Washington Got a System Update. Latin America Is Already Running the Next Version.
In March, Purple Strategies and POLITICO published “Advocacy in Washington’s New Normal,” a survey of 340 advocacy professionals plus interviews with senior public-affairs leaders. Its conclusion was that Washington now runs on a different operating system. Power has centralized in the White House, influence has turned transactional, and the venues that once carried a fight, from agencies to bipartisan process to predictable rulemaking, no longer hold the weight they used to. To anyone who runs government affairs across Latin America, that reads less as news than as a description of the building they already work in. Washington just got a system update. Latin America has been running the next version for years, and most U.S. multinationals are still operating their LATAM public-affairs function on the old build. What follows is the map of the version they are actually on.
The new operating logic
1. The presidency is the operating system; agencies are now peripherals. The Washington report says the White House has become the dominant center of gravity. In Latin America the executive went further. It did not merely centralize the decision, it dismantled the venues where decisions used to be made. Mexico eliminated seven autonomous regulators by constitutional reform, including INAI, Cofece, IFT, CRE and CNH, and folded their functions into line ministries. The antitrust function now sits inside the Secretaría de Economía (Economy Ministry) as the Comisión Nacional Antimonopolio (National Antitrust Commission), created in July 2025. In Argentina, Javier Milei repealed or amended more than 300 laws through a single mega-decree, DNU 70/23, and changed close to 100 laws by decree in his first year. The agency you used to file with may not exist as an independent address anymore.
2. Influence is transactional and personalized, and it runs through people, not institutions. The report calls “new influencers, not always in government” an emerging feature of Washington. In Latin America it is the default architecture, not a trend. Argentina’s strategic decisions move through an informal “triángulo de hierro” (iron triangle) and, increasingly, through Karina Milei and an inner circle the local press calls “los karinos.” A presidential sister with no elected office is consolidating ministries and gatekeeping cabinet access. The org chart is not the power map. In Latin America the gap between the two is wider, more durable, and likelier to run through a family member than anything Washington has produced.
3. The check-and-balance venues have been captured, not merely weakened. The Washington report notes that some fights are shifting toward courts and statehouses. That framing assumes the courts are still an independent escape valve. In much of Latin America they are part of the executive system. Mexico’s Supreme Court, whose justices were popularly elected in June 2025 on roughly 13% turnout and seated that September, has handed down at least six rulings backing Morena-sponsored reforms and decrees, and none against. An advocate who treats a captured high court as a neutral backstop is mis-reading the board.
4. The real fight has migrated subnational, and the executive keeps it bilateral on purpose. Beyond the courts, the live arena is the provinces and the states. La Nación reported in January that Milei “imposed bilateral negotiation with the provinces and dismantled the governors’ front” (“impuso la negociación bilateral con las provincias y se desarticuló el frente de gobernadores”). He refuses to deal with governors as a bloc, takes them one province at a time, and trades fiscal transfers for legislative votes. Seven governors tried to form a common front to negotiate from strength; the bilateral strategy is built precisely to break that. The decisive table is no longer national, and no longer collective.
What no longer works
Four staples of the old LATAM playbook that the new system punishes:
- The technical-merits memo as the lead instrument. A flawless regulatory-impact argument moved agencies when agencies decided; it does little when the decision sits with a president weighing electoral stakes.
- Routing engagement through the independent regulator. In Mexico the independent regulator no longer exists as a separate venue; the function now reports up through a ministry that answers to the presidency.
- The single national-capital strategy. A federal-capital relationship is still necessary and no longer sufficient when the executive deliberately fragments the real negotiation into subnational deals.
- The peak business chamber as a proxy voice. Chambers such as COPARMEX, the CCE in Mexico and the CNI in Brazil are at peak visibility and peak pressure at once; an umbrella statement is a weak substitute for a company knowing its own exposure.
The playbook
1. Re-map power before you spend a peso. Build the map from how decisions actually move, not from the constitution. Identify who decides, whether that is the presidential inner circle, the family member, the party operator or the governor, and which specific action will settle the outcome: a decree, a ministry reorganization, a budget transfer. Then build the named, individual relationships now. They have long lead times and cannot be improvised in a crisis.
2. Argue in the executive’s currency. Translate every ask out of technical language into the terms a presidency actually trades in: jobs in a politically sensitive state, the administration’s growth story, the investment headline it wants to claim. This is craft, not cynicism. The Washington report quotes an advocate saying “it’s not a threat, it’s reality.” In Latin America that line carries more force, because the political consequence is the whole argument.
3. Stand up a subnational desk and run it as a primary channel. Build genuine state- and province-level capability and treat governors as principals, not as relays to the capital. Where the executive negotiates one province at a time, the multinational that already holds a credible relationship with a specific governor is inside the real process, not waiting outside the national one.
4. Use coalitions as precision instruments, and own your exposure map. Join a chamber for what it can credibly say that a single company cannot, and for nothing else. Do not outsource the political read. Each company needs its own current picture of its regulatory exposure, its access, and its vulnerability to a transactional shift.
What this means for your operation
None of this means the executive always wins. In November, Ecuadorian voters rejected all four of President Daniel Noboa’s referendum questions, including a constituent assembly and the return of foreign military bases. The checks can still hold. That is exactly why the work is reading which venues function and which do not, country by country, never as a single regional assumption.
Three tests will show whether the system is hardening or softening. The first is whether Milei’s 2026 tax and criminal-code initiatives clear Congress. The second is Mexico’s Supreme Court ruling on the pending Salinas Pliego tax case, the cleanest test yet of whether the new court will ever rule against the executive. The third is whether any major LATAM business chamber breaks from quiet accommodation into public confrontation.
The reader running government affairs in São Paulo, Mexico City or Houston has a version number to check. The question was never whether the system changed.
It is whether your operating model already did.
Further reading: