Latin America Daily Briefing

Venezuela

• More than 2.4 million people took part in Venezuela’s opposition primary on Sunday, according to organizers. María Corina Machado, who is currently barred from holding political office, won 92.35 percent of the vote, the commission said in its third and final release of results. (AFP)
  
  
• U.S. sanctions relief for Venezuela’s oil sector “is broad-ranging and impactful. It’s unlikely to have any immediate effect on international oil prices, but it will likely realign the regional oil trade, which will benefit the U.S. refining system. It will also test whether a different foreign policy—and sanctions—strategy toward Venezuela can have any impact on the country’s democratic prospects, especially after Sunday’s opposition primaries,” write Francisco Monaldi and Luisa Palacios in Barrons.
  
  
• Brian Winter interviews Juan S. Gonzalez, the White House’s top Latin America official, about the Venezuela-U.S. deal in the AQ Podcast.

Regional Relations

• Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said the Oct. 7 “terrorist attack” by Palestinian militants against Israel did not justify killing “millions of innocents” in Gaza. (AFP)
  
  
• China elevated diplomatic relations with Colombia to a strategic partnership on today, deepening a push with one of the region’s strongest U.S. allies, reports Reuters.
  
  
• The presidents of Costa Rica and Honduras agreed to reverse short-lived visa requirements for travelers from their respective countries, following talks over the past two weeks. (Reuters)

Brazil

• Brazil’s federal police are carrying out a new round of raids and arrests today as part of an investigation into the Jan. 8 riots in Brasilia, including on a relative of former president Jair Bolsonaro’s ex-wife, reports Reuters.
  
  
• Brazil is in talks with international investors to get $2 billion in funding to establish loans for farmers aimed at recovering 40 million hectares of degraded pasture in order to expand agricultural production without deforestation. (Bloomberg)
  
  
• Lula’s government has largely delivered on his promise to protect the world’s biggest rainforest, halving deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon since taking office in January. But destruction has increased 27 percent in the Cerrado savanna. (AFP)
  
  
• Human faces and other figures etched in stone up to 2,000 years ago have been revealed on Amazon riverbanks as a historic drought in the Brazilian region has brought water levels to unprecedented lows, reports the Guardian.

Mexico

• Mexico’s government 300 National Guard troops to Guerrero state yesterday, after a local police chief and 12 officers were shot dead in a brutal ambush on Monday, reports the Associated Press.
  
  
• At least 24 people were killed in three separate attacks in Mexico on Monday, including the killings in Guerrero. (CBS)
  
  
• “Mexico’s criminal dynamics have negatively affected foreign investment and job opportunities in the country for over 20 years, and its experience could give insights into how other countries may handle this problem,” according to a new report published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution. (InSight Crime)

El Salvador

• InSight Crime profiles Dalila Johana Flores Flores, a young woman detained by police under El Salvador’s state of emergency — her family believes relatives of neighboring gang members falsely denounced her as a “terrorist” in retaliation for their clashes with a local leader. Under the ongoing state of emergency “more than 73,000 people have been detained, many of them due to anonymous calls, or quotas demanded from police and soldiers rather than as a result of serious investigations.”

Haiti

• U.S. authorities charging Haitian criminalVitel’homme Innocent, who heads the Kraze Barye (Destroy the Barrier) gang, with the kidnapping of a Haitian American couple and murder, reports the Miami Herald. The U.S. said yesterday “that Innocent’s gang and others in Haiti are increasingly targeting U.S. citizens, particularly Haitian Americans, as they terrorize the nation.”

Argentina

• The first poll following Sunday’s results, conducted by CB Consultora Opinión Pública showed a tie between finalists Sergio Massa and Javier Milei, reports Clarín. (Via Road to the Casa Rosada)
  
  
• Milei’s voter intention is at 41.6% and Massa’s at 40.4%, with 10.4% of respondents saying they would either not vote or vote blank and 7.5% of respondents still undecided. (Via Road to the Casa Rosada)
  
  
• Beyond the electoral results, the election kickstarted a reordering of Argentina’s political gameboard. (See yesterday’s post.) Libertad Avanza’s emergency illustrates the inconsistency of the Juntos por el Cambio alliance of the right-wing Pro with centrist UCR and Coalición Cívica, writes Jorge Fontevecchia in Perfíl.
  
  
• “The combination of theoretical discussions typical of economic anthropology and the Argentine experience of organizing the “popular economy” with a union pretension allows us to visualize the points of tension, as well as the convergence, between the wage economy and forms of unpaid work. nor patterns,” writes Guadalupe Hindi in Nueva Sociedad.

Grenada

• Forty years after the U.S. invasion of Grenada, Bhaskar Sunkara celebrates the legacy of Maurice Bishop and the People’s Revolutionary Government, which “sought creative solutions to the problems of underdevelopment, economic inequality and social oppression. Their solutions by and large worked, and that’s why we must remember them today.” (Guardian)

Migration

• “More than 260 charter flights believed to be carrying migrants from Haiti have touched down in Nicaragua in recent months, according to flight data and experts in the region,” reports the Associated Press. The numbers add “to a historic crush of migration by people hoping to reach the U.S. … and experts say it’s also being used as leverage by governments like Nicaragua’s to get concessions from the U.S. amid tightening sanctions.”
  
  
• A record-breaking number of Cubans have arrived in the U.S. over the last two years, according to updated data released by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Agency. (Politico)

Peru

• The town of Pozuzo is an impeccably well-preserved enclave of Austro-German culture 12 hours away from Lima, on the edge of the Amazon, reports the Guardian.

Jordana Timerman / Latin America Daily Briefing
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