 Well, thank you for being here with us today, and welcome back to Davos, the hottest ticket in town, literally the hottest ticket. I've been complaining about the cold weather for years, and now I kind of miss it. Coming from Miami feels like home here in the Alps, but in all seriousness, thank you so much for joining us. We have an incredible panel today to talk about Latin America, and I know you hear that from every moderator, but it is true. We have an amazing lineup today, and I'm going to start with Arancha Gonzales-Laya, the former minister of foreign relations for the European Union, for the government of Spain, and now the dean of the Paris School of Foreign Studies at Sciences Pro. It's a pleasure to see you. Bienvenida, Arancha. Gracias. Moises Nahim, author, journalist, a prestigious fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Thank you so much for joining us, Moises. Tom Friedman, a columnist with the New York Times, and as we learned with his column yesterday, a lunch mate for President Joe Biden. I don't know if you read the column, but he had a lunch with the president and wrote about it on his column for the New York Times. Andres Velasco, the dean at the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Andres, bienvenido también. Gracias. Let's talk about Latin America, and I'm very happy to do that here at the World Economic Forum. After being battered by the pandemic, the region finally has some tailwinds at its back. Soaring commodities have bolstered the price of exports for many countries in the region. There's a push to fortify supply chains that has prompted many companies around the world to juggle with the idea of opening new factories in Latin America. Still, many challenges remain. Inflation, unemployment are very high. poverty and inequality surged during the pandemic. And there's a wave of democratic backsliding moving across the Western hemisphere. Michael Bloomberg said recently that Latin America could play a crucial part in solving some of the world's biggest problems. He referred to the region as an economic engine, a global trade way, a fertile ground for entrepreneurship, and a crucial component of the planet's natural defense against climate change because of our incredible biodiversity. So to sum it all up, I guess for Latin Americans, the concern here is not going back to the old normal of economic stagnation of social discontent and the discrediting of democratic values. My first question is for Tom Friedman, and it has to do with our place. The one person who has nothing about Latin America. Well, just to put things in a global context, Tom. Please go ahead. How does Latin America fit in this global competition between Democrats and autocrats that has shaped the first two decades of this new century? It's great to be here. Thank you for having me on this panel. How does they fit in? Well, I guess I'd go to 30,000 feet, which is the only way I can survive this panel and say that. So my view is that the world was really governed by empires for millennia. We all know their name from Aztec to Byzantine to British Empire, Spanish Empire. And then in the 19th, 20th century decolonization, the world really divided up into these nation states. We woke up in 1945, and we found 192 countries in the UN. We've never had that many countries, and in Latin America, became new independent states. And the first 50 years after World War II were a great time to be a small little state. There are two superpowers out there competing for your affection, throwing money at you, giving you wheat, building your army. If you were Syrian, you could lose three wars to Israel. One, two, three. And get your army rebuilt for free all three times. And they would educate your kids at Patrice Lumumba University of Moscow or the University of Texas. Number two, populations were really small, a relative population growth hadn't exploded. Number three, climate change was very moderate. Number four, no one had one of these to compare themselves with the village next door, let alone the leader next door. And lastly, China was not in the World Trade Organization. So everybody could be in the low-wage textile business. My argument is that all of that flipped in the early 21st century. Now, no superpower wants to touch you because all they win is a bill. Oh, no, no, ask the Afghans, OK? Number two, populations have exploded. Iran population, 1979, 40 million. Today, 85 million. I can't imagine what Mexico City is or Sao Paulo, but I think the same phenomenon applied. Number three, climate change now hammering, really stressing these countries. Number four, everyone has one of these. In fact, two-thirds of the world now has a smartphone. And mine, oh, what's that there? Mine has a human trafficking app on it. Case I decided I'd actually like to go to Austin without a visa or to Paris or somewhere else. And lastly, China's in the World Trade Organization so nobody can be in the textile business. I was in Egypt for Tahir Square. I was gone for my wife for three weeks after. Three weeks I came home. I went to the airport treasures of Egypt's souvenir shop by my little honey. Something to remind her where her honey was. And what do they have here? Pyramids, ashtrays. No, my honey doesn't smoke. Sphinx, bookends. We have bookends. What's this? It's a stuffed camel. And if you squeezed its hump, it honked. And my honey didn't have a honking humped camel. And so I picked it up, went to the cash register, turned it over. What did it say on the