An Ecuadorean prosecutor focused on cases involving organized trans-national crime in Guayas province, one of the country’s most violent, was killed yesterday in Guayaquil. Police said the attack had the hallmarks of an assassination, reports Reuters.
César Suárez was leading the investigation into the attack against a television station that was broadcast live and became emblematic of the spate of organized crime violence that has become a crisis in Ecuador.
“Suárez had reportedly interviewed the 13 gunmen captured after police special forces secured the TV station, and was investigating who had ordered the high-profile attack,” reports the Guardian. “He had also worked on a number of other high-profile cases involving drug trafficking and political corruption.”
Attorney General Diana Salazar, who last month launched a high level investigation into organized crime penetration in the government, said the death reaffirmed the country’s commitment. "The criminals, the terrorists, will not hold back our commitment to Ecuadorean society," she said.
Suárez had been involved in “Operation Metastasis,” involving favorable treatment from judges, prosecutors, police officers and high officials to criminal leaders, reports the Associated Press.
Milei in Davos
Socialism is a mortal threat to the West and capitalism itself, warned Argentine President Javier Milei at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He called on business and political leaders to reject socialism and instead embrace “free enterprise capitalism” to bring an end to world poverty, reports CBS. He extolled successful entrepreneurs as true heros.
“The main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism. We’re here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world — rather they are the root cause,” Milei said, arguing that Argentina’s economic woes can be traced to such policies.
“Leftist doxa attacks capitalism for being, according to them, unjust. They say it is bad because it is individualistic and they fight for social justice. But this concept that has become fashionable in the world, that of social justice, is an unjust, violent idea, because taxes are collected coercively. Nobody pays taxes voluntarily. The State is financed through coercion. If a company generates a good product it will do well, if the State punishes the capitalist for being successful it destroys their incentives, and the cake will be smaller,” said Milei. (El País)
“A good part of the ideas accepted in the West are collectivist variants, whether they are declared communists, fascists, Nazis, socialists, social democrats, Keynesians, progressives, populists, nationalists or globalists. Basically there are no substantive differences, everyone maintains that the State must direct the lives of individuals," said Milei, in a surprising conflation of all non-libertarian thought. The speech drew heavily on a 2018 TEDx talk, according to Página 12.
He closed urging the world’s wealthiest people not to “surrender to a political class that wants to remain in power and maintain its privileges. You are social benefactors, you are heroes.”
More Argentina
Milei’s speech comes amid tense negotiations in Argentina’s Congress regarding a massive reform package through which the president hopes to enact far-reaching change. (Corta)
A growing gap between the official peso-dollar exchange rate and that of the parallel market will further complicate Milei’s economic agenda, reports Infobae.
Milei met with IMF head Kristalina Georgieva yesterday at Davos, and encounter she characterized as “very good,” on social media. "We talked about Argentina's deep economic and social challenges and decisive steps underway to bring down inflation, promote private sector-led growth, and use scarce public money to help the most vulnerable people," she said. (Reuters)
Guatemala
The U.S. State Department barred Alejandro Giammattei, who finished his term as Guatemala’s president on Sunday, “from entering the United States because of what officials said was information indicating that he had accepted bribes,” reports the New York Times.
The moneyed enclave of Cayalá is a serene outlier in Guatemala, but there is fierce debate over whether the elite urbanization “aggravates problems of inequality and access to urban spaces, instead of alleviating them, after protesters against the efforts to thwart the country’s new president, Bernardo Arévalo, from taking office were barred by gunmen from the area,” reports the New York Times.
Migration
A record-breaking half a million migrants traversed the dangerous Darius Gap jungle connecting Central and South America, last year, “despite policy shifts from the United States and several other governments in the Americas to stop unauthorized migration in the region,” reports the Miami Herald.
Mexico
Mexican human rights activist Lorenza Cano, one of the country’s many volunteer searchers trying to find the country’s 114,000 desaparecidos, has herself been kidnapped in an attack in which her husband and son were shot dead, reports the Associated Press. At least seven volunteer searchers — who are often looking for disappeared relatives, like Cano was — have been killed in Mexico since 2021.
Brazil
Brazil will need to relocate citizens in areas that have been hit repeatedly by storms and other disasters supercharged by climate change, the country's Environment Minister Marina Silva told Reuters in Davos
Colombia
“Colombian police say they have arrested a Venezuelan suspected of involvement in the alleged attempted assassination in Madrid last year of a co-founder of Spain’s far-right Vox party,” reports the Guardian.
Photos
In a decade-long project, Musuk Nolte "has documented the various stages of restitution, mourning and burial performed by relatives of Shining Path victims in Peru, aiming to build a visual record that can strengthen the processes of historical memory, reports the Guardian.