LatinNews Daily - 14 May 2018

Development: On 12 May Nicaragua’s military issued a statement condemning the ongoing violence which began last month amid a brutal crackdown by the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) government led by President Daniel Ortega against anti-government protesters.... Read More

Development: On 12 May Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro appealed to all generations of Venezuelans to “unite as a single family” and vote in favour of his re-election this weekend.... Read More

Venezuela: Transparencia Venezuela, the local branch of international anti-corruption NGO Transparency International (TI), has released a report regarding the contracts signed between Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht, which has admitted to paying millions of US dollars in bribes to government officials across Latin America, and the Venezuelan governments led by the former president Hugo Chávez (1999-2013) and his successor, President Nicolás Maduro.... Read More

Development: A 25-year-old motorcyclist, Diego Augusto Ferreira, was gunned down on 12 May by a member of Brazil’s armed forces during a raid in the Vila Militar favela, in western zone of the city of Rio de Janeiro.... Read More

*Brazil’ss supreme electoral court (TSE) will allow candidates in the October general election to start crowdfunding for their electoral campaigns from tomorrow (15 May).... Read More

Guatemala: Thousands of teachers in Guatemala have called off a strike which has lasted more than 22 days after reaching a deal with the education ministry, mediated by the human rights ombudsman Jordán Rodas.... Read More

Development: On 13 May local education advocacy NGO Mexicanos Primero heavily criticised Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the presidential candidate of the leftist opposition Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (Morena) party in the 1 July general election, for promising to repeal the 2012-2013 education reform if he wins election.... Read More

*Figures from Mexico’s finance ministry (SHCP) show that Mexico’s budgetary income stabilisation fund (FEIP), a public trust created in 2001 to ease the effects of fluctuations in the price of oil on public finances and the national economy, had a balance of M$259.3bn (US$13.4bn) in the first quarter of the year, the highest amount since the FEIP was created.... Read More

Development: On 12 May Argentina’s cabinet chief, Marcos Peña, insisted that the decision by the government led by President Mauricio Macri to turn to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for financial assistance was “not because of a crisis but to avoid one”.... Read More

Chile: Chile’s finance minister, Felipe Larraín, has said that he believes that economic activity in the county may have increased by as much as 5% in April, higher than the 4% increase recorded by the central bank (BCCh) in its monthly economic activity index (Imacec), a GDP proxy measure, in March.... Read More

Argentina: During a visit to Washington DC on 8 May, Argentina’s agriculture minister, Luis Miguel Etchevehere, asked his US counterpart, Sonny Perdue, to open a dialogue table on the technical requirements needed for Argentina to resume beef exports to the US.... Read More