The government of President Sebastián Piñera has come in for a drubbing from the Instituto Nacional de Derechos Humanos (INDH), an official body created two years ago to monitor the authorities’ performance in the area of human rights. Prominent among its criticisms, as last year, is police...
After months in the pipeline, Nicaragua’s 92-seat unicameral legislature approved President Daniel Ortega’s tax reform proposal.
As was the case with his 2009 fiscal reform, the new bill, which was agreed with the private sector lobby, Cosep, fails to introduce major structural changes, once...
The winds are changing in the Southern Cone as investors eye up Argentina’s massive shale gas deposits, with the unconventional sector likely to be up and running by 2015, potentially sooner than Brazil’s deep-water pre-salt oil sector.
The US oil giant, Chevron, has inked a letter of intent with...
In Caracas on 12 December Vice President and Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro announced after six hours of a “complex, difficult, delicate operation," in Cuba to remove cancerous tissue President Hugo Chávez faced a complex and hard post-operative process”.
Chávez returned to Havana for an...
The Mexican reaction to the votes in three US states on propositions to legalise cannabis has been varied, with some officials saying that the results will impact policymaking while others tried to work out what the effect would be on Mexico’s role as the main supplier of cannabis to the...
The latest report from the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ) shows the economy contracting by 0.6% for the July-September quarter year-on-year. A further contraction of between 0.5%-1.5% year-on-year is now forecast for October-December. Confidence is lacking, and is unlikely to return until...
Governor Geraldo Alckmin asked the state security secretariat to publish its latest crime statistics a few days early, so as to shield his new state security secretary from the negative fallout. According to the figures, 1,157 people in the city of São Paulo were murdered between January and...
The ‘decapitation’ of the Gulf cartel has been followed by that of Los Zetas. This has left the Sinaloa/Pacífico cartel as the last big one still standing. It has also triggered a wave of speculation about what will happen next within the Zetas structure and, by extension, what will happen in the...
It has become increasingly difficult to assess the performance of the Cuban economy in recent years, because of the non-appearance of some important economic data. At the end of October, the Anuario Estadístico de Cuba, which is usually published by July by the Oficina Nacional de Estadísticas e...
We are not talking about how many greenbacks are needed to purchase a gram of cocaine, but of the cost that the cocaine trade and other associated illicit activities have on the environment. According to a recent report by the online magazine Yale 360, in northern Guatemala’s Petén region, which...
The official line was that Cuban voters had delivered an expression of mass participatory democracy. But, while it is true that any other government in Latin America would be envious of voter turnout of 91.9%, in Cuba it is a serious disappointment. One vote attracted particular attention. Cuba’s...
Over recent months Peru’s judiciary has attracted a lot of unwanted attention by issuing a series of highly controversial rulings that have been negatively received by the general public. The judiciary’s actions have caught the attention of both the Ollanta Humala government and international...
A majority of the supreme court magistrates have voted to convict the former ‘political nucleus’ of the left-wing ruling Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) for active corruption as the mensalão trial edges towards its conclusion.
The former president Lula da Silva (2003-2010), in whose first term the...
It has been widely assumed that President Felipe Calderón was determined to escalate his government’s anti-cartel drive in the remaining months of his tenure, so as to be able to step down with his policy vindicated. Since the 1 July elections he has deployed more troops and federal police to...
President Juan Manuel Santos has been true to his promise, revealing details about the upcoming peace talks with the Fuerzas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc) little by little. This week, during various public appearances in the US as part of a short visit to attend the 67th UN General Assembly...
Ecuador’s private sector is putting pressure on President Rafael Correa to make a concerted effort to improve trade relations with the US for fear that his decision to grant diplomatic asylum to Julian Assange, the founder of the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, will have negative repercussions....
Those who trawl through left-leaning online news sites and blogs will have noticed the emergence of a new wave of stories about secret US bases across Latin America and hidden agendas behind the ‘small footprint’ US military cooperation activities in the region. One item has been absent: the very...
What started off as criticism of President Sebastián Piñera for politicising poverty ahead of October’s municipal elections has taken on a whole new dimension over the course of the past week. At stake is something far more important than a short-term political gain: Chile’s institutional...
A car carrying US diplomatic plates came under sustained fire from federal police (PF) officers in the south-central state of Morelos on 24 August. Two US officials travelling in the vehicle were injured, and a Mexican navy captain was largely unscathed. At this point the facts of the incident...
Development: On 17 August the central bank reported that real GDP rose 5.6% year-on-year in the first half of 2012.
Significance: There is no mystery to the results. Thanks to sky-high oil prices, the government is spending hand over foot to ensure the October re-election (for a third consecutive...
