Newly discovered messages from pro-Bolsonaro businessmen in the WhatsApp group “Empresários & Política” have revealed their support for a coup should Lula and his Workers’ Party (PT) win Brazil’s presidential election this October, according to Metrópoles. The group, created last year, contains many notable businessmen from across the country. One Rio de Janeiro-based businessman wrote, “I prefer a coup than the return of the PT. A million times. And for sure nobody will stop doing business with Brazil. Like how they continue to do business with many dictatorships around the world.” Bolsonaro and his supporters are planning large rallies for September 7, Brazil’s Independence Day, coalescing in support of Bolsonaro’s campaign and calling into question the integrity of Brazil’s electronic voting system. Many of the WhatsApp group members referenced the day as a key moment for bringing Bolsonaro supporters and the military together. Others have also heavily criticized the Supreme Court and Supreme Electoral Court. 

Although polls have narrowed slightly in recent weeks, Lula holds a consistent, double-digit lead over Bolsonaro, as shown in a new poll published Monday (Reuters). The first presidential debate will be held August 28, reports Folha. Both Lula and Bolsonaro are expected to attend despite initial resistance.

More Brazil

• In Brazil’s Amazon region, “few candidates or voters are talking about current record-breaking deforestation rates or other environmental problems. Instead, many politicians vie for who has a bolder promise to relax legal restrictions on gold mining, expand deforestation for agribusiness or pave highways through the forest. The few who run on an environmental platform struggle to compete and face public hostility,” says AP.

Argentina

• InSight Crime interviewed federal judge Sabrina Namer “to discuss the impact of Argentina’s court system taking gender-related issues into account,” looking at a recent case in which she acquitted a group of transgender women on drug-related charges. 

Central America

• Moisés Humberto Rivera, leader of a Guatemalan branch of Salvadoran gang MS-13, will be extradited to the US following his arrest in April, reports TN23.   

Cuba

• Severe shortages in basic goods such as food, medicine, and fuel have led the Cuban government to open up the country to foreign investment in domestic wholesale and retail trade for the first time in 60 years, reports rfi.
  
  
• Following a lightning strike that damaged one of Cuba’s oil tanks in the Matanzas terminal, Nicolás Maduro announced Venezuelan support to reconstruct the port, notes Reuters. 

Ecuador

• A gang-led explosion in Guayaquil on Sunday prompted the Ecuadorian government to introduce a state of emergency and “was symbolically much larger than any attack seen in recent memory,” write James Bosworth and Lucy Hale in the Latin America Risk Report. 
  
  
• Following a diagnosis of melanoma on his right eyelid, President Guillermo Lasso will travel to the US to undergo treatment and likely surgery at a US cancer center, reports Reuters. 

Migration

• Official statistics find a daily average of 30,000 pendular migrants traveling between Venezuela’s Táchira state and Colombia’s Norte de Santander state, reports Proyecto Migración Venezuela.

Mexico

• In the first installment of its Our Unequal Earth series, the Guardian reports on the dam in the Colorado River at the US-Mexico border that deprives Mexican citizens of desperately needed water. The “Our Unequal Earth” series will “investigate environmental inequalities and discrimination in the US and beyond,” and “reveal how the climate crisis is making things worse for activists and scientists on the ground.”

Panama

• Combating corruption is key to addressing the causes of July’s estallido social in the country, according to La Prensa.

Regional

• Latin America’s legislatures have grown in power vis-a-vis the executive branch in the past decade, making the region’s “presidential democracies increasingly look and act like a broken version of parliamentarism,” writes Will Freeman in America’s Quarterly. 
  
  
• “Business and intellectual elites are most concerned about economic issues. 64 percent of respondents said that the primary challenge the region faces in the next 18 months is economic growth and job creation,” wrote James Bosworth and Lucy Hale in yesterday’s Latin America Risk Report. 

Venezuela

• 125 national and international organizations working on Venezuela said yesterday that the United Nations Human Rights Council should renew the mandate of its Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela, for which a resolution is required to be introduced and accepted by the Human Rights Council, reports Amnesty International.

Arianna Kohan y Jordi Amaral / Latin America Daily Briefing
http://latinamericadailybriefing.blogspot