Guatemala’s Giammattei administration accepted president-elect Bernardo Arévalo’s proposal to resume the transition process, after the incoming government suspended it in response to judicial efforts to overturn the election results.
The transition will be coordinated in bilateral meetings of sectorial officials.
Brazil
After the Brazilian Supreme Court’s recent decision in favor of Indigenous land claims, Indigenous Peoples Minister Sônia Guajajara is preparing to defend the ruling against lawmakers’ efforts to undermine land rights. There is now space for an agreement with agribusiness, she told the Guardian. The government is not opposed, she says, to compensating landowners who acted “in good faith” by buying land titles from the state, but land grabbers cannot receive the same treatment.
Brazil is seeking to swiftly restore its climate credibility and prevent the Amazon from hitting a calamitous tipping point, Guajajara told CNBC.
Brazilian prosecutors have launched a civil investigation into the historical links to slavery of Banco do Brasil, one of the country’s largest financial institutions. It is ”an unprecedented move to hold Brazilian institutions to account for their role in the enslavement of millions of Africans,” reports the Guardian.
Ecuador
Ecuador’s state oil company plans to open 15 new oil wells in the Yasuní national park area, despite a historic referendum in which citizens voted to stop extraction in the biodiversity hotspot, reports El País. President Guillermo Lasso says the referendum is inapplicable, in video of a recent meeting with community leaders in favor of oil extraction.
Indigenous and campesino communities in Ecuador obtained a historic court decision against a gold mine in August, which determined that environmental authorities failed to carry out Indigenous consultation for the Loma Larga mining project. While the ruling was a significant victory for activists, they recognize the ongoing need for resistance to protect their territories from extractive industries, reports Nacla.
In the AQ podcast, Brian Winter and Will Freeman discuss the two candidates in Ecuador’s upcoming presidential runoff election, Luisa González and Daniel Noboa, and how Ecuador might fit into wider regional trends when it comes to ideological tendencies and environmental issues.
Cuba
Blackouts in Cuba will increase substantially due to lack of fuel, adding to difficulties generated by food and medicine shortages, reports the Reuters. Citizens can expect blackouts of up to eight to 10 hours a day outside Havana, where residents are usually spared power outages, starting in October, according to official announcements this week.
Regional Relations
Haiti’s escalating gang violence now permeate all levels of the society, said United Nations High Commissioner for Human RightsVolker Türk as he urgently called for the deployment of a multinational force to help police quell the violence, reports the Miami Herald.
U.S. Republican proposals to deploy the military against Mexican criminal cartels are unlikely to be implmeneted, but the bellic discourse “has the potential not only to negatively affect the United States’ ties to Mexico, but to Latin America more generally,” writes OIiver Stuenkel in Americas Quarterly.
It would “be a mistake to focus solely on Global South countries’ economic and geopolitical differences to dismiss their ability to create coalitions aiming to revamp the international system and take a greater role in it ... Global South countries have not only been marginalized by globalization and capitalism, but they also bear the brunt of these processes’ negative consequences,” writes Aude Darnal in World Politics Review. “These shared experiences of being historically sidelined from international global governance help fuel the attempts to now find common ground, as the BRICS Summit demonstrated.”
The Wilson Center’s Weekly Asado highlights Latin American voices at UNGA.
Migration
Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador called for a meeting of foreign ministers from 10 countries around Latin America to discuss migration, as record numbers of people make the dangerous crossing through the Darien Gap. "It's not an issue that concerns only Mexico, it's a structural issue and it we need to face it this way," AMLO said in his morning press conference. (Reuters)
Mexican authorities agreed with their U.S. counterparts to take measures to reduce concentration of migrants at the two countries’ shared border, including relocating migrants and perhaps even stepping up deportations to some countries, reports WOLA. Mexico’s southern-border city of Tapachula continues to fill up as approximately 6,000 migrants arrive every day along Mexico’s border with Guatemala.
Regional
“In several parts of Latin America, this year’s extreme heat has already caused economic disruption and posed health risks.” — Latin America Brief
Mosquito-borne virus deaths are on the rise — mosquitos have evolved to evade insecticides in places where they are endemic and are conquering new territories thanks to climate change, reports the New York Times.
The World Mosquito Program has experimented with combating mosquito-borne viruses, like dengue, with lab-bred mosquitos who have a virus that blocks the deathly viruses. An experiment in Medellín seems to be behind the city’s low rates of dengue in 2021, which should have been a peak year, reports the New York Times.
“Small trafficking groups embedded in Nigeria’s expansive diaspora play a significant role in moving cocaine between Latin America and consumer markets,” reports InSight Crime based on a new UNODC report.
Bolivia
The political feud between former Bolivian President Evo Morales and current President Luis Arce is tearing the ruling MAS party apart, according to Thomas Graham in World Politics Review.
Peru
A Peruvian man was arrested in Peru for sending more than 150 fake bomb threats to US schools, airports and a synagogue, reports the Guardian.
Culture Corner
A group of female artists is challenging the male stranglehold on Medellín’s thriving graffiti culture, reports the Guardian.