Latin America, bulletproof neutrals

The recent Munich Security Conference exposed the gap that separates the West from the Global South in relation to Ukraine. As the conflict entered its second year, many of the leading swords in the global geopolitical arena gathered in the Bavarian capital, as every year since 1963.

Volodimir Zelensky spoke from kyiv. Among the Europeans, Emanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz, among others, attended. Washington sent Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Beijing sent its Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who later traveled to Moscow to meet with Vladimir Putin.

Six African leaders, seven from the Middle East and 10 Asians did not want to miss the opportunity to put their security problems on the table. Representing Latin America were the Brazilian Foreign Minister, Mauro Vieira, and the Colombian Vice President, Francia Márquez, who defended a position of radical neutrality or “active non-alignment”, as some call it.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock warned that any outcome short of the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine would mean “the end of international law and order.” As Stephen Walt writes in Foreign PolicyEuropeans and North Americans competed to see who delivered the “most Churchilian” speech.

At the UN General Assembly, 141 countries voted on February 23 in favor of a resolution calling for Russia’s “immediate, complete and unconditional” withdrawal. Seven voted against and 33 abstained, among them China, India, South Africa, Indonesia – and among the Latin Americans Bolivia, Cuba and El Salvador.

Nicaragua voted against. And only 33 countries, representing 30% of the world’s population, have imposed sanctions on Russia, most of them NATO members and Washington allies.

Equidistances and divergences

Many of the non-aligned perceive the war as something alien and waged by declining powers. In 1948, with 6.3% of the population, the United States represented 50% of world GDP. Today those figures are 4% and 30% respectively. In China and Turkey only 25% believe that the West is supporting Ukraine to defend its democracy.

In Munich, Sanna Marin, Prime Minister of Finland, replied to Márquez that she too wanted peace, but that when an attack occurs, simply regretting the violence does not solve anything. The Ukrainian prosecutor’s office has documented 67,000 war crimes, including 15,000 kidnappings of children deported to Russia.

In his speech, the former Colombian president and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Juan Manuel Santos, reflected the opinions of many when he said that sometimes it is necessary to think more “about how to end a war than to win it”, complaining about Western “hypocrisy”. in its references to Russian violations of the United Nations Charter while ignoring conflicts such as the Palestinian-Israeli one.

If the war drags on, he warned, these dissonances will intensify, recalling that moral dilemmas are inescapable in peace processes. Macron, for his part, said he was “astonished” at all the credibility the West has lost, a distancing that Josep Borell attributed to Russia’s “powerful narrative” of Western double standards.

Europeans and Americans were careful not to accuse anyone, but Christoph Heusgen, director of the Munich Security Conference, criticized in harsh comments the Financial Times that many Latin Americans believed that the conflict only pits Russia against the Atlantic Alliance, when what is at stake is a “rules-based world order.”

Offers impossible to refuse

Outside of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, all regional governments have condemned the Russian invasion, but nothing else. While Joe Biden visited Zelenski in kyiv, Nicolás Maduro received Nikolai Pátrushev, one of Putin’s hawks, in Caracas.

According to the Mexican Secretary of Foreign Relations, Marcelo Ebrard, the greatest contribution that the region can make is to “imagine” political solutions to the conflict. His boss, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, criticized Scholz for sending Leopard tanks to kyiv, assuring that he had done so against the wishes of the Germans.

In January, Laura Richardson, head of the Pentagon’s Southern Command, asked regional governments to donate their Russian and Soviet-sourced weapons to Ukraine in exchange for the US replacing them with its own more advanced military equipment. The potential help is considerable.

Chile and Brazil have Leopards; Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and Ecuador MIG helicopters and Russian anti-tank and surface-to-air missiles compatible with those of the Ukrainian army. The Peruvian air forces have MIG and Sukhoi fighters in operational conditions. But from Mexico to the Southern Cone, refusals followed one another.

In Bogotá, Gustavo Petro said that he preferred that these weapons end up rusting in garbage dumps before they were used to prolong the war. From his trip to Santiago, Buenos Aires and Brasilia (January 28-31), Scholz returned empty-handed. Lula expressly refused to sell artillery shells to Berlin for re-export to Ukraine.

