On 12 October President Evo Morales won a resounding election victory, taking 61% of the vote to secure a third term in office, starting in January 2015 and running to January 2020. Most analysts agree that the country’s exceptionally strong economic performance was a key factor underpinning the...
Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto will mark two years in office this December – that’s one third of his six-year term. The president’s most significant economic achievement so far has been to secure congressional support for 11 major structural reforms. While it will take a few years for the...
Things are moving quickly in the wrong direction for Venezuela, but the government is sticking to its line that everything is fine.
It is not inconceivable that Rafael Ramírez, Venezuela’s former longstanding oil minister, president of the state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (Pdvsa) and...
Development: On 2 October Brazil’s presidential candidates held their final televised debate before the 5 October general elections.
Significance: A bad-tempered, and at times chaotic, debate shed little light on what any of the candidates might do in office. If anything, the most substantive...
For the first time since the April reform of the military code of justice, the civilian authorities will be trying soldiers for involvement in a mass killing of civilians. This was announced in late September, almost three months after the event, which was initially portrayed by the defence...
In August the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC, also known under its Spanish acronym, CEPAL) became the latest multilateral institution to cut back its regional growth forecast.
The UN commission now says regional GDP growth this year will be only 2.2%, down from its...
President Rafael Correa managed to duck a potentially awkward referendum on the exploitation of oil in the Yasuní national reserve earlier this year, but he might not be able to avoid a referendum on his plans to amend the constitution to be able to stand for indefinite re-election. The political...
Claims have been made that the number of flights on Peru’s cocaine airbridge has been increasing, and that traffickers may have been testing the use of bigger aircraft to carry the drug. In the mean time interdiction of the ‘narcoflights’ (on the ground, since Peru does not have a shootdown...
The annual accounts of Venezuela's state-owned oil company show that both it and the government are (very) short of cash.
Petróleos de Venezuela (Pdvsa), the state-owned oil company and government cash-cow, has scale by world standards. Total proven reserves of conventional and extra heavy crude...
At the end of June, the Mexican and US governments outlined their respective responses to the massive increase in the number of unaccompanied minors, mostly from Central America, looking to cross Mexico into the US.
The US Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP) first detected an increase in...
The government of President Nicolás Maduro has insistently portrayed the wave of protest actions launched by the opposition earlier this year as a ‘continuing coup attempt’, while the latter have maintained that they were initially provoked by public insecurity, rampant inflation and the...
The economic imbalances in Honduras remain large, particularly for a country where institutions are weak and where the rule of law is absent.
Alarming statistics about Honduras are easy to find. According to the US State State Department’s 2014 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report...
Important new agreements signed by the Cuban state oil company with two Russian oil companies have stirred US interest in Cuba, both from those concerned about security implications, and from business frustrated by sanctions.
In late May officials from the Cuban state oil company, Cupet, signed...
Peru is debating whether to amend or repeal a law just passed by congress that allows the military to become directly involved in antidrug actions — as distinct from fighting ‘narcoterrorists’ — against a backdrop of warnings that not only the fate of the antidrugs effort but even the forthcoming...
Small enterprises are often believed to play a very positive role in developing (and developed) economies: they are associated with innovation, flexibility and the ability to seize new opportunities in a way that ponderous, process-bound large organisations cannot. So it is perhaps surprising to...
Chile’s new mining minister, Aurora Williams, on 20 May said the Santiago government would continue to respect an environmental ruling blocking the development of the Pascua Lama gold mine.
The Pascua Lama gold and silver deposits straddle the border between Chile and Argentina in the Atacama...
Negotiators from the European Union (EU) concluded an initial round of talks with Cuban foreign ministry officials in Havana on 30 April in preparation for a new bilateral political dialogue and co-operation agreement, expected to be inked in 2015. The Cuban team was led by the deputy foreign...
Mexico’s education system needs a radical overhaul. That is the boiled down version of a report presented by the new institute for educational evaluation (INEE) to the senate on 29 April. The INEE, which was created under the education reform driven through congress by the government led by...
On 17 April El Salvador’s justice & public security minister, Ricardo Perdomo, proposed a new broader-scope and more ‘transparent’ agreement with “the gang leaders who still believe in the pacification process”. Perdomo urged them to “stop killing and extorting the population” and join...
Hopes for swift approval of a new mining bill unveiled by President Evo Morales in March [RA-14-03] were premature. Late-March protests by mining cooperatives (cooperativistas) over congressional changes made to the bill resulted in two deaths and forced President Morales to replace his mining...