bottom? Say it with me now. Made in China. Yeah, you're the lowest wage country in the Eastern Mediterranean. There's now a country half the world away can make your honking humped camel cheaper than you can, ship it and sell it for a profit. So what's happened is that all these countries are being stressed. Just as it's hard to be an average worker anymore, it's hard to be an average country anymore. And the most stressed countries are beginning to fracture and hemorrhage their people. And we see this in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador. They get on the road. And of course, from the Sahel in North Africa in the Middle East. And they move north with that human trafficking app, of which you can get now. So to me, it's just harder to be a state now. Just as it's harder to be a worker. And if you have a bad leader, but you had a bad leader in the past, you got five miles off course. The world was slower. Well, the pain of getting back on course was not that great. In the world's moving this fast now, you get off course. It's like a pilot in a 747 who just mixes up two numbers. You're 100 miles off course. The pain of getting back, of suffering from a bad leader in this kind of world, is really, really enormous. Tom mentioned this device. And I think of three piece. And your book, Moises, Power, Polarization, and Post-Truth. This device has brought knowledge and information, but also a lot of post-truth and a lot of polarization. Talk a little bit about not just the book, but the idea behind those three piece. Did you write a book, Marcelo? The latest one. What's the name of it? I didn't remember. Tom Friedman's a ring for you, remember? And if you can also, what can the world learn from Latin America's experience with populism? Both from the left and the right, Moises, especially now that Europe and the US are experiencing with autocratic populist movements. In the list that Tom Friedman gave us about what happened in the world in the last two decades most specifically in the last decade, he didn't mention one word that happened that matters very much, and that is democracy. In 2011, 2010, something like 47% of humanity lived in countries that had autocratic regimes in 2010. In 2020, the number is 70%. So 70% of humanity lives in regimes with an autocratic government. And the other change that we saw in that decade is the 3P leaders. These are stealthily autocratic leaders that mask as democratic. They typically arrive to power with some kind of elections. Some cases are fair and free and verifiable. Others are a little bit fasham, but they get there through something that looks like an election. And the first thing they do is that they undermine democracy from the inside. They start making decisions that weaken, check some balances, that take away term limits, that generate all kinds of concentrations of power. And very often through means that are not seen by the naked eye. You need to be an expert. You need to be awake at 10 o'clock at night on Fridays where a decree comes out and, in fact, is a decree that concentrates power. Or they change the Constitution. It is now very common to change the Constitution. We're lucky to have Andres Velasco, who can update us about the Chilean process with the change in the Constitution. So this president that came of age and that are now prevalent around the world are the 3P leaders. They use populism, polarization, and post-truth. These are all concepts, except that now they are combined in ways that are very modern, that they're very different. And one of the surprises of going around the world talking about my book is that everybody believes that the book is about their country. I was in Indonesia. And in Indonesia, I wrote a book about Indonesia, about Spain, about Israel, about Italy, and, of course, about Latin America. And it's true. It's about them, but it's about all of them. It's a global trend. We are looking at it from all kinds of angles. And I can say more about that, but I want to finish with an observation. We are entering Latin America in a very dangerous period in which we have a whole generation or more that has not lived with inflation, except in some, except Venezuela is an exception and we have seen some exception. But the norm in Latin America is that inflation stopped being part of the conversation. Well, inflation is coming, and not just to Latin America. It's coming to the world. But it's coming to a Latin American generation that don't know how to live in inflation. And it can be that the economic consequences, social consequences of inflation are dire. That is the same generation that has lived in democracy. They don't know what autocracy is, but they know that democracy is not performing well for them. Democracy is underperforming in Latin America, and they have all these promises of these authoritarian regimes that are going to solve it. So combine high inflation with high disappointment with democracy, and you have nasty politics and nasty economics combining in ways that are going to make it very hard for our region to satisfy the requirements of integrating to the world that Tom Friedman gave us. So we have a global historical context. We have a diagnosis of the moment Latin America is going through Arancha. And it was mentioned that they're being competing superpowers in the region in the past, but they're still competing superpowers in the region today. Most of the continent has now chosen China as a main trade partner. Economic relations are intensifying between