Medina clinches PLD hat-trick

According to latest results from the Dominican Republic (DR)’s electoral authority (JCE), with 97.4% of the count in, the presidential candidate for the ruling Partido de la Liberación Dominicana (PLD), Danilo Medina, has secured 51.26% of the 20 May vote.

Unravelling the clues of Venezuela’s political future

When a crossword writer is hauled in by the intelligence service for allegedly concealing details of an assassination plot to destabilise the government, it gives a strong indication of that country’s prevailing political climate. This is the Venezuela of today; with President Hugo Chávez absent for long periods in Cuba undergoing life-or-death medical treatment and elections looming on the horizon, political tension and uncertainty has penetrated to the heart of the Bolivarian Revolution and threats seem to lurk in every corner.

“We are not seeing a trend” - IMF

Even as Argentina’s congress approved the state takeover of Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF) on 3 May, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) rebuffed concerns about a new wave of nationalisations in Latin America. "It's a very diverse region, and we would not call what we are seeing, you know, a trend. And I think it's important to know that the region overall has enjoyed high levels of FDI in recent years” , spokesman Gerry Rice told reporters.

The Summit of the Americas and drug legalisation

The VI Summit of the Americas, held on 14-15 April in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, has been written off by a number of commentators as a failure because it did not reach agreement on matters that were not on the agenda: the legalisation or decriminalisation of drugs; Cuba’s admission; and Argentina’s wish for hemisphere-wide endorsement of its stand on the Falkland/Malvinas sovereignty dispute. Disagreement was real enough, and it resulted in no final declaration being issued. The perception of failure, though, was largely due to misrepresentation of one non-agenda item: drug policy.

The world’s second most powerful mother introduces ‘Caring Brazil’

President Dilma Rousseff continues to smash records. To mark Mother’s Day in the US (and much of Latin America) Forbes Magazine came up with a list of the 20 ‘most powerful moms’ in the world. Top of the list, predictably, was Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state. Less predictably, Rousseff was placed second, above Indra Nooyi, the chairman and chief of PepsiCo, Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, Melinda Gates, co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Sonia Gandhi, chairperson of India’s United Progressive Alliance, Michelle Obama, the US First Lady and Christine Lagarde, the International Monetary Fund’s managing director, among others.

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