Energy crisis: The recent dispute over the Panama Canal expansion project [RC-14-03] might ultimately have failed to impact on the ruling Cambio Democratico ahead of the 4 May general elections (see sidebar). However, President Ricardo Martinelli has come under fire over another issue with economic implications: his failure to address the country’s energy crisis. On 17 March Martinelli announced energy rationing measures for both the private and public sector (hospitals, schools and other health services have been exempted). This came four days after a fire at the thermoelectric power plant in the La Chorrera municipality, in central Panama, reduced Panama’s…
On 5 April El Salvador's new president-elect, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, met President Juan Orlando Hernández in Tegucigalpa. The visit, part of a regional tour by Sánchez Cerén before taking office on 1 June, comes amid renewed bilateral tensions over Isla Conejo (Rabbit Island), a tiny unpopulated rocky outcrop some 500m away from the Honduran coast in the Gulf of Fonseca, a Pacific coast area jointly administered by Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Honduras has been occupying the outcrop unchallenged at least since 1992, but El Salvador claims it as its own. The meeting was well received, given doubts as to…
President Juan Orlando Hernández tweeted that he was “very happy” with the statement issued by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) following its 26 March-8 April visit to Honduras to conduct the 2014 Article IV consultation. The deputy finance minister, Carlos Borjas, said the government hoped to reach agreement with the Fund on a new stand-by loan agreement (SBA). The last US$212m SBA ran out in March 2012 and was not renewed after Tegucigalpa said it couldn’t accept the Fund’s fiscal prescriptions. The presidential designate, Ricardo Alvarez, stressed that while the government knows that a deal with the IMF is important…
Salvador Sánchez Cerén wasted no time in announcing his key cabinet ministers, and embarking on a tour of Central America, after being proclaimed president-elect by the supreme electoral tribunal (TSE) one week after the desperately closely contested presidential run-off on 9 March against Norman Quijano. Both moves sent out powerful statements of intent. Sánchez Cerén, a veteran guerrilla, will become the first member of the left-wing Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) ever to hold the presidency, the present incumbent President Mauricio Funes being an independent. The right-wing opposition Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (Arena) accepted defeat after less than…
Last month former president Alfonso Portillo (2000-2004) admitted having received US$2.5m in bribes from Taiwan while in office. Portillo made the admission as part of a guilty plea in the US, where he was extradited in May 2013 to face money laundering charges – becoming the first former Guatemalan president to be tried in another country. Portillo’s guilty plea again raises questions about his acquittal in 2011 by a Guatemalan court for other corruption charges – one of the biggest setbacks to the United Nations-backed International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala [RC-11-06] since it began its mandate in 2007. According…