News List
Justifying a Six-Figure Car
Why So Much? But for most whose hearts have ever leapt at the sight of the lines of a magnificent Italian sports car or whose veins have pulsed with excitement when sitting behind the wheel as the speedometer rapidly ticks over 100 mph, the only rea
Ask the expert: Ch㡶ez and Venezuela
Hugo Chez won a landslide election victory in December and has started his new term in office with a series of radical policy measures to bring what he calls 21st Century Socialism to Venezuela. The country¡¯s electricity and telecommunications indu
Brazilian politician indicted in New York
Paulo Maluf, a prominent Brazilian politician, and four others were indicted on Thursday in New York on charges of stealing more than $11.6m from a Brazilian highway project. A grand jury also charged Mr Maluf, his son and three others with particip
Lula set to miss his own cabinet deadline
President Luiz Inio Lula da Silva of Brazil is likely to miss another self-imposed deadline on Friday by failing to name the ministers who will implement policies in his second four-year mandate. The delays, caused by political horse trading, have l
Brazil ¡®must lift barriers¡¯ to new infrastructre
A new report by the World Bank points to a serious shortage of infrastructure investment in Brazil and calls for the removal of regulatory barriers to private sector investment which it says is essential to revitalise the sector. The report, to be r
Uruguay threatens to downgrade Mercosur role
Uruguay has warned that it will consider downgrading its status in Mercosur if the regional trade bloc prevents it from making a bilateral trade deal with the US. Danilo Astori, finance minister, said: ¡°Uruguay must find a way of making a bilateral
Mill dispute costs Uruguay more than $800m
The losses to Uruguay¡¯s economy from its long-running pulp mill dispute with Argentina have reached a sum equivalent to more than 4 per cent of its gross domestic product and are threatening the unity of South America¡¯s Mercosur trading bloc, acco
Ch㡶ez and Bush step up war of words
Even before President George W. Bush set out for his four-day visit to Latin America, a predictable game of rhetorical ping-pong began. In a speech to the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce this week, Mr Bush pledged to ¡°complete the revolution¡± for
Left turn ahead? How Lula¡¯s plan could condemn Br
Ever since Goldman Sachs coined the term ¡°Brics¡± towards the end of 2000, Brazilians have taken pride in a perception of their country, by investment banks and others, as an emerging power of equal status to Russia, India and China. But of late th
PRI leader rules out purge of old guard
The leader of Mexico¡¯s Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI), which held power for more than seven decades until 2000, has ruled out any possibility of a purge to remove the old guard. Beatriz Paredes , who took over as party leader this month, a
Cigar lovers catch a whiff of lower prices
Lovers of exclusive hand-rolled Cuban cigars caught the whiff of falling prices on Thursday, when non-approved parallel imports of ¡°habanos¡± were given the green light by a London court. Three senior judges at the Court of Appeal found that Corpor
ExxonMobil¡¯s Venezuelan finale plays out
ExxonMobil signalled on Wednesday that it could pull out of Venezuela if it cannot strike a deal with the government on handing over control of its oil operations in the Orinoco basin. The warning follows a decree last week from Hugo Chez, the count
PT ready to battle Telef㳮ica for Vivo
Portugal Telecom could clash with Spain¡¯s Telefica over control of Vivo , Brazil¡¯s largest mobile operator, after successfully defeating a 11.6bn ($15.3bn) hostile takeover bid by Sonaecom , a smaller Portuguese competitor. A battle for Vivo is on
Why Bush¡¯s Latin overtures may fall on deaf ears
B ack in 2001, many Latin Americans harboured hopes that George W. Bush would give greater priority to a ¡°backyard¡± that the US had oftentaken for granted. After all, the newly elected president was a former governor of Texas, a state bordering Me
Rebellious bishop feels call of Paraguay¡¯s presid
The ruins of Jesuit missions in the border area shared by Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay are all that remain of the theocratic state-within-a-state that once threatened the hegemony of the Spanish colonial empire. The Jesuit Reducciones , commemorat