Latin America and China, and not just trade and economics. Also, cultural and political relationships are intense. How do you see the region and how do you see that dynamic shaping the region in the next decade? Well, I start from Tom's advice that it's difficult to be an average country and it's difficult to be a good leader these days in an average country. Grant it. That's the description of the problem. The question is, what do you do about it? If I look at the international scene, I see a total absence of Latin American leadership. Latin America has disappeared from the radar. And Latin America should not disappear from the radar because there are big issues there that are going to hit them. Actually are already hitting them. Let me mention three. First, the geopolitical fight between the US and China risks fragmenting the world. And if you are an average country, a fragmented world is no good world for you. And the prospect that fragmentation can advance is high. So you better watch out that this fragmentation doesn't happen. The second thing that an average country, say in Latin America, but I could also speak about the same difficulty in other latitudes or longitudes, is that the Russian aggression on Ukraine shows the problem that unilateralism can cause on average countries. So the difficulties that average countries will face with unilateral action, whether it's on the political or geopolitical, or whether it is on the trade scene. And let's remember that Latin America, last time I checked, is pretty dependent on international markets, on open international markets. And the third thing that if I were an average Latin American leader I would worry about is the fight against climate change. If we do not do this in a cooperative manner, countries are going to do it alone. And again, alone means extra costs for the countries in Latin America that want to be part of the global economy. So all roads in Latin America lead to being more active on the multilateral scene. Not because this is good for the multilateral system, which it is, but because this is an essential component to bring a bit of stability to Latin America that, yeah, faces lots of challenges. Frankly, these are not different from the challenges that countries face in other latitudes. They have to care much more about showing international leadership, including an international trade. You see more and more escalation in many Latin American countries, starting with, unfortunately, my own in the case of Mexico. Andres, let's talk about the democratic backsliding in the region, of course. It's not exclusive to Latin America, but it's spreading through the continent. And also talk about this idea of multilateral consensus driven forums, no pun intended, and the lack of tangible results or at least the feeling that they lack tangible results in the wake of a pandemic of a Russian invasion in Ukraine and the lack of action in climate change. Thank you very much. I think this is a hard time to be a Latin American. It was never easy, but perhaps it's harder today than ever, among other things, because we get no credit. Moistesses are saying that it goes to Indonesia. Indonesians think they invented populism. Americans think so. The Spanish are getting pretty good at it. We invented populism, right? We had Perón, and we had Vargas, and Cardenas, and of course Chavez. Compared to these guys, Donald Trump is just an apprentice. A really second-rate populist. More seriously, I think the big question that I would want to put on the screen is, why is it so difficult for Latin America to govern itself by some reasonable standard of performance? Look at the 20 countries in the world with the most desperate capital in the pandemic. Eight of the 20 were in Latin America. So over a third, and of course, we're not one third of the world, and Peru, a country that, at least back then, was reasonably well-managed is number one. So we have a problem with the ability of our governments, left-wing, right-wing, more democratic, less democratic to perform. And I think this is basically a political problem. Why is it a political problem? Beyond populism and beyond demagoguery, which, of course, has been around in humanity since the Greeks, I think Latin America has managed to give itself very bad political institutions. Take Peru as an example. The gentleman who's the president of Peru today did not manage to get even 20% of a vote in the first round. In the second round, he was confronted with another candidate who was fairly unsavory, who didn't really have more than 13%, 14% of a vote. One of the two had to win. He won. And after having made many, many promises, he went to Congress on the first Monday on the job and realized that he had one vote out of 10 in Congress. And therefore, every single promise he had made, he didn't have the slightest chance of enacting. On top of that, he comes from a party that he invented himself with a few friends, not particularly sound in its ideas, but it's a party with no national base, no organization, no credibility, no legitimacy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Peru may be an extreme example, but you're finding that pretty much all across Latin America. Colombia used to be a country with very strong parties. There were two of them, there were about 22 nowadays, and the people who were about to make it to the second round in a few days' time don't belong to either one of the big parties. When I went to school in the US many years ago, in Latin America, people