LatinNews Regional Monitor: Brazil & Southern Cone - 15 January 2018

Development: On 12 January, civil police officer Fabio Monteiro was found dead in the boot of a car near the Arará favela in the northern zone of Brazil's Rio de Janeiro city.... Read More

* Brazil’s financial securities regulator CVM has banned investment fund managers from investing in Bitcoin and other kinds of cryptocurrency.... Read More

Development: On 14 January, the local police reported that a group of unidentified individuals had set on fire a Catholic Church in the locality of Melipilla, which forms part of the metropolitan area of Chile’s capital, Santiago.... Read More

Paraguay: The finance ministry has formally requested the central bank (BCP) to provide it with a US$90m cash advance so that it can cover central government expenses this month.... Read More

The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (Eclac) published its updated estimates and forecasts for the regional economies in 2017 and 2018 on 14 December.... Read More

Chile’s political pendulum has swung back to the right again.... Read More

In the tail-end of his five-year term in office, Paraguayan President Horacio Cartes appears to have taken on a new job: trying to steer almost 20 years of free trade negotiations between the European Union (EU) and Mercosur to a successful conclusion.... Read More

As our Special Focus on Mexico shows (see below), notwithstanding intensifying external and internal pressure most governments in Latin America, along with the judiciary, the police, and other state agencies, are still struggling to respond adequately to corruption.... Read More

A wave of new low-budget airlines (also known as low cost carriers or LCCs) is arriving in Argentina with plans to shake up the local air travel market.... Read More

US-based Boeing, the world’s largest aerospace company, and Brazil-based Embraer, the world’s third-largest aircraft manufacturer, acknowledged in December that they were talking about doing something together.... Read More

Brazilian automobile production rose 25.2% in 2017 to reach 2.699m units, according to industry body Associação Nacional dos Fabricantes de Veículos Automotores (Anfavea).... Read More

As we went to press on 9 January, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) issued its latest short-term energy outlook, in which it projected that US crude oil production would average 10.3m b/d in 2018, the highest annual average production in US history, surpassing the previous record of 9.6m b/d set in 1970.... Read More

Coca-Cola move in Chile... Read More