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Peru:  The rate of inflation in Peru was 7.32% in 2008, the highest since 1996, according to National Statistics Institute (INEI).

Chile: The value of Chilean copper exports fell by 9.11% last year compared to 2007, totalling us$ 34 bn, according to the Central Bank.

Costa Rica: The trade deficit in January 2009 was US$265.3mn, down 52.7% on January 2008 (US$560.6mn). Imports fell 32.5% year-on-year to US$865mn, while exports fell 17% to US$599.6mn.

Development: On 1 April congress approved holding a referendum to reform the constitution to allow expatriates to vote in elections from 2014.

Significance: This would significantly increase the size of the electorate: an estimated 600,000 Uruguayans live abroad, the equivalent of nearly 20% of the country's 3.4m population. Expatriates principally live in Argentina, Spain and the US.

The opposition argued that the reform would pave the way for fraud. In truth, they are worried that, as the majority of Uruguayans resident abroad are thought to support the left-leaning Frente Amplio (FA) government, the reform would work in the coalition's favour at future elections.

This is set to be the first of two referendums to be held on 25 October, the same day as the country's legislative and presidential elections.

Supporters of the ruling FA are also gathering signatures to petition for a referendum to abolish the amnesty law, which shields the military from prosecution for human rights abuses committed during the dictatorship (1973-1985). Campaigners, who aim to present the petition to the electoral court by mid-April, say that they have already collected the 255,000 signatures necessary to require a vote.

The opposition accuses the FA using the issue of human rights to divert attention away from the country's deteriorating economic outlook ahead of of the elections. 

October's vote is likely to be tight. A survey published this week by pollsters Interconsult indicated the ruling FA had the support of 42% voters, followed by the opposition Partido Nacional ('Blancos'), with 37%, and the Partido Colorado, with 8%.

This would mean that in the second round, in which the opposition vote would coalesce, the FA would suffer a narrow defeat (by 42% to 45%).

Development: On 11 May President Alvaro Colom dismissed allegations made by a murdered lawyer, Rodrigo Rosenberg Marzano, in a posthumously released video tape, accusing Colom of orchestrating his death.

Significance: Rosenberg, a prominent lawyer who taught at one of the main private universities in the capital, was gunned down in the capital on 10 May. The video has set off a media storm. President Colom dismisses Rosenberg's accusations as an attempt to destabilise his government. In his video, Rosenberg claims that the vice president, Rafael Espada, is the only hope for the country.

The 18-minute video tape, which was released to the local media at Rosenberg's funeral, shows the lawyer seated behind a table talking into a microphone. He states “if you are watching this message, it is because I was murdered by President Alvaro Colom, with the help of Gustavo Alejos [private secretary to the presidency] and Gregorio Valdez [a businessman linked to the government]. He goes on to accuse Colom's wife, Sandra de Colom, of being involved in the plot. Rosenberg then makes a host of wild accusations about alleged corruption in the Colom government.

Rosenberg said in the video that he had been killed because of his links to a client, a prominent businessman, Khalil Musa. Musa, along with his daughter, was murdered in the capital on 14 April. He had been a director of Banco de Desarrollo Rural (Banrural), one of Guatemala's leading banks. According to Rosenberg, Musa was killed because he refused to cover up “daily acts of corruption" at the bank.

Rosenberg said that the illegal dealings ranged from “money laundering to the transfer of public funds to non-existent programmes organised by Sandra de Colom as well as financing fake companies used by drug-traffickers".

The government categorically dismissed Rosenberg's claims and said that the accusation was part of efforts to “create a political crisis" and destabilise the government. The government tends to see the hand of its opponents behind violence. Earlier in the year, Colom blamed a spate of bus driver murders on organised crime. He argued that the killings were part of a strategy to expose the government as weak and helpless in order to justify the hard-handed “mano dura" agenda favoured by his opponents such as a former army General, Otto Pérez Molina.

Colom broadcast to the nation on the evening of 11 May to deny Rosenberg's allegations. Alejos said that the attorney general's office and the UN-backed International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (Cicig) would investigate the case.

