Weekly Report - 29 August 2024 (WR-24-34)

It seems increasingly likely that Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro will ride out the unprecedented pressure to stand down that he faced following the disputed 28 July presidential election, which the opposition insists was won by Edmundo González.... Read More

When President Gustavo Petro took over the presidency two years ago he unveiled an ambitious ‘total peace’ initiative designed to bring Colombia’s disparate armed groups into a single all-inclusive peace settlement.... Read More

The board of state-owned oil company Petroperú says its financial situation is unsustainable and the government must decide whether to declare bankruptcy.... Read More

President Javier Milei has suffered a series of legislative setbacks that reveal structural weaknesses in his coalition and threaten to derail his shock therapy to overhaul the country’s troubled economy.... Read More

Several big copper miners in Chile have reached agreements with labour unions in recent days that ended strikes and restored full production in the world’s largest producer of the key metal.... Read More

Forest fires have intensified in several regions of Brazil, with the south-eastern state of São Paulo hitting a record number of fires for the month of August.... Read More

Public security think tank and NGO Instituto Sou da Paz (ISP) released a report on 26 August indicating that, from 2016-2023, the arsenals of organised crime groups have been filled with more and more firearms and ammunition legally registered under CAC licences for gun collectors, sport shooters, and hunters.... Read More

On 23 August Mexico’s national electoral institute (INE) voted to give the ruling Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (Morena) and its allies around 73% of seats in the lower chamber of deputies, in a contentious process to allocate federal deputies based on proportional representation.... Read More

Parents of the 43 student teachers who disappeared in Guerrero state in 2014 have broken off dialogue with the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, citing a lack of progress and a confrontational atmosphere.... Read More

MEXICO | New Pemex head named.... Read More

A statement published last week by the Caribbean Community (Caricom), following a visit to Haiti by an eminent persons group (EPG), warns of an “erosion of public confidence” in Haiti’s nine-member transitional presidential council (TPC), singling out “strident demands” for three TPC members, Louis Gérald Gilles, Smith Augustin, and Emmanuel Vertilaire, to be withdrawn.... Read More

Costa Rica’s Rodrigo Chaves has become the first foreign president to visit Panama since José Raúl Mulino took over the presidency last month.... Read More

Panama’s President José Raúl Mulino made the incendiary claim last week that the state had been infiltrated at “all levels” by drug trafficking and dirty money.... Read More

“Venezuela’s supreme court has just consolidated the fraud…There is no doubt that we are faced with a dictatorship that falsifies elections, represses those who think differently, and is indifferent to the greatest exodus in the world which is only comparable to that caused by the war in Syria”.... Read More