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Development: On 12 January the Jurado Electoral Especial rejected, as expected, the second challenge to the candidacy of Ollanta Humala, the nationalist frontrunner in April's presidential race.

Significance: Humala can now devote his time to trying to establish a lead over his main rival, Lourdes Flores, the leader of the conservative coalition Unidad Nacional; polls put them neck-and-neck. Humala's supporters gathered outside the headquarters for a second consecutive day awaiting a favourable verdict. A day earlier, the JEE ruled against a challenge to his candidacy on the grounds that he belonged to another party when he was chosen as the candidate for the Unión por el Perú (UPP). The party's six legislators turned on Humala after he suggested that they should not stand for re-election to the legislature.

The JEE's decision sparked scenes of celebration outside among Humala's supporters who, carrying flags and banners, chanted Humala's name. It was a rather different picture outside the nearby Jurado Nacional de Elecciones where supporters of former president Alberto Fujimori, in custody in Chile facing an extradition case, began a hunger strike to protest against the JNE's decision to bar their man's candidacy.

Development: On 16 February Leslie Manigat, who finished a very distant second to René Préval in Haiti's presidential elections on 7 February, claimed that the decision by the interim government and the provisional electoral council to pronounce Préval the winner was "a Machiavellian comedy".

Significance: Manigat's criticism of the decision to disregard suspect blank ballots to enable Préval to obtain the absolute majority required to win in the first round raises the concern that Préval's government will be undermined by charges of illegitimacy. Under electoral law blank votes have to be "counted, tabulated and included" in the final result. Any investigation to establish why the blank ballots were adjudged to be suspect is very unlikely to be finished before Préval takes over power on 29 March when it will probably be shelved. This will leave him open to charges of illegitimacy throughout his term in office.

Manigat, who finished more than 35 percentage points behind Préval, could and perhaps should have conceded gracefully rather than pushing his right to compete in a second round of elections. He managed to win only 11.8% of the vote. The international community, as concerned as the Haitian authorities at the prospect of a month of instability before the second round would have been held on 19 March, recognised Préval's victory. This was not the case when former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected in 2001; international criticism of these elections dogged Aristide's term before he was ousted in 2004.

Brazil, which is heading the UN peacekeeping force, Minustah, invited Préval to visit. The UN and the OAS also congratulated Préval on his victory. Significantly, the US said it was looking forward to working with the new president. However, Washington has already urged him not to welcome Aristide back from his exile in South Africa.

ARGENTINA: A credit rating agency, Standard & Poor's raised its rating to B, the same as Uruguay and one step above Bolivia.

CHILE: GDP growth in the fourth quarter was 5.8%

MEXICO: The country ran a trade surplus of US$461m in February. Exports were up by 22% at US$18.8bn. For the first two months exports are up by 29% at US$38bn.

Development: The Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) picked several former members of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), on 27 April, to run for congress.

Significance: Some of the choices are highly controversial and have upset local panistas. At least one of the prií­stas nominated by the PAN, Benjamí­n González Roaro, is close to Elba Esther Gordillo, the dissident prií­sta who is feuding with the PRI presidential candidate, Roberto Madrazo. In the TV debate on 25 April, Madrazo forecast that the PAN would nominate Gordillo's supporters for congress. González is a former director of the public sector workers' union, the Issste. Madrazo also predicted that Gordillo's candidate, Roberto Campa, would withdraw and endorse the PAN's presidential candidate, Felipe Calderón, in the next few weeks.

The most prominent prií­sta the PAN nominated is Diodoro Carrasco, a former PRI governor of Oaxaca and interior minister. He will campaign, the PAN says, in Quintana Roo. This is a fiction since Quintana Roo and Oaxaca are in the same electoral district (the third) for electing proportionally-elected members of congress. The country is divided into five such districts, and the deputies are elected according to their parties' share of the vote in each district. The PAN claims that Carrasco is running for the seventh seat in the third district which traditionally represents Quintana Roo, but whether he is elected depends much more on how his vote holds up in Oaxaca. 

