Former president Michelle Bachelet (2006-2010) could win the presidential elections on 17 November in the first round, crushing her main opponent, Evelyn Matthei, in the process, according to a poll released on 29 October. Bachelet has long been the overwhelming favourite for victory but it had...
Venezuela has put into effect the regulations to implement a shootdown law approved 17 months ago. Within days a stream of announced shootdowns began to appear in the media, but most of these turned out to be the result of confusion with the previous practice of destroying suspected drug-carrying...
The Cuban government has announced plans to eliminate gradually its dual currency system, finally moving to address the most fundamental barrier to proper economic reform in the country. In the short-term, currency reform will create winners and losers. The official statement sought to reassure...
The government in Kingston, the IMF, the ratings agencies and creditors were all making reassuring noises in September. There are indeed signs that the Jamaican economy may be stabilising. But with its massive foreign debt overhang, Jamaica isn’t out of the woods yet.
There were two pieces of...
In early July 2013, Marino Murillo, Cuba's economic tsar and architect of its economic policy ‘updating’, addressed an invited delegation of international journalists and academics about the direction of the economic reforms being undertaken by the government led by President Raúl Castro. Among...
The resurgence of violence in Guatemala, doubts about the gang truce and the working of the judiciary in El Salvador and about the state’s capabilities in Honduras are the background against which the prospect is again being raised of Central America’s Northern Triangle becoming — or having...
Another date for the diaries of Argentine debt-watchers: on 30 September the US Supreme Court will decide whether to hear Argentina’s appeal against a ruling that would block further payments on its current bonds unless it also pays holdout creditors. Following another decision against the country...
It is one of Latin America’s biggest technology and civil engineering contracts, valued at just under US$17bn. It could transform passenger travel in Brazil’s densely populated Campinas – São Paulo – Rio de Janeiro urban area. But Latin America’s first bullet train project isn’t moving just yet:...
President Enrique Peña Nieto has trumpeted the fact that the number of homicide cases has fallen significantly in his first eight months in office, and has attributed this to greater cooperation between federal and state authorities and improved intelligence. However, a leading private tally of...
A sudden mid-August upsurge in violence in eastern Port-of-Spain led to a first-ever political event: a meeting between Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar and opposition leader Keith Rowley to work out a consensual approach on anti-crime measures. It also triggered a police response that was...
President Nicolás Maduro has called a national emergency in Venezuela to combat corruption “at its roots”, for which he is seeking special powers.
Maduro has not clarified exactly what these special powers might be but in order to begin a decidedly vague “process to reform laws and change...
A recent visit by the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism, Ben Emmerson, has subjected the government led by President Sebastián Piñera to fresh criticism over the long-running dispute with the indigenous Mapuche community over land claims. Following a...
In September or October coming the US Supreme Court must consider whether to issue a ruling on a dispute over Argentina’s foreign debt. Under existing rules various institutions have the right to file a ‘friend of the court brief’, taking a position on the matter in hand, which is submitted for...
The government of President Otto Pérez Molina recently announced the arrest of five members of a ‘community police’ group in Tejutla, San Marcos, on suspicion of involvement in serious crimes. This has been highlighted as proof that the authorities have not lost control of these organisations,...
President Evo Morales won international sympathy for what Bolivians have dubbed “that strange episode in Europe” – when France, Italy, Portugal and Spain refused to allow Morales and his presidential jet to transit through European airspace on the unfounded suspicion that fugitive US...
Corruption has proved a popular spectator sport in Argentina this year. Attempts by the government to shift the spotlight away from an investigative journalism programme by scheduling domestic football matches at the same time failed to dampen the public’s appetite for tale of official corruption....
Incredulity was perhaps the main international reaction to the news on 11 June that the Nicaraguan government had awarded a virtually unknown Chinese company a 50-year concession to build a new canal across the Central American isthmus, at an estimated cost of US$40bn. A few weeks on, massive...
Defence Minister Pedro Cateriano has announced that by the end of this year there will be 21 new antiterrorist bases in areas where guerrillas and drug traffickers are active. This comes in the wake of a recent spate of Sendero Luminoso (SL) actions in which the government forces suffered several...
Devaluation, stagflation, a toilet roll crisis, food rationing - no wonder President Nicolás Maduro prefers to dwell on conspiracies, real or imagined, in the face of the dour economic scenario he has inherited. And with global oil prices plateauing, his options are limited. It is probably no...
Peter Beaven, the president of mining company BHP Billiton Cobre, has raised concerns about high production costs and the fall in productivity in Chile, the world’s biggest copper producer. Accounting for 13% of GDP and 60% of total exports in 2012, mining remains by far the biggest destination of...
