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Development: On 21 July a commission of the chamber of deputies released a report claiming the Chilean government lost around US$6bn during the privatisation of state firms during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Significance: The findings of the commission, composed entirely of members of the ruling leftwing Concertación, are unlikely to help those angling for the privatisation of other state firms, such as Codelco, the state-run mining company. Despite a series of scandals about corruption at the firm, the Chilean public remains opposed to its privatisation. The current high world price of copper, of which Chile is the world's largest exporter, has made a substantial contribution to Chile's strong economic growth. The report comes at a time when two parliamentary commissions have been set up, at the instigation of Chile's rightwing opposition, to look into the running of both state and private firms during the period 1998-2004. 

The commission found that the sale of just 30 of the country's largest firms (out of a total of 725) lost the state some US$2.2bn. The report said that the privatisations carried out were created to benefit government employees who were able to snap up the firms at a bargain price. One example was the Compañí­a de Aceros del Pací­fico (CAP), which was sold for US$105.5m, but whose value subsequently rocketed to US$811.5m. The document also reported other dishonest activity with state assets, such as the transferral of 11,000 pieces of state real estate into private ownership.

Development: The Brazilian federal police arrested a senior official of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, Francisco Antonio Medina Collazos, on 24 August in São Paulo.

Significance: Medina Collazos is a controversial figure in Brazil as well as in Colombia. His arrest is another twist in the interlinked scandals over campaign finance that have dominated the Brazilian media for the past six months.

In March 2005 a Brazilian news magazine, Veja, reported that, according to the Brazilian secret service, Medina Collazos, who is also known in Brazil as Cadenas Collazos, had offered President Lula da Silva's party, the Partido dos Trabalhadores, US$5m from the Farc for the elections in 2002. What is not clear is whether the PT actually got the money. Veja reported that, according to the secret service, Medina Collazos met senior PT officials on 13 April 2002 who cheered when he made his offer.

The Brazilian authorities have picked up Medina Collazos before, in 2000. Then they arrested him in Rio Grande do Sul over problems with his visa before letting him go again. The Farc hailed his release then, calling Medina Collazos a comrade, a political activist and claiming that he was the Farc's "ambassador" to Brazil.

This time the Brazilian authorities arrested him after Colombia applied for his extradition and the Brazilian supreme court allowed the application to go forward. The supreme court will now have to decide whether to allow him to be extradited. The Colombian government wants him to face murder and terrorism charges. In Colombia, Medina Collazos went under the alias of Cura Camilo López and acted as the Farc's press spokesman during the peace negotiations with the preceding Colombian government.

It seems that the Colombians were tipped off about the arrest because President Alvaro Uribe announced in Barranquilla, that the Farc press chief had been arrested well before the São Paulo police admitted the fact.

The Colombian secret service, Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad, has been on the trail of Medina Collazos, who is now 58, for years. The DAS said that Medina Collazos trained as a priest in the Seminario Mayor de Garzón and was ordained priest and held several parish posts in the diocese of Huila before joining the Farc in 1983. He then rose through the Farc's ranks to become the private secretary to Manuel Marulanda, the Farc commander-in-chief.

According to the DAS, Medina Collazos first went to Brazil 10 years ago and established an alias there as Olivério Medina. The DAS claims that he ran a religious community in Brazil and managed a religious publications business.

Separately, but also on 24 August, the Colombian authorities mounted a huge security operation around a hospital in Tunja when Rodrigo Granda, the Farc's so-called foreign minister who was kidnapped by the Colombians from Venezuela in December 2004, was rushed in for emergency treatment. Granda has a prostate problem. After treatment, he was taken back to prison before nightfall.

Development: The government sent a revised draft of its proposed political reform to congress on 27 September.

Significance: The government of Alfredo Palacio is rekindling the debate on political reform. It sent the draft of a 17-question referendum on issues such as whether the legislature should have one or two chambers to congress and admits that the referendum to approve the changes is more likely in February 2006 than December 2005. Some of the proposals are radically straightforward: who can argue with a law which demands that parties pick their leaders and presidential candidates through primaries? Others are highly controversial.

