LatinNews Daily - 27 July 2017

Development: On 26 July, El Salvador’s President Salvador Sánchez Cerén condemned a ruling issued the same day by the constitutional chamber (SC) of the supreme court which suspended a legislative reform approved on 18 July by the 84-member unicameral national assembly aimed at addressing the country’s pensions crisis.... Read More

Development: On 26 July, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated 13 current and former senior Venezuelan government officials as undermining democracy, human rights abuses, violence and repression, plus corruption.... Read More

Peru: The national congress has elected Luis Galarreta of the main right-wing opposition Fuerza Popular (FP) party as its new president for 2017-2018.... Read More

Development: On 26 July, Brazil’s federal government revealed that it has posted a fiscal deficit of R$56bn (US$17.8bn) in the first six months of the year - the worst result for this time period since records began in 1997.... Read More

* Federal judge Hilton Queiroz has overturned the suspension of the PIS/Confins tax on petrol, diesel, and ethanol fuels decreed by the federal government, which had been issued by another federal judge last week.... Read More

Central America... Read More

Development: On 26 July, Mexico’s national statistics and geography institute (Inegi) released new statistics which show that the national homicide rate reached 20 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2016, the highest rate since 2012 and the fourth highest in the past decade.... Read More

* Thousands of farmers have staged a protest march in Mexico City demanding that the agricultural chapter of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) be excluded from the upcoming renegotiations of Nafta’s terms due to start next month.... Read More

Development: On 26 July, representatives of Paraguay’s Coordinadora Nacional Intersectorial (CNI), the umbrella peasant farmers association, rejected the latest offer tabled by the government to refinance their debts and vowed to continue with their protest campaign.... Read More

Argentina: The foreign ministry has issued a statement noting that representatives of the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) regional trade bloc and Canada held a meeting at the ministry’s offices in Buenos Aires on 24 July to discuss a new prospective bilateral trade agreement.... Read More