Latin America’s Ukraine stance falls predictably along Cold War lines
How much do people in Latin America hate the U.S.?
The question is hardly new, but the war in Ukraine brings it up again: How can Latin American countries loudly committed to the principle of nonintervention shrug off the decision by Russian President Vladimir Putin to send in the tanks to take over a smaller neighbor whose land and resources his country has coveted for centuries? The answer has little to do with what’s going on in the Donbas or Kyiv.
From Buenos Aires to Mexico City, left-leaning governments are falling along predictable lines drawn from 20th-century struggles in which Washington mostly played the bad guy.
Latin American positions are not monolithic. They range from that of Mexico’s Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who blasted Germany’s decision to send Leopard tanks to Ukraine, garnering heartfelt thanks from the Russian embassy, to that of Chile’s Gabriel Boric who, alone in the region, emphatically condemned Russia’s invasion from the beginning.
In the middle, Brazil is working to walk back President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s statement in the spring of 2022 that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “is as responsible as Putin for the war.” It signed onto the United Nations resolution last month placing responsibility for the conflict on Russia and offered to be a mediator. (In the region only Nicaragua voted against the resolution, while Cuba, Bolivia and El Salvador abstained.)
Anti-gringo bile may not be the exclusive motivation of their reluctance to take a stronger stance. The Cold War idea of nonalignment runs strong in Latin American foreign policy circles, not least for the protection it offers against being railroaded into uncomfortable positions.
What if Xi Jinping jumps in on Putin’s side? China, unlike Russia, is a critical investor and trading partner. Best to stay outside the fray as long as possible, to see what happens. “Maintaining optionality is worth something,” said Alejandro Werner, former head for the Western Hemisphere at the International Monetary Fund and now at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
The war is far away. It has had limited impact on access to energy and food security in Latin America. People in the region “don’t have a dog in that fight,” said Jose Miguel Vivanco, former head of the Americas at Human Rights Watch now at the Council on Foreign Relations.
With belief widespread in the region and elsewhere that neither side will win this war outright and a negotiated settlement is inevitable, something approximating neutrality may be a promising position. “Ukraine cannot lose the war and Russia cannot lose face,” said Carlos Ominami, a former Chilean senator and economics minister. “We can converge on a common position of calling for ceasing hostilities and promoting a process towards peace.”
And yet, pragmatic though Latin America may hope to appear, the stance of some of its countries, and perhaps of other countries of the Global South, does indeed rest on deep-seated hostility toward the U.S.
The hostility is not undeserved. The U.S. did take a chunk of Mexico. From toppling governments to funding insurgencies, its overt and covert interventions to install regimes to its liking in Latin America during the Cold War are hard to square with the honest hegemon image it hopes to project today. Pointing out that Putin’s intervention in Ukraine was unprovoked is more than likely to evoke recollections of George W. Bush playing regime change in Iraq.
“You don’t want the U.S. to completely get away with it,” Ominami noted, about the endgame in Ukraine. “Because an out-of-control U.S. is very dangerous.”
There is a final irony in the anachronistic maneuvers so reminiscent of the Cold War. Latin American political elites might still harbor deep resentment toward the U.S. But most Latin American voters don’t seem to share it. In 2020, two years before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, 59% of Latin Americans had a good or very good opinion of both Russia and China, according to the Latinobarometro polls. But 72% had a good or very good opinion of the U.S.