According to latest estimates, over 600,000 people will be visiting Brazil during the upcoming FIFA World Cup, the once-every-four years football extravaganza due to be held between 12 June and 13 July. Some US$11bn has been spent on preparations for the event. The matches will be held in 12...
Salvador Sánchez Cerén wasted no time in announcing his key cabinet ministers, and embarking on a tour of Central America, after being proclaimed president-elect by the supreme electoral tribunal (TSE) one week after the desperately closely contested presidential run-off on 9 March against Norman...
The good news is that over the past two years Haiti has achieved a drastic reduction in its epidemic-proportion rate of a kidnapping for ransom per day. The bad news is that a recent high-profile kidnapping, while foiled, has brought again under the spotlight the cosy relationship between criminal...
Bounded by the highways of the Avenida Brasil to the west, and the Linha Vermelha to the east, the Complexo do Maré sits between the two main roads into and out of the city of Rio de Janeiro. Getting to or from the international airport at Galeão requires passing the sprawling favela complex, with...
The cut in the official primary surplus target to 1.9% of GDP for 2014, from 2.3% previously, was welcomed by private economists as an overdue ‘reality check’.
Announcing the move at a press conference on 20 February, Finance Minister Guido Mantega said the government would freeze R$44bn...
{This article is also published in our March 2014 issue of Latin American Regional Report: Caribbean & Central America.}
On 6 March, Cuba’s government confirmed that it plans to abolish the ‘convertible peso’ (CUC), and provided instructions for businesses for the day when that happens. But...
Development: On 9 March Mexico’s national public security system (SNSP) confirmed the death of Nazario ‘El Chayo’ Moreno González, one of the founding leaders of the criminal gang Los Caballeros Templarios (LCT), in a shootout with federal security forces in Michoacán.
Significance: Moreno’s...
The capture of Joaquín Guzmán Loera (‘el Chapo’), boss of the Sinaloa/Pacífico drug trafficking organisation (DTO) and possibly the world’s leading drug trafficker, has been counted as a great victory for the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto. Speculation is rife about the possible...
On 7 February, Grenada marked 40 years of independence. It may be independent from Britain, but it is very far from being out of the clutches of international lenders following its March 2013 default on US$257m of foreign and local debt. A US$193m bond maturing in 2025 is currently trading at 32...
The security forces had warned as early as November 2013 that the Mapuche heartland in Araucanía faced the prospect of another wave of militant actions similar to that of a year earlier. By early December a communiqué had begun to circulate in social networks calling for the staging of a protest...
UPDATE [24 January 2014]: Argentina – a tense weekend ahead
The recent fall in foreign exchange reserves, and the rise in the black market ‘Dólar Blue’ exchange rate, has prompted many commentators to suggest that Argentina is headed imminently towards an inevitable – and major – currency...
In late November an outline deal was reached to resolve one of Latin America’s biggest and bitterest commercial disputes: the battle over compensation after the Argentine government expropriated a 51% shareholding in the country’s main oil company Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF),...
Costa Ricans became aware in early December that a group of about 100 citizens had begun to undergo military training, ostensibly to prepare for the eventuality of war with Nicaragua. The government has condemned the initiative, which is headed by a former police chief, and warned that it could...
Ever trying to put a positive spin on things, Brazil’s finance minister Guido Mantega sought to put the disappointing Q3 GDP figures news in context. “Among the Brics we were the country that grew the most in the second quarter. In the third quarter we had the lowest growth,” he said, blaming the...
Development: On 27 November after a four-hour meeting in Madrid, the board of Spanish oil firm Repsol accepted in principle an offer of compensation from the Argentine government for last year’s expropriation of its majority stake in Argentina’s national oil company, Yacimientos Petrolíferos...
Mexico’s fiscal reform bill, approved by both houses of congress at the end of October and now awaiting the signature of President Enrique Peña Nieto, has not gone down well with the country’s mining industry. The general aim of the bill was to boost non-oil tax revenues to strengthen the...
That Mexico should figure prominently in the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)’s public summary of its drug threat assessment is not surprising. What does catch the eye is the fact that it foresees increases in the supply of all the drugs that Mexico produces, and a possible continuing...
A grenade attack killing four people in the town of Pauna, in the western Boyacá department, has sparked concerns about a revival of the so-called ‘green war’ between rival emerald tycoons in the department in the 1980s.
Colonel Carlos Antonio Gutiérrez, the departmental police chief for Boyacá,...
On 4 November Argentina’s defence minister, Augustín Rossi, announced that a clean-up of old military files had uncovered a series of ‘blacklists’ with the names of artists and journalists considered ‘uncooperative’ by Argentina’s last military government (1976-1983). Along with the other military...
The Dominican Republic (DR)’s energy sector has long been the main weak point of an otherwise surprisingly solid domestic economy. Plagued by chronic production and financing problems, the sector is often considered the main factor holding back the country’s economic development. Successive...
