Brazil & Southern Cone - April 2009 (ISSN 1741-4431)

The World Bank released a new report in late March showing that the Botnia pulp mill on the Uruguayan banks of the River Uruguay was not a source of pollution. The report concluded that a comparison of water taken from the river before and after the construction of the pulp mill revealed no difference at all in levels of contamination. The report is a setback for Argentina in its case against Uruguay at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague, which is expected to issue its final ruling on the dispute later this year. Uruguay's lawyers rushed to include the report, the third such to reach these conclusions, in their case.

Argentine officials dismissed the findings of the report. They said it was biased because it was carried out by a Canadian environmental consultancy firm, EcoMetrix, hired by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group: the IFC financed part of the construction of the pulp mill.

Another report by the World Bank in July 2008 reached the same conclusion. In January, Argentina's Institute of Industrial Technology (Inti), which could hardly be accused of bias, published the findings of a study concluding unequivocally that, so far, the pulp mill “has not contaminated the Uruguay River".

The Argentine government said that it was preparing its own reports, presumably with different conclusions, to present at The Hague. It was adamant that it would continue with its legal challenge, which rests on the claim that Uruguay contravened the River Uruguay Statute, a binational treaty signed in 1975 to coordinate issues such as water quality and pollution prevention.

• Correa
  Ecuador's President Rafael Correa has angered the political establishment in Uruguay by throwing his weight firmly behind José Mujica, the former Tupamaro guerrilla, to win the presidency in October. He said that Mujica's victory would be comparable to that of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, deepening the move leftwards in Latin America, and especially in the Southern Cone after the election of Fernando Lugo in Paraguay last year.