Pointer:Banrural was formerly the state-run National Agricultural Development Bank (BANDESA). Under a 1997 decree it was turned into a joint-venture (estructura mixta) bank, with the state the main shareholder (30%). The other shareholders include agricultural cooperatives, non-governmental organisations, Mayan groups, municipalities and associations of micro, small and medium-sized businesses.

Brazil: Brazil's tax take reached US$133.8m in the first quarter of 2009, equivalent to 38.45% of GDP.

Paraguay: The Andean development corporation (CAF) approved a US$85m loan for Paraguay, to be used in part for the government's anti-crisis plan.

Development: The Brazilian government announced on 26 July that in June it sacked a record number of officials for corruption.

Significance: President Lula da Silva has been heavily criticised by his opponents and the media for doing little to combat corruption. The publication of these figures suggests that the government is sacking people but failing to convict them for corruption. Almost none of those sacked have been jailed. 

Jorge Hage, the minister for the Controladoria-Geral da União, said that 43 central government officials had been sacked in June 2009. This means that 2,179 officials have been sacked for corruption since President Lula da Silva took office in 2003. The overwhelming bulk of the sacked officials (1,878) have been summarily dismissed.

Under the Brazilian justice system even government officials who have been convicted twice of “irregularities" have their innocence presumed until their convictions have been upheld by a higher court. Hage said that often it could take 10 or 20 years for a higher court to uphold the two convictions and thus render the defendant liable to jail.

Cuba: This week officials from the US State Department and the US Postal Service (who asked not to be named) reported that talks regarding the possibility of renewing direct correspondence between the US and Cuba are set to be held later this month. Since 1963, mail sent between the two countries has been redirected through Mexico or Canada and, as a result, letters that should take two or four days to reach their destination are delayed by up to 4 months. For years Cuba has tried to stall talks about resuming direct mail because it feared that radical exiles in the US would send bombs through the post. Both former US presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, offered to renew direct mail but Cuba and the US could not reach an agreement. The new prospect of talks is the latest sign of the rapprochement between the two countries following US President Barack Obama's declared intention to "recast" relations with Cuba.

Cuba: On 1 September the Miami Herald published a new poll by a Miami-based polling company, Bendixen & Associates, which indicated that 41% of Cuban Americans (400 were surveyed on 24 August) were against maintaining the US-imposed embargo, while 40% were in favour of keeping it. The poll showed that most Cubans born in the US want the embargo to end, while older exiled Cubans generally support it.

Brazil: The US has blocked a request made by Brazil to establish a commission of experts to study the 'antidumping' methods imposed by the US on Brazil's orange juice imports. Brazil is the number one producer of orange juice in the world, while the US is the second, producing 37% of the world's orange juice. The high tariff barrier imposed by the US makes it impossible for Brazilian juice to compete with Florida juice except when adverse weather affects the citrus crop, which is what is happening now.

Brazil: On 31 August the World Trade Organization (WTO) ruled that the US needs to pay US$300m in sanctions over Washington's failure to scrap illegal subsidies to US cotton farmers. The trade retaliation is barely a tenth of the US$2.7bn Brazil had asked for. The WTO agreed that US undercutting of its foreign competitors left Brazilian and West African farmers with reduced business in their own markets. The US said it was disappointed with the outcome of the dispute.

Development: On 12 October 12 of the 32 deputies from the rightwing opposition Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (Arena) announced that they would not be toeing the party line in congress.

Significance:  The rebellion within the main opposition party, which stems from disgruntlement with the new party leadership, is a boon for President Mauricio Funes and the ruling Frente Farabundo Martí­ para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN). It reflects the continued crisis afflicting Arena since it was voted out of power in the 15 March presidential and legislative elections.

The ruling party has 35 of the 84 seats in congress, below the simple majority of 43 required to pass ordinary legislation. It has so far struggled against the 47 seat right-wing bloc comprising Arena; the Partido de Conciliación Nacional (PCN) (which has ten seats), and Partido Demócrata Cristiano (PDC) which has five. The possibility of a further 12 votes for the FMLN (although the dissidents maintain nebulously they will vote independently as and when circumstance requires it) thus puts the ruling party in a strong position.