Carrasco is hugely unpopular with Panistas, who did not want him nominated. The PAN also nominated former PRI senator, Addy Joaquí­n Coldwell, who was elected for Quintana Roo in 2000, to run alongside Carrasco for the chamber of deputies. She is, theoretically, running for the Oaxaqueño seat. 

The PAN prefers to point out that 88 of the 200 candidates it is nominating for the 200 proportionally elected seats in the lower chamber are women. It also noted that half its candidates for proportional election to the senate are also women.

Development: Ten heads of state will meet in the Dominican Republic today (2 June) to discuss the possible construction of a US$6.5bn multinational oil refinery in Central America.

Significance: Central American nations see the refinery, which would have a capacity of 360,000 barrels a day, as providing the answer to rising oil prices. The seven Central American presidents, Mexico, Colombia and the Dominican Republic will discuss two potential sites for the refinery in Puerto Quetzal in Guatemala and Puerto Armuelles in Panama. The project might not get off the ground, however, if Andrés Manuel López Obrador wins the presidential elections in Mexico on 2 July. López Obrador has expressed his opposition to the scheme, which he claims is senseless given that Mexico exports crude but imports refined products.

Mexico's energy ministry estimated this week that the total cost of the project could amount to US$10bn. Mexico's state-owned company Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) would provide 230,000 barrels a day of crude to the refinery; Guatemala, 17,000 bpd, and Belize 8,000 bpd. The shortfall would be made up by importing 105,000 bpd. Venezuela, which is already in talks with left-wing mayors in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala about providing oil at preferential rates, could be an option.

Development: On 6 July, with 99.7% of the votes counted for the constituent assembly, President Evo Morales's Movimiento al Socialismo has 139 of the 255 seats and its close allies another 12. 

Significance: This leaves the MAS only 19 seats way from the two-thirds majority that will allow it to dictate to the constitution-rewriting constituent assembly. The complexity of the electoral system appears to have handicapped the MAS: in the first-past-the-post elections for the 255-seat constituent assembly, the MAS won 80% of the races. It only won 18 of the 45 seats allocated proportionally according to the minority vote in the nine departments. 

The MAS's closest allies are: Movimiento Bolivia Libre; Movimiento Ciudadano San Felipe de Austria and the Movimiento Originario Popular. It is possible that the evangelical party, Concertación Nacional, which won almost 4% of the votes for the constituent assembly, will support the MAS. 

What is interesting is that in the east of the country the MAS won a majority of constituent assembly seats, though it campaigned against increased autonomy for the departments. In Santa Cruz, the MAS came out narrowly ahead of the Poder Democrático y Social (by 26.4% to 24.8%) Alvaro Garcí­a Linera, the vice-president, said the message from voters was clearly that they supported the MAS constitutional reforms but they also wanted increased local autonomy.

Development: On 9 August Ricardo Alarcón, the president of the national assembly, warned Cubans to be united and on their guard against the "explicit threat" of "US bandits".

Significance: In the absence of Raúl Castro, Fidel's "provisional" replacement, Alarcón, the most media-savvy figure in the Cuban government, appears to be taking the initiative. Along with Carlos Lage, the vice-president, who has been out of the country for the past week, Alarcón has been the most informative of the higher echelons of power, though once again contradictory reports about Fidel's state of health have surfaced in the international media.

Speaking on the flagship "Round Table Discussion" programme, part of the Battle of Ideas, one of Fidel's pet projects to reengage Cuban youth with the country's original revolutionary ideals, Alarcón explained once again that information about Fidel's health had to be kept to a minimum to safeguard the security of the state. He also called for the release of "the Cuban five", imprisoned in the US on charges of espionage; almost every town in Cuba has a secular shrine to the five men.

Meanwhile also on 9 August Daniel Ortega, the leftwing candidate for the presidency of Nicaragua, refused to expand on his recent comments that Fidel was now "active" when speaking to the foreign press. Ortega, visiting Havana to check on Fidel's health, had claimed the day before to have chatted to him about literacy programmes in Nicaragua. Rigoberta Menchú, the Guatemalan Nobel Peace prizewinner, had more to say on the subject; reporting that Lage had told her by telephone that Fidel would be back at work shortly.

Development: On 14 September the national electoral council announced that just under 16 million people were registered to vote in the presidential elections on 3 December.

