Tuesday, July 20, 2021

Finally, Peru's New President (July 20, 2021)

 

PERU
Peru's National Electoral Tribunal (JNE) pronounced Pedro Castillo the winner of the June 7 presidential elections, according to the New York Times and Andina, the country's official news agency. Inauguration Day is July 28, when the country celebrates its Bicentennial year. The 44,000 voter point spread did not change since the vote counting concluded on June 15. In this era of elections during a pandemic, the new president was invited to appear on the Zoom call when Castillo's name was announced by the JNE. A Bloomberg video captured the exuberance by the crowd after the elected president's speech last night; among the cheers, "We are not terrorists but rather people from the provinces." ("No somos terroristas, somos provincianos.")
  • The AP adds that, "historians say he is the first peasant to become president of Peru." Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal explains that "the rise of Mr. Castillo, a former schoolteacher from the rural Andes, underscores how the pandemic can fuel a backlash against the ruling class in hard-hit countries"
  • Losing candidate Keiko Fujimori put out a short video with mixed messages: while she recognizes the official result “because it is what the law” she insists that the JNE's declaration was “illegitimate” and that the truth “will come to light,” according to the Financial Times. For its part, the Associated Press started their story with a bit of melodrama, "A teacher in one of the poorest communities in the Andes who had never held office is now Peru’s president-elect."
  • "Two failed coup attempts in 7 months: first USA (November 2020-January 2021) and then Peru (June-July 2021). I'm exhausted," tweeted Steve Levitsky, director of Harvard's Latin American Center.

NEWS DIGEST

Colombia
  • President Ivan Duque announced a new human rights office that will report to the nation’s police chief, and will be led by a retired colonel, according to the Associated Press. This follows weeks of protests in which officers were accused of killing at least two dozen demonstrators. "The new department will gather complaints from citizens and produce two reports each year on human rights issues."
  • The Guardian calls out the Colombian government as they support "freedom of expression in Cuba [while] police mount a brutal response to local activists." 

Cuba
  • The Biden administration is set to make changes on Cuba policy including the U.S. remittance policy, increase humanitarian assistance, increasing staff at the U.S. Embassy in Havana to "better facilitate civil society engagement," and identify options to make the internet more accessible, according to the Associated Press, Reuters, and the Miami Herald. "The Trump administration tightened restrictions on travel and remittances to Cuba, reversing the engagement policies from the Obama era." Trump policies resulted in Western Union no longer serving Cuba since early 2020, "leaving many Cuban Americans without a legal way to send remittances ... the second-largest source of revenue for the country and a lifeline for many families."
  • The Cuba Lex twitter feed continues to report on missing persons and identifying locations where some are held. The Wall Street Journal reports that "the whereabouts of hundreds of arrested demonstrators is unknown and others are being held incommunicado without charges."  
  • The death of Cuban Division General Agustin Peña on Sunday has unusual press coverage, some of it speculation. Cuba's Prensa Latina offers the official account while 14 y Medio offers a quick run down of questions surrounding his death. 
  • President Miguel Díaz-Canel accused Anonymous for systematically targeting Cuba with cyber terrorism through #OpCuba, according to 14 y Medio.
  • The Nation publishes a column that surveys an array of opinions from Capitol Hill.

Haiti 
  • The NY Times catches up with the shifts in power in Haiti as Ariel Henry expects to replace Claude Joseph today, a week after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. “Haiti has become a baseball being thrown between foreign diplomats,” says Joseph Lambert, the president of Haiti’s Senate who had presidential ambitions of his own until "the United States urged him to stand down." Samuel Madistin, a human rights lawyer, told NPR, "I don't think he can fix the problems we have now," and said Henry's appointment was problematic even before the assassination.  Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, the leader of Seeing Eye To Eye, told The Times, "it's as if they have replaced the Haitian people. It’s revolting. We need the accompaniment of a lot of countries but we can’t accept they make decisions in our place,” referring to the Core Group of international diplomats. 
  • Members of Henry’s cabinet were announced with the ministers of justice, economy, finance, agriculture and others keeping their positions, according to the Associated Press.
  • "How could the perpetrators, who were caught almost immediately, have pulled off such an audacious, Abbottabad-style commando raid on a guarded presidential compound without an apparent exit strategy?," asks a column in Slate. The answer: the Haiti assassination shows we live in an age of cheap, available mercenaries. (The article does not explain how or why Colombia's military has been so well funded - in weapons and training - over the last 20 years.)

