Why Latin America Will Stay Nonaligned

As Argentina’s president prepares to meet with the U.S. president, the bloc’s consensus on Russia’s war in Ukraine will be put to the test.

By , a freelance journalist based in Buenos Aires.
A woman demonstrates in front of the Russian Embassy in Buenos Aires.
A woman demonstrates in front of the Russian Embassy in Buenos Aires.
A woman demonstrates in front of the Russian Embassy in Buenos Aires on Feb. 24, the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. LUIS ROBAYO/AFP via Getty Images

Russia’s War in Ukraine

On Feb. 23, the eve of the one-year anniversary of the war in Ukraine, U.S. Ambassador to Argentina Marc Stanley gathered with the Ukraine Embassy chargé d’affaires Sergei Nebrat at the North American Cultural Institute of Argentina in downtown Buenos Aires. The diplomats’ ostensible purpose was to unveil a photography exhibit celebrating the resilience of the Ukrainian people. In practice, the event served as an opportunity to denounce Russian President Vladimir Putin—and, perhaps, to pressure the Argentine government ahead of the October elections to align itself more fully with Ukraine. (In Latin America, only Chilean President Gabriel Boric has condemned Putin’s invasion from the start.)

On Feb. 23, the eve of the one-year anniversary of the war in Ukraine, U.S. Ambassador to Argentina Marc Stanley gathered with the Ukraine Embassy chargé d’affaires Sergei Nebrat at the North American Cultural Institute of Argentina in downtown Buenos Aires. The diplomats’ ostensible purpose was to unveil a photography exhibit celebrating the resilience of the Ukrainian people. In practice, the event served as an opportunity to denounce Russian President Vladimir Putin—and, perhaps, to pressure the Argentine government ahead of the October elections to align itself more fully with Ukraine. (In Latin America, only Chilean President Gabriel Boric has condemned Putin’s invasion from the start.)

“I can’t tell Argentina what to do, but I would love to see [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky address legislatures in Argentina and Brazil and other countries,” Stanley said.

Nebrat did not mince words. Addressing members of the local and international press, he urged the Argentine President Alberto Fernández’s center-left administration to become the first Latin American government to apply economic sanctions against Moscow—a call that Mauricio Macri, right-wing former president and possible Juntos por el Cambio (“Together for Change”) party presidential candidate, echoed on social media four days later.

The odds that Ukraine will become a hot-button issue in a country with inflation topping 100 percent and a social crisis unseen since the economic crash of 2001 appear remote. Still, this burgeoning debate offers a window into the internal workings not only of Argentina’s major political coalitions but those of the region as a whole—a region that has been steadfast in its refusal to join NATO in sanctions and military aid, even as the majority of its countries have sided with Ukraine in the conflict. This positioning seems unlikely to change, regardless of what any individual opposition leader may claim ahead of his party’s primary. But as Fernández prepares to meet with U.S. President Joe Biden at the White House next week to discuss bilateral relations, the bloc’s consensus will be put to the test.


The Argentine government’s stance on Ukraine has evolved, slowly but surely, over the past year. Just weeks before Putin’s “special military operation” in Kyiv, Fernández traveled to Moscow in the hopes of expanding ties with Russia. When Russia did invade, Argentine presidential spokesperson Gabriela Cerruti was cautious in response, calling for Moscow to “cease its military actions” while simultaneously urging “prudence.” Argentina’s opposition lambasted the president for declining to co-sign a statement from the Organization of American States formally denouncing the invasion.

In April 2022, alongside Chile, Uruguay, and several other South American countries, Argentina voted to suspend Russia from the U.N. Security Council. Standing beside German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Madrid one month later, Fernández lamented the human cost of the conflict but asserted his opposition to sanctions on Russia, noting their disastrous results in countries such as Cuba and Venezuela. Then in June, the president zagged again—this time to voice his desire for Argentina to join BRICS, a constellation of developing economies that includes China and Russia, along with Brazil, India, and South Africa, during the bloc’s annual summit. Fernández later affirmed that his country would not be sending arms to Ukraine during a separate meeting with Scholz in January this year. Recently, on the war’s one-year anniversary, the Argentine government issued a statement condemning Russia’s aggression and calling dialogue “the only path.”

“One area in which this government has been surprisingly coherent has been in its foreign policy,” said María Esperanza Casullo, a professor of political science at Argentina’s National University of Río Negro. “They’re aligned with the United States and the social democratic governments of Western Europe but not overly so.” Casullo added that this position of relative neutrality “comes very naturally to this government. Like most countries in Latin America, they would rather fly under the radar.”

Brazil is one of the few exceptions to this rule. Whereas Argentine soil remains some of the most fertile in the world, even amid the mounting threat of climate change, Brazil’s is far more unforgiving. As a result, the nation’s agroindustry is dependent on nitrogen fertilizers from Russia—a leading exporter that accounts for approximately 25 percent of the world’s supply. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that Brazil was one of seven countries in Latin America and the Caribbean to abstain from the April 2022 U.N. vote. (Bolivia, Cuba, and Nicaragua—whose governments the United States has helped overthrow, embargoed, and sanctioned, respectively—rejected the measure.)

