Weekly Report - 18 July 2024 (WR-24-28)

Since taking office at the start of the month, Panama’s President José Raúl Mulino and his new right-of-centre Realizando Metas (RM) government have moved swiftly on a campaign pledge to curb illegal migration through the Darién Gap, a roadless expanse of jungle on the border with Colombia which serves as a key migration route to the US.... Read More

Peru’s authoritarian former president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) is plotting an unlikely presidential comeback after being controversially released from prison last year, where he had been serving a 25-year sentence for human rights abuses and corruption.... Read More

The Estado Mayor Central (EMC) – the largest grouping of dissident units of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc) guerrilla group – has fractured, with only three EMC factions still engaged in peace talks with President Gustavo Petro’s government.... Read More

Venezuela’s opposition is accusing President Nicolás Maduro’s government of waging an escalating campaign of repression in the run-up to the 28 July presidential election.... Read More

The first sentence was handed down in Ecuador’s massive ‘Metástasis’ corruption investigation on 15 July.... Read More

The Argentine government’s efforts to tamp down inflation suffered a setback on 12 July when the national statistics institute (Indec) revealed that the monthly rate in June was higher than in May.... Read More

A week after Argentina’s President Javier Milei attended a far-right event in Brazil, the Brazilian ambassador to Argentina, Julio Bitelli, was recalled to Brasília for consultations for a few days.... Read More

The state police forces of Rio de Janeiro launched a new operation on 15 July, dubbed Operation ‘Ordo’ (from the Latin for order), aiming to combat drug trafficking organisations (DTOs) as well as the paramilitary criminal gangs known as ‘milícias’ that compete with established DTOs for control over favelas in the western zone of Rio de Janeiro city.... Read More

Supreme court (STF) justice Alexandre de Moraes has removed the court seal on files relating to the federal police (PF) investigation into members of the Brazilian intelligence agency (Abin) who allegedly carried out illegal surveillance for the benefit of former president Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2023).... Read More

Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador might have shown some bias in his daily pre-election press conferences during the campaign leading up to last month’s general elections, but nothing that would have unduly influenced the results.... Read More

MEXICO | Growth revised downwards.... Read More

The Cuban parliament will rubberstamp a new austerity plan this week, the second in just six months presented by the government as it seeks to confront the acute economic crisis afflicting the country.... Read More

El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele has warned that the tactics his authoritarian government has applied to tackling gangs (which since March 2022 have been targeted in a major crackdown), may soon be extended to wholesalers, importers, and distributors, who he blames for high prices.... Read More

The proposal by the leftist Partido Libertad y Refundación (Libre) government led by President Xiomara Castro to build a new maximum-security prison on Islas del Cisne (Swan Islands), a chain of three islands located in the north-western Caribbean Sea, which in 1991 was declared a national marine park, has sparked major concern from environmentalists.... Read More

Bolivia’s President Luis Arce announced the discovery on 15 July of a mega natural gas field containing an estimated 1.7 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of reserves, located in the department of La Paz, and which would generate a total of US$6.8bn in earnings for the country.... Read More

“We have no other motive than that of protecting our people and the migrants travelling through what we have called a humanitarian corridor.”... Read More