Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Regional oil exporters show resilience amid the Strait of Hormuz crisis, Honduras rethinks its plans to recognize Taiwan, and Argentina advances to the World Cup final.
Disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz caused by the Iran war have underscored the economic muscle of a handful of Latin American countries that are experiencing oil export booms, including Argentina, Brazil, and Guyana.
The region’s relative geopolitical neutrality and distance from the conflict has made its oil more attractive to global buyers during the crisis, part of a rewiring of energy sales that International Energy Agency Executive Director Fatih Birol described in Foreign Policy this month.
While energy importers are hurting, some South American oil exporters have announced positive economic numbers. Last week, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) projected that Brazil’s growth this year would be 0.5 percent higher than it had calculated in April. That is despite U.S. tariffs, which Washington said this week that it will hike to 25 percent on many Brazilian goods.
