Weekly Report - 23 January 2014 (WR-14-03)

The most intriguing elections in a generation in Costa Rica have locked the presidential candidate for the country’s most powerful traditional party in a three-way tie with candidates from either side of the political spectrum.... Read More

The international consortium Grupo Unidos por el Canal (GUPC) did not make good its threat to halt work on the US$5.3bn Panama Canal expansion project on 20 January [WR-14-01].... Read More

Newly elected deputies for former president Manuel Zelaya’s left-wing Libertad y Refundación (Libre) caused US$78,000 worth of damages in their first day in congress (on 22 January), after they smashed desks and microphones and destroyed the computerised voting system, according to Francisco Rivera, president of the congressional budget commission.... Read More

NICARAGUA | New central bank president.... Read More

The conflict-torn area of Tierra Caliente in the south-western state of Michoacán is now under the full control of federal security forces, the interior ministry (Segob) revealed this week.... Read More

President Rafael Correa celebrated his seventh anniversary in power on 15 January, eclipsing his icon former president Eloy Alfaro (1895-1901; 1906-1911) as the longest consecutive serving head of state in Ecuador’s history.... Read More

One person was killed and 61 injured after an attack perpetrated by the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc) in the municipality of Pradera in the south-western department of Valle del Cauca.... Read More

Rafael Ramírez, the long serving energy minister and president of the state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (Pdvsa), and since last year also vice-president for economic affairs, announced this week another new ‘reform’ of the officially controlled exchange rate regime.... Read More

COLOMBIA | Record breaking bond issue.... Read More

Last year, Brazil’s delegation to the World Economic Forum in Davos was decidedly modest: Alexandre Tombini, the central bank president, and Luciano Coutinho, the president of BNDES, the development bank.... Read More

Even by the levels of violence to which Brazilians are accustomed, the video published by Folha de São Paulo in early January was particularly gruesome.... Read More

For 40 days now the usually active Twitter feed @CFKArgentina has fallen silent.... Read More

ARGENTINA | Aerolíneas’s 2013 losses.... Read More

A bitter smile.... Read More

“To play with people’s need to work, to threaten them with unemployment, to pressure them to vote this way or the other, is a very powerful and unacceptable form of coercion.... Read More