The most controversial suggestion is that the three constitutional elements (the executive, the legislature and the judiciary) should each appoint three members to each of the nine-person Tribunal Supremo Electoral and the Tribunal Constitucional which will police the new system. What makes this suggestion controversial is that that the referendum will ask, provided the supreme court has been chosen before the referendum, whether people are happy with it: if the reply is no, the government will have 30 days to call what it terms "an electoral assembly" to pick a new supreme court. The last elected government, of President Lucio Gutiérrez, came unstuck over its abrupt reform of the supreme court.

The final controversial element in the reform is a rule that the system it produces can only be modified in its first eight years by another referendum, rather than by congress changing the laws.

Development: On 31 October the attorney general, Isaí­as Rodrí­guez, ordered the arrest of Isaac Pérez Recao and Daniel Romero, two alleged participants in the April 2002 coup for refusing to testify over their involvement.

Significance: The attorney general is investigating around 300 people for their involvement in the short-lived government of Pedro Carmona, who is now in exile in Colombia. Rodrí­guez's predecessor, Danilo Anderson, was killed by a car bomb in November last year while investigating the participants in the coup, which left up to 50 people dead, and returned President Hugo Chávez to power after the 48-hour reign of "Pedro the Brief".

Rodrí­guez said he had ordered the detention of the two men for their failure to testify over the events of April 2002, despite repeated requests by the ministry of law and order. Daniel Romero, a lawyer, read the document which declared Carmona to be president, while Pérez Recao, a reputed arms dealer and heir to an oil fortune, played a highly visible role during the coup. The arrests follow the opening of charges on 21 October against Cecilia Sosa, the former president of the supreme court, and two lawyers, for their roles in the ouster of Chávez . The attorney general used evidence compiled from Carmona's autobiography, "My testimony to history" to accuse Sosa.

The attorney general also announced his intention to ask journalists who covered the coup to give their version of events. He said that this was not to force them to reveal their sources but to advance the investigation. Rodrí­guez admitted that the idea to call journalists to testify was inspired by an article in the anti-Chávez daily El Nacional on 30 October entitled "Journalists resist confiding in the attorney general" which included interviews with journalists who rejected the idea they had to testify.

Development: Marcelo Ebrard, the candidate of Mexico City mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, easily won the primary on 4 December for the Partido de la Revolución Democrática's nomination to be mayor of Mexico City.

Significance: Ebrard's easy (60:40) win against Jesús Ortega means that there will not be a nasty feud in the PRD heartland of Mexico City. Such a feud could have derailed López Obrador's campaign for the presidency. The elections for the presidency, and mayor of Mexico City, are due on 2 July 2006.

The PRD has yet to say how many people voted. It claimed that voting picked up as the day wore and ended up being quite high. The PRD has controlled Mexico City since elections started in the city in 1997.

Development: The Unidad Nacional party, led by Samuel Doria Medina decided to block the election of the senate president on 16 January. The new congress is due to meet today, 17 January.

Significance: Evo Morales and his Movimiento al Socialismo do not have a majority in the senate, despite winning the elections last December. The centre-right opposition Podemos has 13 senators to MAS's 12. MAS secured the support of one of the two independent senators, from the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario, but the other, José Villavicencio, from Unidad Nacional wants to be president of the senate and is refusing to back either the MAS or the Podemos candidates.

All the parties are reading the fine print of the constitution. The country's vice president, Alvaro Garcí­a Linera, has the right to sit in the senate and will preside if the senate cannot choose a president. The MAS is quite happy for this to happen because the president of the senate only gets to vote if there is a tie. If he was not president, Garcí­a Linera could, in theory, vote every time, thus ensuring a tie between the MAS and Podemos.

The MAS has nominated Santos Ramí­rez as its candidate. Podemos has nominated a senator from Santa Cruz, Oscar Ortiz.

Development: According to a report published by the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo on 19 February, Brazilian meat exporters are paying bribes to Russian authorities to dodge the embargo imposed by the Russian government on Brazilian beef.

Significance: The Russian government imposed a total embargo on Brazilian beef on 12 December following an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the states of Mato Grosso do Sul and Paraná. According to O Estado, however, Brazilian meat exporters are ducking the embargo by paying Russian health authorities bribes of US$125 per tonne of beef exported to Russia. The bribes ensured that the sale of Brazilian beef to Russia continued despite the embargo. In fact, Brazilian meat exports to Russia doubled in January, reaching 24,000t (worth US$45.38m) in comparison to the 12,500t exported in December.

