Weekly Report - 10 January 2006

It was a spectacle to thrill leftwingers and produce a frisson among rightwingers the region over: Venezuela's Hugo Chávez simultaneously hosting Bolivian president-elect Evo Morales and rising Peruvian candidate Ollanta Humala - though it remains hard to discern what it means beyond the rhetoric. The event did, however, have two immediate diplomatic repercussions in Peru and Brazil, the latter perhaps being the most significant.