LatinNews Daily - 03 January 2020

On 2 January, Colombia’s Fuerza Alternativa Revolucionaria del Común (Farc), the political successor to the demobilised guerrilla group, reported the murder of  former combatant Benjamín Banguera Rosales in the south-western department of Cauca.... Read More

* Germany’s federal ministry of foreign relations has contributed €1m (US$1.11m) to the United Nations (UN) World Food Programme (WFP) in Ecuador, which will go towards aiding the humanitarian response operations the WFP brings to vulnerable people in situations of human mobility.... Read More

On 2 January, Venezuela’s attorney general Tarek William Saab addressed a letter to Brazil’s attorney general Augusto Aras, requesting the extradition of five members of the Venezuelan armed forces (FANB) who fled to Brazil after supposedly being involved in an attack on a Venezuelan military base earlier in December 2019.... Read More

* Brazil’s foreign trade secretariat at the economy ministry (Secint/ME) has released the latest figures for the country’s trade flows, which totalled US$401.363bn in 2019.... Read More

On 2 January President Laurentino Cortizo highlighted the need to reactivate Panama’s economy as a key challenge for his Partido Revolucionario Democrático (PRD) government.... Read More

* The British energy company Tullow Oil (Tullow) has announced that the Carapa-1 exploration well, drilled on the Kanuku licence offshore Guyana, has encountered approximately four metres of net oil pay based on preliminary interpretation.... Read More

On 2 January, Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said that his government would focus this year on “pacifying the country [and] stopping the violence”.... Read More

* Mexico’s national statistics institute (Inegi) has released new figures which show Mexico’s exports in November 2019 totalled US$37.5bn, a 2.9% fall on November 2018.... Read More

On 2 January, Argentina’s President Alberto Fernández said that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) cannot expect to collect the debts owed by Argentina in the terms set out in their Stand-By Arrangement (SBA) and must accept the renegotiation of the debt repayment terms.... Read More

* Chile’s central bank (BCCh) has released the latest instalment of its monthly economic activity index (Imacec), a GDP proxy measure, which shows that economic activity in the country fell by 3.3% year-on-year in November 2019.... Read More