used to tell you that Chile is a country with the strongest Latin American parties. Gone. We're having a constitutional convention, and the party that used to be the largest, the Christian Democrats, is one seat, one seat out of 155 in parliament. So what do you get? You get fragmentation, you get short-termism, and you get government by tweet. Tom, the US is not the only country which has been hijacked by government by tweet. And in this way, first, it is very hard to deliver, take the pandemic, take the economy, and it is also a setting in which narratives take hold which sometimes have a bit of truth, but are not the whole truth. Let me give you one example. The standard narrative about Latin America in the last 25 years is that Latin America is a very unequal country, or a very unequal region, sorry, and Latin Americans got tired of inequality, they took to the streets, and now the system is shaking. Of course, Latin America is very, very unequal. What that narrative does not tell you is that in pretty much every country in the region between 2000 and 2010, inequality fell very quickly because of high commodity prices, better fiscal policies, cash transfers, whatever. So the story that we have to explain is no one in which the region becomes more unequal and people get pissed off, it's a region in which it becomes starting from a very high level of inequality, slightly less unequal, and people are very upset. And why is that? Again, because politics is reserved for a few, because you look at Congress in many countries and the same people who've been there for a long time and because of democracy's inability to deliver on the things that matter to people. In the end, jobs, jobs, jobs. So where do we go? Well, I'm sure we will get questions on that on the second round, but let me just give you one taster. The taster is that economically, I'm gonna put on my head as an economist here, of course, we're facing something that looks like a perfect storm. Not quite the perfect storm because commodity prices are high, and for most countries, not every country in the region, that's good news, but everything else, of course, is looking pretty bad. Interest rates are high. And every time, if you look at history, every time there was a spike in interest rates in the US, you had a blow-up financially in some country in Latin America. And of course, the pandemic is not over. Economies grew very quickly in the year after the pandemic, but growth is pretty much zero now. Political instability means low investment, prospects for growth are dim. Not a pretty picture, but I'm sure we talk about that in succeeding rounds. Absolutely, and I promise that we had a great panel, and they say simplicity is an art form, and in 20 minutes, we were able, I think, to paint a very comprehensive picture of what's happening in the region. Can we go now? In the region. So now we can just go grab a drink, and no, no, but Moises, I wanna talk a lot about what's ahead for the region. We, I think, did a good job of painting a picture of what's happening right now, but I wanna talk about what's ahead, and also about the opportunities. When Michael Bloomberg called Latin America a fertile ground for entrepreneurship, I think there's a lot to explore in that concept. Arancha, I first wanna start by this idea of the dominant narratives, which I think it's fascinating, right? Sometimes we limit ourselves on repeating and perpetuating those dominant narratives around the region. What are people getting wrong about Latin America besides what you say, this lack of global leadership? What else are people getting wrong about Latin America today? No, I think there is a lot of homegrown, I mean, for a start, there are incredible amounts of unicorns in Latin America. There is innovation, there is technology uptake, there is modernization of the economy, but that's only the part that we don't necessarily see a lot, maybe because the French say to live happy, live hidden, maybe that's not that visible, and what we see is the politics. Now, I want to build on something that Damoy says we're saying about democracies. Democracies are legitimacy, but democracy is also about results, efficiency. And if we paint democracies only as legitimacy without looking at the efficiency performance, then we've got a problem. We need to put the two together. What we know is that there is plenty of entrepreneurs in Latin America that are innovative, that are inventing, that they are creating, and they are making the economy work. So maybe with a bit of doses of reforms, we can make it a bit bigger. Yeah, yeah, Tom Friedman, talk about the role the US is or should be playing in the region, especially now when it seems that it has lost, it's not, it doesn't seem, it has lost the sort of influence it had not too long ago. We have the Summit of the Americas coming up in a couple of weeks, and there's a melodrama around who gets to attend or not a very Latin American telenovela happening around the Summit of the Americas. Where has US leadership failed recently in the region and how can we correct the course? Well, the problem is that in the last five years, the leaders of three of the biggest countries in the world, the United States, Russia, and China, all tried to make themselves president for life. Let me repeat that in case you missed it. And drop the microphone. The leaders of all three of these countries had a president who tried to make himself president for life. That's not exactly the example that we wanted