The Brazilian Ambassador in Moscow, Carlos Augusto Santos Neves, denied the allegation made by O Estado when he was contacted by the newspaper. According to the report, however, the case is well-known to both the Brazilian and Russian governments. O Estado based its report on several sources, including negotiators in the Brazilian agriculture ministry, who admitted that "part of the trade between Brazil and Russia goes under the table". The Russian embassy in Brasí­lia did not comment.

In another article published on the same edition, O Estado told that multinationals operating in Brazil have started to cut investments in the country because of increasing production costs. According to the report, multinational companies have decided to reduce their production in Brazil because of the Real's strength against the dollar, which has started to affect the price of Brazilian exports. O Estado cites the cases of Bunge and ADM, two multinationals that operate in the soya market, which have suspended investments worth US$1bn and reduced their production capacity in Brazil by 30%. The report also cites a study by the Central Bank which revealed that foreign investment in metallurgy in Brazil has fallen by 62% year-on-year, reaching US$310m in 2005.

Development: Despite recommendation from the Ethical Council of congress, two other deputies were cleared by their peers of involvement in the cash-for-vote scandals late on 22 March.

Significance: With the pardoning of Wanderval Santos, from the Partido Liberal, and João Magno, from the ruling Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), seven deputies have now been absolved by congress. As in the previous cases, congress went against the advice of the Ethical Council, which found enough evidence of both Santos and Magno's involvement in the cash-for-vote scheme to recommend their impeachment.

So far only three deputies have lost their seats in connection with the scandal. Four others resigned before the Ethical Council started investigations to avoid losing their right to run in the October elections. Congress's decision outraged public opinion: both Santos and Magno confessed in congress having received bribes from Marcos Valério de Souza, the advertising tycoon who lies accused of supplying the money to feed the corruption scheme mounted by the PT.

Members of the Ethical Council say that their work has been in vain, undermined by a group of deputies who did not even bother to show up to vote in plenary. The opposition accuses the government of offering to back congressmen's pet projects provided they voted to absolve their two colleagues. A group of congressmen has started to lobby for changes in the vote-secrecy rule for such matters. They believe, rightly, that if the voting was recorded publicly, fewer deputies would take such a relaxed view of corruption.

Development: On 1 May the new legislature sat for the first time, listened to outgoing President Abel Pacheco's final speech and voted in the new government-backed president of congress.

Significance: Although an auspicious start for the government, it is unlikely that many other pieces of legislation will pass so easily. The president-elect, Oscar Arias, who will take office on 8 May, had said that controlling the presidency of congress was a fundamental requisite for him to fulfil his campaign promises.

The election of Antonio Pacheco, from the ruling Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN) was the most significant event of the day. He won with 38 votes (out of 57) and was backed by his own party, six members of the rightwing Movimiento Libertario (ML) and five from the outgoing Partido Unidad Social Cristiano (PUSC). He also received the support of each of the tiny, independent parties (with one vote each), Unión Ciudadana and Restauración Nacional.

The PLN had to negotiate hard with the ML and promised the party it would prioritise its plans to push through reforms to increase competitivity and grant property-ownership rights to people living in border areas and marginal urban zones.

Development: On 2 June President Nestor Kirchner dropped the strongest hint yet that he will seek re-election in 2007. He said that “the candidate will be an Argentine man or woman, a pingüino or a pingüina", a reference to himself and his wife, Senator Cristina Fernández, who he says would have all the credentials for the job.

Significance: Kirchner's decision to speak about re-election came at the end of a week in which his former economy minister, Roberto Lavagna, was hotly tipped to launch a challenge in 2007. A leader of the main opposition party, Unión Cí­vica Radical and former president, Raúl Alfonsí­n, repeated his call for Lavagna to head a "centrist and progressive" coalition in 2007. Lavagna, who has refused to comment on the issue, attacked several of the government's economic policies.

Cabinet chief Alberto Fernández and interior minister Aní­bal Fernández, a heavyweight in the cabinet, both dismissed Lavagna's putative challenge on 3 June. Alberto Fernández said Lavagna had been put forward by “two former presidents trying to drag Argentina 20 years into the past". The second ex-president is presumably a reference to Eduardo Duhalde, who still commands the support of a faction of disgruntled Peronists.

