Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: The region’s so-called second pink tide comes to an end, Bolivia secures a $1.9 billion IMF loan, and the United States ends deportation protections for Haitians.

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: The region’s so-called second pink tide comes to an end, Bolivia secures a $1.9 billion IMF loan, and the United States ends deportation protections for Haitians.

Taking Stock of the Second Pink Tide

Right-wing lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella will be inaugurated as Colombia’s president on Friday. He replaces Gustavo Petro, the latest in a string of left-wing Latin American leaders to leave office amid the region’s broader shift toward the right.

When Petro and his ideological allies were elected in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, their victories were so widespread that many observers dubbed the phenomenon a “second pink tide,” recalling the wave of left-leaning and socialist governments that swept through Latin America from the late 1990s to the early 2010s.

The first pink tide transformed the domestic and foreign policies of many South American countries, which increasingly turned toward one another to pursue a shared agenda of regional integration.

These changes were made possible in large part by a global commodities boom that increased public revenue across the region. Social spending generally went up, income inequality declined, and access to higher education expanded. By the end of the first pink tide, South American governments were cooperating regionally on health, infrastructure, and conflict resolution.

That momentum gave way in the mid-2010s as falling commodity prices, mounting economic challenges, and high-profile corruption scandals ushered in a more volatile political period.

Across the region’s democracies, voters elected a new crop of right-wing leaders whose foreign policies deprioritized regional integration. Their tenures, however, coincided with COVID-19, and many were ousted after a single term.

That political shift gave rise to the second pink tide. By 2023, leftist governments had taken office in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Peru, pledging to reduce inequality at home and resurrect regional integration as a central pillar of their foreign policies. (Mexico has also been led by the leftist Morena party since 2018, though it has prioritized integration with North America over South America.)

Latin America’s second pink tide has proved to be much shorter-lived than the first. While Morena held on to Mexico’s presidency in 2024 and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da........

© Foreign Policy