Honduras
  • Former Honduran President Porfirio Lobo Sosa and his family are banned from any travel in the U.S. for their "involvement in significant corruption," according to a press statement from Secretary of State Antony Blinken and a follow-up in Reuters. 

Ecuador
  • In Ecuador, a woman found guilty of an illegal abortion can be sentenced for up to two years in jail, according to Al Jazeera based partly on last week's report from Human Rights Watch.

Mexico
  • About 15,000 Mexicans including 50 people close to Mexico's president have their phone numbers show up in the spy investigation sparked by Project Pegasus." Mexico was the first country in the world to buy Pegasus when the defense ministry purchased it in 2011. Current President López Obrador says the spying is no longer taking place, according to Reuters.
  • Almost 6,000 Mexicans who speak indigenous languages are being jailed for not knowing, or having limited knowledge of, Spanish, according to El País.  In 85% of the cases, there were no interpreters available; 30% are jailed in pre-sentencing conditions. 

Democracy in Brazil and Venezuela
  • Brazil's democracy is crashing in slow motion, according to El País which reviews how the Bolsonaro government has been breaking social norms and agreements crafted over 36 years of democracy.

El Salvador
  • Amnesty International explains President Nayib Bukele "recipe for limiting the exercise of human rights" and its four ingredients including discrediting activists and harassing journalists.

COVID-19
  • Brazil authorizes trials with 3rd dose of AstraZeneca COVID vaccine Brazil's health regulator Anvisa said on Monday that it has approved trials with a third dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine against COVID-19, according to Reuters.
  • Peru announced the purchase of Sputnik vaccines from Russia, according to Andina. Until now the country has been applying Pfizer, Sinopharm and some Johnson & Johnson vaccines to its population. 
  • Fake doses of Remdesivir, the antiviral COVID-19 drug, has been found for sale in Mexico at a private hospital near the U.S. border and "offered for sale on the internet", reports the Associated Press. They were going for about $2,000 a dose.
  • The gendered effects of COVID-19 in Mexico is explored in a column in Modern Diplomacy. "Two of the largest factors ... are childcare and household responsibilities in combination with gender norms ...  Many could not transition to work from home."

The Environment
  • The Barbuda Ocean Beach Club and a new airport for its private-jet clientele is being scrutinized with "deep concern," by the U.N.'s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, according to The Independent.  "The developments are facing multiple legal complaints which allege dismantlement of Barbudans’ historical legacy and legal rights, and significant harm to fragile ecosystems."
  • 2.5 billion trees died in the recent drought in the Amazon and the region is at risk of a ‘large-scale dieback’, according to the Financial Times. "With droughts becoming more common and more intense, this means more tree mortality and less water being recycled." The story is based on a new Lancaster University report.

Caribbean Docs
  • The New York Times reviews two PBS documentaries, “Landfall” on Puerto Rico and “Stateless” about the Dominican Republic, and writes that "Caribbean narratives are rarely granted this kind of complexity onscreen."

It's Eduardo Romero here filling in for Jordana: let me know if I missed or misinterpreted something or perhaps you have a different take. 


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Monday, July 19, 2021

LEADERSHIP CHANGE IN HAITI (July 19, 2021)