Development: Manuel Contreras, the erstwhile head of Augusto Pinochet's secret police, said on 8 July that the former dictator was involved in drug-trafficking.

Significance: This is a sensational claim against Pinochet, especially given that it comes from someone so close to his regime. Moreover, Contreras' story ties into a broader scandal involving the Pinochet regime and its assassination of former foreign minister Orlando Letelier in Washigton.

According to Contreras, Pinochet and his son Marco Antonio oversaw the distribution to the US and elsewhere of cocaine manufactured at an army-run laboratory at Talagante, 40km southwest of Santiago. The profits from the illegal narcotics then went into Pinochet's overseas accounts, helped by businessman Edgardo Bathich and a Syrian, Monser Al Kassar.

In charge of producing the cocaine was Eugenio Berrí­os, also a member of the secret police (the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, Dina). Berrí­os, who has also been accused of producing poison-gas for Piniochet, was murdered in Uruguay in 1993 before he was due to testify in an investigation into the murder of Chile's former foreign minister, Orlando Letelier, who was killed on Pinochet's orders in Washington in 1976. In April this year three Uruguayan military officials were extradited to Chile for their part in Berrí­os's murder.

Contreras included the accusation against Pinochet in a letter to a Chilean judge, Claudio Pavez, who is investigating the murder of Colonel Gerardo Huber, who was killed in 1992 after agreeing to testify an investigation into Chilean arms sales to Croatia. The Chilean military, still under the control of Pinochet at the time, covered up the murder. Contreras said that he felt compelled to make his accusations against Pinochet because of the esteem he feels for Huber.

The accusation against Pinochet puts into perspective the former dictator's complaint on 7 July that he has had to sell his medals "just to survive". Pinochet's overseas funds have been frozen since they were discovered in 2004.

Development: President Michelle Bachelet announced on 12 August that she would be willing to call a referendum on her plans to reform the electoral system.

Significance: Bachelet, like her predecessor Ricardo Lagos, wants to change the binominal electoral system, which was instituted by former dictator Augusto Pinochet and which has since greatly favoured rightwing parties. The new president wishes to replace the current system with one involving proportional representation.

Lagos attempted to do away with the binominal system in December last year but failed to secure the two-thirds majority required to change the constitution. Bachelet will have similar difficulties: although her leftwing Concertación alliance controls over half the seats in both the lower and upper chambers of congress, rightwing parties can still prevent any reform gaining a two-thirds majority.

The problem with holding a referendum on electoral reform is that its results will not be binding. However, Bachelet hopes that strong popular support for a reform of the binominal system will force the Right to accept the changes.

ARGENTINA: Industrial production increased by 7.2% in August compared with a year earlier.

LATIN AMERICA: Latin America's economies are expected to grow 4.2% next year, according to a new forecast from the IMF. That is higher than the 3.6% growth the IMF had forecast in April.

MEXICO: Mexico needs to expand its nuclear energy programme and should start by building a new US$3bn power plant, its outgoing energy minister, Fernando Canales, said.

NICARAGUA: Exports grew by 19.5% to US$722.5m in the first eight months of the year, according to the Centro de Trámites de las Exportaciones (Cetrex).

VENEZUELA: In 2007 Venezuela will post an inflation rate of 15.4%, which will be worse than the 12.1%, the IMF estimates. The 2007 rate will also be the worst in Latin America, it said.

Development: The Brazilian energy minister, Silas Rondeau, said on 23 October that Brazil and Bolivia were close to an agreement on Petrobras's role in the Bolivian gas industry.

Significance: Rondeau was speaking in Brasilia after Petrobras executives had a series of meetings in La Paz on 23 October. His optimism jarred with a statement from President Lula da Silva's key foreign policy adviser, Marco Aurelio Garcí­a, now Lula's election campaign coordinator, who said: “If there's a deal, great. We sign a new contract. But if there's no deal, Petrobras pulls out of Bolivia. It's very clear."

Garcí­a went on to claim that Bolivia needed Brazil more than Brazil needed Bolivian gas, even though half Brazil's domestic demand for gas is met by the 26m cubic metres Bolivia exports each day. Garcí­a said that the Brazilian government and Petrobras had no problem with the Bolivian government taking over Petrobras's two refineries in Bolivia provided Petrobras was compensated. The two refineries produce 90% of Bolivia's fuels: Petrobras's president, Sergio Gabrielli, said that the company had invested US$105m in the two refineries. 