Significance: According to the figures released by the Consejo Nacional Electoral (CNE), 1.2m voters have registered since 1 February. One of President Hugo Chávez 's missions, “Misión Identidad" has focused on supplying the undocumented with identification and getting them on the electoral register. The opposition will be studying the electoral roll to check for discrepancies, such as whether those long dead are voting. Given the high number of new voters, there are bound to be some suspicions.

According to Sandra Oblitas, one of the directors of the CNE, there are 15.9m Venezuelan voters; 162,530 foreign nationals eligible to vote and 56,000 Venezuelans based abroad who can vote. Foreign nationals can vote as long as they have been in the country for at least 10 years, but they can only vote in parish, municipal and state elections, not the presidential. The state with the highest number of voters is Zulia, one of only two states (out of 22) controlled by the opposition. Venezuela has a total population of 26 million.

An opinion poll published on 13 September found that 58.2% of Venezuelans would vote for Chávez , versus 17.4% for Manuel Rosales, the governor of Zulia. The poll, of 1,300 adults, was carried out between 18-30 August by Datanálisis. The survey also found that 61.2% of Venezuelans believed the opposition would participate in the presidential elections, against 19% who did not think they would.

Development: President Lula da Silva and his rival in the run-off presidential vote, the social democrat Geraldo Alckmin, changed their approach to the campaign in the latest TV debate broadcast on 19 October. 

Significance: According to most local political commentators the latest TV debate was “civilised" and very different from the previous “nervous and aggressive" televised exchange, which was aired only one week after the presidential race went to a surprising run-off. Commentators, however, complained that there were still very few policy proposals in both candidates' speeches. 

Lula and Alckmin tried to highlight their differences instead of making personal attacks. Both men were well prepared. Commentators found it hard to say if any one of them had “done better" than the other. Alckmin referred to Lula as a “candidate" in a bid to detach the president from the government, which according to opinion polls is very popular. Lula, on the other hand, swapped his traditional broach with his party's red star for another one of the Brazilian flag, a clear attempt to disengage himself from the shenanigans of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT). 

Alckmin went out of his way to explain all his proposals in a very accessible way, in an attempt to make himself better understood by the less educated electorate, which favours Lula. Lula used irony to show that he does not fear the corruption allegations against the PT tainting him. For commentators Lula was successful at portraying himself as “the people's president" while Alckmin succeeded in giving off an image of a “good administrator". 

The main topics debated were investments and economic growth. Alckmin said that the Lula administration had failed to invest in public health and that his government's policies had subjected Brazil to low economic growth rates. Lula answered his rival using statistics. He recognised that “there is still much to improve" in the public health sector, but said that his government had done better economically than the previous one, Alckmin's Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (PSDB).

Once again Lula accused Alckmin of wanting to privatise public companies, a strategy that seems to have succeeded in diverting attention from Lula's role in corruption scandals. According to opinion polls, by linking Alckmin to the PSDB's privatisation programme Lula has managed to garner leftwing middle class votes that had gone to other leftwing candidates in the first round. Alckmin, however, was confident when he defended the privatisation of telecoms. But he made sure to say that allegations that he wants to privatise Petrobrás and Banco do Brasil are “lies". 

One of the reasons why the debate was “lukewarm" was the fact that Brazilians seem tired of continuous personal attacks. According to a DataFolha poll, only 10% of the electorate believe that attacking another candidate is important. The great majority, of 56%, prefer candidates to “present and defend" proposals. Lula and Alckmin, however, failed to present their proposed government policies and instead concentrated on comparisons. In this sense, Lula succeeded in setting the debate's tone.

According to the latest opinion polls, Lula is far ahead Alckmin by as much as 20% points. The reason for this, analysts say, is that Lula has managed to link his rival with the previous PSDB administration, which was not popular by the end of its term. The tactic worked to avoid further debate on Lula's responsibility over the corruption that surrounds his government and the PT. 

Alckmin, however, is still confident. He said that opinion polls should not be trusted blindly. He proved that he could turn the game around in previous races for the governorship of São Paulo and the recent first round presidential election. Also, the PSDB has conducted a survey for internal consumption that shows Alckmin only 7 percentage points behind Lula, the same rate he finished on in the first round.

