by El Reportero news services
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner
Martín Lousteau, the economy minister, resigned on 24 April.
Significance: Lousteau’s departure is a major blow to President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Fernández is under intense pressure to change her cabinet after a poor start to her presidency but the one person Argentines did not want to go was Lousteau. Moreover, Argentines will be very worried about Lousteau’s reason for leaving: Fernández would not listen to his plan for preventing the economy from succumbing to what he described a “severe crisis”.
Venezuela’s Chávez plans to bury old empire of USA
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez harshly criticized the US administration again after the unauthorized passing of the USS George Washington along the coast of the Latin American country. Chávez promised to bury the USA in the 21st century.
“When Americans appear near our shores with their navy, the George Washington aircraft carrier, one should not forget that it happens at the time when we together with Brazil are creating the Defense Council of South America,” Chavez said in a speech that was broadcast by all TV and radio channels of Venezuela.
“In this century we will bury the old empire of the USA and will live with the American nation like with a brotherly nation, because over 40 million of its citizens live below the poverty line,” the Venezuelan leader said. Chavez also said that Latin America entered the new era that was marked with the creation of a bloc of leftist forces – Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Chile and Brazil.
“There are two women standing behind us: Cristina Kirchner in Argentina and Michelle Bachelet in Chile. We have in our bloc a worker from Brazil – Lula – and three revolutionaries – Fidel and Raul in Cuba and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua.
There is a soldier from Venezuela there too (Hugo Chavez). Now with the victory of a former bishop at the presidential election in Paraguay, we have a priest in our ranks,” Chavez said.
Trade becomes political
This special report was conceived as an examination of trends in regional trade and how various trade agreements have affected the direction of countries’ exports and imports. We expected to discuss what is replacing the US Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) initiative and how, generally, trade within the region, and with external markets – particularly, Asia – is developing. Instead, we found that trade agreements have become an issue of heated political debate.
How Latin America is coping with the US slowdown
Despite all the gloom in the U.S. about the arrival of another Great Depression, there has been amazingly little effect on Latin America. Most international economists expected Mexico, which still sends 80 percent of its exports north to the US, to be buffeted by the US economy’s abrupt switch onto a no-growth track. This has not happened, yet.
After Hurricane Katrina battered the United States’ Gulf Coast in late 2005, the Chavez administration was the first foreign government to offer aid to the devastated regions. The Bush administration opted to refuse this aid. Later during the winter of 2005, various officials in the Northeastern United States signed an agreement with Venezuela to provide discounted heating oil to low income families.
