Latin America Daily Briefing

Sept. 13, 2024
Jordana Timerman

Regional Relations

• “Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Brazil of being pro-Russia in the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine and lambasted a joint peace proposal drawn up by Brasília and Beijing,” reports Politico.
  
  
• “In the aftermath of Venezuela’s disputed election, the compact that has long bound the region’s left together appears finally to be breaking down,” writes Jon Lee Anderson in the New Yorker.
  
  
• Venezuelan opposition leader Edmundo González’s forced exile to Spain last weekend “has raised new questions about how the Biden administration has handled one of the worst political crises in the Western Hemisphere and the limited foreign policy tools available to the U.S. and international partners to counter authoritarian governments,” according to the Miami Herald.
  
  
• The developers of El Salvador’s digital cryptowallet have been tasked leading conversations with China for a free trade agreement, reports El Faro.
  
  
• Chile’s government formally requested files to participate in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, reports La Tercera.
  
  
• Smarter U.S. security assistance could help Latin America reduce its lethal violence, argues Paul Angelo in Foreign Affairs.
  
  
• Nicaragua’s Ortega government is “strengthening ties in matters of “security” and surveillance with Russia and China, while, internally in Nicaragua, it approves new reforms to the Criminal Procedure Code that empower the Police to request telephone information and freeze bank accounts without a court order,” reports Confidencial.
  
  

Nicaragua

• Nicaragua’s government said it was revoking the citizenship and seizing the property of 135 political prisoners who were expelled from the country last week under a deal with the United States and Guatemala, reports the Associated Press.
  
  

Migration

• Ortega’s government is also “weaponizing the mass migration of its citizens and those from other countries, making it easier for the latter to use the country as a transit point on their way to the U.S. border, according to Manuel Orozco, director of the migration program at the Inter-American Dialogue,” writes Robert Looney in World Politics Review.
  
  

Colombia

• Colombian President Gustavo Petro promised to give a third of the country’s official press advertising budget to community and small media outlets, in a speech in which the leader lashed out at major media companies. (El País)
  
  
• Petro is facing criticism from press freedom groups after calling female reporters “dolls of the mafia,” reports AFP.
  
  
• Petro said yesterday that efforts are underway to carry out a coup against his government. (Mercopress)
  
  
• Petro authorized a service to detect traces of Pegasus spyware on civilian phones, reports the OCCRP.
  
  

Peru

• Alberto Fujimori transformed Perú for better or for worst, writes Mitra Taj in Foreign Policy. “Many in Peru will remember Fujimori for ending an era of bread lines and terrorist attacks that scarred a generation, and for leaving the country with fresh wounds and new challenges, chief among them Fujimori himself.” (See yesterday’s post.)
  
  

Bolivia

• Bolivia is battling more than 3,000 forest fires, with air contamination in some parts of the country “incompatible with human life,” reports El País.
  
  

Regional

• Forest fires in various parts of Brazil have spread a blanket of pollutant-filled smoke across much of the country, also affecting neighboring countries, reports Folha de S. Paulo.
  
  
• Nearly 40% of the areas of the Amazon rainforest most critical to curbing climate change have not been granted special government protection, as either nature or indigenous reserves, according to an analysis by nonprofit Amazon Conservation. (Reuters)
  
  
• Climate change lawsuits have become an important tool in the fight over planet-warming emissions, reports the New York Times.
  
  
• Laura Woldenberg writes in Boom about how escort platforms exploit the vulnerability of migrant women in Mexico and Latin America, perpetuating a cycle of abuse and violence that few face or acknowledge.
  
  

El Salvador

• Seven members of El Salvador’s security cabinet died in an Air Force helicopter crash on Sunday. They “were transporting an accused embezzler with financial ties to the ruling party who was detained in Honduras under unclear circumstances,” reports El Faro. President Nayib “Bukele will receive U.S. help to investigate at a delicate political moment: The Salvadoran president was the first to insinuate possible foul play, despite possible flight protocol violations.” (See Monday’s briefs.)
  
  

Mexico

• Sinaloa cartel leader Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada pleaded today in a U.S. drug trafficking case that accuses him of engaging in murder plots and ordering torture, reports the Associated Press. (La Jornada, Reuters)
  
  
• Schools and businesses Sinaloa state’s capital remained closed in the midst of violent clashes between factions of the Sinaloa cartel, reports the Associated Press.
  
