Latin America

• Friday, November 26th 2010 - 02:18 UTC

  Uruguay’s Lower House approves Unasur; Senate votes next Tuesday

  

  Uruguay’s Lower House approved on Thursday the Unasur (Union of South American Nations) constitution protocol sending a strong message of support to the group’s summit in Guyana.

• Thursday, November 25th 2010 - 21:25 UTC

  First time ever woman president (for a few days) in Uruguay

  

  Uruguay’s First Lady and speaker of the main Senate group in the ruling coalition Lucia Topolansky will be sworn as interim president on Friday, the first woman-president in the history of the Uruguayan democracy.

• Thursday, November 25th 2010 - 04:34 UTC

  Latinamerica not involved in an arms race and can further reduce defence costs

  

  Latinamerican countries are not involved in an arms race and can further cut into military expenditure because it is essentially a region of peace, said the Defence ministers of the Americas IXth conference meeting in Bolivia.

• Thursday, November 25th 2010 - 04:26 UTC

  The Economist analyzes Uruguay’s debate on rejecting the “Expiration Law”

  

  Néstor Kirchner Argentina’s late former president first became popular by pushing for the repeal of the amnesties and pardons that prior governments had granted to members of the country’s bloody 1976-83 dictatorship. Argentines cheered when the Supreme Court ruled the laws unconstitutional in 2005, and have supported the hundreds of prosecutions for human-rights abuses that have been launched since then.

• Wednesday, November 24th 2010 - 22:12 UTC

  Petrobras abandons Ecuador: no agreement on new oil contracts

  

  Brazil’s Petrobras is abandoning Ecuador after not having reached an agreement on the new oil contracts with the government while Spanish-Argentine Repsol-YPF will remain, announced Minister of Non renewable natural resources Wilson Pastor.

• Wednesday, November 24th 2010 - 20:50 UTC

  Colombian oil industry booming; Ecopetrol plans 8.5 billion investments

  

  Colombian state oil company Ecopetrol announced investments of roughly 8.5 billion US dollars in 2011, with 5% of that total to be allocated for projects in the United States, Brazil and Peru.

• Wednesday, November 24th 2010 - 05:28 UTC

  Lula da Silva not interested in Unasur secretary general post

  

  Brazilian president Lula da Silva has no plans or intentions of becoming the next secretary general of Unasur, Union of South American Nations said his spokesperson Marcelo Baumbach who discarded all speculations related to the issue.

• Wednesday, November 24th 2010 - 02:56 UTC

  Ample support for democracy in Uruguay and Argentina; much less in Peru

  

  Peru is the country with less citizen support for democracy in the Americas while in Uruguay, Costa Rica and Argentina the system enjoys massive approval.

• Tuesday, November 23rd 2010 - 03:22 UTC

  Chavez announces 2012 re-election bid and warns on the return of the ‘bourgeois’

  

  Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez announced he would again run for office in 2012 underlining that “there’s no turning back” from the current “Bolivarian revolution” process which he has been leading for the last twelve years.

• Monday, November 22nd 2010 - 20:54 UTC

  Italy’s Eni to invest 7 billion USD in developing Venezuela’s oil and gas reserves

  

  Petroleos de Venezuela SA and Italy’s Eni SpA said they’ll jointly invest 17 billion US dollars to produce and refine heavy crude in the Orinoco Belt.