 HAITI

Claude Joseph is handing the leadership over to Ariel Henry, according to an interview this morning in the Washington Post.  Joseph has been acting prime minister since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse."  The international community, led by the Core Group, made it clear the path forward in Haiti's political leadership.
Below is a tick-tock of the different groups applying public and private pressure on the Caribbean island over the weekend. (The Core Group includes the Ambassadors from the United States, France, Spain, Brazil, Germany and Canada, as well as representatives from the UN and OAS.)
  • On Friday, a group of Hatian opposition leaders published a "National Memorandum of Understanding '' making clear they no longer supported Ariel Henry, according to Haiti Economie. 
  • On Saturday a group of civil society leaders expressed their interest in being involved in the process of naming a new president, according to VOA News.
  • Later on Saturday, the Core Group of Ambassadors on Haiti endorsed designated Prime Minister Ariel Henry and did not mention Claude Joseph, interim prime minister and Haiti’s effective leader, according to a statement (only in French). The Washington Post reported that, "by apparently snubbing Joseph and backing Henry, the Core Group appeared to be the first major international group to withdraw its support for Joseph. 
  • Also on Saturday, the U.N. Special Representative in Haiti, Helen La Lime, released to a statement on Saturday that didn't name names but concluded, "all Haitian stakeholders must urgently set aside their differences, eschew their narrow interests, and work together to tackle the protracted political, structural, and social issues that hinder the country’s progress."
  •  Some neighboring countries expressed displeasure at the Core Group's decision, according to the Jamaica Observer.
  • Haiti's former First Lady's return to the island seemed to be in anticipation of Friday's funeral, according to the Miami Herald, But now it seems to have been a way to be present in all the political changes. It was the departing leader Joseph who has the backing of police and the military and who met the former First Lady at her unannounced arrival in Port au Prince this weekend, according to the AP.
  • Jakob Johnston (of CEPR's Haiti AidWatch) tweeted over the weekend:  "The Core Group statement isn't about snubbing Claude Joseph, who had already accepted, begrudgingly perhaps, to join Henry's government. It's a snub to parts of the opposition, who issued a statement opposing Henry yesterday, and to the civil society commission." 
  • The Financial Times' editorial board wrote that Haiti and Cuba must find their own steps forward. (The editorial is only hours old but the news has outpaced it.)

Other Haiti News
  • The  Miami Herald reported on Haitian President Jovenel Moïse final phone calls. “My life is in danger. Come quick; come save my life.” (A summary is also in the Sun-Sentinel).
  • The Pentagon identified seven Colombian nationals, arrested in Haiti, as having received "U.S. military or police training ... both in Colombia and the United States between 2001-2015," in a Friday news dump, according to Voice of America. In Haiti, four of those on the assassinated President's security detail are not allowed to leave the country, according to the Washington Post.
  • On Friday, the head of Colombia’s national police gave a press conference where he suggested it was Haitians who shifted the plan from an arrest of the president to an assasination of Jovenel Moïse, according to the New York Times. The underworld of Colombian mercenaries is explored by the Los Angeles Times.
  • A revealing look at the missteps and failures of both the Trump and the Biden administrations was published in Sunday's NYTimes and includes an anonymous but "senior Biden official" calling their strategy of keeping their predecessor's policies in place " a mistake." Haitian novelist Évelyne Trouillot writes, "We have been living in an atmosphere of terror for months," in an op-ed in the Washington Post.
  • Moïse and the northern city of Trou-du-Nord, where he was from, is profiled in the New York Times. There have been Catholic masses and marches there in his honor, where "he was remembered mostly as the son of a sugar cane farmer and seamstress."

CUBA
  • This weekend it was pro-government forces who paraded around Havana in "a very different show of strength", according to the Washington Post and Reuters. In the crowd were President Miguel Díaz-Canel and Raúl Castro. (The Post cops to an unfortunate translation error in an editor's note.)
  • The Cuba Study Group put out a press release "unequivocally supporting the right of all Cuban citizens to self-determination and to peacefully make demands for change. The myth that large-scale public protests cannot happen in Cuba has been shattered." The Center for Democracy in the Americas statement "urges the Biden-Harris administration to adopt policies of engagement that empower the Cuban people to determine their own future." And almost 500,000 have signed a petition calling for a "humanitarian military intervention", on Change.org, and reported on by 14 y Medio. According to a column in Foreign Policy, "Biden’s hard-line rhetoric belies the island’s humanitarian crisis and cedes an opportunity to shape what comes next."
  • Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez writes an essay in the NY Times: "the goal of these protests is not to escape the island’s economic crisis on a raft, but to bring about change in the island." She is director of 14ymedio and hosts the podcast Ventana 14. Sánchez was able to tweet out live reports this weekend, reacting to the government-sponsored marches, but she was unable to share her videos.
  • Cuba now has the highest "contagion per capita" of COVID-19, according to Reuters. About 20% of the population is fully vaccinated; see data and #s from Cuba's Ministry of Health.
  • The Washington Post profiles Cuba president Miguel Díaz-Canel, "a former education minister, longtime bureaucrat and Communist loyalist," and head of state since 2018 and compares him with the Castro brothers. When Díaz-Canel "walked through streets of protesters this week, he was cursed at," something that never happened to Fidel or Raúl."
  • Virtual private networks, or VPNs, are allowing websites blocked in Cuba to be read and watched in Cuba, according to Reuters. Media previously blocked can be seen and then, "shared on social media sites generally available in Cuba."
  • Pope Francis said, “I am close to the dear people of Cuba in these difficult times, in particular to those families suffering the most," in his first appearance since leaving the hospital, according to Vatican News.