  
• Crashout Media reports on the insider plan for the Sinaloa Cartel war.
  
  
• Mexico is poised to amend its constitution this weekend to require all judges to be elected as part of a judicial overhaul championed by outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador after a majority of the country’s state legislatures ratified the constitutional reform passed by Congress earlier this week, reports the Associated Press. (See Wednesday’s post.)
  
  

Ecuador

• Ecuador will hold general elections on Feb. 9. President Daniel Noboa will run for reelection. (AFP)
  
  
• The director of Ecuador’s biggest prison was killed in an armed attack on yesterday. It is the second such killing in under two weeks in the Latin American country, according to the national prison agency. (AFP)
  
  

Guatemala

• A Swiss court sentenced former Guatemalan police chief Erwin Sperisen to 14 years in prison. It is in his fourth trial over the 2006 extrajudicial killings of seven jail inmates, reports AFP.
  
  

Trinidad and Tobago

• “Gang violence in Trinidad and Tobago is on the rise, and without significant policy changes, predictive models suggest the trend will worsen over the coming years,” reports InSight Crime.
  
  

Haiti

• The awarding of a penalty kick in soccer championship match in the Cité Soleil community of Port-au-Prince touched off a shootout at the venue that killed the second-in-command of one gang and injured another gang leader, reports the Associated Press.
  
  

Argentina

• Argentine President Javier Milei’s deep spending cuts have produced in the first 5 months of 2024 a primary fiscal surplus of 1.1% of GDP and inflation is down to about 4% a month, but rising poverty levels and an IMF projected economic contraction of 3.5% this year raises the question of what do results amount to in terms of real improvement to the economy? Eduardo Levy Yeyati on the Americas Quarterly podcast.
  
  
• The IMF board removed Western Hemisphere Director Rodrigo Valdés from its negotiations with Argentina. Valdés was accused by Milei of not wanting “the best for Argentina,” so the move appears to be a victory for Argentina’s leader. (Buenos Aires Herald)
  
  
• A ten-year-old child participating in a protest outside of Argentina’s Congress was tear-gassed by police on Wednesday — security officials falsely accused human rights organizations of attacking the girl, reports Página 12.

Uruguay

• Uruguay’s slow and steady approach to governance is the secret to its success vis a vis neighboring Argentina, according to Richard Sanders in Global Americans.
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  Fujimori dies, Boluarte declares national mourning

Sept. 12, 2024
Jordana Timerman

Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori died at age 86, yesterday. He was lauded for improving the country’s economic situation during his time in office, and quelled brutal armed insurgencies, but his administration was marred by significant human rights violations and corruption.

Fujimori carried out a self-coup in 1992, he shut down Congress and governed by fiat for a time. He fled the country to Japan in 2000, after a television channel broadcast a videotape showing his spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, trying to bribe a congressman.

He resigned via fax from Tokyo and then unsuccessfully campaigned for a Japanese senatorial seat.

In 2009, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for ordering two massacres carried out by the army death squad Grupo Colina. He was the only Peruvian president to have been convicted and jailed for human rights crimes.

Fujimorismo remains a highly relevant political force in Peruvian politics, and two of his children, Keiko and Kenji, are influential politicians who persistently fought for their father to be pardoned and released from jail.

Peru’s government declared three days of national mourning and decreed that flags be flown at half-mast in public and military buildings as Fujimori, who governed Peru throughout the 1990s, lies in state in the Museum of the Nation until the burial on Saturday.

(New York Times, Guardian, Associated Press, Reuters)

Chile

• Chilean President Gabriel Boric marked the anniversary of the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende with a promise to push for the repeal of an iron-clad amnesty that has for years precluded prosecutions of crimes against humanity committed by members of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship, reports the Associated Press.
  
  

Regional Relations

• The U.S. Biden administration sanctioned 16 Venezuelan judges, election officials and other allies of Nicolás Maduro today for their role in suppressing the presidential election results last month, reports the Miami Herald.
  
  
• Spain’s Congress voted to recognize Edmundo González, the opposition leader who appears to have won Venezuela’s July’s election by a landslide, as the South American nation’s president-elect. Venezuela’s Maduro administration is proposing to cut ties with Spain in response, reports Bloomberg. (See also Associated Press.)
  