«The Cold War, which turned the Caribbean and Central America into squares on the geopolitical board where the superpowers settled their disputes, reinforced the region’s resistance to becoming involved in non-hemispheric conflicts»

If the regional chancelleries are aware of anything, it is that when the war ends, as they all do, Russia will still be there. According to a January poll by the Levada center in Moscow, 80% of Russians support “armed actions” in Ukraine. In addition, the Russian economy has withstood the sanctions better than anyone expected: according to the IMF its economy will grow by 0.3% this year.

Collateral damage

Latin America and the Caribbean is a nuclear-free region without relevant geopolitical conflicts, but if the war lasts, it will feel the impact of its reverberations. According to Jürgen Stock, the Secretary General of Interpol, if the black market for weapons – rifles, armored vehicles… – overflows the Ukrainian borders, it will end up flooding other war zones, from Kurdistan and Kashmir to the Sahel and the Niger Delta.

The Cold War, which turned the Caribbean and Central America into squares on the geopolitical chessboard where the superpowers settled their disputes, reinforced the region’s resistance to becoming involved in non-hemispheric conflicts. Brazil’s membership of the BRICS (with China, Russia, India and South Africa) has strengthened the role of Itamaraty, Brazil’s influential foreign ministry, and, according to Vieira, the BRICS can create a “propitious environment” for negotiations.

peace plans

According to Brazilian media, Lula is going to present a peace plan for Ukraine during his next visit to Beijing at the end of March. At first he criticized Zelensky as much as Putin, but since he visited Joe Biden in the White House, he has been modulating and qualifying his views.

In 2010, at the end of his first term, he tried to broker an agreement with Iran with Turkey on its nuclear program, which failed, among other things, due to the obstacles put up by the Barack Obama administration. In Washington, he this time he said that the Russian invasion was a “historic mistake.”

No one, least of all Lula, believes that Putin or Zelenski will do something because Brazil asks them to, but their neutrality could give them a role in a future negotiation that could also include other countries such as India and Indonesia.

In their private conversations in Munich, Walt sensed less triumphalism from his interlocutors, who admitted that taking back Crimea is unrealistic, no matter how much military aid kyiv receives. In the US, the upcoming electoral campaign could break the bipartisan consensus on Ukraine’s maximalist agenda, which includes, in addition to the Russian withdrawal, the prosecution of those guilty of war crimes and the payment of reparations.

Take sides

Under these conditions, it is not surprising that regional governments prefer not to be forced to take sides. For example, in Chile, the commemorations this year of the 50th anniversary of the 1973 military coup will reopen old anti-imperialist debates and also many wounds, which may influence the debate.

According to an Ipsos poll, 73% of Latin Americans oppose arms shipments to war zones. But in his relations with Russia, other interests are more mundane. Brazil thanks to its imports of Russian fertilizers, its agricultural exports increased 36.1% in 2022, to 75,050 million dollars. Its trade balance closed 2022 with a record surplus of 61.8 billion dollars.

The problem is that neutrality also has its price. India and Turkey can afford ambiguity, but perhaps not South Africa or Argentina. India, which has increased its trade with Russia by 400% in the last year, is the fifth largest economy in the world. Turkey is a member of NATO and holds the keys to the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits. Argentina, on the other hand, depends on the US vote in the IMF to finance its public accounts.

If the governments of the region can better resist the pressures that were previously due to China, currently the largest trading partner of its main economies, with the exception of Mexico. In 2021, Chinese investments grew again (30%) after several years, especially towards Brazil, where they increased by 200%.

win peace

Sergey Radchenko suggests in The New York Times the possibility that the war in Ukraine will end like the one in Korea in 1953 after claiming three million lives. It all ended, he recalls, with a ceasefire and the signing of an armistice on July 27, 1953 that kept the two Koreas in a theoretical state of war.

He status quo It has lasted much longer than anyone could have imagined. After all, a frozen war is preferable to a red hot one. In the last 70 years, Seoul, which was invaded twice by the North Koreans, is today one of the most prosperous and vibrant cities in Asia. Not always, remembers Radchenko, those who win wars are those who win peace.