The Arena dissidents, who are still in talks with the party leadership, announced they had reached the decision after weeks of frustration, culminating in 11 October re-election of the new national executive committee (Coena) from which they were excluded. The election confirmed former president Alfredo Cristiani (1989- 1994) as party leader.

The split in Arena vote will most immediately affect the bill for the new 2010 state budget currently in congress.

Development: The UNAIDS Epidemic Update, published today, 24 November, shows that Latin America has not reduced AIDS infections as dramatically as other regions of the world in the past eight years.

Significance: The UN argued that although Brazil's commitment to preventing the spread of AIDS was praiseworthy, other Latin American countries' AIDS policies have varied enormously. The UN points out that although the region's AIDS infections are concentrated in three groups (men who have sex with other men, intravenous drug users and sex workers), most AIDS prevention programmes focus on other, less vulnerable groups.

The report found that globally, AIDS infections have been reduced by 17% in the eight years since 2001. In sub-Saharan Africa, the fall was 15% and in East Asia it was 25%. In Latin America, however, the number of new infections increased slightly, from about 150,000 in 2001 to about 170,000 in 2008.

Where Latin America does score highly is in treating people with the disease: 54% of AIDS sufferers get antiretroviral treatment. The proportion is even higher in South America, largely thanks to Brazil's policies. This has led to a 5% decline, across the region, in HIV-related deaths.

Development: On 14 January the exchange rate commission, Cadivi, which authorizes the sale of US dollars to local importers, published the list of import items deemed 'essential' and 'non-essential' under the new two tiered exchange rate regime, in which essential goods can be purchased at BF2.60/US$, while non-essentials will be available at a pricier BF4.3/US$.

Significance: The lists contain thousands of items. The new regime creates an incentive for massive corruption, as people seek to get hold of the preferential rate of BF2.60/US$. The government of President Hugo Chávez insists that it can manage the system, and local economists point out that a painful de facto devaluation already took place last year, but a steep and politically costly rise in inflation is nonetheless virtually certain. Even for the basic essential goods, prices are set to rise about 20%.

Cadivi has designated 59% of a total of 6,934 import items 'non-essential'. This covers most other consumer goods, including luxury food items, home appliances, electronic goods/games, alcohol and tobacco, cars/car parts, telecoms equipment etc. The remaining 41% deemed 'essential' items include basic foods, medicines, personal hygiene items, manufacturing inputs and machinery.

The lists have been pored over - Tuna, pickles, tomatoes and other vegetables, rice and butter are essentials, along with personal hygiene items like toothpaste, aspirin and codeine tablets, shampoo and condoms. Non-essential items include yogurt, hams, cheese, ketchup, tinned salmon, asparagus, strawberries, apples and pears. Imported toilet paper is also a non-essential.

Importers unable to get access to either rate will be forced to turn to the parallel black market rate, currently trading at about BF6.10/US$. On 13 January, five days after the so-called “currency adjustment", the central bank began auctioning US-dollar denominated securities, in an effort to strengthen the bolí­var to a targeted BF5.0/US$ in the parallel market. The bank has indicated that such auctions will be regular, as the government seeks to more aggressively manage the parallel rate, the main driver of inflation in this import-dependent economy. Local investors typically re-sell these securities in international markets to get round the official exchange controls and obtain US dollars.

Amid a stark shortage of Cadivi dollars last year (due to the collapse in oil export revenues), the wholesale price of imported goods rose 35.7% year-on-year, up on 17.1% in 2008. The local consultancy Ecoanalí­tica has calculated that the average exchange rate for (private sector) imports in 2009 was BF3.36/US$, already representing a de facto devaluation. It now expects an average rate of BF4.05/US$in 2010, a 20.5% drop in the currency. On this basis, it says that the actual impact on prices in coming months may not be as bad as projected - in effect, the real pain took place last year.

Nonetheless, prices are set to rise, and government pre-electoral spending will add to the pressure. The consensus forecast for average annual inflation this year is now 35%-40%.

Development: On 25 February President Alvaro Colom fired his agriculture and education ministers, Mario Aldana and Bienvenido Argueta.