  
• Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele will visit Argentina in two weeks, where he will meet with President Javier Milei. The two governments signed a security related cooperation agreement in June. (La Nación, Ámbito)
  
  

El Salvador

• Bukele’s crackdown on crime has been hugely controversial, built on systematic human rights violations — but it has also greatly reduced violence in the country, reports CNN. New data from US Customs and Border Protection reveals a surprising trend: fewer Salvadorans are now heading north.
  
  

Argentina

• Argentina’s Milei administration succeeded in thwarting an effort to overturn a veto of legislation that would have increased social security spending, reports Bloomberg.
  
  
• Argentina’s monthly inflation rate came in at 4.2% in August, defying analyst predictions of an ongoing slowdown. Inflation in the 12 months through August reached 236.7%, still the highest level recorded in the world, reports Reuters.
  
  

Brazil

• Climate change has been exacerbated by deforestation in Brazil, which is undergoing a massive drought. “Even in a country that has grown increasingly inured to the damage wrought by drought … recent scenes of privation and struggle have been startling,” reports the Washington Post.
  
  
• The balance of power in Rio de Janeiro may be shifting from paramilitary militias to one of the city’s oldest criminal groups, the prison-gang Red Command (Comando Vermelho), reports InSight Crime.
  
  

Haiti

• Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness announced that his country would send 24 soldiers and police officers to Haiti this week to boost a 400-strong Kenya-led international security force that has struggled to make progress against the country’s armed gangs, now in control of more than 85% of Port-au-Prince. (Miami Herald, Associated Press)
  
  
• But Holness cautioned that the multinational force was only an initial step in finding a solution for Haiti’s crises, and that it would need to be complemented by other initiatives to have the chance of being successful. (See today’s Just Caribbean Updates.)
  
  
• Ongoing violence in Haiti is putting the education of over 100,000 displaced children in the south at risk, UNICEF warned yesterday.
  
  

Mexico

• Mexicans’ takes on the judicial reform bill that was approved by Congress this month are complex: “In interviews with The New York Times, Mexicans expressed a range of concerns and aspirations for the measure. Some worried about the end of judicial independence, while others celebrated the chance to vote in the people responsible for distributing justice. Many more were indifferent to the overhaul, unclear on exactly what to expect from the change.”
  
  

Colombia

• The Colombian Senate’s economics committee threw out the Petro administration’s proposed 2025 budget, arguing that government efforts to raise enough funds to meet budget needs are unrealistic, reports Reuters.
  
  

Histories

• Dr. Francisco Lopera, a groundbreaking Colombian Alzheimer’s researcher, died this week at age 73. “It is one thing to build a research cohort in a disease population, launch a hunt for an Alzheimer’s gene, start a bank of autopsy brains, conduct long-term studies in mutation carriers to understand the evolution of their disease and investigate therapies that might prevent or stall it. It is quite another thing to do all this with little money, in a country struggling with wave after wave of political and drug violence,” writes Jennie Erin Smith in the New York Times.
  
  
• A new genetic study of Rapa Nui residents counters the “ecocide” theory of Easter Island’s population, popularized by Jared Diamond in his 2005 book. (Financial Times)
  

Mexican senators pass judicial reform

Sept. 11, 2024
Jordana Timerman

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s controversial judicial reform passed in a marathon Senate session last night. Senators voted 86 to 41 — one absence in the chamber gave the ruling Morena party a super majority to pass constitutional reform. (Aristegui Noticias, El País)

It is a major win for the outgoing president in his final month in office. (Reuters) The legislation must now be ratified by the legislatures of at least 17 of Mexico’s 32 states. Morena has a majority in 27 of the 32 state legislatures, so ratification is expected. (Washington Post) Oaxaca’s legislature became the first to ratify it just hours after the Senate’s approval, reports the Associated Press.

