Why are Latin American countries building closer ties with Israel?

When Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar announced on October 8 that Colombia would be moving its embassy to Jerusalem, he made sure to point out how important the development was for his country’s diplomatic narrative, and that it heralded warming relations with Latin American governments.

“We will work hard because this is the diplomatic battle over the truth,” Saar said. “And the truth is, Jerusalem was always the capital of one nation.”

Brazil, Saar went on to say, might soon join Colombia and the growing list of Latin American countries that had moved their embassies to Jerusalem, the disputed city claimed by Israelis and Palestinians as their capital.

Latin America’s relationship with Israel is shifting, as right-wing parties come into power in the region and pro-Israel politicians use their support for the country to rally voters.

Brazil, the largest country in the region, is in the midst of a presidential election campaign in which the relationship with Israel has become a key talking point.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a left-wing ardent supporter of Palestine, is locked in a close contest with right-wing rival Senator Flavio Bolsonaro. He has sported Israeli flags at campaign rallies and played up his friendship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The pair are scheduled to take part in a run-off election after Bolsonaro performed surprisingly strongly in the first -round, apparently raising hopes for a detente with Israeli officials like the foreign minister.

Last month, for instance, Colombia and Israel began allowing their citizens to travel visa-free between their countries, yet another signal the newly inaugurated government of Abelardo de la Espriella wants to restore ties that were cut in the wake of Israel’s war on Gaza.

Experts say the realignment with Israel is driven, in part, by new leaders trying to signal they have joined a regional alignment with United States President Donald Trump. But it’s also being fuelled by a massive lobbying effort in which Evangelical Christian groups and Israeli-government-backed organisations in the region have pushed Latin American countries to support Israel.

“It’s not one factor or the other, but a convergence,” said Marta Tawil Kuri, Research Professor at the Center for International Studies at the College of Mexico. “Right-wing leaderships seeking validation from Washington, evangelical bases giving them electoral and ideological grounding, and an Israeli diplomatic offensive that finds fertile ground in Latin America precisely as its image deteriorates elsewhere.”

“The most Zionist president in the world”

Colombia’s last leader, Gustavo Petro, severed ties with Israel over what he said was the genocidal war on Gaza. He stopped exporting Colombian coal to Israel, cut military and security cooperation and planned to open a Colombian embassy to Palestine. The former left-wing fighter seemed to take every public opportunity to criticise Israel, even using a trip to New York City for a United Nations summit to take part in a protest against Trump and the war on Gaza.

His successor, de la Espriella, has rapidly reversed Bogota’s stance on Israel since coming to power in August, announcing plans to move his country’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, re-appoint ambassadors and even recognising Israeli control over the occupied Syrian territory of the Golan Heights.

Strong presidential systems and weak, unprofessional diplomatic corps allow new heads of state to quickly pivot on issues such as ties with Israel, said Kuri.

“Unlike the US, where support for Israel has stayed relatively stable across administrations thanks to more consolidated institutions and bipartisan consensus, in much of Latin America foreign policy can swing sharply from one election to the next because that institutional buffer doesn’t exist,” Kuri said.

In 2023, Argentina elected right-wing populist Javier Milei as president, who pledged to move the embassy to Jerusalem, refused to recognise a Palestinian state at the UN and said he was “proud to be the most Zionist president in the world.”

In Bolivia, the leftist administration of Evo Morales, who was president from 2006 to 2019, had refused to have full diplomatic ties with Israel. This continued under the presidency of Luis Arce, who joined other regional left-wing leaders in recalling their ambassadors from Israel after October 7, 2023. When Arce was voted out last year, his replacement Rodrigo Paz promptly reversed that policy.

Soon after coming to office this August, Chilean President Jose Antonio Kast undid his leftist predecessor’s actions against Israel as well, appointing an ambassador to Israel who describes himself as a “proud Zionist”.

Over in Honduras, the left-wing government was replaced by a right-wing leader this January. New President Nasry Asfura, the grandson of Palestinian immigrants from Bethlehem, similarly reappointed an ambassador to Israel this year.

In August, Venezuela announced it would restore consular relations with Israel, undoing nearly two decades of an antagonistic stance towards Israel under previous leaders Nicolas Maduro and Hugo Chavez.

