LatinNews Daily - 25 January 2019

Development: On 24 January, Honduras’s 128-member unicameral national legislature approved constitutional changes which would dissolve the electoral authorities (TSE) and restructure the national registry office (RNP).... Read More

Development: On 24 January, Interpol issued an international arrest warrant for ‘Aureliano Carbonell’ (Víctor Orlando Cubides), one of the negotiators for the Colombian guerrilla group Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) in the suspended peace talks with the Colombian government in Cuba.... Read More

* Peru’s minister of foreign trade & tourism, Édgar Vásquez, has announced that in April Peru and China will begin new negotiations to optimise the free trade agreement (FTA) which was originally signed by the two countries in April 2009.... Read More

Development: On 24 January, Jean Wyllys, a federal deputy for Brazil’s left-wing Partido Socialismo e Liberdade (PSOL), announced that he was relinquishing his seat as deputy in congress and leaving the country, citing increased harassment and death threats.... Read More

* Brazil’s economy minister, Paulo Guedes, said that he will look to lower business income tax in Brazil from an average of 34% to 15%, as a way of attracting more foreign investment.... Read More

* Nicaragua’s central bank (BCN) has published figures which show that in the third quarter of 2018 Nicaragua’s total external debt totaled US$11.2bn, of which US$5.7bn corresponds to the public sector. The debt-to-GDP ratio was at 83% - showing a 0.1% decrease compared with the figures observed in the second quarter of 2018.... Read More

Development: On 24 January, Alejandro Gertz Manero, the head of Mexico’s newly revamped federal attorney general’s office (FGR), announced the opening of a new investigation into the ‘La Estafa Maestra’ corruption case that implicates various federal government officials.... Read More

* Mexico’s national statistics institute (Inegi) has released new figures which show that national economic activity was up 0.4% in November 2018, compared with the previous month, while the year-on-year rate was up 1.7%.... Read More

Development: On 24 January, Santiago Soto, the deputy director at Uruguay’s planning and budgets office (OPP), rejected the doubts about the veracity of official government economic data raised by Un Solo Uruguay (USU), the agricultural producers’ protest movement, as being “irresponsible and baseless”.... Read More

* Argentina’s national statistics institute (Indec) has released its latest figures on monthly economic activity (Emae) which reveal that there was a fall of 7.5% in November 2018 year-on-year.... Read More