It was a dramatic session, marked by accusations of illegal pressure and arm-twisting: The senators were forced to relocate to an alternative building, as heated protests by judicial workers interrupted the session — similar to what occurred last week when the Chamber of Deputies approved the reform. (Animal Político, Animal Político)

The swing vote — Morena and allies are one short of a supermajority in the Senate — came from PAN lawmaker Miguel Ángel Yunes, accused by his party of being a traitor after he decided to support the reform that will make all the country’s federal judges elected positions. Yunes was initially absent due to medical issues, but left the hospital and joined fellow senators in time to cast a decisive vote. (Animal Político, El País)

Senator Daniel Barreda was absent because his father was arrested — his Movimiento Ciudadano party had initially announced that Barreda himself was also detained and said Barreda’s father’s detention was aimed at tilting the senate vote. (Animal Político)

The bill has sparked fierce pushback from Mexico’s judicial sector, which has been on strike for three weeks. The proposal has created a schism within the country’s Supreme Court — three judges named by the outgoing leader support the government’s plan, while another group, led by Justice Norma Piña, have supported a judicial strike against the move, reports El País.

It has also been opposed by the business community and from international allies, namely the U.S. and Canada. “The peso has lost more than 15 percent of its value since the June election. Some international businesses have put investments on hold,” reports the Washington Post.

“The proposed measure could produce one of the most far-reaching judicial overhauls of any major democracy,” according to the New York Times.

But, “the virulence of the debate, coupled with the speed and seeming corruption with which this crucial reform has been pushed through, has distracted from what it is really about,” warns Alex González Ormerod in the Mexican Political Economist: “At its core the reform tries to address the judicial branches’ perceived unresponsiveness to citizens’ needs by inserting their voice into the system via the ballot. Critics of the current system have accused the judiciary of becoming akin to a private club where judges are just responsive to private interests, including organised crime.”

Experts say the reform will not address the systemic problems that afflict the country’s judiciary — including the general impunity rate that is above 90 percent and a toothless disciplinary system that hasn’t meted out significant punishment in decades, even in response to corruption and sexual violence.

Over the course of the debate over the reform, there has been increasing recognition, even among critics, that some sort of overhaul is necessary.

While the elections would be a technical headache, and would put the final selection of judges in public hands, it’s important to note that getting on the ballot itself involves being nominated by committees from one of the three powers of government (executive, legislative and judicial), who will only receive applications from candidates who fulfill pre-requisites. Their longlists will be whittled down through a lottery, notes González. (Mexico Political Economist)

More Mexico

• Shootouts Mexico’s Sinaloa state have kindled fears that an intra-cartel war is about to break out in the wake of the arrest of kingpin Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, in July. (Reuters)
  
  

Bolivia

• Bolivia’s experience in voting judges should be a warning for Mexico. “It has been an abject failure. It has eroded not only the judiciary’s legitimacy and independence but also the country’s rule of law and its political stability,” writes Raúl Peñaranda U. in Americas Quarterly.
  
  

Regional Relations

• Haitians in Haiti and the U.S., have blasted lies, propagated by Donald Trump’s campaign and Republicans, that Haitian immigrants are abducting and eating local wildlife and their neighbors’ pets in Ohio. Leslie Voltaire, a member of Haiti’s ruling Transitional Presidential Council, called it “deeply troubling.” Foreign Minister Dominique Dupuy, in a social media post on X, responded by sharing a quote from African-American author and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison about racism being a distraction. (Miami Herald)
  
  
• A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers, the El Salvador Caucus, formed this year with the apparent goal of boosting Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s image, and “also to drive the agenda of the Bukele government within the United States,” according to the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. (Nacla)
  
  

Regional

• Mauricio Cárdenas and Eduardo Levy Yeyati imagine how a centrist revival could take place in Latin American politics: “A critical starting point to revive the center is to promote a new breed of politicians willing to break with the practices of corruption, nepotism and clientelism that have for so long characterized Latin America politics. The new center cannot be a recycling of insiders masqueraded as a transformation. The goal should not be to resuscitate the center but to reinvent it.” (Americas Quarterly)
  
  

Venezuela

• Following the sudden exile of opposition leader Edmundo González, who appears to have won Venezuela’s presidential election by a landslide, and the failure of diplomatic efforts to negotiate a transition, analysts increasingly believe that Nicolás Maduro will remain in power, reports the Guardian. (See yesterday’s briefs and Monday’s post.)
  
  
• The New York Times spoke to several election volunteers for Venezuela’s opposition party who contributed proof that González defeated Maduro in the July vote. They fled the country after facing death threats from Maduro’s supporters.
  
