Joe Biden will shift gears in Latin America
A post-populist president will encounter a region where populism has recently flourished
IN 2013, after WikiLeaks revealed that the United States’ National Security Agency had bugged the phone of Dilma Rousseff, then Brazil’s president, Joe Biden called to apologise. A year later the American vice-president went to Brazil for a World Cup football match bearing a gift: declassified documents shedding light on abuses by Brazil’s military dictatorship of 1964-85. Ms Rousseff had herself been tortured.
Ms Rousseff called Mr Biden “a seductive vice-president”. Other Latin American leaders found him less so. Otto Pérez Molina, a former president of Guatemala, rues the day that he bowed to pressure from him to prolong the life of CICIG, a UN-backed graft-fighting agency. He expressed this regret in 2015 from a military prison, where he awaited trial on corruption charges. CICIG supplied the evidence.
This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline "A shift of gears"
From the January 16th 2021 edition
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