Development: On 27 November former president Lucio Gutiérrez asked the people of Ecuador to give Rafael Correa, the president-elect, the opportunity to deliver on his campaign promises.

Significance: Gutiérrez, the president who was ousted unconstitutionally by congress following weeks of street protests, will control the second-largest party in the new legislature, Sociedad Patriótica (SP). As such his support, along with that of Izquierda Democrática and other smaller leftwing parties could prove crucial to Correa, whose own party Alianza PAIS did not field any congressional candidates in protest at its venality. The imponderable is whether even these parties, which collectively will still fall short of a majority, will back Correa's plans for a constituent assembly. Given that the party of Bolivia's President Evo Morales won a majority in congress and the constituent assembly, and yet has still been unable to get the constituent assembly to make decisions, Correa's prospects look bleak.

“We cannot say: as the other presidents have been overthrown, we'll have to overthrow Correa as well," Gutiérrez said. “No, let us give him the opportunity to work, so that he fulfils his promises." Gutiérrez himself was instrumental in the overthrow of an elected president, Jamil Mahuad, in 2000. Gutiérrez added that the SP, which will control 24 seats in the 100-seat congress, will work to ensure Correa lasts four years. It is unlikely that the Prian, the party of defeated rightwing presidential candidate Alvaro Noboa, which won 28 seats, will have the same priorities. Indeed, Correa has already said that despite his criticisms of congress he is prepared to work with any parties other than the Prian and the other main rightwing party, the Partido Social Cristiano (PSC).

Correa himself promised stability on 27 November as well as “change for the benefit of the whole country" and insisted that he and vice-president Lenin Moreno were the “instruments" to deliver it. This week Correa's team will begin working with the outgoing government to determine the 2007 budget. He has yet to spell out how he plans to renegotiate contracts with foreign oil firms operating in the country, but he expressed his determination to make Petroecuador administratively, technically and financially independent. Previously, Correa has emphasised his priority will be increasing the state's control over current production and not increasing foreign investment or exploration. Given Ecuador's limited refining capacity, he also intends to send oil to be refined in “friendly countries" (ie, Venezuela).

The US, Brazil and Venezuela have already congratulated Correa on his victory, but Noboa has yet to accept defeat, despite a 15-point margin between the two. Observers from the Organization of American States (OAS) are happy the election was fair and transparent. Linda Jewell, the US ambassador, telephoned Correa to congratulate him and reiterated the US government's “commitment to the Ecuadorean people". Although Correa labelled President George W. Bush an “idiot" ahead of the first round, he subsequently moderated his rhetoric and visited Jewell twice to explain his opposition to a free trade agreement with the US in a more sober fashion. Correa also repeated that his government would be respectful of international treaties, but would not renew the US's lease on the airbase at Manta, due for renewal in 2009.

Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez , a personal friend of Correa's, was clearly delighted by his victory. “I did not want to say anything during the campaign in case they used my name or my words against this young Ecuadorean patriot," he said. Despite Noboa's attempt use of Chávez as a bogeyman figure, Correa's friendship with the Venezuelan electorate did not damage his image, as it did to Ollanta Humala in Peru and Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico.

Colombia has yet to comment on the result, but is bound to be less effusive, given Correa's refusal to label the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia as “terrorists". The Peruvian reaction has so far been cautious. The Peruvian minister of foreign trade, Mercedes Aráoz, said that the Andean Community could become divided between countries close to Venezuela (Bolivia, Ecuador) and those in favour of free trade (Peru, Colombia). Aráoz said Correa could also damage the Andean Community's negotiations with the EU, specifically over banana exports. One indication of the degree of Correa's radicalism should be obvious fairly soon. The Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act is set to expire at the end of the year, and the other Andean countries are urging the US to renew it. If Correa joins the chorus, it will show a willingness to compromise.

Development: The economy minister, Felisa Miceli, has announced that tariffs on exports of soya and cooking oils will increase by 4% from 15 January.

Significance: This is the latest in a series of measures taken by the government to control inflation. The increase in tariffs, which will go from 23.5% for soya and 20% to 24% for cooking oils, should earn the government an extra US$500m with which to subsidise the basic basket of goods and avoid a rise in retail prices. 

