
Peru's presidential candidates, conservative Keiko Fujimori and leftist Roberto Sánchez, closed their campaigns in Lima on Thursday before thousands of supporters, three days before a runoff that polls suggest will be very close. Fujimori appealed for the “unity and reconciliation” of Peruvians, while Sánchez promised to end the “chaos” and centered his speech on anti-fujimorismo.

The United States sanctioned Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel and his closest circle on Thursday, in a fresh escalation of Washington's pressure on the island with the stated goal of forcing a change of regime after 67 years of communist government. Havana rejected the move at once.

Seven of the eight deputies of the National Libertarian Party (PNL), the far-right group founded by Johannes Kaiser, presented a resolution in Chile's Congress asking President José Antonio Kast to create a Museum of Truth devoted to what they describe as the abuse, hunger and humiliation of the Popular Unity government, led by Salvador Allende from 1970 until his overthrow on September 11, 1973.

The social conflict in Bolivia has split the country once again. The road blockade led by Indigenous peasants, which has besieged La Paz for more than a month, has brought expressions of racism to the surface in the capital. Worn down by the lack of gasoline and food and by soaring prices, some residents lash out at the protesters —and the hostility runs in both directions.

Argentina's government warned that it could fully exercise all available actions over plans to develop an oil field near the Falkland Islands, in a fresh escalation of the sovereignty dispute. The Foreign Ministry declared the plans of Britain's Rockhopper Exploration unlawful and described that company and its Israeli partner, Navitas Petroleum, as clandestine, after the Sea Lion project moved from exploration into development.

Argentina's Senate on Thursday approved the appointment of María Verónica Michelli as a judge of Federal Oral Court No. 3 in La Plata, a nomination President Javier Milei had tried to block because she is the sister-in-law of journalist Hugo Alconada Mon, of the newspaper LA NACION. The nomination was approved on the floor by 44 votes to 18 —all the negatives from the ruling party— with two abstentions, in a session that exposed a rift within the governing bloc.