can't plan for anything. No, I'm joking. I think democracy is a pretty good system. Bos, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. I'm a big fan of your work and really appreciate you chatting with us.

Speaker 4:
[44:36] Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 2:
[44:49] It is really weird, Tracy, how little attention, generally speaking, Latin America always seems to get, both in sort of media and political discourse in the US.

Speaker 3:
[45:01] No, absolutely. And it's interesting, I guess, to see that starting to change now. I don't know, it's so hard to talk about, because you have to go on a sort of country by country basis. Yeah, of course.

Speaker 2:
[45:10] Yeah, I know, it feels like-

Speaker 3:
[45:11] Like, where should we start?

Speaker 2:
[45:12] No, let's talk about Milei. What's up with Lula? How's she doing? How's, yeah, I know.

Speaker 3:
[45:16] I mean, the broad theme does seem to be a Zoran shift, as Bos was pointing out, and this idea of like delcification of the entire region. I still think there is a Donro doctrine in the sense that Trump wants a lot out of the region, and if he has to take it by direct ownership versus work out a specific deal with a leader, the outcome is kind of the same.

Speaker 2:
[45:41] I think the issue, and it's somewhat related. So obviously, we all know it, there's gonna be at some point where Trump isn't president and no one knows what the future holds beyond that. There also is this broader thing, even if you just look in US domestic politics, where because there's a lot of paralysis in American politics, you have a lot of lawmaking essentially via presidential orders or whatever, and then those can immediately be ripped up on the very next day. And so I do think there's this real issue of durable policy that expands beyond any president, both on the foreign policy realm, but then also even on the domestic policy realm, because the idea of what is the US aspire for its relationship with Mexico to be long forward strikes me at this point, such an abstraction beyond which I think US politics is capable of seriously discussing. The idea of having a cogent framework that stands any sort of test of time just seems like too much of a lift for US politics right now.

Speaker 3:
[46:49] Well, I was also thinking it was interesting when Bos was talking about having to apply sort of a Venezuelan framework, a political analysis to the current Trump administration, where you're going on a person by person basis to try to identify what each of them wants and who holds the most power to actually make it happen.

Speaker 2:
[47:06] Yeah, you know what it is, it's sort of like, I think there's one way to think about the Trump administration. I'm going to sound like a chat bot where it like brings, because it has a memory of the user, it's going to bring in something very arbitrary. But it's a little bit like the Podshot model, where you have a lot of different players.

Speaker 3:
[47:25] I did not expect you to go there.

Speaker 2:
[47:28] They're allocated political capital in real time based on whether they have the hot hand and sometimes they get shown the door really quickly. You see these reports about how like Bill Poulty, the head of the FHFA is behind these subpoenas of people on the FOMC. Why is this the domain of the FHFA secretary? It's very strange. It's a very odd situation, but at any given moment, someone in the Trump orbit has that political capital that they have been allocated, they're perceived to have the hot hand or whatever. Trump likes them. And so then they get influence on all kinds of things. And it feels like, I don't know where I'm going with this, but to Bos's point, it's like what you really do have to pay attention on the member by member level because they are rising in power and who has the influence and who has the ear in a way that does seem somewhat novel.

Speaker 3:
[48:17] No, I really like that analogy, actually. And I guess the risk, like as in any pod shop, is that people like kind of go off and do their own thing without an integrated risk management system that kind of oversees all of it. All right, shall we leave it there?

Speaker 2:
[48:33] Let's leave it there.

Speaker 3:
[48:34] This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.

Speaker 2:
[48:40] And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stallwart. Follow our guest, James Bosworth, aka Bos. He's at Bloggings by Bos. Definitely check out his newsletter, Latin America Risk Report. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Arman, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, and Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks. And for more Odd Lots content, go to bloomberg.com/oddlots, where we have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.

Speaker 3:
[49:09] And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we go on tours of Latin American politics, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.