President Evo Morales confirmed on 23 October that the new contracts for gas and energy have to be agreed by 28 October. Morales “nationalised" the energy industry on 1 May 2006, and wants international energy companies to pay more to do business in Bolivia. On 23 October, the other key investors in Bolivia, Total and Repsol-YPF also held meetings with Bolivian officials in an effort to clinch new contracts.

Development: On 29 November President Hugo Chávez and the main opposition candidate, Manuel Rosales, travelled to the west of Venezuela to wrap up their election campaigns.

Significance: Rosales travelled to his home state of Zulia, where he is the governor, while Chávez visited Trujillo and Yaracuy. The consensus opinion among pollsters, who have often misdiagnosed Venezuelan voting trends in the past, is that Chávez will win comfortably on 3 December. Although abstention within the Chavista ranks could have been underestimated, as it has been consistently in the past, it seems probable Chávez will return to office on Sunday. He has promised a “new era" of his Bolivarian Revolution if re-elected for what would be, technically, his third term. 

Although insecurity, corruption and unemployment feature prominently on the list of Venezuelans' concerns, the economy is booming. With growth this year of at least 8%, Venezuelans are spending excessively and saving or investing little. According to a survey conducted in October, despite strong sales in the commercial sector, retailers are not looking to expand their businesses for fear of a sudden change in the economic climate following the election on 3 December. 

Between 1999, when Chávez took office, and 2005, around US$66bn has been deposited outside Venezuela, compared to US$112bn for the period 1950-1999, adjusted for inflation.

Development: President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa promised, on 14 January, to intervene in the row over the increase in tortilla prices.

Significance: Exactly what the government will do is unclear. Tortilla process have jumped to M$10 (US$0.90) a kilo from M$6 before Christmas, largely as a result of the rise in maize prices in the US. Over the past two years maize prices have doubled because of the increasing demand in the US and China for maize for bio-fuel. On 12 January the Mexican government announced that it would authorise immediate imports of 650,000t of maize. This move infuriated peasant organisations who produce a lot of Mexico's 22m t of maize and had been relishing the surge in maize prices. Every year Mexico imports between 2m t and 10m t of maize to meet domestic demand. 

President Calderón noted that the government did not set either maize prices or tortilla prices but he promised that the government would take all the action it could. “Just because we do not set the process does not excuse us," he said. His first move was to announce an investigation into the local maize and tortilla market to see whether the price rises were the product of monopolistic practices. 

How far this investigation will get is far from clear since one of Calderón's biggest supporters is Maseca, the maize milling company which produces 80% of Mexico's tortillas.

BOLIVIA: Bolivian exports reached US$300m in January, a 10.2% increase on the same month last year. Brazil was the destination of one-third of Bolivian exports in the period.

COLOMBIA: The US dollar reached its lowest exchange rate since 2001, averaging Col$2,235.49 in the first month of 2007.

MEXICO: Unemployment in the last quarter of 2006 rose to 3.6% of the working population, or 1.6m people.

REGION: Exports of Arabian coffee, which is produced in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, Colombia, Peru and the Dominican Republic, rose by 5.86% in January in comparison to the same month last year, reaching 2m 60kg sacks.

Development: On 24 March the Venezuelan embassy in Brasí­lia rebuffed the “offensive" and “insulting" declarations made by the Brazilian communications minister, Hélio Costa, against Venezuela's President, Hugo Chávez .  

Significance: The criticisms made by Costa reveal the Brazilian political elite's distrust of Chávez 's policies, which many in Brazil see as anti-democratic. Defending the democratic credentials of his own project in creating a “public TV" channel, Costa said that the state TV in Venezuela is an instrument of governmental marketing. Costa made the distinction between the two models, saying that “public TV is different from state TV, which is what Chávez does, [...] what was done in the old Soviet Union".

Costa's tirade prompted an angry response from Venezuela's ambassador to Brazil, Julio Garcí­a Montoya. In a two-page letter to Brazil's foreign office Montoya was forced to explain that Venezuela's state TV “responds to the interests of the state and not to those of its administrator, which is the government". Montoya considered if Costa's “mistaken declaration is not part of a bigger tendency" in Brazil's government and demanded an explanation.  