Months removed from a Jan. 6-style insurrection, newly elected Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva can ill afford to rattle one of Brazil’s largest economic sectors. Still, he has been especially equivocal on Putin’s invasion, suggesting last May that Putin and Zelensky bore equal responsibility for the war. And since his reelection, Lula has refused to provide military aid to Ukraine, instead positioning Brazil as a potential mediator of peace in Eastern Europe.

Eduardo Mello, an assistant professor of politics and international relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas, believes the Biden administration should have seen this coming, even after it lent its support to Lula following the riots in Brasília, Brazil’s capital. “There’s really been no thought in Washington about how to provide Brazil with an alternative supply of fertilizers,” Mello said. “If the cost of these fertilizers goes up, so too will inflation.”

Lula is also dependent on the left wing of his party, which has stayed loyal to him through his corruption scandals and imprisonment, Mello said. “They are distrustful of the intentions of the U.S. government,” he said, “and don’t want to see Brazil dragged into something they see as none of their business or the Americans’, for that matter.”

In the wake of Jair Bolsonaro’s pariah-like presidency, and following the desultory terms of former presidents Michel Temer and Dilma Rousseff, the latter of which ended in a judicial coup, the new Brazilian head of state may also see this crisis as an opportunity to return his country to the world stage.

“It seems clear that Lula wants to recover Brazil’s international standing and rapidly reassert his country’s leadership,” said Elsa Llenderrozas, who heads the department of political science at the University of Buenos Aires. “He’s making a calculated bet on peace.”

Lula’s reelection has fortified a trend of active nonalignment that would appear to transcend the left-right political divide, said Brian Winter, editor of Americas Quarterly. Whatever the United States or Western Europe might prefer, he suggested, there simply isn’t an incentive for Latin America to get more involved than it already is, especially when it risks alienating a major trade partner like China. “On this question and others, we’ll continue to see governments acknowledge that we’re living in a multipolar world,” Winter said. “Because of these investment ties, they recognize it’s best for them to navigate these tensions as delicately as possible and take advantage of what could be South America’s greatest strategic asset in this new era, which is its distance.”

In this context, it’s difficult to believe that Macri is criticizing the Fernández administration in good faith. After all, Russia is a close Chinese ally, and China remains Argentina’s largest trade partner outside of the South American trade bloc Mercosur. Beijing also operates a space station in the Patagonian province of Neuquén with limited oversight from the Argentine government. While that base’s construction was approved by then-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, it was completed in 2017 under her conservative successor. If the right should return to power amid a deepening economic crisis—and recent polling data suggests it’s more likely to than not—then any shift in its stance on Ukraine is probably rhetorical.

“I could see Together for Change adopting a more Western attitude,” said Juan Gabriel Tokatlian, a professor of political science and international relations at Torcuato Di Tella University in Buenos Aires. Still, Tokatlian contended, “there will be no catastrophe, no crisis and no rupture in relations [with China].”

Along the same lines, Frente de Todos (“Everyone’s Front”) party seems all but certain to maintain its current position if reelected. Although there exist certain elements within the Kirchnerist wing of the party that are suspicious of U.S. power and even broadly sympathetic to Russia, domestic conditions are simply too dire for the country and its Latin American allies to react as they did during Operation Iraqi Freedom, when the region could nearly be called a “coalition of the unwilling.”

“In the early aughts, international conditions were extremely favorable to the region,” Tokatlian said. “Commodities prices were high and there was a greater possibility of state intervention, which allowed Latin America to take a certain distance from Washington. If leaders like Gustavo Petro in Colombia and Gabriel Boric in Chile manifest a new pink wave, I expect it to be very light.”


As a sputtering global economy and the war in Ukraine throw into relief, the geopolitical realities of 2023 are radically different than those of 2003.

“There’s some antiquated thinking on both sides right now,” Casullo said. “The [Argentine] right is calling for open trade agreements that no country seems interested in pursuing. And on the left, there seems to be this nostalgia for an anti-colonialism that assumes the United States is automatically in the wrong and that its adversaries are inherently virtuous.”

This new multipolar, post-pandemic order begs the question: What additional measures would the United States actually like to see the Fernández administration or a future government take? In a statement to Foreign Policy, Stanley, the U.S. ambassador, would only concede the following:

“As Russia continues its brutal, unprovoked, full-scale invasion, democratic governments must stand together to uphold democratic values and human rights. The United States, Argentina, the EU, and the other [G-7] countries stand in solidarity with Ukraine and are committed to working together to secure a positive path for its future.”

No stranger to violations of territorial integrity, Argentina has indeed proved willing to stand with Ukraine. Just don’t expect it to level economic sanctions against Russia any time soon.

Jacob Sugarman is a freelance journalist based in Buenos Aires. His writing has appeared in the Nation, In These Times, and Salon, among other publications. Twitter: @jakesugarman

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