In 2006 President Néstor Kirchner achieved his goal of keeping inflation below two digits by a whisker: it hit 9.8% by year-end, down from 12.3% in 2005. Meeting the target came at a cost, however. The treasury spent nearly US$1.5bn in subsidising the transport sector, especially in the form of fuel for buses to keep fares down, and the energy sector. It also extended the temporary ban on exports of beef, to control domestic prices. This triggered a strike by the three main farm organisations in December.

Development: Two senate commissions ratified Arturo Sarukhan, President Felipe Calderón's senior foreign policy adviser, as ambassador to Washington on 15 February.

Significance: The appointment suggests that the president himself, rather than the foreign ministry, will deal with the crucial relationship with Washington. Sarukhan advised Calderón on foreign policy issues throughout the election campaign in 2006 so it was a surprise when he was not appointed foreign minister. Calderón plumped instead for Patricia Espinosa, a foreign affairs ministry veteran. The plan now seems to be that she will handle relations with Latin America and elsewhere, while the presidency will manage relations with Washington. 

The two senate committees, foreign affairs and North American affairs, both approved Sarukhan enthusiastically. Rosario Green, a senator from the Partido Revolucionario Institucional and a former foreign minister, said that the committees were “more than satisfied" with Sarukhan's testimony to the committees. 

On 14 February the same two committees criticised the government's nomination of Emilio Goicoechea as ambassador to Canada. The full senate has to approve all ambassadorial appointments.

Development: The financial committee of Brazil's congress approved on 22 March a proposal raising the salaries of congressmen, the president and cabinet ministers by 26.5%.

Significance: The pay rise, together with another proposal granting congressmen more autonomy to manage public funds that pay for the running of their offices and personnel, will be voted on next week. The pay increase is expected to be approved. Ironically, the financial committee decided to give voting priority to the pay rise proposal despite the fact that important bills on public security and the government-proposed economic programme have yet to be voted on. 

The 26.5% pay increase corresponds to the rate of accumulated inflation from February 2003 to February 2007. This will bring the monthly salaries of congressmen to R$16,250 (US$7,740). Yet, because Brazilian congressmen receive 15 salaries per year their total earnings will exceed the R$24,500 (US$11,660) pay ceiling of civil servants. Meanwhile, Lula's monthly salary will be raised to R$11,240 (US$5,350) and those of his cabinet ministers to R$10,580 (US$5,040). 

The pay rise is expected to have an impact of R$765m (US$365m) annually on Brazil's budget. The reason for this is that every one of the over 25,000 “special" advisers and assistants working for Brazil's executive and legislative branches will also have their salary increased. The so-called “snowball effect" is expected to cost local governments at least another R$500m (US$240m) since governors, mayors and regional legislators will now certainly press for a pay rise too.

Development: The US drugs czar, John Walters, admitted in a letter to a US Senator, published on 26 April, that the price of cocaine on US streets is falling and its purity is increasing.

Significance: The admission is further evidence that the US's anti-drugs policy, which focuses on coca eradication, is failing. The admission, from a senior White House official, coming just days before a crucial visit to Washington by President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia, suggests that the administration is preparing for a major change in anti-drugs policy. Of the three main drug producers, (Colombia, Peru and Bolivia) only Colombia has stuck to the US line that the best way to control cocaine is to eradicate coca plantations. 

Until Walters's admission the US administration had been maintaining, against mounting evidence, that Plan Colombia, which has cost the US government US$4bn since 2000 and is focused on eradicating coca plantations, was working. The fact that Walters made his admission to a Republican senator, Chuck Grassley from Iowa, who immediately called for a change in US policy, is further evidence that a change of policy may be imminent. 

Bolivia, home to the biggest US embassy in South America, is advocating a change in international drugs policy to focus efforts on combating cocaine production and smuggling, not coca growing. Peru is showing signs of moving towards such a policy, though its government is currently aiming to break a protest by radical coca-growers who do not want any restrictions on coca production and refining. In Colombia, the world's biggest cocaine producer, the US-inspired policy of aerial spraying of alleged coca plantations has caused major friction with Ecuador because the glysophate blows across the border and damages crops and people in Ecuador. 