Last month an ally of President Lula da Silva, Senator José Sarney, accused Chávez of triggering an arms race in South America. Sarney, a former Brazilian president from 1985 to 1990, said that Chávez 's “outdated military populism" was creating a “military imbalance" which would compel Brazil to rearm. At the time the Venezuelan government preferred to keep quiet. Costa's outburst against Chávez , however, is altogether a different matter as it came from inside the Brazilian government.

On 24 April the Mexico City assembly voted by 46 votes to 16, with one abstention, to allow abortion for any reason in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. The change has infuriated the Roman Catholic church and poses a significant political problem for President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa.

Although Calderón himself is personally against liberalising abortion he can do little about the Mexico City vote. The leftwing Partido de la Revolución Democrática dominates the city assembly which took the vote. Calderón's wife, herself a prominent politician in her own right, has come out strongly against liberalising abortion. Furthermore, a substantial element of Calderón Partido Acción Nacional is clericalist and thus opposed to any liberalisation of abortion. The PAN will put pressure on the government to do something to neutralise the Mexico City vote.

The other problem for Calderón is that the virulence of the Roman Catholic church's opposition to abortion has touched an anti-clerical nerve in Mexico. The ministry of the interior announced that it is opening an investigation into statements by the Cardinal-Archbishop of Mexico City and his spokesman, Hugo Valdemar. The complaint was made by the small Partido Alternativa Social Demócrata y Campesina (PASC). The PASC alleged that the cardinal and his spokesman had broken the constitution and the law which regulates what religious organisations can do in Mexico. 

Until 1992 there were tight restrictions on what churchmen in Mexico could do. Under Article 130 they were banned from commenting on public affairs. This article was reformed under President Carlos Salinas de Gortari,. Under the reforms, the church recovered it's right to own property and priests could comment on public affairs and vote. The limits of the churches' freedom have not been defined by the courts. 

The last great rebellion in Mexican history, by the Cristeros, in 1927, was caused by the demand by the then president, Plutarcho Elí­as Calles, that the Roman Catholic church submit itself to regulation by the secular government. This would allow mayors to dismiss parish priests. The rebellion lasted three years, cost 90,000 lives and involved 13 states in central and western Mexico. It also prompted the first major emigration to California. The central western states where the Cristero guerrillas operated, especially Jalisco, remain the heartlands of Catholicism in Mexico. 

In the Mexico City vote, the PRD secured the support of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the organisation which ruled Mexico from the Revolution until 2000. The PRD also won the support of the Partido Nueva Alianza, and the PASC. The opponents of liberalisation were Calderón's Partido Acción Nacional and the Partido Verde Ecologista Mexicano (PVEM). An independent also voted against liberalisation. 

The degree of polarisation caused by the abortion issue was exemplified by an unhappy exchange between two of Mexico's most progressive public figures. Santiago Creel, now president of the senate but previously interior minister under President Vicente Fox; prior to which he was a progressive member of congress, had a public disagreement with Juan Ramón de la Fuente. De la Fuente is now Rector de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and had previously been health minister under President Ernesto Zedillo (1994 to 2000). If Andrés Manuel López Obrador had won the presidential election in 2006 De la Fuente would probably have been interior minister.

What caused the two to fall out was De la Fuente's claim that "a democracy was only a democracy if it was secular." Creel, who ran unsuccessfully for the PAN presidential nomination in 2005, said that "a debate on whether states should be secular was something out of the 19th Century and the issue was resolved in favour of secular states so that people who believed different things could live in this country. It is a bad thing to go back to the debates of 19th Century.

Development: On 4 June the vice-minister for education, Gabriel Burgos, was injured by a letter bomb sent to his office.

Significance: The attack, which left Burgos with only minor injuries, occurred at a time of crisis in the education sector. On 30 May thousands of teachers and university teachers went on strike across the country in protest at the government's new development plan which they say will lead to reductions in the education budget. Demonstrations have since continued at various universities.

The education minister, Cecilia Marí­a Vélez, said that the bomb was evidence that the protests had been hijacked by militant forces. “I believe there has been an infiltration by well-financed organizations who wish for a return to the violent days of old, but we know that they are in the minority," the minister commented. Police say that the bomb was not intended to do serious harm to Burgos.