Risk Watchdog’s long-held view that the bolivar would sooner or later have to be devalued has finally materialised, with President Hugo Chávez on January 8 announcing the introduction of a dual exchange rate system.

Bolivars will now officially be exchanged for dollars at two rates, VEF2.6000/US$ and VEF4.3000/US$, as opposed to the VEF2.1500/US$ peg that had [Read more...]

The popularity and influence of Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, knows no bounds. As Lula enters his final year in office, his popularity continues to hover near record highs. Interestingly, as his ruling Partido dos Trabalhadores gears up for next year’s election (in which his chief of staff Dilma Rousseff is Lula’s hand-picked [Read more...]

Cautious appears to be the best way to describe sentiment among Mexico City’s executives and bureaucrats at present, or at least that was the feeling Risk Watchdog came away with after spending a week on the ground there. This is not surprising, given the severity of the blow to Mexico’s economy from the recent downturn. [Read more...]

Latin America will soon have a new currency, the Sistema Único de Compensación Regional, or Sucre, for short. It’s no coincidence that the currency’s acronym is also the name of 19th century regional independence leader, Antonio José de Sucre, close friend and ally of Simón Bolívar, in whose name the currency’s proponents (members of the [Read more...]

With the spectre of US military bases in Colombia causing another bout of breast-thumping by some regional heads of state, I’ve decided to take a closer look at the age-old debate about whether foreign interest in Latin America is a good or bad thing for the region.

First things first, while US bases appear to have [Read more...]

Personally I thought it would be some time before President Obama was next forced to put his diplomacy skills to the test, but just a few days after condemning the Iranian authorities’ crackdown on protestors, another political crisis is dumped on his doorstep. At first glance, Honduran politics seems like a relative backwater when compared [Read more...]

On February 15 the Venezuelan electorate voted in favour of the constitutional amendment that allows the indefinite re-election of all elected government officials. Crucially, the vote enables President Hugo Chávez to run in the 2012 presidential election, and beyond, providing him with a mandate to accelerate his socialist revolution, which he believes will take until [Read more...]