Felipe Cáceres, the deputy minister for social welfare in Bolivia, claimed on 26 April that since President Evo Morales changed coca policy 15 months ago, Bolivia's coca production has fallen. Some NGOs support this claim, though Cáceres admitted that he could not provide official figures to substantiate it. He said that he expected a survey of coca plantations in the two main growing zones, Yungas and Chapare, to be finished by November this year, finally giving the government reliable statistics. Currently official estimates of coca plantations in Bolivia range from 21,000 to 32,000 hectares. 

Walters, whose official job title is the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), sent the letter to Grassley in January. In the letter, which was obtained by an NGO, the Washington Office on Latin America, Walters reported that the street price of cocaine had fallen by 11% between February 2005 and October 2006. The price is now US$135 a gramme. This pretty similar to the price at the beginning of the 1990s and much cheaper that the US$600 a gramme dealers charged in 1981 when the Drug Enforcement Administration first started to monitor the price of illegal drugs. 

The timing of the release of the letter is appalling for Colombia. President Uribe is facing heavy criticism from Democrats, who now control both houses of congress in the US, for human rights abuses. The Democrats have already cut military aid to Colombia, which is the US's closest ally in Latin America on drugs. 

Charles Rangel (D, New York), the chairman of the Ways and Means committee in the House of Representatives, said on 24 April that Colombia was less likely than Peru to get US congressional approval for its free trade agreement with the US. Rangel had just met the Peruvian president, Alan Garcí­a, who was in Washington to lobby for the agreement. 

It is far from clear that Colombia has the same links Peru has forged with the Democrats on Capitol Hill. Uribe has been counting on the US administration to push through the free trade deal. If the US administration now believes that Plan Colombia has failed, Uribe, who has relied on US support to improve the security situation, faces a major problem.

President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa's shrewd decision to forge close links with the country's governors paid off on 29 May when the Conferencia Nacional de Gobernadores (Conago), unanimously supported his controversial deployment of the army against organised crime. The governors' support for the policy is a blow to congress, the UN and a range of human rights organisations which oppose the deployment of the army in anti-crime actions.

Calderón has been courting governors who, arguably, are taking over from the political parties as the country's powerbrokers, since he took office. This policy is a marked contrast with his predecessor, Vicente Fox, who rarely supported governors, even when they ran into problems. Although Fox himself had been a successful governor (of Guanajuato) and gave two former governors seats in his first cabinet, they had second-rank jobs. Calderón on the other hand, picked Francisco Ramí­rez Acuna, a controversial former governor of Jalisco, as his interior minister, traditionally the second most powerful job in the federal government. The finance minister, Agustí­n Carstens, on Calderón's instructions, said that Conago would be consulted about the government's reforms before congress.

The third biggest party in congress, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) dominates the Conago. Following the PRI victory in Yucatán elections on 20 May, Prií­sta governors run 18 of the country's 32 states.

President Calderón opened the Conago meeting at the resort of Puerto Vallarta on 29 May, and Ramí­rez Acuña, stayed for the whole day. Ramí­rez stressed that the army is only deployed at the request of governors. This policy was strongly endorsed by a succession of governors from the PRI. Significantly, the support came equally from governors of states in which the army is deployed and in states where it is not deployed.

Conago's strong endorsement of Calderón's policy is politically risky. Even the federal government admits that it is not yet winning the war against organised crime and that the fight will demand more money and lives.

Before the Conago meeting, on 24 May, Calderón bluntly said that he had no intention of changing policy and replacing soldiers deployed against criminal gangs with policemen and accused his critics of wanting a Mexico dominated by organised crime. Calderón was speaking in Durango, one of the 10 states in which the army is deployed. The PRI governor of the state, Ismael Hernández Deras, strongly endorsed the government's actions and the use of the army.

So far the only leading politician to publicly attack the government's security policy is Roberto Madrazo Pintada, the increasingly marginalised former leader and presidential candidate from the PRI. He argues that the government could have improved the security situation by beefing up police intelligence and coordinating the country's various police forces better. Madrazo believes that the government had been premature in sending in the soldiers, claiming that they should only be used as a last resort.

