Weekly Report - 25 May 2023 (WR-23-21)

Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso delivered his second annual state-of-the-nation address on 24 May, which marked what should have been the halfway point of his four-year term in office.... Read More

One by one, Colombia’s main illegal armed groups are raising serious doubts over whether President Gustavo Petro will be able to implement his flagship ‘total peace’ initiative.... Read More

Bolivia’s President Luis Arce, still battling the fallout from a severe shortage of US dollars, is under fire from all sides.... Read More

Peru’s former president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (2016-2018) earned a short-term reprieve on 22 May when a judge ordered prosecutors to restart their investigation into him.... Read More

Chile’s giant state copper mining company Codelco announced on 19 May that it had created two subsidiaries to explore and exploit lithium.... Read More

Brazil’s environment minister, Marina Silva, has spoken out against an executive decree (MP) which would strip some subordinate agencies and functions away from her ministry as well as the ministry for indigenous peoples led by Sônia Guajajara.... Read More

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was invited to this year’s G7 leaders’ summit from 19-21 May as an external partner, amid the group’s efforts to gain the favour of developing countries such as Brazil and India who maintain a non-aligned foreign policy, cooperating with the US, China and Russia, and some of whom have expressed similar calls for peace talks to end Russia’s war in Ukraine.... Read More

ARGENTINA | Economy slows.... Read More

Mexican Navy Marines seized the facilities and railway yards on a section of line in the eastern state of Veracruz, operated by Grupo México, one of the country’s largest conglomerates, early on 19 May.... Read More

The opposition Va por México is struggling to reach a consensus over a proposal for selecting a presidential candidate to represent the disparate coalition in the July 2024 elections.... Read More

Carlos Pineda, a businessman running for the conservative Prosperidad Ciudadana (PC), has become the third presidential contender to be barred from Guatemala’s 25 June general election by the discredited electoral authority (TSE).... Read More

The recent decision by the governors of the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (Cabei), a multilateral development bank, not to renew the five-year mandate of its executive president, Honduras’s Dante Mossi, could prove a major blow to Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega.... Read More

“A milestone in bilateral ties.” This was the response by Cuba’s deputy prime minister and foreign trade & investment minister, Ricardo Cabrisas, to a string of deals recently signed by Cuba and Russia during the visit to Havana of a high-level delegation from Moscow.... Read More

“From the very beginning, my great and gifted predecessor, George Canning, foresaw that Latin America would hold the balance of power in world politics [and that] rings as true today as when he said it in 1826,” the UK’s foreign secretary, James Cleverly, said in a keynote speech delivered in Santiago, Chile, on 22 May.... Read More

“The vast majority of voters have applauded the application of the measure [the muerte cruzada] as the best moral sanction against obstructionist [legislators] with their clear desire to carry out a coup.”... Read More