More foreign affairs in a crazy, mixed-up world

Updates on Panama, Suriname, Argentina, and South Korea

As a former Foreign Service Officer—my wittier old colleagues called me a “reformed” FSO after I walked away from the State Department in 1997—I keep my eyes out for unusual and outrageous events occurring in countries of interest to the United States, particularly those I have served in or visited. This occasionally includes analyses of U.S. actions affecting those countries, whether wise or effective—or neither—and in some cases, simply puzzling.

Two of my favorite subject countries—Panama and Suriname—have been in the news just this week, prompting today’s blog update. Meanwhile, two others—Argentina and South Korea—continue to astound the world with their inexplicable displays of domestic leadership, as well as how they are treating their leaders.

First, the Panama Canal—already the object of sustained attention by and veiled threats from the new Trump administration—appears close to a deal engineered by a major U.S. investor, Blackrock, to purchase controversial ports at either end owned by a Hong Kong-based company [See “BlackRock Led Group,” March 4, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/04/business/blackrock-panama-canal-ports-hutchison.html?campaign_id=60&emc=edit_na_20250304&instance_id=149042&nl=breaking-news&regi_id=66543734&segment_id=192512&user_id=9e758cd9bf637abc0a14a155f872e540 ].

It is a complicated $23 billion deal. Under its terms as announced in a joint statement with BlackRock, Hutchison agreed to sell all shares in Hutchison Port Holdings to a consortium led by Blackrock, its subsidiary Global Infrastructure Partners, and a third group, Terminal Investment. The HPH subsidiaries hold 80 percent of the Hutchison Ports group, which oversees 43 ports in 23 countries (including England, Mexico, and many EU countries)—control of most or all of which will now pass to BlackRock and friends.

According to Barron’s, the BlackRock consortium agreed to acquire a 90 percent interest in Panama Ports Company, which owns and operates the ports of Balboa and Cristobal in Panama—and which Trump has accused of operating under the secret control of the Chinese government. [See “BlackRock Acquires Majority Stake,” March 4, https://www.barrons.com/articles/blackrock-panama-canal-ports-trump-5fbfdc5f .]

Confused so far? Don’t feel alone. The end result is that ownership of the two Panamanian ports by the U.S.-led investment group should bring a temporary end to one of Trump’s stranger fantasies—that China would act to block the Canal by collapsing bridges and exploding computers that operate container cranes during any major difficult upheaval in the Far East, such as its supposedly-imminent invasion of Taiwan.

What this deal will not do, however, to lower the “outrageous” fees charged to U.S. ships which transit the waterway, another major source of complaints by Republicans in the U.S. Senate; those fees are set by the independent Panama Canal Commission, not the port owners, which have absolutely nothing to do with Canal operations. That may require yet another unfortunate visit to Panama’s political leaders by the Chief Apologist and Water Boy, Marco Rubio, carrying more thinly-veiled threats from on high.

The Hong Kong firm CK Hutchison is selling off its stake in port of Balboa, Panama, Photo courtesy Bloomberg

For this deal will no little to reinforce the larger foreign policy goals of the Trump administration, either. Larry Fine, the billionaire CEO and co-founder of BlackRock, is no ally of anyone now in power; the longtime Democrat and former supporter and close friend of Hillary Clinton is interested in profits for his investment groups, and little else. He is simply taking advantage of an opportunity that may—or may not—pay off in the long run.

Apparently Hutchison saw the writing on the world’s seawalls and decided to make its own profit quickly—in a very sweet deal for them—before the Chinese government might have chosen to co-opt its operation. Now it is up to Fine and BlackRock to prove that they can keep these ports profitable and pay dividends to investors, and that will involve hiring experienced folks to run the ports, both in Panama and Europe. He will not certainly be looking to Washington any of those experts.

* * * * * * *

Not too far away from Panama lies Suriname, that clown-like South American refuge of fugitive drug smugglers, Chinese casino gangsters, and Romanian home-invasion bandits. It has emerged as the apparent star of a startling new scheme: selling off its rare jaguars in a ghoulish version of the widely-reviled trade in human organs.

