The presidents of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela, signed on Saturday night an agreement establishing the South Bank with an initial capital of 20 billion U.S. dollars.
The United Nations Security Council held an emergency meeting on the situation in the Brazilian Embassy in Honduras, where ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya has been sheltering since Monday. The council condemned acts of intimidation and called on the de-facto Honduran authorities to stop harassing the embassy.
A report from the US Library of Congress legal branch released this week concluded that the ousting of elected Honduran president Manuel Zelaya was “legal and constitutional”.
The coming electoral year makes it difficult for the Brazilian congress to approve in the short term the agreement reached with Paraguay referred to the surplus energy from the world’s largest operational hydroelectric dam Itaipú, signed last July by presidents Lula da Silva and Fernando Lugo.
A recent survey by the Cisco Latin America Broadband Barometer showed that Chile has the highest percentage of broadband Internet connections in South America. The study found that 9.7% of Chile’s population has access to broadband.
Ecuador is considering the purchase of 12 Atlas Cheetah C fighter bombers from South Africa, according to Defence minister Javier Ponce in an interview with Quito’s newspaper El Universal.
The activity displayed by ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya from the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa has triggered controversy in Brazil’s political establishment and uncertainty about diplomatic jargon such as the extent of the “refuge” condition.
The Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) will open its new Latinamerican headquarters in Chile next Monday, Sept. 28. J-PAL is an organization that investigates poverty and is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Department of Economics.
Amongst the different leftist governments in Latin America, there are new and rather strident populist regimes (Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador), which seem to grab all the attention.
Weak international markets led to a 6% drop in the value of Chile’s fresh fruit exports this past 2008/2009 season, reported Fedefruta President Rodrigo Echeverría this week in Santiago.