to set on a more serious tone. I'm happy to be here and talk about your problems, but I'm gonna talk about my problems now, okay? How much time do you need? Exactly, because you asked a very important question, because we hopefully we're gonna be a model right now. We are at a point in the United States where the core engine of American democracy, our ability to peacefully and legitimately transfer power is in doubt. And we have, we've seen a challenge in the last, in two elections since 2000, but the first time, Gore V. Bush, Al Gore said, the Supreme Court has spoken, I'm standing down. And in the last election, principled Republicans, a majority of them who either were governors or election officials, said no, Joe Biden won the most votes. You absolutely would be making the worst mistake in the world to assume that either of those things will happen in 2024. The Republican Party is not whispering that there was a big live election was stolen. They are running on that position. They're running on that. And there is a high probability that we will have a contested election and our ability to peacefully and stably transfer power for the first time since 1776 will not happen. And that's all I'm thinking about right now. I think it's the most important story in the world because I do have a expansive view out of America. I think we do our really important model for people. And if we go dark, it's gonna be a justification and invitation for every leader in Latin America to do the same, not to mention there, but all over the world. So we are on the edge of breaking something in America, something really, really big. And leaders are, they said in my column yesterday, Republicans are going there. They're going there. Kevin McCarthy wants to be Speaker of the House. That is third in line for the presidency. It's President, Vice President, God forbid, anything happens to him, the Speaker of the, he would be President of the United States. Kevin McCarthy, this month, three weeks ago, was caught lying about telling the truth. Who in your life have you ever met? Do you know anyone in your whole experience who lied about telling the truth? He said on the evening of January 6th to his party, Donald Trump must be impeached, and I'm going to the White House to tell him that. That was exposed in a book, and he said, I never said that. He didn't know we had the tape. He lied about telling the truth. Do you realize what aberrant behavior that is? And the effect was a one day story. So we know that he knows that we know that he knows that he doesn't believe a word coming out of his mouth, and they do it unabashed without embarrassment. So, y'all, I'm really worried about you. You know, I really, I wish y'all well, but we have so much bigger problem, and as a result, you have so much bigger problem given what's going on in America. I just want to give you a chance to react to that. The January 6th changed Latin America forever too. Well, I just want to say that the United States is going to be an example of, that we will see in Latin America where you have elections. It's no longer between two candidates, A and B, and each of them has pros and cons. In Latin America, in the United States, is it gonna be a choice about regime change? I am deeply convinced that if Donald Trump is elected as the next president of the United States, the regime, the political regime of the United States that we have known is gonna be altered deeply, profoundly. And I believe that in a lot of Latin American countries that is the case, elections will mean picking not a president, but a regime. And that is a different game. We have not seen that, we have seen episodes of that, but not in a systematic way like it is now. Andres. I should have warned you, I can ruin any dinner party and I do weddings and bar mitzvah. So I forgot to tell the people that. But it's an important, it's an important precision. Andres, I saw you, you also wanted to react to this, so please go ahead. I don't know, on the one hand I simply wanna welcome the United States to the community of nations that have such troubles, you know. You're one of us now, welcome to the club, welcome to the club. You mentioned democratic backsliding in a previous question, and none of us has really addressed that. This is absolutely terrible and it's happening all over the world in a way that is more subtle and more insidious than ever before. We in Latin America used to be the kings and queens, of course, there's a big coup and the generals and the guns and the guy in green fatigues and dark glasses. That ain't happening anymore, of course. Democratic backsliding today happens, and you have a nice, well-meaning, actually, well-meaning is not right. Who looks like he's well-meaning and who, you know, packing the court here and changing the rules there and fiddling with a majority over there suddenly has maybe not complete power, but closer complete power. And of course, you know, Moises' country is the tragedy that embodies that process, but we're seeing that in many other countries of the region. We're seeing it in Nicaragua, we're seeing it in Salvador in the most obscene way. Bits and pieces of that are today visible in Mexico, visible in Brazil, and the list is very long. And I do want to take you through with one thing that Anja said. It is true that democracies have to deliver, but it is also true that democracies have to be things that we are proud of, because given that no democracy delivers all the goodies all the time, we need to