News Digest

Chile
  • Presidential primaries in Chile's two largest political groups were held over the weekend and they selected Sebastian Sichel (Chile Vamos) and Gabriel Boric (Convergencia Social), according to La Tercerca. These results showed "signs of moderation", says EFE, and were clearly "upset wins," according to Reuters. Polls had suggested that communist candidate Daniel Jadue or ultraconservative Jaoquín Lavín would be top vote getters. Sichel, former president of the state-owned BancoEstado and ex-minister of social development under Piñera is the candidate for the coalition that included his Christian Democratic Party. Boric, the former student leader and now 35-year-old member of Congress, had a convincing win. The first round of the presidential elections is on Nov. 21; the runoff on Dec. 19. News of the winners was warmly welcomed by corporate interests, according to Bloomberg. The winners provided the "final blow" to traditional politics, according to a column in El Mostrador.

Surveillance
  • Several newspapers around the world report on The Pegasus Project about "military-grade spyware leased by the Israeli firm NSO Group to governments for tracking terrorists and criminals [that] was used in attempted and successful hacks of 37 smartphones belonging to journalists, human rights activists, business executives." According to the Washington Post, "the greatest number was in Mexico, where more than 15,000 numbers, including those belonging to politicians, union representatives, journalists and other government critics, were on the list."  The Guardian reports on a murdered Mexican journalist, found on the list.

Guatemala
  • "It’s Not a Border Crisis. It’s a Climate Crisis", argues an analysis from Guatemala published in Politico. "And it’s not just climate change acting alone. It’s food insecurity. Malnutrition. Poverty. It all ties together."

El Salvador
  • Confessions of torture in the 'house of horrors', in Chalchuapa, a town about 50 miles from the capital, are coming out  according to Reuters and a censored story in Revista Factum. "The macabre discovery has sent a chill through a nation that's no stranger to brutality."

Brazil
  • Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro left the hospital on Sunday and was expected to return to work today, according to Reuters and the BBC.
  • Lula's presidential campaign is ramping up the volume but keeping policies on the downlow, according to the Financial Times.
  • There is a dearth of vaccines for second doses for COVID-19 in Brazil, according to the BBC.

Photographs

It's Eduardo Romero here filling in for Jordana: let me know if I missed or misinterpreted something or perhaps you have a different take. 
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Friday, July 16, 2021

CUBA REACHES THE WHITE HOUSE (July 16, 2021)

CUBA REACHES THE WHITE HOUSE
The first question was about Haiti and Cuba at Biden's White House press briefing yesterday with Angela Merkel. A CBS reporter asked, "With respect to Latin America and the developments there in the last week-plus, what are the circumstances under which you would send American troops to Haiti? When it comes to Cuba, what is your current thinking on American sanctions toward Cuba and the embargo? And today, your Press Secretary said that communism is a “failed ideology.” I assume that’s your view. I was wondering if you could also give us your view on socialism." 