Development: The Japanese foreign minister, Taro Aso, said on 5 July that his government would not interfere in proceedings to extradite the former Peruvian president, Alberto Fujimori, from Chile to Peru.

Significance: Aso's decision narrows Fujimori's hopes of escaping extradition to Peru, where is wanted on charges of corruption and human rights abuses. The rightwing Japanese New People's Party asked Fujimori to stand for a seat in the Japanese upper house, and leaders of the party wanted Aso to intervene in legal proceedings in Chile and bring Fujimori back to Japan in time for the elections at the end of July.

The news will be warmly greeted by many in Peru who want to see Fujimori stand trial for alleged crimes that he committed while in power between 1990 and 2000. Although Peru's prime minister Jorge del Castillo had insisted all along that Fujimori's decision to seek election in Japan would not stop the extradition process. Peru's judiciary appears to be doing its best to delay extradition. This is adding to speculation that the government is applying pressure to the judiciary to stall on the extradition to avoid potentially damaging domestic political repercussions; Fujimori's Alianza para el Futuro has 13 seats in congress and President Alan Garcí­a relies on the party's support in order to push his legislative agenda through congress.

Development: On 6 August Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards accused the trade policies of former President Bill Clinton and current President George W Bush of being too weak in labour and environmental regulations.

Significance: In a speech to union workers, Edwards stressed the importance of not only assuring the safety of imported products, but also the job security of American workers. "For far too long, presidents from both parties have entered into trade agreements, agreements like Nafta, promising that they would create millions of new jobs and enrich communities. Instead, too many of these agreements have cost us jobs and devastated many of our towns."

The North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) between the US, Mexico, and Canada was approved in 1993 and implemented in 1994 under President Bill Clinton. President George H W Bush negotiated the agreement.

The Democratic Congress is currently delaying approval for free trade agreements with Peru, Colombia, and Panama, demanding stricter environmental and labour provisions. Edwards opposes a deal with Colombia. One of Edwards' challengers, Barack Obama, has called for renegotiation of Nafta and plans to award tax credits to companies that produce the majority of their products in the US.

The Democratic presidential candidates will attend a forum for the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) on 7 August. The AFL-CIO is the biggest labour federation in the US.

Development: Mexico's main political parties said on 10 September that they had not yet reached a deal on political reform.

Significance: The Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the opposition party most likely to back the government, is unhappy with what the government is offering in the way of electoral reforms. Senior Prií­stas have made it clear that the party will not back the government's fiscal reform without electoral reforms.

The failure to agree means that the electoral reform may be more wide-ranging than the party hierarchies would like. One proposal going around the senate would give the Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación the right to annul any election if it had sufficient evidence to believe that campaign spending limits had been breached. The IFE has already fined all the main political parties for their failure to file full accounts of their election spending in 2006, in both the presidential and congressional elections.

The parties are also considering how long members of the board of the Instituto Federal Electoral should serve and how the president of the IFE should be chosen. The suggestion is that the president of the IFE should be chosen by a two-thirds majority of congress and that IFE commissioners should serve only one term of nine years rather than the current seven.

Development: On 11 October the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights, which answers to the Organization of American States, criticised the demobilisation of paramilitaries.

Significance: The Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos's criticism is another blow to President Alvaro Uribe, who claims that the process has improved the law and order situation in the country. The CIDH was outspoken. It said that there was no guarantee that those who demobilised were paramilitaries; nor that they handed over their weapons; nor that the process gave enough help the paramilitaries' victims in binging criminals to justice.

All these criticisms have been made by domestic critics of the demobilisation process. Particularly worrying for Uribe is that the CIDH specifically said that there was evidence that the authorities had agreed, when launching the scheme, not to investigate paramilitary leaders for their human rights abuses.

Since 2003, 32,000 paramilitaries have demobilised but critics allege that a lot of them are simply common drug gangsters taking advantage of the preferential terms available to paramilitaries.

ARGENTINA: The final results of the 28 October presidential election were published on 12 November. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner received 45.29% of the 19,101,819 votes cast; Elisa Carrió took 23.04%; Roberto Lavagna won 16.88%.