  

Brazil

• Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva visited Amazonia state and expressed concern over intense drought and the often criminally set fires that are consuming three of Brazil’s six biomes: the Amazon, the Cerrado and the Pantanal wetlands, reports the Guardian.
  
  
• “Brazil is already an important and reliable breadbasket for the world. But to help create a more resilient and sustainable food system for the future, Brazil must strategically prepare its domestic capabilities to meet the projected demands of 2050—and it should do so in partnership with the private sector and the international community,” according to a new Atlantic Council Issue Brief.
  
  

Chile

• Today is the anniversary of the 1973 military coup against Salvador Allende in Chile. The Partido Repúblicano, José Antonio Kast’s far-right party, saluted the armed forces, saying they saved the country from “a Marxist tyranny.” (La Tercera)

Ecuador

• “Private security companies have surged in Ecuador as crime has intensified, but mounting evidence of criminal infiltration in the industry suggests that it may be servicing criminals as much as the private sector and the government,” reports InSight Crime.
  
  
• Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa sent his vice president, Verónica Abad, to Turkey, where she is forbidden from discussing Ecuadorean internal politics. The transfer follows her posting as a peace mediator to Israel, part of efforts to force her to quit her post, according to Abad. (El País)
  
  

Culture Corner

• “Socialist Cuba, the birthplace of salsa and other rhythms that have conquered the world, is now surrendering to the invasion of South Korean pop music,” reports the Associated Press.
  
  
• Peruvian photographer Víctor Zea Díaz created a series of family portraits in the Miraflores community in Nor Yauyos-Cochas Landscape Reserve, where a shrinking population is restoring and reviving their ancestor’s water management systems. (Guardian)
  

New NSA documents on CIA operations in Chile – Fifty year’s after Hersh’s exposé

Sept. 10, 2024
Jordana Timerman

This weekend was the fifty year anniversary of Seymour Hersh’s New York Times exposé on CIA covert operations in Chile. The National Security Archive posted new documents showing that the architect of those operations, Henry Kissinger, misled President Gerald Ford about clandestine U.S. efforts to undermine the elected government of Socialist Party leader Salvador Allende. The covert operations were “designed to keep the democratic process going,” Kissinger briefed Ford in the Oval Office two days before the article appeared fifty years ago this week. According to Kissinger, “there was no attempt at a coup.”

The front page story “C.I.A. Chief Tells House Of $8 Million Campaign Against Allende in ‘70-’73”—”set in motion the biggest scandal on covert operations the intelligence community had ever experienced,” according to Peter Kornbluh’s new briefing book on the subject.

The article led to the formation of a special Senate committe “that conducted the first major investigation of CIA covert actions in Chile and elsewhere and that was the first congressional body to evaluate the role of secret, clandestine operations in a democratic society … The Senate investigation, which also revealed CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders, and a similar investigative effort in the House of Representatives led to legislation to enhance checks and balances on CIA operations and curtail the ability of future presidents to “plausibly deny” covert action programs abroad.”

Regional

• At least 196 people were killed last year for defending the environment, with more than a third of killings taking place in Colombia, according to the latest Global Witness report. Colombia, Brazil, Mexico and Honduras were the most deadly countries for people trying to protect their lands and ecosystems, making up more than 70% of all recorded killings globally. (Guardian)
  
  
• With half a million migrants slogging through the rainforest each year, Indigenous groups in the Darién Gap say their once isolated ecosystem and way of life are under threat, reports the Guardian.
  
  

Colombia

• Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s efforts to negotiate peace with the Gulf Clan, one of the country’s most powerful criminal organizations must balance military pressure with talks aimed at demobilization, argues International Crisis Group analyst Elizabeth Dickinson in a New York Times op-ed. The group’s financial and territorial dominance poses a significant challenge to achieving long-term peace in Colombia.
  
  
• Colombia’s criminal armed groups, “increase the cost of doing any sort of business in Colombia, writes James Bosworth in Latin America Risk Report, highlighting that “the ELN and Gaitanistas organizations are operating in a post-drug war environment and they are thriving. Ending the “drug war” doesn’t magically bring security.”
  
  

Mexico

• Outgoing Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on Monday defended controversial judicial reforms under which voters would elect judges, rejecting an unusual public warning from the Supreme Court chief justice, reports AFP.
  
