According to President Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela received just US$100m from oil sales in March, which he said was a 97% drop from US$3.5bn two years ago. Maduro didn’t specify the provenance of his figures but on central bank balance of payments data, Venezuela’s oil exports peaked in 2013 at US$93.6bn overall that year, equating to average monthly earnings of US$7.8bn, an amount that the Maduro government can only dream about these days. Indicative of the severe cash crisis, international reserves hit a new low US$12.93bn this week and the most important oil services provider in Venezuela, Schlumberger, which has been…
COLOMBIA | External debt. Colombia’s central bank (Banrep) has released a report showing that the country’s external debt reached US$111.2bn in December 2015, representing 38.1% of Colombia’s GDP. As a ratio of GDP Colombia’s external debt increased 11.3 percentage points (26.8%) compared to December 2014 and the figure is also 9.8% higher than the nominal figure recorded that month. According to the report, this substantial increase is mainly due to “the decreased value of the current GDP caused by the depreciation of the Colombian peso compared to the US dollar”, together with “the expansion in dollars of the external debt’s…
Despite the announcement by the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), Colombia’s second-largest leftist guerrilla group, that it will soon engage in formal peace negotiations with the government, it has launched a military offensive in recent weeks, prompting a counter-offensive by the armed forces. The decision by Clan Úsuga, the country’s largest emerging criminal organisation (Bacrim), to initiate a new campaign of violence in repudiation of the government’s peace negotiations with the guerrillas [WR-16-13] is also a factor in the upsurge of violence in the country. All of this is sparking fears that the peace process being conducted by the Juan…
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