Cuba
  • Biden's press conference was widely covered including by Reuters ("Biden says no U.S. plans to send troops to Haiti at the moment"), NPR ("U.S. would offer aid to Cuba if given assurances")and the Miami Herald. Biden is prepared to send vaccines to Cuba if it is assured an international organization would administer them but he is not considering easing U.S. policy around sending remittances to the country., reported Reuters.  All this "concern for Cuba" is a preview for U.S. intervention, according to Counterpunch.
  • Lots of advice for Biden on what to do about Cuba. A column in the Miami Herald makes the case for "humanitarian intervention." Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen writes, "The one thing [Biden] should not do is ease the embargo."  Rather, Biden should "go to Miami and deliver a speech declaring America’s solidarity with the Cuban people and laying out a strategy to rally the world’s democracies to help them." Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson writes, "U.S. policy should be to end the travel and trade embargoes and flood Cuba with American tourists, entrepreneurs and ideas." (Robinson is a former correspondent in Latin America.). Also: the government of Vietnam has also called for the lifting of the blockade in Cuba. 
  • The U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet called on Cuba on Friday to release protesters and several journalists arrested at demonstrations and denounced alleged excessive use of force against some of them.  according to Reuters.  Meanwhile, a WOLA statement states, "the administration should prioritize measures that will concretely aid the Cuban people, reversing Trump era sanctions, beginning with the removal of limits on family and donative remittances, and the specific licenses required to send medical supplies, as a number of members of Congress have suggested. At the same time, the Cuban government should respect the right of peaceful protest, refrain from violence and repression." Bloomberg reports on balseros riding the ways on their way to Florida.
  • Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Tweeted yesterday, "We stand in solidarity with the Cuban people ... We also call for an end to the U.S. embargo and additional Trump-era restrictions ..." It produced the anticipated headline: "AOC's Cuba tweet draws fiery response from Florida Democrat" (Politico).
  • Bigger picture assessments on what happened in Cuba last Sunday have already started. Javier Corrales' op-ed in the NYTimes though "It’s too early to tell what happens next."  Julio César Guanche suggests several ideas in an essay in NACLA. while he recognizes they are "surely insufficient, though not irrelevant." Black Lives Matter leaders don't care about the Afro-Cuban community in Cuba, according to Miami Herald columnist Fabiola Santiago. (I couldn't find this column in English.)
  • Biden interjected toward the end of his press conference: "one of the things that you did not ask but we’re considering is — they’ve cut off access to the Internet. We’re considering whether we have the technological ability to reinstate that access." (This was an idea the Florida Governor DeSantis had suggested earlier this week.) The Wall Street Journal re-emphasizes that "the wave of spontaneous protests that rocked Cuba on Sunday was propelled by social media and the proliferation of mobile internet, which Cubans have only had for the past three years." And it was an internet stoppage that seems to have halted protests. Said one protestor, "there was no way to tell people: Let’s get together at the plaza to shout and demonstrate."

News Digest
Haiti
  • The Economist continues to ask, "it is still unclear who murdered Haiti’s president or what to do about it," but leads with a historical note: "the last time a president was murdered in Haiti, in 1915, troops from the United States occupied the Caribbean country for 19 years." The BBC suggests that the Colombian connection 

Brazil
  • Brazil's President Bolsonaro spent a second night in the hospital and could return home as early as today, according to Reuters.
  • A new DataFolha survey suggests that a majority of Brazilians think the country's coronavirus pandemic is no longer "out of control". Reuters adds that this "could be a boost for President Jair Bolsonaro, who is almost certain to seek re-election next year."
  • The Guardian interviews presidential candidate Ciro Gomes who is running third (behind Lula and Bolsonaro). "Brazil is ‘living through the worst government in its history" and "foreign governments should send a 'forceful and explicit' message that any democratic regression would be unacceptable."
  • The Amazon Green Recovery Plan (Plano de Recuperação Verde) was presented to former President Lula da Silva, by the Consórcio Amazônia Legal, led by Maranhão governor Flávio Dino, according to Poder 360 and an interview with the governor on Jornal da CBN.

Mexico
  • Mexican President AMLO has organized a national referendum on August 1 over whether to put five ex-presidents on trial, according to The Economist.