  
• Incoming President Claudia Sheinbaum points to “scandalous” levels of nepotism in the existing judiciary, reports La Jornada.
  
  

Venezuela

• Venezuelan politician Edmundo González fled to Spain over the weekend in response to grave threats from the Maduro government, a move that “may send Venezuela’s post-election crisis into an unpredictable new phase and test the opposition’s popular support in the weeks and months ahead,” reports Americas Quarterly. “While leading opposition figure María Corina Machado reiterated that she will stay in Venezuela facing Maduro and his inner circle, it’s unclear whether she’ll be able to withstand the regime’s next steps.”
• González’s move “has largely extinguished hope for political change” among the country’s voters, according to Reuters.
  
  
• “While González was undoubtedly threatened, his departure to Spain, suddenly, late on a Saturday night, remains extremely grave, if not catastrophic, considering he is the man supposed to—according to the constitutional order Venezuelans are trying to restore—take oath as president on January 10th, 2025,” writes Rafael Osío Cabrices in the Caracas Chronicles.
  
  
• Those who support González’s exile see it “as a way of protecting a man who has no real desire for power, unlike Machado, and who has no obligation to become a martyr for the cause. In addition, they wanted to avoid “a bloodbath” that could have been unleashed by his arrest and imprisonment,” reports El País.
  
  

Brazil

• Apocalypse in the Tropics, which looks specifically into the relationship of the far right and Christian fundamentalism in Brazil has pushed filmmakers Petra Costa and Alessandra Orofino to ask “Where does democracy end and theocracy begin for Brazil?” (Guardian)
  
  
• Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva named lawmaker Macaé Evaristo, as human rights minister after firing her predecessor over claims he had sexually harassed several female colleagues, reports AFP. (See yesterday’s briefs.)
  
  

Regional Relations

• A U.S. effort to transition the ill-equipped and under-funded multinational security mission in Haiti into a U.N. peacekeeping mission will require convincing Russia and China to support a draft resolution, but also U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, who is a critic of peacekeeping operations, reports the Miami Herald. (See yesterday’s briefs and Friday’s post.)
  
  
• The Honduras based Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI) sued its former president, alleging that he used his position to set himself up to profit after leaving the bank and also has attempted to extort the institution, reports the Washington Post.
  
  

Argentina

• The International Monetary Fund is satisfied with some aspects of President Javier Milei’s economic plan, such as the reduction of fiscal deficit, deregulation, and spending cuts. However the government shouldn’t expect fresh funding until progress is made on exchange restrictions and Central Bank reserve accumulation, according to Alejando Werner, former director of the Western Hemisphere Department of the IMF. (Buenos Aires Herald)
  
  
• Argentines are declaring hundreds of millions of dollars of previously hidden savings in response to a tax amnesty President Javier Milei hopes will boost the country’s scarce foreign exchange reserves, reports the Financial Times.

González Urrutia flees to Spain

Sept. 09, 2024
Jordana Timerman

Venezuelan opposition leader Edmundo González Urrutia, the winner of July’s presidential election according to several independent auditing efforts, fled the country on Saturday. González Urrutia received asylum in Spain, days after the government sought an arrest warrant for him, (see last Tuesday’s post), though El País reports that the diplomatic operation to grant González Urrutia asylum has been going on for two weeks. He was granted safe passage by the Maduro government to reach the airport. (Associated Press)

“My departure from Caracas was surrounded by episodes, pressures, coercion and threats,” González Urrutia said in a recorded voice message after arriving in Madrid. “I trust that soon we will continue the fight to achieve freedom and recover democracy in Venezuela.” (Washington Post)

On Saturday, Venezuela’s government said Brazil could no longer represent Argentina’s diplomatic interests in the country. The move puts several anti-government opponents who have holed up for months in the Argentine ambassador’s residence seeking asylum at risk, reports the Washington Post. Venezuela’s government said its decision responds to information that the asylum-seekers were conspiring to carry out “terrorist” acts, including the assassination of President Nicolas Maduro and his vice president.

Brazil said that it had received the communication “with surprise” and Argentina said shortly afterwards that it rejected the “unilateral” decision by Venezuela. Both countries urged the government of Nicolas Maduro to respect the Vienna convention on diplomatic relations. (Guardian)

Armored vehicles from the SEBIN political police had been parked outside the Argentina ambassador’s residence since Friday and electricity to the diplomatic mission was also cut, this weekend. Analysts say the position was a clear message for González Urrutia, who had been staying at the Spanish ambassador’s residence in Caracas.

