Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Uruguay announces a mass regularization scheme for asylum-seekers, China sanctions officials in Belize and Paraguay, and a debate over Brazil’s patron saint roils the country’s presidential race.
Many Latin American governments have recently tightened their migration policies, emulating U.S. President Donald Trump’s approach. But last week, Uruguay did just the opposite: It announced a straightforward path to permanent residency for tens of thousands of asylum-seekers in the country, most of whom are Cubans fleeing political and economic crisis.
The measure builds on a 2024 Uruguayan policy to grant residency based on “rootedness” in the country that was successfully used by a few thousand Cubans before its eligibility window expired last year.
It’s a big move for Uruguay, which has a population of around 3.5 million people. The plan is significant for Latin America as well, according to María Teresa Urueña, a migration policy expert at the Washington-based Center for Engagement and Advocacy in the Americas.
“This is a show of leadership that should be celebrated,” Urueña said. “It’s a concrete response to the needs of asylum-seekers and Cubans in particular,” and “it’s a signal to other countries around the region that it’s possible to set policies that lead to people’s regularization, protection, and integration.”
There are only a few countries in the Western Hemisphere where it remains viable for Cubans to apply for asylum. Uruguay has emerged as a leading destination, alongside Brazil and Mexico; last year, around 100,000 Cubans applied for asylum in the three nations. Trump has effectively shut all migration pathways for Cubans to the United States, previously a top destination.
But applying for asylum doesn’t necessarily mean getting it. Cubans in Brazil risk having their asylum applications rejected when they cite economic reasons for migrating rather than political or religious persecution, said Larissa Getirana, a coordinator at the Rio de Janeiro arm of the Catholic charity Caritas.
Now, people who entered Uruguay before Jan. 1 and applied for asylum—even those whose applications were denied—are eligible for permanent residency in the country.
In some ways, Uruguay’s move recalls Colombia’s decision to make hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants eligible for temporary residency in 2021, Urueña said. That decision was celebrated across the region and internationally as a humane and pragmatic way to deal with a population fleeing a complex crisis.
This year, Costa Rica granted a more temporary form of legal status to Cuban migrants. In May, the government announced that it would offer two-year work permission to asylum applicants from Colombia, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela—a move that could affect around 10,000 people, officials said.
But in most of Latin America, policies toward fleeing Cubans are more ambiguous.
In Ecuador, Cubans can technically apply for asylum, but accessing Cuban government documents has become more difficult since Ecuador expelled all Cuban diplomats in March. In Colombia, President Abelardo de la Espriella announced a mass deportation drive of undocumented migrants—including Cubans—in August, though he did not immediately move forward with it.
Speaking to the podcast El Hilo last month, Colombian political analyst Sandra Borda argued that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio might have dissuaded de la Espriella from the idea during a recent trip to Colombia, given how a mass outflow of migrants could be destabilizing for the region.
Colombia’s earlier policy of granting legal status to Venezuelan migrants yielded positive results, according to multiple studies. Researchers found that migrants who obtained legal status created more economic activity—and were less costly to the state—than undocumented ones.
Tiny Uruguay is now set to be a new testing ground for the potential benefits of such a policy.
Monday, Oct. 19: The United Nations Security Council discusses Haiti.
Sunday, Oct. 25: Brazil holds a presidential runoff election.
Tuesday, Oct. 27, to Wednesday, Nov. 4: The United Kingdom’s King Charles and Queen Camilla visit the Bahamas, Guyana, and Antigua and Barbuda.
Boat strike trial. Last week, an Ecuadorian court acquitted 32 fishermen who had been under investigation for having gang ties after the U.S. military sank their two medium-sized boats in September.
The Trump administration said the boats served as a refueling station for smaller drug-smuggling speedboats. The judge in Ecuador’s coastal province of Manabí found that there was not enough evidence to prove that the sailors had committed a crime.
The United States first evacuated the boats instead of bombing them outright—marking a partial shift in strategy in its deadly anti-drug campaign. However, the U.S. military has continued lethal strikes against smaller speedboats in recent weeks. At least 238 people have been killed in the campaign since it began last year.
In those cases, the question of whether the speedboat crews committed crimes has generally not been scrutinized in a court of law. There are a small handful of lawsuits in which victims’ families are trying to change that, but they are making slow progress.