build some tolerance for those hard periods in which democracy is not delivered, but we love it anyway because it's democracy and it's ours and we built it, dammit. And one of the ongoing weaknesses of Latin American democracy over the last 200 years, I mean, democracy in Latin America did not begin last week, is precisely that an important part of the polity, sometimes on the right, sometimes on the left, is all too ready to say, oh, democracy, bourgeois democracy, neoliberal democracy, add any surname you'd like. Oh, we can do without that. And I think what we know, I am the child of the Pinochet dictatorship. I lived 16 years of my life in exile. Much of my family was in prison. What we learned is that democracy does not need a surname. We just want democracy. And democracies are resilient precisely when even in those periods when it's not delivering, people have a certain pride in the fact that in this country we choose the people who run the show. And that has weakened and I find that particularly worrisome. Let me, to the point raised by Tom and maybe to give him a bit of hope. Please, I need it. How we... All of us, I think you need it. How we saw what happened in the U.S., what we saw was the institutions of democracy Right. being resilient and making sure that the guy would not trump the rules. Which tells us that we have to care, if we really care about democracy, we do, certainly I guess in this room, we have to care about institutions. And we don't pay enough attention to those institutions. We think this is bureaucratic, but it's not bureaucratic. How we elect those institutions, how we destaff them, how we finance them matters to the health of our democracies. So that is big lesson we learned from the U.S., which I think all of us can take back home and that hopefully you in the U.S. can also work to strengthen. At a time where international institutions are understaffed, under-empowered, and under-financed, and we've seen the results of that. Local institutions, I don't need to hog the microphone here. What I found very moving on the day of the election was the local electoral officials in some county, I lived in the U.S. for a dozen years, I thought I knew the United States, counties I never heard of, one person under massive pressure with all the lights saying, well, I am told that I should say that Mr. Trump won, but he actually lost. And here's the count, you know, that is the kind of pride and strength of institutions that I think the U.S., and this is the good news, is very far from having lost. We're gonna go to the Q&A before we do that. Moises, Naim wants to ask you a question. So, I want to add to the good news and to the surprises. It's very hard to surprise an audience in Davos. You all read the Economist and listen and read to Tom Friedman, so you are well informed. And so, surprising news, difficult, but I will try. Which is the country that is the fastest growing country in Latin America? Don't answer, think. Which is the country that is going to have the fastest growth rate in the world in the next five years? We're talking about Guyana. 687,000 is the population. Economy is $4 billion, they just discovered oil, massive, massive oil. They have, the estimates are $1.1 trillion of reserves. 11 million barrels of loss over oil, very attractive. Geographically, very well positioned to trade in oil. Is GDP, this year grew 20%, is estimated to grow at 20% forever until oil stops being in demand. And they aim, in five years, they're gonna be pumping 1.2 million barrels per day. And so they're going to be big contributors to climate change and everything else. But they're gonna be a very, they're going to provide a test for one of the most interesting and difficult questions for which we have mixed messages that has to do with the resource curse the notion that if you are the exporter of a single commodity, your exchange rate, it gets overvalued, imports are cheap, but domestic production is expensive, accepting what you specialize in your commodity. So we're gonna see, they know that it's very dangerous. They're in very promising territory, but it's very dangerous because they can end up like Venezuela, Venezuela is a victim of the resource curse. And so we have this tiny country that nobody knows much about it, that nobody knows in terms of the details, that is going to be both the fastest growing country in the region and one that is going to be testing some of our main ideas about the economics and the politics of being a single commodity exporter. Thanks for that, Moses. Let's start with the questions. Some housekeeping items we have, I think, less than 10 minutes. If I'm right, you can share the conversation on social media using the hashtag WEF22. I'm contractually obligated to say all of that. I'm kidding. Let's start over here. I think we have someone with a mic and we'll pass it around. If we can keep the questions with a question mark at the end, they'll be peachy. Hey, Roger Wicker, Republican Senator from Mississippi. I'd just say, Tom, I think you're overly pessimistic. I think that county election worker that Mr. Velasco mentioned his mindset is going to prevail, but that's not why I'm intervening. I wanted to let you know of a bipartisan initiative by Senator Ben Cardin and me to enhance the OAS, the Organization of American States. And actually, this was legislation that was passed in 2020 and ironically signed by President Donald Trump. It has seemed to me as a member of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly