These are the three social evils Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned would destroy America from within: Militarism, materialism, and racism. Decades later, they help explain the divisions in our country that led to the January 6 attack by protesters on the U.S. Capitol. Of the three, however, the role our recent wars have played in exacerbating these conditions is often the most overlooked.
Video produced by Khody Akhavi.
The small country of Costa Rica, home to just over five million people and roughly the size of West Virginia, has long prided itself on being a bastion of democratic norms in Latin American politics.
To its north lie Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras, nations that, over the past several decades, have experienced periods of near-social collapse and outright dictatorship. Nearby Colombia and Venezuela have wrestled with their own, well-documented crises. By contrast, Costa Rica has consistently ranked high among global democracy watchdogs, which have pointed to its strong institutional protections for voting rights, its high literacy rate, and its reputation for civic stability as hallmarks of a healthy and vibrant political system.
That is changing. Since 2022, the country has been governed by the right-wing populist President Rodrigo Chaves. The Chaves administration has drawn close to El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, and has sought his government’s assistance in constructing a prison modeled on El Salvador’s CECOT megajail. At the same time, homicides in the country have surged, unsettling a population long accustomed to seeing Costa Rica as an island of calm in a turbulent region.
As drug trafficking routes have shifted through Central America, Costa Rica has become an increasingly important transit hub, bringing with it competition among criminal groups and a sharp rise in homicides. While much of the crime is drug-related, there have also been rises in robberies, and the incarceration rate rose from 282 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2022 to 359 per 100,000 in 2025. For many Costa Ricans, the change has felt abrupt: neighborhoods that once saw little lethal violence have experienced drive-by shootings, contract killings, and public assassinations tied to narco-trafficking disputes.
Costa Rica has also recently faced widening inequality, underemployment, and strains on public services, developments critics attribute in part to decades of market-oriented reforms encouraged by international financial institutions. Increased migration from neighboring countries and Venezuela has added additional pressure to housing, labor markets, and social systems.
Even as homicide rates reached record highs during his administration, Chaves is popular; his approval ratings hover near 60 percent. The persistence of his support suggests that voters may see the crisis less as a failure of leadership than as evidence of larger structural issues.
On February 1, Laura Fernández, the candidate of Pueblo Soberano, a Chaves-backed political party, won the presidential election with 48% of the vote. She fought off 19 other candidates and surpassed far beyond the 40% she needed to win in the first round of election. Campaigning on an explicitly anti-institutional platform, she was handpicked by Chaves as his successor (the Constitution bars presidents from seeking reëlection for eight years) and positioned her administration as continuing his goals of limiting the legislative and judiciary branches' power. The race was widely seen as a referendum on the ruling party, and her landslide victory confirmed Costa Ricans appetite for a more confrontational, strongman-style politics.
"Today, Costa Rica closes a cycle in its political history," Fernández declared to a crowd of cheering supporters during her victory speech. "What was called the Second Republic, formed in 1948 in battlefields drenched in the blood of our fathers and brothers, has remained in the past by the express will of Costa Rica. It is up to us to edify the Third Republic."
Fernández was evoking a crucial turning point in Costa Rican history, a civil war that took 2,000 lives, resulted in the abolition of the military, and ushered in a new constitution that reshaped the nation’s political order, a period known as the Second Republic (the First Republic was formed after independence in the nineteenth century and defined by its oligarchic structure that politically excluded vast swaths of the country). Established in 1949 by José Figueres Ferrer, who also expanded suffrage, public education, and the welfare system, the current government organizes civilian rule by ensuring the strength of autonomous institutions, separating power between the executive, legislative, and judiciary branches, and giving full authority to an independent election tribunal that safeguards voting.
For decades since, Costa Rica has been internationally known for its independent courts, its robust electoral system, and a press that operated largely without fear of reprisal helped turn elections into predictable, almost prosaic affairs. But Chaves's hostility towards the other branches of government and the press throughout his presidency set off alarm bells about the health of the country's democracy.
Alongside labelling journalists as “political sicarios” and repeatedly denounced Costa Rican establishment news outlets like La Nacion, Chaves has used state power to pressure companies connected to media outlets and given presidential orders to cancel advertising for media outlets deemed in opposition to the executive branch's goals.
A feature of the Chaves presidency has been his Wednesday press conferences, in which administration-vetted journalists, often influencers, are allowed to ask questions and the president and ministers answer them, usually involving discrediting of the mainstream press, judges, lawmakers, and opposition parties. In 2025, the World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders moved Costa Rica from 26th to 36th place globally, marking the fourth consecutive year of decline from its peak of 5th place in 2021.
Also in 2025, both the Supreme Court and the Supreme Electoral Court asked the legislature to lift Chaves's presidential immunity based on corruption charges and “political belligerence,” respectively. He has also led demonstrations against Attorney General Carlo Diaz, who was investigating him for illicit campaign financing and abuse of power.