The choice for González Urrutia to leave was made because “his life was in danger”, opposition leader María Corina Machado said on social media, citing a “brutal wave of repression” in the aftermath of Venezuela’s July election. (Guardian)

But González Urrutia’s exile has deflated hopes for the opposition’s capacity to effectively oust Maduro. “We’ve witnessed in the past how the remote-controlled or holographic opposition leadership quickly deflates and becomes a punchline that fuels the narratives of the government and the opposition’s opposition,” wrote the Caracas Chronicles.

Brazil

• Tens of thousands of supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro took to the streets of São Paulo on Brazil’s Independence Day on Saturday, to rally against the Lula administration and protest the Supreme Court’s ban of social-media platform X, reports the Wall Street Journal.
  
  
• Critics are concerned that Starlink’s almost complete dominance of the Amazon’s satellite internet market gave Elon Musk huge and potentially dangerous leverage over Brazil’s government, reports the Guardian.
  
  
• Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva fired his human rights minister, Silvio Almeida, following claims that he sexually harassed several women. (AFP)
  
  
• Almeida is accused of harassing cabinet colleague Anielle Franco, the racial equality minister. Almeida has denied the allegations, while Franco thanked Lula for his “decisive action.” The scandal “has been greeted with deep dismay by the Black rights movement,” as both ministers “are among the leading voices in the fight against racism in Brazil,” reports the Guardian.
  
  

El Salvador

• Mauricio Arriaza Chicas, El Salvador’s national police chief, died in an Air Force helicopter crash. Arriaza had played a key role in the country’s controversial crackdown on organized crime. President Nayib Bukele alleged foul play. (New York Times)
  
  
• Arriaza was escorting Manuel Coto, a suspect in a multi-million-dollar fraud scheme who was arrested in Honduras over the weekend. (BBC)
  
  
• Coto, the former manager of the COSAVI savings and loan cooperative, had been the subject of an Interpol arrest warrant and one of 32 people implicated in the embezzlement of more than $35 million by the cooperative’s directors and employees, reports the Associated Press.

Regional Relations

• The United Nations Security Council began considering on Friday a draft resolution to extend the mandate for an international security mission helping Haiti fight armed gangs, which expires on Oct. 1, for another 12 months. The 15-member council is due to vote on Sept. 30 on the mandate renewal. The United States and Ecuador circulated a draft text that would also ask to transition the mission into a U.N. peacekeeping operation, reports Reuters. (See last Thursday’s post.)
  
  
• U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Dominican Republic President Luis Abinader in Santo Domingo on Friday, following a visit to Haiti. (See Friday’s post.) Haiti dominated the private conversation, reports the Associated Press.

Honduras

• Following a major scandal linking Honduran President Xiomara Castro’s brother-in-law with drug traffickers, “one big question is what impact the crisis will have on Honduran politics,” writes James Bosworth in World Politics Review. “With a presidential election scheduled for next year, all three mainstream political parties—Castro’s ruling Libre party and the Liberal and National parties—are jockeying to turn it into political advantage. Yet, all three have now faced credible or proven allegations of major narco-corruption at their highest levels.”
  
  

Mexico

• Mexico’s opposition senators hope to block the outgoing López Obrador administration’s judicial reform bill. The ruling Morena party is one vote shy of a super majority in the upper chamber, though a number of technical issues over how to calculate the vote could make the exercise complex (to say the least), reports Bloomberg.
  
  
• “Opposition lawmakers have also denounced attempts by the ruling bloc to intimidate or buy senators’ support, allegations Morena has denied,” reports Reuters.
  
  
• Juan Manuel Karg analyzes why Mexico’s Morena is a rare case of political continuity in a region of anti-incumbent tendencies. (Cenital)

Bolivia

• Bolivia declared a national emergency due to raging forest fires, reports Reuters.
  
  
• Bolivian inflation hit its highest level in nearly ten years. (Reuters)

Jordana Timerman / Latin America Daily Briefing
latinamericadailybriefing.blogspot

EnergiesNet.com 09 14 2024