Economic checkup. The latest global economic forecast by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), released on Tuesday, had good news for Venezuela and some Central American economies—which the fund expects will grow more in 2026 than previously thought. But it had bad news for others, shrinking growth forecasts for countries including Argentina, Barbados, and Chile.
Argentina suffered one of the largest adjustments since the IMF’s April forecast. The fund expects its GDP to grow by 2.1 percent this year, down from the 3.5 percent expected in April. That’s a more optimistic outlook than that of the analysts consulted as part of Argentina’s own central bank survey, who say it will grow by 1.5 percent; the survey also projected the country would enter a recession by the third quarter.
Though Latin America and the Caribbean have not been hit as badly by the energy shock of the Iran war as other places, the IMF suggested the region appears to be missing out on the artificial intelligence boom. The exception is Mexico, which is assembling hardware needed for data centers in the United States.
Catholic devotees attend celebrations marking Our Lady of Aparecida Day at the Basilica of the National Shrine of Our Lady of Aparecida in Aparecida, Brazil, on Oct. 12.Pablo Porciuncula/AFP via Getty Images
Mary in the spotlight. In Latin American Catholicism, October contains a few holidays devoted to the Virgin Mary, such as Guatemala’s Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary and Mexico’s pilgrimage in honor of the Virgin of Zapopan. In Brazil, these include huge festivals. One of them—the Day of Our Lady of Aparecida, which took place on Monday—is a national holiday.
In the 18th century, Brazilian fishermen discovered a dark clay figure of the Virgin Mary in a river. The figure was said to have miraculously freed a slave in the following years, and worshippers created replicas of her in part to honor that story and her popularity among Black Brazilians. The “Black Madonna” became Brazil’s patron saint in 1930 thanks to a proclamation from Pope Pius XI.
This year, Our Lady of Aparecida sprung out of the history books and into the middle of a controversy in Brazil’s presidential election. The founder of right-wing candidate Flávio Bolsonaro’s evangelical church has called for removing Aparecida as the patron saint, and Catholic leaders worry that Aparecida might lose her status if Bolsonaro is elected.
When Brazilian media reported those concerns last month, Bolsonaro accused an influential council of Catholic bishops of spreading fake news—which they denied. Bolsonaro has now said he will not unseat Aparecida, but the incident triggered fear in the Catholic community. On Monday, both presidential candidates made sure to be photographed at events honoring the saint.
Mexico also has a Virgin Mary as its patron saint. What year did Our Lady of Guadalupe become the patron saint of Mexico City, before later earning the national title?
After a colonial archbishop named Our Lady of Guadalupe patron saint of Mexico City, the Vatican named her the patron saint of the Spanish colonial territory of New Spain. Mexican independence fighters later embraced her image in the Mexican Revolution.
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Paraguayan President Santiago Peña delivers a speech during a visit by Taiwan’s foreign minister in Asuncion, Paraguay, on July 14, 2025.Daniel Duarte/AFP via Getty Images
Foreign sanctions on Latin American officials are nothing new—if they’re coming from the United States. For decades, Washington has imposed measures such as asset freezes and visa bans to punish policymakers in the region for offenses including anti-democratic behavior and drug trafficking.
This week, China used the tool in the region for the first time. On Monday, it announced sanctions on Belize’s foreign minister and Paraguay’s information technology minister over their ties with Taiwan and alleged threats to China’s national interests. Both countries recognize Taiwan and do not have formal diplomatic relations with China.
The sanctions carry little weight: Ministers from countries that recognize Taiwan rarely travel to China. But they nevertheless marked an escalation. In the case of Paraguay, the sanctions seemed to be a response to apparent coordination between Paraguay and the Trump administration to ensure that Paraguay stays in Taiwan’s camp.
China has been courting officials in Paraguay, Taiwan’s largest official diplomatic partner, for years. Last year, the Trump administration threatened Paraguayan ruling party officials with sanctions for planning to visit China, Paraguayan media reported. The officials canceled their travel plans, and only opposition members took the trip.
Public opinion in Paraguay is warming to China, according to a new Latinobarómetro survey: 61 percent of Paraguayans see China’s influence as positive, compared with only 57 percent who say the same of the United States. But within the country’s political class, devotion to Taipei has become more steadfast, said Julieta Heduvan, a political analyst who is based in the Paraguayan capital of Asunción.
Ahead of Paraguay’s 2028 presidential election, “even opposition candidates who might have, at some point in recent years, appeared closer to China—and all potential candidates who are starting to take positions—are sticking with the government’s line,” Heduvan said.