Though the other Costa Rican branches of power have so far been able to counter these power-grabbing attempts, experts say the democratic backsliding is moving at a fast pace, and coupled with rising economic insecurity and the highest murder rates Costa Rica has seen in its modern history, have made for a particularly high stakes election.
Fernández won by casting herself as a continuation of Chaves, and has even promised that she would name him as chief of staff. Fernandez’s victory confirms that a voting majority of the country approves of Chaves’s rhetoric and approach to power. Moreover, this election saw the highest voting turnout since 1998 at 70%, skyrocketing from 60% at its lowest in 2022.
“Participation rose across the whole country, not just in the Central Valley or the coasts,” said Ronald Alfaro, a political scientist at the University of Costa Rica’s Center for Investigation and Political Study. “And looking at the data, the Pacific and Atlantic coasts went heavily for Fernández and Pueblo Soberano. So when thinking about what the decisive factor in these elections were, it’s the urban-rural divide.”
On March 7, both Chaves and Fernández, alongside other Latin American leaders, will attend a high-stakes security summit hosted in Florida by President Trump. Costa Rica and the United States have historically had friendly relations, and that has continued with Chaves’s government; in early 2025, a deal between the countries resulted with 200 migrants being deported to Costa Rica. Fernández has said that she will seek the U.S.’s help particularly on the fight against organized crime and narco-trafficking.
Fernandez will begin her term on May 8. Though she lacks the 38-member majority to be able to alter the Constitution and bring about her promised Third Republic, her party controls 53% of the legislative assembly and will be able to accomplish things like passing economic and security reforms.
“Right now, their goals have been very vague,” said Alfaro. “Their campaign slogan was “la continuindad del cambio” (the continuity of change), and that’s all been undefined; what exactly does that change look like? Soon, they’re going to have to establish their priorities.”
When Brazilians vote for president in October, multilateralism will likely be on the ballot. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has long stressed diversifying and deepening the diplomatic and trade relations of Latin America’s largest nation with the rest of the world.
His most likely opponent, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, will argue that Brazil belongs squarely in Washington’s camp.
The Bolsonaro clan has long criticized Lula’s dogged embrace of the BRICS bloc, for example, as well as his attempts to insert Brazil into major geopolitical debates as unnecessarily provocative to the Trump administration with which the family has enjoyed close ties. Whether to align with the United States — as Brazil’s neighbor Argentina has done under President Javier Milei — or double down on a decidedly independent foreign policy is a question that will be put to voters this October.
In a sign of where his priorities lie, Lula opted against attending the inaugural meeting of President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace in Washington — Lula declined Trump’s invitation to join — and instead headed to India to attend the AI Impact Summit. He traveled with a large delegation of officials, lawmakers, and business leaders intent on signing various new partnerships and trade deals with the world’s most populous nation.
Brazil has done relatively little business with India compared to its robust trade portfolio with the United States and China. Deepening commercial ties with India is yet another hedge for a Brazilian government eager to diversify its export markets in an era of increasing geopolitical competition.
Lula and his advisers have long argued the necessity of this approach, but the trade war Trump launched against Brazil last summer has undoubtedly given it new life. In standing up to Trump’s demands that the Brazilian government drop all charges against Jair Bolsonaro, who is currently serving a lengthy prison sentence for his role in an attempt to overturn the 2022 election, Lula enjoyed a polling bump at home. This has placed his domestic opponents in the awkward position of having to either defend Brazilian sovereignty — thus implicitly aligning with Lula — or criticize the U.S. government, potentially alienating Trump.
Lula will almost certainly remind voters of this dynamic as the October election approaches. Trump eventually backed down and opened a direct line of communication with Lula. The two have since met in person and, as at least one analyst predicted early on, seemed to hit it off. Lula is tentatively scheduled to visit the White House next month.
But Brazil remains on alert. In fact, in a recent interview, Lula’s main foreign policy adviser went so far as to assert that in an increasingly uncertain world Brazil must increase its military spending, which currently stands at about one percent of GDP. A stronger, more assertive, and independent Brazil is what Lula will propose to voters.
This is the context in which his India trip — and his snub of Trump’s Board of Peace — should be understood. Brazil’s Foreign Ministry reportedly sees ties with India, a fellow-charter member of the BRICS group, as more important than ever and wants to bolster its relationship with India in pursuit of multilateralism. In New Delhi, Lula reiterated his call for a reconfiguration of the U.N. Security Council — including permanent seats for Brazil and India.
Speaking at the AI Impact Summit alongside Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Emmanuel Macron, Lula sharply criticized the business model of major technology platforms, arguing that their profitability “depends on the exploitation of personal data, the invasion of the right to privacy, and the monetization of eye-catching content that amplifies political radicalization.” He also called for global governance standards for artificial intelligence, rules and institutions capable of safeguarding democratic integrity and human rights.
Last Thursday, Lula met with Macron on the sidelines of the summit to discuss global peace and security as well as expanding cooperation. Macron used the occasion to invite Lula to attend the next G7 summit, scheduled for June in France, signaling Paris’s ongoing desire to cultivate Brazil as a reliable partner in major international deliberations. Although it hasn’t been reported, Lula very likely also pressed Macron on the stalled trade deal between the European Union and MERCOSUR, which would, when consummated, create the world’s largest common market.
