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Argentine President Javier Milei garnered a major legislative victory yesterday, albeit a bittersweet one: Senators approved a key economic reform bill and a fiscal package, but significantly watered them down. (El País) Both bills must now return to the Chamber of Deputies as they were modified. (Reuters) The economic reform bill passed after 11 hours of heated debate, with Vice President Victoria Villarruel casting the tie-breaking vote. (Guardian)
Modifications include a reduction in sectors covered by a business friendly investment incentive plan and removing state entities from those eligible for privatization. The national airline, postal service and public TV and radio were among the public companies removed from the list. The negotiations mean that just a handful of state-owned firms, such as Argentina’s nuclear power company, could be sold off.
A measure lowering the income tax threshold to include thousands more workers also failed to pass the second round of Senate voting, reports the Associated Press.
Cabinet chief Guillermo Franco hailed the legislative victory, but said the government will seek to reinstate some of the original wording on the tax bill in the lower chamber of Congress. (Infobae)
However, the bill as passed still delegates broad legislative powers to the president in energy, pensions, security and other areas.
Underscoring the controversial nature of the government’s proposals, the Senate debate advanced as fiery protests took place outside of Congress. Protesters urging lawmakers to reject the austerity and deregulation measures threw rocks, broken glass and Molotov cocktails yesterday afternoon at riot police attempting to clear a nearby plaza with a water cannon and tear gas, reports the Bloomberg. Dozens of people were detained and at least nine were hospitalized, including multiple members of the lower house of Congress.
The government said the vote took place amid attacks by “terrorist groups” on Congress.
Haiti
Haiti’s new prime minister, Gary Conille, presented a new cabinet of ministers after days of negotiations with the transitional presidential council that appointed him last month. Conille reduced the cabinet from 18 ministers to 14 by combining some ministries, reports the Miami Herald.
Most of the new ministers are unknowns or relative newcomers to Haitian politics. However, most were put forward by the sectors represented on the nine-member presidential council, where seven members have voting rights and two serve as observers, writes Jacqueline Charles in the Miami Herald.
Migration
Advocacy groups led by the ACLU sued to overturn U.S. President Joe Biden’s latest asylum restrictions on the country’s southern border.They argued officials risk rapidly deporting migrants to countries where they could face persecution, reports the Washington Post.
Ecuador
“More than 200 rotting corpses of murder victims, many of them unidentified and others unclaimed by anyone, have collapsed the morgue in the city of Guayaquil, the economic engine of Ecuador,” reports El País.
Venezuela
It is hard to define the implications of an incipient shift of sympathies among soft-core Chavistas towards the Venezuelan opposition, but it could play an important role in the upcoming presidential elections, reports Americas Quarterly.
“Transactions paid with foreign credit cards are helping circulate more foreign currency in Venezuela, where the government has locked in an exchange rate as part of efforts to control double-digit inflation,” reports Reuters.
Bolivia
Faced with chronic petrol shortages, Bolivian President Luis Arce militarized the provision system to avoid contraband of the subsidized good to neighboring countries, reports El País.
More Argentina
The inland river port city of Rosario is strategically important for drug trafficking, and has been ensnared by gang violence for decades. But recently trade has increased. Experts say incoming drug flows probably feed into Argentina’s domestic market as drugs and guns are exchanged as payment, in turn fueling internal violence, reports the Guardian.
Regional Relations
A flotilla of Russian warships docked in Havana yesterday. The military exercises come as Cuba finds itself mired in economic crisis, in part related to the long-time U.S. embargo. Yesterday Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said that Moscow would continue to provide humanitarian support to Cuba, reports the Washington Post. (See today’s Just Caribbean Updates)
“Cuba and Russia have historically been friendly. Though Cuba is not a key player in Russian foreign policy, the island is important because “Cuban friendship offers Russia entry to the Global South, where Cuba remains respected and influential,” Cuba expert William M. LeoGrande, told the New York Times.
While Russian exercises in Caribbean were common in previous years, this iteration comes just weeks after the U.S. authorized Ukraine to use U.S. provided weapons to strike inside Russia. “Most of all, the warships are a reminder to Washington that it is unpleasant when an adversary meddles in your near abroad,” the Wilson Center’s Benjamin Gedan told the Associated Press.
Regional
A Reuters analysis reveals that a program intended to help developing nations fight climate change is instead funneling billions of dollars back to wealthy countries through market-rate loans and conditional grants. Countries like Japan, France, Germany, and the United States have provided climate funding that benefits their own economies, undermining the goal of compensating poorer nations for the impacts of climate change. (See today’s Just Caribbean Updates)
Critter Corner
Cocaine consumption is threatening the habitats of rare tropical birds in Central America as narco-traffickers move into some of the planet’s most remote forests to evade crackdowns, warned a paper published in journal Nature Sustainability. (Guardian)