LatinNews Daily - 19 October 2021

On 18 October, Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso declared a 60-day state of exception allowing the armed forces to work alongside the police to counter a surge in drug trafficking activity.... Read More

* The international credit ratings agency Fitch Ratings has downgraded Peru’s long-term foreign currency issuer default rating (IDR) to ‘BBB’ from ‘BBB+’, maintaining its outlook as ‘stable’.... Read More

On 18 October, it was reported that a judge on a criminal court in the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro accepted charges filed by prosecutors against two police officers for their actions during a police raid in the Jacarezinho favela which left 28 dead.... Read More

* Economists in Brazil have warned that the slowdown in economic growth in China will be felt particularly strongly in the commodity-exporting South American giant.... Read More

On 18 October human rights groups complained about police intimidation designed to dissuade protesters from participating in demonstrations against President Nayib Bukele in El Salvador’s capital San Salvador the previous day.... Read More

* Guatemala’s central bank (Banguat) has released the latest figures on foreign trade, which show that exports in the first eight months of 2021 totalled US$8.9bn, up 21.6% on the value of exports recorded over the same period a year earlier.... Read More

On 18 October Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and US Special Climate Envoy John Kerry skirted around their disagreements on environmental issues and sought to accentuate the positive during a meeting in Palenque, in the southernmost state of Chiapas.... Read More

* The finance and public credit committee in Mexico’s federal chamber of deputies has approved the draft revenue budget (Ley de Ingresos), the income side of the 2022 budget proposal, with 24 votes in favour and 17 against.... Read More

On 18 October mainly peaceful demonstrations, but with some violent incidents, were held across Chile to mark the second anniversary of the national protest movement; on the same day the constituent convention (CC) began its substantive debates to draft a new constitution.... Read More

* Argentina’s ministry of productive development has announced that the secretary of domestic trade, Roberto Feletti, is in discussions with representatives from the business sector to freeze prices on hundreds of widely used consumer goods, principally food, in a bid to keep costs down for consumers faced with rising inflation.... Read More