The Latin American Report # 339

Argentina is another country in the region facing problems in its energy balance, deepened by the lack of foresight in investment and climatic contingencies. Javier Milei's government presented this Wednesday an emergency plan to avoid the annoying blackouts in the months when demand soars for the next two years, oriented to the generation, transportation, and distribution segments of electric power. It is intended to avoid or reduce the energy deficit that is foreseen for peak demand times, a circumstance that would motivate “resorting to imports from neighboring countries” or “affecting the system's reserve power”. The Energy Secretariat foresees actions for generating companies to import energy at peak demand times, while transportation ones must “ensure the availability of transformers in critical nodes”.

Distributors, for their part, must present “a contingency attention program” which, from what I understand, would imply planning programmed outages. Large consumers will be remunerated for voluntary programmed interruptions to consumption as well. Despite the strong increases in tariffs promoted by Milei, there is still talk of a “tariff backlog” that vitiates the reading of the real capacities of the energy infrastructure, which will also be weakened by the scheduled two-and-a-half-year shutdown of the Atucha I Nuclear Power Plant—the first of its kind in Latin America—, the reduction next year in the deliveries of the Yacyretá Hydroelectric Power Plant -motivated by the drought-, and lower import volumes from the South American giant.

Bolivia

In Bolivia, indigenous communities affected by fierce forest fires have launched a 'National Popular Consultation for Life' that will gather citizen proposals to deal with this problem that is showing its worst historical face, with thousands of displaced people. Thus, civil society organizations, backed by private actors, intend to demand that the Great House of the People take decisive action to improve the situation. “We come to support this national consultation as a decision also of our territory because we continue with the fires, the communities are being evacuated and there are more than 8,300 people affected [there]”, says a female community leader in Santa Cruz, the region where the fires would have devastated more than 7 million hectares comprising part of the Bolivian Amazon rainforest. One of the questions to be put to the population is whether to repeal regulations allowing the so-called “chaqueo”, which is burning— in principle controlled—of wooded areas and natural pastures to establish cultivated areas or expand cattle ranching. The consultation begins next Monday, and its results will be presented on October 18. La Paz declared the situation a “national disaster”, opening the door to urgently needed international assistance.

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Brazil in flames

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And this is all for our report today. I have referenced the sources dynamically in the text, and remember you can learn how and where to follow the LATAM trail news by reading my work here. Have a nice day.