If you can trust Jeff Bezos’s floundering Washington Post—whose motto used to be “Democracy dies in darkness,” but whose editorial page has now gone almost dark instead—it seems the endangered animal is being trapped in the nation’s vast jungle interior, sold, then dissected, and its fangs, pelts, bones, and sex organs sold on the world’s underground markets. You don’t want to know how the clients use the latter, but let’s just say it involves an obsession with male virility.

A rescued jaguar at the zoo in Paramaribo, Suriname. Courtesy Washington Post

According to the intrepid Post reporters, only a handful of these beautiful but dangerous wild jaguars have been saved so far by the country’s hapless Suriname Forest Service, whose head, Romeo Lala, says he “has just 50 rangers to police a jungle territory larger than the state of Georgia” [59,000 square miles]—and one working 4-wheel vehicle for the entire country, much of it mountainous and almost impenetrable, given the country’s poor-to-nonexistent internal roads.

One of those jaguars now resides in the Paramaribo zoo, founded in 1972 by former prime minister Jopie Pengel, but his long-term fate is uncertain in a country where money talks and corruption is ubiquitous. During the dictatorship of the late, unlamented Desi Bouterse in the 1980s, the zoo was almost decimated—with no explanation of who slaughtered Pengel’s carefully-acquired animals or why. I never got to visit it when I was posted there in 1989 and 1990, but I understand at least it has recently been renovated—and is drawing tourists again; it is now one of the few tourist sites in the capital city not to house a Chinese casino.

Enter U.S. officials, who would like to take a bite of the $23 billion worldwide illicit wildlife trade—particularly because so much of it is run by the same people who smuggle illegal Chinese immigrants into the United States through Mexico: 60,000 reportedly since 2023, many of them with forged documents made available after surreptitious arrival in Suriname. But it is arduous and expensive to mount such an investigation, which may take years, and the United States is likely to lose interest well before then.

A curious undercover operation authorized by Congress in 2023 and mounted by the U.S. government into the nefarious wildlife industry was detailed by the Post in its recent Sunday feature describing undercover actions by a small new unit, HSI (Homeland Security Investigations) of the Department of Homeland Security. DHS, of course, is now overseen by former South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem—ironically famous for gleefully admitting she shot her own dog after it disobeyed her. The avowed huntress has now technically responsible for protecting dangerous animals from the wilds of the South American jungle.

Noem has changed her look, as well, currently starring in a lavish new U.S.-paid commercial ominously warning undocumented migrants to “go home” before she finds and deports them. Future illegal migrants are warned grimly that “we will hunt you down.” Gone for the moment, at least, are the silly costumes she donned in a series of brain-dead tourism commercials before graduating from Pierre to Washington—though one fully expects her to pull out Dirty Harry’s .44 Magnum any minute. [See press release, “DHS Announces Nationwide and International Ad Campaign Warning Illegal Aliens to Self-Deport and Stay Out, https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/02/17/dhs-announces-ad-campaign-warning-illegal-aliens-self-deport-and-stay-out .]

How long the HSI operation will survive in Noem’s Brave New World is anybody’s guess. The HSI was set up by Congress during the Biden administration, grounds for early termination in almost every case these days. In any event, no one at DHS was talking about it to the Post reporters. The telegenic Noem herself was too busy, apparently, helping round up undocumented immigrants and deporting them back to their countries of origin—except for China, of course, which will neither acknowledge nor accept U.S. deportees, many purposefully smuggled out through Suriname and thence to the Mexican border.

Suriname’s surface is covered almost completely by its rain forest, inhabited largely by wild animals. Courtesy Washington Post

For her latest career move, the so-called “ICE Barbie” donned Special Forces-like headgear and full body armor in helping ICE agents invade an apartment complex in Northern Virginia, in search of the so-called “worst first.” (Once brain-dead, always brain-dead?)

