Following his inauguration on 15 August as Paraguay’s new president, Horacio Cartes has taken the first steps towards mending the country’s fraught relations with its regional neighbours. Achieving this, while obtaining ironclad assurances from these same neighbours that Paraguay’s sovereignty henceforth is respected fully, is the most complex and challenge immediately facing the novice administration and one that could make or break President Cartes’s five-year term. After Paraguay’s congress in June 2012 impeached former president Fernando Lugo (2008-2012), the country was ostracised from both the Union of South American Nations (Unasur), the main regional political talking shop, and from the…
Falling just over two months before the 17 November general election, the 40th anniversary of the coup that ushered in the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1974-1990) inevitably took on added political resonance. Legacies of the Pinochet era, like the privatized higher education system and the binomial electoral system, are key issues in the 2013 campaign. Forty years on from the 11 September 1973 coup against the left-wing former president Salvador Allende (1970-1973) and his Marxist Unidad Popular government, Chile remains politically divided, albeit less so than a decade ago. In a report* released on 3 September by the Santiago-based…
Another date for the diaries of Argentine debt-watchers: on 30 September the US Supreme Court will decide whether to hear Argentina’s appeal against a ruling that would block further payments on its current bonds unless it also pays holdout creditors. Following another decision against the country in late August, and looking ahead to a possible Supreme Court judgement, Argentina’s chamber of deputies voted overwhelming to approve a new indefinite debt swap offer for the remaining 7% of holdout creditors from the country’s 2002 default. Given that the main attraction of the new offer is that it has no expiry date,…
Fear of crime, as well as recorded incidence of crime, is rising steadily in Argentina. The annual survey carried out by the Observatorio de la Deuda Social Argentina at the Universidad Católica (UCA), published in July, found 30.3% of respondents had been victims of a crime in 2012, up from 28.4% in 2010. Fear of crime was up 2.3% from 2010 to 2012, and was just as high among low-income interviewees as among the middle and upper classes. With such fear threatening to eat away at the ruling Frente para la Victoria (FPV) voter base, the party has promoted a…
A victory large enough to rewrite the constitution may be out of the question, but there are signs that the ruling party, the Frente para la Victoria (FPV), is well-placed to put in a decent performance in the legislative elections due on 27 October. Success in the mayoral elections of the northern Patagonian city of Bariloche in early September, and a surprisingly strong showing by the FPV in the gubernatorial elections in Corrientes, have offered signs of encouragement to the party leadership. Bariloche Five months after the ousting of the mayor of Bariloche, FPV candidate Maria Eugenia Martini was elected…