The Active Non-Alignment (ANA) proposal is seductive. Indeed, today Latin America carries less weight than before on the world stage—both economically and politically—and at the same time United States–China tensions are increasing. Being passive in the international arena is not an attractive option, and neither is, in Latin America at least, siding openly with Washington or for Beijing. The thesis of an ANA, then, at least has the advantage of responding to these two concerns that many Latin American analysts have detected for some years.

However, the ANA also has some challenges and they are not easy to overcome. To give this innovative proposal the credit it deserves, it is imperative to identify those challenges and find a way, if possible, to overcome them. I see three initial challenges.

The first is the geopolitical and economic division of Latin America into two distinct spheres, largely determined by the relationship with the United States and with China of the countries in the region. The second is about the difficulty of being symmetrical in the approach and criticism of both superpowers. They are not the same. Third, for Latin America to develop a non-aligned and active international position, it would have to embrace causes that for many countries are still alien or that for many leaders in Latin America today are even anathema.

The division into two subregions occurs mainly through the way countries are linked to the global economy. However, for historical and geographical reasons this division also overlaps others. On the one hand, there is what we could call, following a North American tradition of the 1980s, the Caribbean Basin: Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean islands, and perhaps Colombia and Venezuela, although they rather belong to South America. The countries of the Caribbean Basin, in the first place, have been much more closely related to the United States than the countries of South America. Its main linkage to the world economy is with the United States through the export of manufactures, services—tourism and migration—and other illicit sales such as drugs.