Kristi Noem, the “ICE Barbie” of Trump’s Brave New World. Courtesy ANC News

So jaguars, beware. Noem may be coming for you next, in a stylishly-camouflaged tank. Tune in this summer, after the Surinamese parliamentary elections, and see how well the U.S. move to protect the jaguars is paying off. [See “In Suriname, a shadowy hunt for traffickers selling jaguar parts to China,” February 23, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/02/23/suriname-jaguar-trafficking-dhs-investigations/ .]

* * * * * * *

Argentina has made great, if sometimes faltering strides toward democracy since its brutal military dictatorship ended in 1983. But it cannot seem to escape its bloody past entirely—nor can its current president, Javier Milei, who has lately tied himself into a bizarre scandal over cryptocurrency, escape his own folly. According to the New York Times, this is how it started: “with a tweet.”

“The world wants to invest in Argentina,” Javier Milei, Argentina’s president, posted at 7:01 p.m. on Valentine’s Day, offering a code to buy a new cryptocurrency. The digital coin was called $Libra, and it had been created 23 minutes earlier. Over the next few hours, thousands of people invested. $Libra’s value skyrocketed.

Then it swiftly collapsed. The largest stakeholders had sold their coins, leaving almost everyone else with a collective $250 million in losses. To cryptocurrency veterans, it was a classic ‘rug-pull.’ A celebrity touts a new digital coin, prices soar and then insiders who own most of the coins pull the rug: They sell their stakes for a big profit at the expense of amateur investors who got in later.” [See “Milei, $Melania, and Memecoins,” February 28, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/world/americas/argentina-crypto-scandal-president.html .]

The unpredictable economist-in-chief of Argentina then spent the rest of February sharing a stage with a chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk at the Conservative Political Action Caucus (CPAC) in Washington—after furtively deleting his tweet, then furiously denying rumors that he staged the $Libra scam to enrich himself.

Javier Milei, at far right, cheers Elon Musk in Washington. Photo courtesy New York Times

It was only the latest international black eye for his country, which was featured—though unflatteringly so—in a chillingly ghoulish CBS Sixty Minutes segment this past weekend. The story concerned the continuing attention being paid to the fate of 30,000 “disappeared” Argentine citizens, abducted and presumably murdered by the country’s dictatorship more than 40 years ago.

Many of their bodies were tossed from airplanes over the Atlantic from 10,000 feet—some still alive, horrifically—by military pilots who have come to face justice only in the last decade. Some of the naked bodies, belonging to kidnapped grandmothers and nuns, unexpectedly washed up on Argentina’s shores, when the planes did not go out far enough …

The bloodthirsty dictatorship is ancient history for some. It ended in 1983, after the unlucky loss to Great Britain in the ill-fated Falklands War, followed by an uneasy return to democracy. The Sixty Minutes segment focused in part on the return of one of those old British Skyvan PA-51 airplanes from the United States, where it was recently being used to transport skydiving tourists in Fort Lauderdale, Florida—all quite unaware of the terrible history of the plane they were boarding, “quite literally, a vehicle for evil,” according to telemagazine reporter Jon Wertheim.

Skyvan plane, once used by Argentine military to dump bodies over the Atlantic in the 1970s. Courtesy CBS Sixty Minutes

Thanks to the diligence of an Italian documentary photographer and an Argentine investigative journalist, the 50-year-old plane was retrieved and “is grounded for good here at the former Navy School of Mechanics, or ESMA, in a Buenos Aires neighborhood,’ said Wertheimer. “The facility is now a museum and a memorial to the 30,000 citizens tortured and murdered during the dictatorship,” where “images of the victims adorn the walls—most were students, dissidents, and union members, never charged with a crime.”

Amazingly, its original logbooks were still onboard, detailing hundreds of trips made out into the dark Atlantic on Wednesday nights with no official explanation. [See “How a small plane, once used by Argentine military,” https://www.cbsnews.com/news/finding-argentina-death-plane-60-minutes-transcript/ .]

The Argentine government purchased the plane in 2023 and repatriated it for the museum, according to a Buenos Aires Times piece detailing its gruesome history:

“The plane’s most infamous journey took place on December 14, 1977. On that day, three members of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo human rights group—Azucena Villaflor, María Ponce de Bianco and Esther Ballestrino de Careaga—as well as French nuns Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet were tortured, sedated and finally forced into the small plane and flown up in the air. Their captors then threw them into the sea and to their death.”