France, whose politically powerful farm lobby is worried about competition from South American exporters, has been the prime opponent of the deal, which has been a strategic priority for Brazil for well over a decade.
After India, Lula traveled to South Korea, where he met with President Lee Jae Myung and signed 10 memorandums of understanding spanning trade, critical minerals, digital technology, agriculture, health, and security cooperation. The two sides also adopted a four-year action plan covering sectors from defense and space to food security and agreed to resume talks on a South Korea–Mercosur trade deal.
Lula used the visit to court South Korean investment in Brazil’s rare-earth and nickel reserves and to expand market access for Brazilian agricultural and higher-value exports. He capped the tour with a surprise stop in Abu Dhabi to push forward the Mercosur–UAE trade deal and deepen cooperation in a host of other areas as well. Cumulatively, the trip reinforced Lula’s longstanding claim that an active, autonomous foreign policy can deliver greater tangible economic and strategic gains than automatic alignment with any one nation.
That is the proposition he will put before voters later this year. Not a rupture with the United States, nor a romanticized alignment with any alternative bloc, but a pragmatic multilateralism designed to maximize autonomy. It bears mentioning, of course, that Modi and India represent opposing ideological camps. Lula is a left-wing elder statesman whereas his Indian counterpart is a noted right-wing nationalist. Yet both took pains to demonstrate their exceedingly warm working relationship. Lula’s opponents will argue that his ecumenical global stance — as comfortable in Moscow and Beijing as he is in Washington, if not more so — risks unnecessary friction with the United States.
Lula, in turn, is likely to counter that sovereignty in the 21st century depends on working with all comers to seize the initiative.
The most high-profile deal to come out of Lula’s India trip was a new agreement related to rare earth minerals, key inputs for electric vehicles, solar panels, jet engines, and advanced electronics. As geopolitical competition intensifies and supply chains tighten, these minerals have acquired strategic weight far beyond their commercial value.
According to Roberto Goulart Menezes, an international relations scholar at the University of Brasília, the urgency of leveraging Brazil’s rare earths and critical minerals escalated during last summer’s stand-off with the Trump administration. By elevating rare earths in its negotiations with India, Brazil is shoring up its agency in an increasingly heated geopolitical climate.
The current trip to Asia, then, is not incidental to Brazil’s core interests. It is a test case. If Lula can translate diplomacy into durable trade flows and technological cooperation, he will have tangible evidence that an independent foreign policy delivers concrete returns. Tellingly, the Brazilian president saw this as a better use of his time than listening to Guns N Roses alongside Trump’s Board of Peace in Washington.
In Tuesday’s State of the Union address, President Donald Trump threatened to bomb Iran but left open a path to return from the brink, suggesting that he would back down if Tehran pledged to never build a nuclear weapon.
“They were warned to make no future attempts to rebuild their weapons program, including their nuclear weapons,” Trump said. While his preference is to “solve this problem through diplomacy,” the president pledged to “never allow the world’s number 1 sponsor of terror… to have a nuclear weapon.”
The speech gave little insight into Trump’s thinking about the possibility of war with Iran as the U.S. continues to surge American forces to the Middle East at rates not seen since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In making the case for war, he reiterated claims that the Iranian regime killed more than 30,000 protestors in a brutal crackdown last month and alleged that Tehran is “working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America.”
“Trump tried to sound very tough — repeating accusations against Iran that will serve as a basis for his case for war, if he chooses war,” said Trita Parsi, executive director of the Quincy Institute, which publishes RS. “Yet he also kept the door open for a deal.”
While the speech focused primarily on domestic issues, Trump addressed several other foreign policy initiatives, lauding his administration’s peacekeeping efforts. “In my first 10 months, I ended eight wars,” he claimed, referring to conflicts including last year’s brief conflict between India and Pakistan as well as a threat of war between Egypt and Ethiopia.
But the president had little to say about the Ukraine war, which he once hoped to end in the early days of his second term. Urging an end to the conflict, he said that 25,000 soldiers are dying per month in the war.
Trump struck a relatively mild tone in his criticism of the Supreme Court, saying last week’s decision to overturn many of his tariffs was “unfortunate.” The president connected the issue of tariffs to his peacemaking efforts, arguing that “many of the wars I settled was because of the threat of tariffs.”
Trump also lauded his administration’s efforts to restore “American dominance in the Western hemisphere.” He described the January capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro as “one of the most complex, spectacular feats of military competence and power in world history.” To honor the raid, Trump awarded a helicopter pilot who was wounded in the attack with a Congressional Medal of Honor.
The president also celebrated the impact of his campaign of airstrikes against alleged drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean, saying “nobody wants to go fishing anymore.” And he claimed responsibility for the Sunday killing of cartel leader El Mencho, who he described as “one of the most sinister” drug kingpins in the world.
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