Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Jamaica petitions the United Kingdom for slavery reparations, Argentina renews its claims to the Falkland Islands, and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio tours South America.
Olivia Grange, Jamaica’s minister of culture, gender, entertainment, and sport, traveled to London this week to file what the island called a first-of-its-kind petition to King Charles III.
The petition asks the highest court of appeal for Commonwealth countries to issue a decision on whether the British trafficking of enslaved Africans to Jamaica from the 17th to 19th centuries was unlawful—and whether the United Kingdom owes financial reparations.
The petition made no specific monetary claim, though a lawmaker from Jamaica’s ruling party previously estimated that the U.K. owes Jamaicans around $10 billion. The Jamaican government has the right to lodge such a demand because it is a member of the Commonwealth, itself a vestige of the colonial era. Charles is still Jamaica’s head of state.
