Weekly Report - 27 August 2020 (WR-20-34)

Despite 20 parties managing to nominate presidential candidates for next February’s general election before the midnight deadline on 23 August, some high-profile names are set to be absent from the ballot.... Read More

Colombia’s President Iván Duque has claimed that Venezuela is interested in buying medium- and long-range missiles through Iran, a development guaranteed to ramp up tension with the US administration led by President Donald Trump.... Read More

A wave of massacres - or “collective homicides”, as the government refers to them - has swept across rural areas of country where illegal armed groups are particularly active.... Read More

Thirteen people died as a result of a stampede at a Lima nightclub on 22 August, provoked by a police raid.... Read More

PERU | Record GDP contraction. Peru’s GDP declined by an unprecedented 30.2% year-on-year in the second quarter of 2020, Peru’s national statistics institute (Inei) announced on 20 August, with the country now officially in recession after recording a 3.4% contraction in the previous quarter.... Read More

Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro avoided a defeat in congress last week thanks to the chamber of deputies, which sided with the government and against the senate in maintaining a presidential veto to the law which regulates the federal government’s financial aid to states and municipalities during the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic.... Read More

Chile’s constitutional referendum has been billed as an essential step to build a new consensus after the deep divisions and widespread protests that shook the country in late 2019.... Read More

On 21 August Argentina’s President Alberto Fernández issued a decree declaring internet services, pay-TV, and fixed and mobile telephony to be an “essential public service”, thereby allowing his government to freeze their tariffs, effective until the end of this year.... Read More

ARGENTINA | Economic recovery? On 20 August Argentina’s national statistics institute (Indec) released the monthly indicator of economic activity (Emae), used as a proxy of GDP, which gave an indication of the extent of the damage caused by one of the region’s longest and strictest lockdowns for coronavirus (Covid-19).... Read More

“All corruption needs to be publicly exposed…to stigmatise the corrupt, to embarrass them.” With these words Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador called for the video that the former director of the state-owned oil firm Pemex, Emilio Lozoya Austin, submitted to prosecutors as evidence of how bribes were distributed in the previous Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) administration [WR-20-32], to be made public.... Read More

Six weeks after assuming power, Suriname’s President Chandrikapersad Santokhi is coming to terms with the scale of the challenge he inherited from his populist authoritarian predecessor Desi Bouterse (2010-2020).... Read More

Amid the ongoing stand-off between President Nayib Bukele and the opposition-controlled legislature over the lack of transparency surrounding government spending [WR-20-32], the position of Attorney General Raúl Melara is attracting growing scrutiny.... Read More

The recent death of Cuban political dissident Yosvani Aróstegui Armenteros, following a 40-day hunger strike, has subjected the Cuban government led by President Miguel Díaz-Canel to fresh scrutiny regarding human rights.... Read More

“I have never sought out anything for myself, through their hatred and mediocrity my enemies have never understood that, and in order to destroy me they did not mind destroying our sacred land.... Read More