Get Ready for a More Pragmatic Latin America
Bolivia's President Rodrigo Paz points the way in Panama.
Photographer: Martin Bernetti/AFP/Getty Images
What better setting to debate a fast-changing world than the Panama Canal? The emblematic waterway is not only a key geopolitical flashpoint; it’s also Latin America’s most visible frontline in the intensifying rivalry between the US and China.
That’s why last week’s sight of the region’s top political leaders and business executives — more than 6,000-strong, under the auspices of the development bank CAF — in a huge convention center just a few miles from the canal’s Pacific entrance was not just symbolic but revealing. Latin America is beginning to confront the risks of a more discretionary global order, one in which its chronic lack of integration and unity leaves it vulnerable to great-power maneuvering.