over time that OAS wasn't as effective and certainly wasn't as well known. We've proposed and it is now the statute of the United States that we put our efforts behind forming a parliamentary forum to strengthen parliamentary dialogue among all of the countries of the Americas from Canada on down to the tip of South America. We had Mr. Cardin and I, a Democrat and a Republican, had a nice Zoom meeting with a number of Latin American leaders. What this would do is we've been asked about American leadership. We've heard about paying more attention to Latin America. Mr. Velasco said, he's glad we're one of you. We want to be one of, we parliamentarians for the United States want to be part of an honest to goodness parliamentary dialogue that includes members of the majority party but also legislators from the opposition party. That has not existed. There are some organizations that attempt to do this. I think put it under the imprimatur of the OAS would enhance it. If anyone from Latin America would like to talk to me about that, I am available and I'll send you to talk to Ben Cardin too. Thank you for allowing me to intervene. Thank you, Senator. It's great to have a view from Capitol Hill here in Davos, a taste of US politics at the Alps. Tom, I don't know if you want to react to that. I hope the center is right. The OAS and it's rolling everything that we've talked about, Moises. Are you a big fan of? Those institutions are as good as the members. And if the members are divided as is the case now, they cannot even agree on who should come to the Summit of the Americas. So that institution is crucially important. I welcome that initiative. I hope it works. But let's not forget that these multilateral institutions in effect are representations of countries, of states. And if those states are deeply divided, that is the case now, the institution will have difficulties performing. Over here, Marcos. And then we'll go here. Marco Lironi from Argentina. First, a very short comment. I think that I see the glass have full, more than the glass have empty. And I've heard a lot of half empty comments in this panel regarding the future of Latin America. I think that we work in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil. And I tell you, there's never been or there seldom been more opportunities for business as there is today, albeit in a cycle of increased commodities. But here goes the questions. To the panel, whoever wants to answer it, what in your view is an intelligent or would be an intelligent strategy for any country in particular, the region as a whole, with this dichotomy that has been planted upon us on being friends of China or friends of the US, because I do strongly believe that no one country in Latin America can forego being a commercial partner to China or very few countries can forego doing that. But if not all of the countries, most of the countries in Latin America are hit fastly in the Western camp. So what would be an intelligent strategy given those two premises? Yeah, I don't think I would very much argue with you that you cannot choose camps in a world where today China is an economy the size of the US. It's like asking you to choose between dad or mom. And you're gonna do that. But what you can do is work to strengthen the rules of the game. So you don't choose camps, but you want a multilateral system that shelters you against abuse from any of them, whether it's dad or whether it's mom. That's the winning strategy. Invest in making sure that the rules of the game are clearer, that the mechanisms are at your disposal and that you are going to limit the temptation of one or the other to abuse you, be it in a nice way or in a nasty way, like we know the guys know to do. In 30 seconds can I add a couple glass half full thoughts? Absolutely. Because we have been a little too gloomy maybe. When I was an undergraduate at Yale many, many, many years ago, a professor of mine brought an essay called Latin America in the 1940s. And the point is that he made us, World War II, the Holocaust, terrible things happening in the world. Latin America looked pretty good. A lot of bad things happening elsewhere. Maybe there's a chance that Latin America can look pretty good. Let me just give you two reasons why. We could be big producers of low cost, clean energy. We are a very sunny continent and we are a very windy continent and we have in some countries not all plenty of water. The crucial bit of course is kind of we export it. And the technology there is called hydrogen. If in fact you can put it into hydrogen and ship it, Latin America is poised for yet another commodity boom. Secondly, that thing that we all hate, Zoom. Latin America trained a lot of professionals who don't find jobs at home. They typically don't want to leave. So they're sitting, you know, driving Uber or driving taxis. Today you can be an architect and Buenos Aires and be designing housing projects in Beijing. You need a Chinese partner to sign the plans at the end, but you can do all the work at home. And a lovely suburb of Buenos Aires or Salta or Montevideo or pick your favorite Latin American city. So there are ways in which technological change is opening up big new opportunities for the region. On that note, I'm gonna have to end our discussion because we are right on time. Thank you so much. Andres, Tom, Moises, Arancha for your insights and for your time today. And thank you all of us. I mean, all of you for being here with us today. Thank you. Thank you.