LatinNews Daily - 19 March 2018

Development: On 17 March, Paraguay’s political opposition and civil-society groups expressed their repudiation of a new constitutional reform bill approved by the national congress, which seeks to make it more difficult for national legislators to be impeached. ... Read More

Development: On 18 March, the Ecuadorean government led by President Lenín Moreno confirmed that two armed incidents took place in Ecuador’s coastal province of Esmeraldas, on the border with Colombia.... Read More

Bolivia: Today (19 March) public hearings begin at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague regarding Bolivia’s case against Chile over access to the Pacific Ocean, which it lost in the 1879-1883 War of the Pacific.... Read More

Development: On 17 March, Brazil’s state-owned postal service firm, Correios, denied that the bullets used to kill Marielle Franco, a Rio de Janeiro city councillor and human rights activist, had been stolen from one of its offices.... Read More

* Romário de Souza, the former Brazilian football star who is currently a federal senator for the centrist Podemos (PODE) party, has announced his bid to become governor of Brazil's Rio de Janeiro state ahead of the October general election.... Read More

Development: On 18 March, the permanent coordinator of the United Nations (UN) in Honduras, Igor Garafulic, said new agreements had been reached at the technical pre-dialogue table set up to address the post-electoral crisis in Honduras following the November 2017 general election won by Juan Orlando Hernández.... Read More

Central America... Read More

Development: On 16 March, Mexico’s national electoral institute (INE) announced that Margarita Zavala was the only aspiring independent candidate to have met the requirements to be entitled to stand in presidential elections on 1 July.... Read More

* Credit ratings agency Fitch has identified Mexico’s presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador as a potential risk to the country’s economic stability.... Read More

Argentina: Argentina’s head of the cabinet, Marcos Peña, and treasury minister Nicolás Dujovne have signed an agreement to increase the state budget for 2018 which the local news website Infobae estimates will result in a budget deficit of over Ar$1.4bn (US$69m).... Read More

Mexico: On 13 March, US President Donald Trump visited the US-Mexico border near San Diego, California, where he inspected the prototypes for his proposed border wall with Mexico.... Read More