Significance: The departure of both ministers (Aldana for corruption and Argueta for withholding details about a government programme, Mi Familia Progresa, [Mifapro]), highlights the continued instability and weakness of Colom's government.

Aldana, who was fired over alleged irregularities in the acquisition of fertilizers, is the third agriculture minister to see the door since Colom took office in January 2008, while Argueta was Colom's second education minister.

Argueta's departure in particular will cause problems for Colom and will subject the highly controversial Mifapro, which provides subsidised access to health and education for low income sectors, to fresh scrutiny. The programme, which began in 2008, is managed through the social cohesion council, headed by Colom's wife, Sandra Torres de Colom. It has long been criticized for lacking in transparency.

Argueta's dismissal was in line with a constitutional court ruling following his refusal to comply with a demand presented by Nineth Montenegro, a deputy for the leftwing Encuentro por Guatemala (EG), to provide information about the Mifapro and its recipients. Montenegro has spearheaded the campaign against Mifapro. Argueta's predecessor, Ana Ordóñez de Molina, also lost her post over the Mifapro programme. While Ordóñez cited “lack of budget" as the reason for her resignation, the national daily El Periódico (which is highly critical of Torres) speculated that it was more likely her refusal to succumb to pressure from Torres to prioritise Mifapro over other education projects.

The government remains under pressure to provide the information - the court ruled that Argueta's replacement must comply with Montenegro's demand.

Development: On 8 April, the Guatemalan authorities, with the help of the UN-backed commission against impunity in Guatemala (Cicig), arrested four people for murder of Ví­ctor Rivera, a government security advisor,in April 2008.

Significance: The arrests could provide the key to one of the most serious scandals to hit the country in recent years: the murder of four El Salvadoreans. Rivera had been working on this case, but there have been no convictions.

Three Salvadorean politicians and their driver were murdered in Guatemala in February 2007. Four senior Guatemalan police officials arrested for the crime were themselves killed days later in a high security prison.

According to Cicig, the suspects arrested in relation to Rivera's murder (one colonel and three civilians) were members of a criminal gang which specialised in sabotaging investigations. The other key figure implicated in the case is a former public prosecutor, Álvaro Matus, accused by Cicig of obstructing the investigation into Rivera's murder. Matus is currently on bail.
 
The arrests follow other recent successes by Cicig which include the recent removal of Guatemala's top police officials and interior minister accused of corruption; its conclusion of an investigation into the prominent case of a murdered lawyer, Rodrigo Rosenberg; and the arrest of a former president, Alfonso Portillo, accused of corruption. President Alvaro Colom has said that he wants Cicig - whose mandate is due to run out in September 2011 - to continue its work in Guatemala for at least another five years.

Development: On 19 May businessmen in Guayaquil hailed President Rafael Correa's announcement that he wanted to negotiate an economic cooperation agreement with the European Union.

Significance: Ecuadorean businessmen argue that the EU's trade deals with Central America and Peru and Colombia will put them at a disadvantage. The deals were signed in Madrid on 19 May. The big question for Ecuador is whether the EU will be interested in taking up Correa's belated offer.

In July 2009 Ecuador withdrew from the EU trade talks, which Peru and Colombia successfully concluded yesterday. Correa now says that he wants an economic cooperation agreement with the EU, not a free trade agreement, which Peru and Colombia achieved. Ecuador's trade negotiator, Mentor Villagómez, hopes that the EU will respond next month (June).

Banana exporters will be the big Ecuadorean industry at a disadvantage in the EU after the EU deals with Central America, Colombia and Peru come into effect. Under the deals, their bananas will face an EU tariff of â‚ ¬75 (US$61) a tonne in 10 years' time but Ecuadorean bananas will still have tariffs of â‚ ¬114 a tonne. Other Ecuadorean commodities which could also lose out in the EU are: other fruits, flowers, coffee, cocoa, vegetables and oil seeds.

Some Central American agro-industrialists fear that they will lose out as European products flood their markets. The big winners in Central America from the EU deal are the coffee and tuna industries.