Besides deciding where to put their embassies, Latin American governments have also sometimes lent support to legal efforts against Israel over the Gaza war. Mexico, Bolivia, Colombia, Brazil, Chile, Belize, Cuba and Nicaragua are among governments that at one point backed South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

Signalling in the Trump era

When Flavio Bolsonaro launched his Brazilian presidential campaign last July, he did so standing beside Argentinian President Milei. Some in the crowd waved Israeli flags and watched as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a video message calling Bolsonaro a friend and a “great champion of the friendship between our peoples”.

Giving foreign leaders such a prominent role in an election campaign is “unheard of in Latin America,” said Alexander Main, Director of International Policy at the Washington-DC-based Center for Economic and Policy Research. “This did not happen before, at least not so overtly.”

Bolsonaro’s campaign, experts say, is seeking to make itself part of a larger political camp that is led in the hemisphere by Trump and internationally includes Israel. Some received direct endorsements from Trump, such as Colombia’s de la Espriella and Honduras’s Asfura.

They’ve joined new right-wing umbrella groups led by the US, such as the Shield of the Americas, a counter-narcotics security alliance bringing together Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guyana, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and Trinidad and Tobago. The effort is part of Trump’s policy for the Western Hemisphere that seeks to keep out the influence of other global powers like China.

Members of this Trump-led bloc have helped facilitate controversial US policies to deter migration, such as El Salvador, which is housing third-country deportees for the US. They’ve also chosen to frame their war on narcotics as a new kind of war on terrorism, a zero-sum conflict that is inspired by Israel’s war on the Palestinians, according to Main.

“They find common ground with Israel on a lot of these things,” Main said.

“Before, you had left-wing politicians in these regions that have seen what has happened in Gaza and called that war crimes and human rights abuses,” Main said. “Now you’ve seen, on the other hand, sectors seeing this as an existential fight against a deep-rooted enemy and that merits a kind of war on terror framing.”

Having good relations with Israel could translate into access to key military and security resources as well, Main said, including the use of sophisticated spy software such as Pegasus – which was developed by an Israeli software company – and sales of military jets or training of forces.

Isaac Accords and evangelical lobbying

The rally in August in Brazil that featured Netanyahu’s video message was also an attempt to win support from a large and influential voter bloc there who see protecting Israel as part of their religious worldview.

The Evangelical Parliamentary Front, a caucus of pro-Israel evangelical legislators, includes more than 40% of the Chamber of Deputies and more than a quarter of the Senate. If they formed a party, the loose alliance would become the third-largest in the country.

“Those constituencies have become increasingly politicised in recent years, to the point it is beneficial for politicians to court them and one of the ways they can do that is rallying behind Israel,” Main said.

Brazil is not the only country seeing this evangelical push to build ties with Israel.

“Evangelicalism — particularly Christian Zionism — is a real and growing factor in countries like Honduras and Guatemala,” Kuri said.

Around 40 percent of the population in those countries are evangelicals and both governments have moved their embassies to Jerusalem.

Groups from the US have also been lobbying on Israel’s behalf.

The Latino Coalition for Israel, led by Florida-based evangelical pastor Mario Bramnick, sends delegations throughout Latin America and has met with leaders in Guatemala, El Salvador, Brazil, Panama, Chile, and Costa Rica.

“Our support for Israel is first and foremost rooted in the Bible, where it was clearly established that God gave the Land of Israel, with Jerusalem as its undivided capital, to the Jewish people as an eternal covenant,” the group says on its website. A spokesperson for Bramnick declined to comment for this story.

In 2025, the Genesis Prize – an Israeli nonprofit launched with a $100 million endowment and Israeli government backing – awarded $1m to Argentinian President Milei for his “unequivocal support of Israel during one of the most difficult times since the founding of the Jewish State”.

Milei took the money and established the Isaac Accords, modelling the effort after the Abraham Accords, a Trump-backed effort to restore diplomatic and economic ties between Israel and the Arab world. The initiative gives grant money for pro-Israel civil society groups in Latin America. It also keeps meticulous track of many of the signalling moves right-wing governments are making in recent months to show their new stance on Israel, from moving embassies to Jerusalem to how they vote on Israel-related resolutions in the United Nations.

The initiative’s latest push? At the end of Netanyahu’s trip to the UN General Assembly in late September – where most of the audience walked out of his speech in protest – he and the leaders of Bolivia, Panama and Paraguay held their own summit. The Israeli leader urged them to join the Isaac Accords, writing on X that he sought to “expand the circle of friendship and partnership with Israel”.