COVID-19
  • Americans can't travel to Canada, yet, but Mexico has open doors, according to the New York Times. "The coronavirus is surging, especially in tourist hot spots," but the tourists keep on arriving. American arrivals to Mexico are up over 32% (3rd Q of 2021, compared to the same period in 2019). But infections in Mexico are also up — by about 85 percent in the first two weeks of July,"
  • Brazil is seeing a respite in cases and deaths, according to the Washington Post, reporting from hard-hit Manaus, in the center of the Amazon. "Vendors were back selling water. People were back laughing at their phones. ... [Said one resident,] “It was total desperation here. By comparison, this is paradise.”

Church of Maradona
  • The first Maradonian church has opened," according to Reuters, and apparently just in time as "the Maradonian religion has spread to several countries around the world and has more than half a million followers." At the front of this church in Mexico is "an image of Diego Maradona wearing a charro hat that welcomes worshippers." Local media Almanaque Puebla has an excellent 5-minute video including this detail: neither alms nor offerings are part of the liturgy.

It's Eduardo Romero here filling in for Jordana: let me know if I missed or misinterpreted something or perhaps you have a different take. 
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Thursday, July 15, 2021

Drugs & Cartels in Mexico (July 15, 2021)

Drugs & Cartels in Mexico

  • WOLA this morning began a 6-part webinar series: Decades of Damage Done: The Drug War Catastrophe in Latin America and the Caribbean. 2021 marks five decades since U.S. President Nixon launched a global ‘war on drugs'. The webinars will examine the consequences of prohibition and the drug war for Latin America and the Caribbean and identify alternative approaches consistent with protecting human rights and achieving social justice.
  • The Mexicans cartels seem to be tightening their grip on politics, according to the Financial Times.
  • U.S. Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) led the bipartisan Congressional Delegation (CODEL) to Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia, and Guatemala, which focused on narcotics trafficking, the COVID-19 pandemic, unlawful migration, and combating corruption, according to a press release and transcript.
  • The Mexican Navy offered a "rare apology for its potential role in the abductions of dozens of people" who went missing during operations against drug cartels in 2018, according to Reuters.

News Digest

Cuba & Haiti
  • The history and politics of migration to the USA from both countries is compared in the Washington Post and each countries' exile / expat community in Miami is featured in the Wall Street Journal.  "What the US really needs to do about Cuba and Haiti," writes Dan Restrepo, Obama's Special Assistant for Western Hemisphere Affairs in an opinion piece in CNN. "The hard, simple truth is the United States is not going to be the primary engine of political change in either Haiti or Cuba. Meaningful, durable political change in both lies in the hands of the populations themselves."

Cuba
  • The Cuban government is making concessions to protestors' demands including temporarily lifting restrictions "on the amount of food and medicine travelers could bring into the country," according to the BBC and Reuters. Prime Minister Manuel Marrero said restrictions would be lifted until the end of 2021. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel offered some self-criticism during his televised address last night, acknowledging that "government shortcomings in handling shortages and other problems played a role in this week’s protests," according to the Associated Press. The story indicates several other changes the government is making: "the directors of state-owned enterprises will be allowed to determine salaries beyond the regulations and long-promised rules will be instituted for small- and medium-size enterprises to be formed, a step once unthinkable under the communist government."
  • Dozens of NGOs and media outlets condemned the crackdown in Cuba and called for a respect for human rights, according to a press release earlier this week. The lawyers’ group Cubalex has counted over 200 detained or missing people; their Twitter feed has highlighted the cases of animal rights activist Yenney Caballero as well as José Hernández y Yoel Romero.
  • "As internet access began to return on Wednesday, images and videos circulated on social media that purported to show police officers breaking into Cubans’ homes and arresting suspected protesters," according to the Washington Post. 
  • Politico reports on the pressures the Biden White House is facing; how they respond "could have a big political impact in a state where Democrats are reeling."
  • Cuba still divides Latin America ideologically, reports Reuters. Andres Oppenheimer slams the presidents of Mexico and Argentina "for their shameful response to the peaceful July 11 protests in Cuba," in his column in the Miami Herald.  This is all too much a focus on the past for Michael Stott, the Financial Times' Latin America editor. "The tired policies in Havana and Washington fail to address the country’s myriad problems; Cuba needs fresh thinking to prevent further protests."

