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MercoPress, en Español

Montevideo, July 7th 2025 - 09:06 UTC

Latin America

  • Saturday, April 1st 2017 - 09:43 UTC

    Paraguay: protestors set Congress on fire following secret vote allowing presidential reelection

    Television images showed protesters breaking windows of the Congress after several hours of escalating violence and confrontations with police.

    Protesters stormed and set fire to Paraguay's Congress on Friday after the Senate secretly voted for a constitutional amendment that would allow President Horacio Cartes to run for re-election, a change that will also require approval by the Lower House. The country's constitution has prohibited re-election since it was passed in 1992 after a brutal dictatorship fell in 1989.

  • Saturday, April 1st 2017 - 09:09 UTC

    Chavism divided: Chief prosecutor says there has been a ”rupture of constitutional order

    Loyalist Luisa Ortega said it was her “unavoidable historical duty'' as top judicial authority to denounce what she called a ”rupture'' of the constitutional order.

    Venezuela's chief prosecutor broke with the government on Friday and rebuked a Supreme Court decision stripping Congress of its last vestiges of power, showing a crack in the unity of the embattled populist government of President Nicolas Maduro as it came under a torrent of international condemnation over what many decried as a major step toward dictatorship.

  • Friday, March 31st 2017 - 07:20 UTC

    Venezuelan Supreme Court closes Legislative gives all power to Maduro: world condemnation

    “Maduro is now the National Assembly,'' assembly leader Julio Borges said.”It's one thing to try to build a dictatorship and another to complete the circuit.”

    The Venezuelan Supreme Court's decision late Wednesday to take control of the opposition-controlled legislature has set off a wave of outrage, with some hemispheric neighbors, including the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Peru and Argentina, denouncing the measure as a threat to democracy.

  • Monday, March 27th 2017 - 05:12 UTC

    Correa´s candidate headed for victory in Ecuador presidential runoff next Sunday

    Cedatos poll showed incumbent Lenin Moreno ahead with 52.4% of the vote compared to opposition leader Guillermo Lasso‘s 47.6%

    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).

  • Saturday, March 25th 2017 - 10:00 UTC

    Mexico prepared to “step away” from NAFTA if negotiations don't benefit the country

    “If what is on the table is something that is not good for Mexico, Mexico will step away from NAFTA,” Videgaray said.

    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.

  • Wednesday, March 22nd 2017 - 12:01 UTC

    Guyana beats exploration/production record: oil extraction expected to begin 2019

    Exxon-Mobil in 2016 announced the successful drilling of a deepwater exploration well, positioning Guyana's seafloor as one of the richest oil discoveries in decades.

    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.

  • Friday, March 17th 2017 - 06:39 UTC

    Torrential rains and mudslides ravage Peru: thousands left homeless

    Evangelina Chamorro emerged near a bridge, lifting herself from a current of wooden planks and walking toward the shore covered head to toe in mud.

    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.

  • Wednesday, March 15th 2017 - 07:56 UTC

    Two US airlines cancel flights to Cuba: excess of capacity

    Airline Frontier is canceling its Miami-Havana route starting next June 4 due to unforeseen high costs, and also because of the low demand.

    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.

  • Tuesday, March 14th 2017 - 21:34 UTC

    Death of swimming pigs of Big Major Cay shocks Bahamas

    Running wild on the uninhabited island, swimming out to meet boatloads of tourists the friendly porkers enjoyed a porcine paradise on their island in the sun.

    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.

  • Tuesday, March 14th 2017 - 21:23 UTC

    Mexico practices direct diplomacy with the Trump family at the White House

    Videgaray met 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

    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.