The capture of Nicolás Maduro almost a week ago has completely changed the outlook for the continent. On the one hand, Gustavo Petro, president of Colombia, has dropped his childish antics and contacted Donald Trump directly to request a meeting. In a few months, Petro will leave office, and everything suggests that Colombia will no longer play with populist options “on the left.” In Venezuela, the recomposition is moving forward, and Cuban “doctors” are leaving the country while political prisoners are returning to the streets. As several colleagues have already pointed out, the group in power in Mexico is being left alone, and the absurd relationship with Cuba will weigh heavily.
On the other hand, Trump has grown emboldened and is returning to his intention of acquiring Greenland. Europeans insist that the future of that great island should be decided by those who live there and by Denmark, but Trump has no limits. A couple of days ago he decided to withdraw from some fifty international bodies, and it does not seem that remaining in NATO concerns him very much. The paramilitary force he created out of the shell of ICE killed a woman a few days ago. That has not affected him either.
Although there are some positive data points in the economy, as we discussed on Wednesday, overall we remain in a very weak situation, and we will enter the USMCA review carrying that weakness on our backs. Considering the change mentioned in the first paragraph, and Trump’s attitude described in the second, it seems difficult to obtain anything beneficial for Mexico in the reviews, renegotiations, or subordinations of the coming months.
We have not seen much of Putin these days, although it seems that more and more people are realizing that Russia has nothing. It was not enough to defeat Ukraine, its economy is only slightly larger than Mexico’s, and its southwestern buffer is collapsing. Syria had already been lost, and recent days have been spectacular in Iran. It is not clear what is happening in that country, but its weakness was also laid bare by Israel’s attack (supported by the United States), and the combination of economic and environmental collapse has resulted in the largest demonstrations ever recorded.
The unmistakable demonstration of the end of the eighty postwar years that the capture of Maduro represents (although this was already obvious before) seems to have unleashed all kinds of forces, everywhere. I do not believe there is a strategy behind it. If you are old enough, you may remember the animated sequence in Fantasia: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, in which the mouse tries to apply a magic he does not master to get the brooms to do the work that was his responsibility. To the music of Dukas, what seemed like a blessing gradually turns into a nightmare.
Venezuela—and Cuba—will be on the brink of chaos. The same may well happen in Iran and Syria. Once the dance of the brooms has begun, the failed states bordering the latter will have great difficulty avoiding joining in. The sorcerer’s apprentice, incapable of understanding the forces he has unleashed, delights in the dance unfolding around him and perhaps wonders why no one had made the brooms dance before. He no doubt answers himself by celebrating how superior he is to his predecessors. “I am the greatest,” he tells himself, to Dukas’s accelerating rhythm.
For quite some time, we are not going to understand what is happening. We will not be able to assign appropriate risks to decisions. We are going to live in absolute uncertainty. If we are lucky, the violence will be limited, both in magnitude and geographically. Enjoy each day of this 2026.