Haiti
  • The Pentagon says that they once trained Colombians implicated in Haiti assassination plot, according to the Washington Post this morning.
  • Continued investigations on the how and why of the assinnation of President Moïse is reported on by the New York Times and the Miami Herald. One arrested suspect claims that he was not planning for a killing but a forced transition. “I keep asking myself, there must be something wrong with me for being so naïve. I believed a new transitional government was needed in Haiti.” 
  • Dimitri Hérard, the head of security at the presidential palace in Haiti, was arrested yesterday, although "it isn’t clear on what charges, if any, according to the Washington Post.  Haiti’s police chief accused a Venezuelan businessman, Antonio Intriago of CTU Security, as part of a plot to assassinate President Jovenel Moïse, according to the Associated Press.

Environment
  • Parts of the Amazon rainforest emit more carbon dioxide than they absorb, according to an article in Nature and reported on by the New York Times and the BBC. This is "a troubling sign for the fight against climate change" where deforestation and an accelerating warming trend have contributed to change in the carbon balance." The area with the most extreme conditions are in the southeastern region in Brazil, "which is around 30% deforested [and] emitted 10 times more carbon then in the west, which is around 11% deforested," said lead author Luciana Gatti, with Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE). The authors of the Nature article conclude: “We stand exactly in a moment of destiny: The tipping point is here, it is now.”
  • Brazil should pay for not halting deforestation due to Bolsonaro’s failed policies, according to a Financial Times editorial.
  • What will be Honduran environmental activsts Berta Cáceres' legacy now that the army intelligence officer and businessman had been found guilty of collaborating in her murder, asks The Guardian.

Peru
  • Less than two weeks before inauguration day (and five weeks after the election), Pedro Castillo "has yet to begin preparing for the official transfer of power — his path blocked by Fujimori’s claims of electoral fraud," according to the Washington Post. July 28 also marks the nation's bicentennial of independence. The article details how opposition leader (and former candidate) faces "a looming trial for alleged money laundering and the potential for a long jail sentence if she doesn’t acquire presidential immunity" as well as how possible coups are being planned.

Brazil
  • President Bolsonaro spent last night in the hospital for an obstructed intestine, according to Reuters. Bolsonaro used social media to suggest that this may have been a result of his 2018 stabbing and wrote, “One more challenge resulting from an assassination attempt. It was a cruel attack not just against me but against our democracy," according to the New York Times and Folha do São Paul and others, recalling his 2018 stabbing. The AP says surgery is likely not needed.

COVID-19
  • The WHO / PAHO reports that new COVID-19 cases spiked in Central America, the Caribbean and some South America countries last week.
  • In Peru, almost all new infections are from the coronavirus variant known as Lambda (C.37) "which has largely slid under the radar for the past nine months," according to National Geographic. (Several news reports in Peru are focusing on the Iota variant.) In Chile Lambda accounts for 31% in the last 60 days. "The high case numbers are occurring even though 58.6 percent of Chile’s population is fully vaccinated ... The poor efficacy of the [Chinese CoronaVac] vaccine may be partly to blame."
  • Frida Ghitis writes: Latin America Needs Vaccines and Money in her column in World Politics Review. "Rich countries are finding it possible to restart their economies safely, while lower- and middle-income countries, whose populations continue to be brutally battered by the pandemic, are struggling with massive public health demands."
  • Although Mexico reported the largest jump in COVID cases since February, Bloomberg Businessweek reports on how Mexico forgot its COVID crisis. "While other countries essentially paid workers to stay home and supported companies so they could preserve jobs, Mexico’s policies had the effect of keeping people in circulation to earn a living."
  • The US donated 500,000 vaccines to Haiti through COVAX, according to Reuters. These are the first to reach the island from the USA, according to the Miami Herald.

Superheroes
  • Latin America’s protest superheroes fight crime and climate change, according to The Conversation, which recalls Superbarrio and updates newer characters like Menganno and Pareman and "Stupid and Sensual Spiderman."

It's Eduardo Romero here filling in for Jordana: let me know if I missed or misinterpreted something or perhaps you have a different take. 
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