[See “Skyvan PA-51 death flight plane,” February 2, 2023, https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/argentina/death-flight-plane-that-flew-mothers-of-plaza-de-mayo-to-their-death-to-be-repatriated.phtml .]

This occurred during the waning months of President Alberto Fernandez’s lackluster administration; he did not seek reelection in 2023. Whether the incoming government of Javier Milei would even have wanted the plane is anyone’s guess. The conservative new president took office 9 months later, and is often accused of cozying up to the nation’s military, rather than continuing to stir up old troubles that do not serve his specific political purposes as an “anarcho-capitalist.” Almost confoundingly erratic, he has lately made no secret of wanting Italian citizenship—or as a baptized Catholic, of converting to Judaism.

Despite his flair for theatrical gestures and his academic credentials, Professor Milei somehow seems as ill-fitted as the luckless astrologer Isabel Peron—whose foolish reign ignited the military takeover in 1976—to lead the country out of economic chaos, and as prickly as the self-absorbed Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, the former president who singlehandedly drove Argentina into international default in just seven years while publicly squabbling with the cardinal who later became Pope Francis.

Milei is convinced that embracing free markets and Trump’s heretical sideshow will somehow save him from similar disgrace. And in all fairness, to some degree, so far he has been right. The country’s wildly fluctuating inflation rate—84.5 percent (!!) in January—was the lowest since he took office, and down 30+ points since December. But it is still stuck near the fatal point of doubling prices every year. (Think about that for a minute …)

Meanwhile, critics in the Argentine congress already want to impeach him for his ill-fated tweet, and the ubiquitous Kirchner—who also served as vice president until 2023, now the dyspeptic leader of the opposition—might smile, for once, instead of frowning.

The country’s current vice president, lawyer and author Victoria Villarruel, is an even more enthusiastic supporter of the military—her father served in the Falklands War—and has recently broken ranks with Milei over his new deal with Britain. She succeeded Kirchner as vice president, after all, and might well prove to be an easier target of—or co-conspirator—for Kirchner’s machinations.

* * * * * *

Finally, South Korea’s impeached and imprisoned president, Yoon Suk Yeol, may be on the verge any day of being removed from office—and eventually sent to prison for life. There has been no official announcement yet from the country’s Constitutional Court, but observers seem to think the court will soon act to uphold the opposition-controlled parliament’s impeachment, triggered after Yoon declared martial law briefly in December—and then tried to take it back.

After Yoon refused to cooperate with the Court voluntarily, he was finally arrested on separate insurrection charges—which carry a maximum penalty of death—and hauled into a courtroom. His February trial concluded with his insistent plea that he did nothing wrong, that he was only trying to save Korea from a nefarious fifth column of North Korean sympathizers.

If removed from office, he will then be tried in criminal court on the insurrection charges. That trial could last up to a year. Meanwhile, crowds of both Yoon supporters and opponents staged noisy, competing rallies in Seoul last weekend, according to Global News.

You might well ask, as I did, just who—if anyone—is in charge there at the moment. That unenviable job belongs to Finance Minister Choi Sang-mok, South Korea’s second acting president in three months. But he is struggling to unite the country, torn by economic uncertainty over Yoon’s fate, in the face of possible U.S. tariffs threatened by U.S. President Trump during his speech to Congress on March 4, according to the Financial Post.

Choi became acting president only the first acting president, former Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, who assumed power after Yoon’s impeachment, quickly ran afoul of parliament and was also impeached; Han awaits a similar trial before the Constitutional Court.

Choi will continue, presumably, until a new election occurs to replace Yoon—mandated to come 60 days after the office is declared vacant, as in in 2017, after former president Park Geun-hye was removed—and later imprisoned for corruption. [See “Trump puts spotlight on Korea for ‘higher than China’ tariff,” March 5, https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/trump-puts-spotlight-on-south-korean-higher-than-china-tariffs .]

More to come …

Next time: More foreign affairs in a crazy, mixed-up world