ARGENTINA-URUGUAY | Green energy investments. On 12 April, Argentina’s Corporación América announced that it is to invest US$100m in the construction of two wind energy farms in Uruguay. According to a company statement, Uruguay’s national energy transmission administrator (UTE) awarded two consortiums (Fingano and Vengano), both led by Corporación América, contracts to build and operate two wind farms in the Uruguayan department of Maldonado. The farms, which will take up 2,000 hectares of land, are slated to produce 40 to 50 megawatts. The Uruguayan government is currently trying to diversify its energy production matrix in order to reduce its reliance…

In the presence of the visiting US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, President Dilma Rousseff this week celebrated Brazil’s new freedom of information law, which will take effect on 16 May. Rousseff was opening the First Annual Open Government Partnership (OGP) Conference, in Brasília, attended by Clinton and representatives from 53 other countries that have signed up to the US-initiated scheme. Rousseff, who spent much of her first year in office battling official corruption scandals, stressed the importance of transparency in government. She defended better management both of public accounts and public information thereof as a way to clamp down…

The Brazilian government is gearing up to take on the banking sector, pushing financial institutions to reduce the exorbitant high double-digit interest rates charged to local consumers and investors. On 12 April Finance Minister Guido Mantega took a pop at private banks, saying that the conditions were ripe locally for the sector to reduce the banking spread (the percentage difference between the interest rate charged on a bank loan and the lender’s funding costs). Days earlier the leading state banks, Banco do Brasil and Caixa Econômica, said that they would slash their rates dramatically, in Caixa’s case by up to…

Spain is at the head of the line, but the queue of countries complaining about this week’s decision by President Cristina Fernández to re-nationalise Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF), the local subsidiary of Spain’s Repsol, is growing by the hour. As Fernández continues to make policy U-turns (see our sister publication the Brazil and Southern Cone report, RBS-12-04), confidence in the country is crumbling faster than a house of cards on a windy day; with it also vanishes the government’s ability to return to international credit markets, from which it has been barred since the 2001 default. The rumours about the…