The Americas Archive

Prime Minister Dean Barrow of Belize is pushing international creditors to agree to a debt restructuring after his government missed a payment this week. In an email interview, Heather Berkman, an analyst at Eurasia Group’s Latin America practice, where she takes the lead on the Caribbean, Central America and Colombia, discussed Belize’s debt problems. WPR: What are the scope and causes of Belize’s current economic difficulties? Heather Berkman: There are a number of factors contributing to Belize’s current financial predicament. First, the economy has struggled to rebound since the global downturn in 2009, and recorded only 2 percent growth in […]

Mexico’s Ciudad Juárez saw a decrease in killings last month, with 48 homicides, 40 of them related to the drug trade, down from more than 300 deaths in many months of 2010, when drug violence was at its peak. While Mexican authorities point to their own efforts as the reason for the decline, the two experts who spoke with Trend Lines emphasized the consolidation of power in the drug cartels, with the Sinaloa drug trafficking cartel gaining control of smuggling routes and the local narcotics trade in Ciudad Juárez, and Los Zetas, the largest crime organization in Mexico, experiencing deep […]

South America’s history throughout the 1980s and 1990s is littered with the names of now-defunct currencies, such as the Argentine austral and the Brazilian cruzeiro. Now, an old vulnerability is re-emerging as an economic and political Achilles’ heel for several South American governments: exchange rates. Some are clamping down on citizens’ purchases of U.S. dollars, in attempts to prop up local money and stem capital flight. Others are promoting central bank dollar purchases and sales, or deploying derivatives contracts, to manage volatile exchange rates. Whether deployed to defend currencies, such as the Argentine peso and Venezuelan bolívar, or smooth the […]

While foreign investors might be feeling a lot of uncertainty about Bolivia’s resource sector policy, one thing is perfectly clear: Bolivian President Evo Morales is firmly in control of any foreign-funded project seeking to develop the country’s natural resource wealth. And when partnerships with foreign investors turn sour, he has not hesitated to seize the underlying assets. That has occurred with surprising frequency this year. In the past four months, Bolivia has nationalized a Canadian company’s silver mine, a tin and zinc mine operated by the Swiss commodities giant Glencore and a Spanish electric grid operation. To say nothing of […]

According to UNICEF, some 700,000 children in Bolivia work — a third of the total child-age population — earning far less than adults. The young workers have now formed a union, UNATSBO, to fight for fairer pay and official recognition. Video News by NewsLook

On Tuesday, Venezuela was formally admitted as the fifth full member of Mercosur, the South American trading bloc that was founded in 1991 by Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. While the accession of Venezuela, which has one of the largest proven oil reserves in the world, will improve regional economic integration, it is also likely to deepen divisions among the group’s members. Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told Trend Lines that Venezuela’s admission to Mercosur was long overdue, having been held up in recent years by the Paraguayan legislature for reasons that were also […]