To "win" Latin America is to fix its crime problem

China presents a winning package offering, while America fantasizes about militarily invading Mexico to magically wipe out drug cartels

Jim and Sara Nuttle illustration from “America’s New Map”

The argument of America’s New Map is simple enough to break down:

• Climate change hurts the South more than North, so the North either helps the South or suffers dangerous levels of mass migration

• Demographic aging in the North means it must accept some migrant flow from the still-young South

• The global middle class is increasingly centered in the Global South — likewise encouraging the North’s attempts at deeper integration.

Put it all together and these three massive structural changes in the world system demand North-South integration — logically in the most direct manner possible (e.g., North America focuses on Latin America — not SE Asia or the Middle East). Superpowers will naturally focus their attention most on their immediate South because, if not addressed, that is where the instability will emanate most directly from.

Latin America is, by all measures, poorly integrated into global value chains, poorly integrated within its own realm, and poorly integrated with North America. It has remained largely stuck in a neocolonial pattern of trade: basic materials out, consumer stuff in.

As a result, Latin America, while enjoying basically the same demographic dividend as China over the same time frame, only doubled its GDP compared to China’s 7-fold increase. The culprits include corrupt governments, weak public services (especially education), insufficient hard infrastructure, insufficient soft legal infrastructure, low rate of female participation in workforce [although that is rapidly improving now], and — above all, I would argue — crime.