
The latest release of public opinion polls ahead of next Sunday's (April 2) presidential runoff in Ecuador show the ruling party candidate Lenin Moreno winning by a margin of 4.5 percentage points. The Cedatos poll conducted between March 18th and 21st, showed the ruling party candidate with 52.4% of the vote compared to opposition leader Guillermo Lasso‘s 47.6% (a 4.8% difference).

Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray said that if North American Free Trade Agreement negotiations don't benefit all parties involved, the country is willing to “step away” from it. In an interview with Bloomberg, he said pulling out of NAFTA would be a last resort.

United States oil giant Exxon Mobil Corporation is moving full steam ahead with plans to transform Guyana, in the north of South America, into a major oil producer. In what industry experts call a rare occurrence in the industry, Exxon Mobil has asked the David Granger administration for a production license to start pumping oil from the country’s seabed, less than five years after it discovered major oil finds.

Muddy water spilled onto streets and into homes on Thursday in a new round of unusually heavy rains that has killed at least a eighteen people in Peru and now threatens flooding in the capital Lima. The intense rains and mudslides over the past three days have wrought havoc around the Andean nation and caught residents in Lima, a desert city of 10 million where it almost never rains, by surprise.

On Monday, two US airlines announced that they have plans to cancel their flights to Cuba, one of which is Fort Lauderdale-based Silver Airways, whose representatives said they had made the “difficult but necessary” decision to cancel its services to Cuba from April 22.

For many years the swimming pigs of Big Major Cay, also known as Pig Beach, in the Bahamas Exuma island chain, have been a major tourist attraction. Running wild on the uninhabited island, swimming out to meet boatloads of tourists and happily gobbling down the food and snacks they brought, the friendly porkers enjoyed a porcine paradise on their island in the sun.

Mexico's top diplomat was in Washington last week for meetings with the U.S. government, sidestepping the normal channels and heading straight for the White House. Mexican Foreign Secretary Luis Videgaray met at the White House with President Trump's son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner, along with National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, a top financial aid, the Mexican government announced.

The death toll from the fire at Guatemala's Virgen de la Asunción shelter for girls in the municipality of San José Pinula has risen to 40, officials said. Four of the girls hospitalized after the fire last Wednesday were flown on an airplane ambulance to the United States for treatment at the Shriners Hospital for Children of Galveston, Texas, Saturday night.

Bolivia passed a controversial measure on Wednesday to expand production of coca, the raw material for cocaine. Leftist president Evo Morales dismissed warnings that an increase in coca crops would fuel the illegal drug trade.

Peruvian Ministry of Production (PRODUCE) has set the maximum allowable catch quota for Patagonian toothfish (Dissostichus eleginoides) at 160 tons for 2017. According to the Ministerial Resolution No. 097-2017-PRODUCE, published on Friday in the official newspaper El Peruano, states the quota may be modified according to biological and/or environmental conditions, following a report from the Instituto Mar del Peru (IMARPE).