Mexico: Mexico's state oil company Petróleos Mexicanos said it exported an average of 1.3m barrels per day (bpd) in the first five months of 2010, earning $14.3bn in revenues. According to the statement, average crude output for the January-May period came in at 2.6m bpd, roughly equivalent to the average for all of 2009.

Region: The publication América Economí­a has ranked cities in the Americas by ease of doing business. The report used the index of urban competitiveness (ICUR) based on criteria such as the quality of infrastructure and environmental sustainability, as well as other measurements including the number of international destinations reachable directly by air. Miami, the only US city included in the survey, came in first place, followed by Santiago, Chile, and São Paulo, Brazil. The capital city of Honduras, Tegucigalpa, was placed at the bottom of the table of 37 cities, just below the capitals La Paz (Bolivia), Caracas (Venezuela), Asunción (Paraguay) and Managua (Nicaragua).

Uruguay: According to Uruguay's union of exporters, exports totalled US$3.9bn in the first seven months of 2010, a 22.78% increase on the same period the previous year. Imports increased 33.2% over the same period to a value of US$3.65bn.

Development: On 13 September the government bowed to international pressure and sent a bill to congress to strike down a controversial 1 September legislative decree, DL 1097, which could have allowed human rights abusers, such as the former president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), to be released from prison.

Significance: The row over DL 1097 coincided with President Alan Garcí­a's final cabinet reshuffle, after senior ministers led by the prime minister Javier Velásquez Quesquén resigned in order to run in the general election in April 2011. The big loser in the controversy over DL 1097 was the defence minister, Rafael Rey, a Fujimorista: he claimed that the DL1097 opponents were “noisy" special interest groups.

Rey will probably run for either the presidency or congress next April, but his failure to push through DL1097 over the objections of the justice minister, Victor Garcí­a Toma, weakens his bid, and probably also the presidential campaign of the poll front runner, Keiko Fujimori, Alberto's daughter. Rey admitted that DL1097 had been drafted with the help of César Nakazaki, a lawyer who had defended Alberto Fujimori when he was prosecuted for (and convicted of) human rights abuses in 2009. During Fujimori's decade in power there were at least two massacres of the government's political opponents (including the 'Barrios Altos' massacre in 1991 and 'La Cantuta' in 1992).

The tipping point in the DL1097 row was an intervention by Mario Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian novelist defeated by Fujimori in the 1990 presidential election. Vargas Llosa sent a letter to President Garcí­a criticising the decree, and resigning with immediate effect from the Comisión de Alto Nivel para la Construcción del Lugar de la Memoria (the high level commission charged with constructing a museum and memorial to the victims of the internal conflict which lasted from 1980 to 2000). This conflict was resolved by Fujimori's hardline (some human rights observers would say corner-cutting) security policies. At least 69,000 people were killed in the country's internal conflict.

Vargas Llosa's description of DL1097 as a “barely disguised amnesty_ for the dictator and his right-hand man [Vladí­miro Montesinos]", coupled with his resignation, forced Garcí­a's hand. The cabinet said that a majority of ministers agreed with Garcí­a's decision to send a bill to congress to strike down DL 1097. Congress responded by saying that it would hold an emergency session to nullify the decree. President Garcí­a does not have the power to veto a legislative decree.

It's not clear whether the constitutional court will now report on whether DL1097 was constitutional: Rey and Garcí­a Toma had both argued that it was. Garcí­a Toma had insisted that DL 1097 would not allow Fujimori to be released, but he acknowledged on 13 September that getting congress to cancel the decree was the “right way" out of the crisis.

Pointer: The new prime minister will be José Antonio Chang, who was the minister of education in the outgoing cabinet. He is likely to be sworn in tomorrow (15 September). Chang is a political lightweight who was heading back towards academia before President Garcí­a asked him to help him see out his final 10 months in office. The only ministers all-but-certain to remain in the cabinet are: Enrique Cornejo (transport); Manuela Garcí­a (labour); José A. Garcí­a Belaunde (foreign affairs); and the culture minister, Juan Ossio. The big surprise is that, according to Velasquez Quesquén, Mercedes Aráoz, the economy minister, might stay in the cabinet and thus surrender her presidential ambitions for 2011. The interior minister, Octavio Salazar, is leaving cabinet to run for congress.

