Montevideo spent this week playing host to the hemisphere's progressive lawmakers, as the third edition of the Panamerican Congress opened inside the city's Legislative Palace on Friday, running through Sunday. Uruguayan President Yamandú Orsi is welcoming delegations from more than fifteen countries across North, Central and South America and the Caribbean — the largest turnout the young forum has drawn since it began meeting two years ago.
Unlike treaty bodies such as the Organization of American States, the Congress has no binding authority. It functions instead as a recurring gathering where left-leaning legislators compare notes and try to build a common playbook across borders.
From Bogotá to Montevideo
The project dates back to August 2024, when Colombian President Gustavo Petro brought eight delegations together inside Bogotá's National Capitol. That inaugural session closed with the Declaration of Bogotá, a founding text pledging to shield democratic institutions from disinformation and outside interference, to pursue regional peace through negotiation rather than force, and to fund a green economic transition that reflects wealthier nations' historical environmental debts to poorer ones.
A Widening Circle in Mexico City
A year later, the gathering roughly doubled in size. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum hosted delegations from twelve countries inside the Senate building in Mexico City, where discussions turned to equality, prosperity, solidarity and sovereignty, according to the Congress's own account of its editions. Delegates left that session having agreed to reconvene in Uruguay — setting the stage for this week's meeting.
Warming Up: Rio, Santiago and Toronto
Organizers spent the past year staging smaller preparatory events to build momentum toward Montevideo. A May seminar in Rio de Janeiro brought together ministers and legislators to discuss industrial policy and regional supply chains, followed in June by a session in Santiago built around the theme "Green Industrial Policy From and For the South."
That Santiago gathering, covered by the Chilean outlet The Clinic, drew lawmakers and academics from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Peru and Uruguay. Chilean senator Beatriz Sánchez used the session to pose a question progressive parties keep returning to: how the opposition can drive growth and job creation without controlling the executive branch. Tomás Leighton, executive director of the Chilean think tank Rumbo Colectivo and one of the event's organizers, argued the answer lay in giving the state better coordination tools rather than shrinking it. The same reporting confirmed the Montevideo dates and the fifteen-country turnout organizers were projecting.
The following month, the focus moved north to Toronto, where the Broadbent Institute and Rumbo Colectivo co-hosted a public panel on artificial intelligence and digital sovereignty. Speakers included Canadian NDP leader Avi Lewis, Chile's former science and technology minister Aisén Etcheverry, and Costa Rican National Assembly member Sigrid Segura of that country's own Frente Amplio party — plus Nancy Okail, president of the Washington-based Center for International Policy, according to the Broadbent Institute's recap of the event. A fourth and final preparatory session followed in Mexico City in August, billed as focusing on multilateralism; reporting on that session's full agenda was harder to independently confirm.
What Delegates Will Actually Discuss
Over three days at the Legislative Palace, delegates are working through policy proposals in an effort to sketch a shared hemispheric agenda, with peace and diplomacy, technology and digital sovereignty listed as headline themes — a continuation of the groundwork laid in Toronto and Mexico City. The Congress describes its purpose as building trust among the region's legislators, mapping the challenges they hold in common, and designing cooperative strategies rooted in dialogue and mutual respect.
A New Wrinkle: Washington's Shadow
This year's edition carries a charge the first two didn't have to reckon with. Following the U.S. military intervention in Venezuela and the removal of President Nicolás Maduro late last year, the Trump administration has leaned into a more assertive hemispheric posture that critics and even the president himself have taken to calling the "Donroe Doctrine" — a play on the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. Announcing the Venezuela operation, Trump said that "American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again."
That backdrop is shaping who showed up in Montevideo. According to reporting from Common Dreams, the U.S. delegation is being led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) set to address the Congress remotely. Reps. Nydia Velázquez and Delia Ramirez — who earlier this year introduced legislation modeled on the Franklin D. Roosevelt-era "Good Neighbor" approach to Latin America — are also part of the delegation. Organizers are framing the week's discussions partly as a direct counterweight to Washington's newly muscular approach to the region.
No Treaties, No Secretariat — Yet
For all its growth, the Congress remains a loosely structured affair. It has no treaty-making power and no standing secretariat, relying instead on allied think tanks — Rumbo Colectivo in Chile and Brazil's Fundação Perseu Abramo among them — to keep the project moving between sessions. Its founding under three left-leaning presidents, Petro, Sheinbaum and now Orsi, has so far kept its membership largely confined to parties already sympathetic to that project.
Whether Montevideo produces anything more binding than shared talking points is still an open question. What's certain is that, for a third consecutive year, left-of-center lawmakers from across the hemisphere have found a room to compare notes — with a fourth edition presumably still to be named, and Washington watching more closely than it did the first two times around.