Development: On 24 October Carlos Villegas, the head of Bolivia's state-oil company, Yacimientos Petrolí­feros Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB), told reporters that previous administrations had “inflated" the size of Bolivia's gas reserves in order to justify the privatization process.

Significance: Villegas's comments add to continuing uncertainty regarding the actual size of the country's gas reserves. The government led by President Evo Morales has yet to make public the results of a new study (it commissioned) by a US consultancy firm, Ryder Scott Company, which apparently suggests that proven reserves are in the region of 8.3 trillion cubic feet. This is far short of the 26.7 trillion cubic feet reported in a 2005 study by another US consultancy firm, De Golyer and McNaughton.

If the revised reserves figures are confirmed, it will be a blow to the Morales government. The industrialisation of Bolivia's hydrocarbons sector has been central to its economic development plans. Critics had already questioned the government's recently unveiled US$17bn five-year investment plan to industrialise the economy, much of which was based around the development of the gas sector. Aiming to end Bolivia's “500 years of exploitation" as a supplier of commodities to the global economy, the plan includes six megaprojects to be carried out by YPFB and the state run Empresa Boliviana de Industrialización de Hidrocarburos (EBIH). These include the construction of two plants to separate hydrocarbon liquids (representing a total investment of US$400m), a new fertiliser (urea) plant (US$700m), oil-funded housing projects (US$70m), a plant to produce diesel from natural gas (US$670m), and a new oil refinery.

In the medium term, the new report also raises questions over whether Bolivia will be able to meet its export commitments. YPFB is currently contracted to sell 30.5m cubic metres per day (cmpd) of gas to Brazil and 7.5m cmpd to Argentina (rising to 27.7m over the next few years), with further plans to export to Paraguay and Uruguay.

Development: On 7 December the Guatemalan congress finally approved 'Law 55-2010', known as the 'domain extinction law' (LED).
 
Significance: The LED is intended to fight narco-trafficking and organized crime by allowing the government to expropriate assets (including monetary gains) found to have been obtained illegally and to make free use of them. The law had been stuck in congress for almost seven months amid concerns by legislators that it would be too invasive and that it could be used for political persecution if extended to public servants. However, pressure from civil society groups and more importantly from the US to introduce similar laws to those already in place in Mexico and Colombia persauded congress to approve the bill.      
 
Just days before the vote, various legislators denounced that they had received death threats from unidentified persons threatening to target them should they vote in favour of the LED. This raised serious questions about whether the initiative would be approved by congress.

However, in an unprecedented move, the day before the vote, the US ambassador to Guatemala, Stephen McFarland, invited all congressional caucus leaders for breakfast at his residence in order to discuss the delay in the vote. Also present at the breakfast was the US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Arturo Valenzuela, who was on a regional tour. Upon arriving in Guatemala, Valenzuela had commented that the hard-line (mano dura) repressive tactics adopted in Guatemala and elsewhere were not enough to combat crime in Central America.
 
In the end, the LED law was approved unanimously by the 112 legislators present for the vote, following 39 minor changes to the bill.

Development: From today, 28 January, the Mexican army will join state police officers in joint patrols in the northern, crime-ridden state of Nuevo León.

Significance: Both the federal and state government said that the move was a temporary one. Nuevo León has seen one of the biggest surges in killing in the past 18 months as gangsters battled for control of smuggling routes into the US. The prospect of the arrival of the army appeared to have an immediate effect: there were no killings in Monterrey, the state capital, on 27 January. In the first 26 days of 2011 there had been 97.

Key points:

Most of the joint patrols will be in the metropolitan zone of Monterrey, Mexico's industrial hub and home to 4m people. The city's mayor and the state governor, have both said recently that their resources were simply not sufficient to deal with the gangsters. In 2010, there were 610 gang murders in the state, up from 99 in 2009.

The strategy is that the army will help the police in urban zones while the state, not the federal government, recruits and trains new police officers who will then be deployed to replace the army. It is not clear how many troops will be deployed in and around Monterrey: unofficial sources say 300. The soldiers, according to state officials, will wear state police uniforms, though they will carry the army's more powerful weapons.