The Latin American Report # 618

Bolivian President-elect Rodrigo Paz Pereira said today in La Paz that the South American country is "recovering [its] role in the world" after his clear victory this past Sunday in an unprecedented run-off for the current configuration of its political system. Paz Pereira is a centrist politician but with a clear shift to the right, perhaps above all on the ideological plane.

He, the son of a former president who will very soon run the political business from the Great House of the People—will he change its name?—, is already in sync with Donald Trump, assuring support at least in the matter of fuels, an issue that heavily punished the outgoing government of Arce. "I believe we are doing a good job with all the effort, 24 hours practically without sleep, but Bolivia, you deserve everything. They are leaving us a very difficult [scenario, but] we will put our heart and soul into moving forward," he said in direct reference to the government management of recent years.

The ideological conflict is very clear with the suspension of Bolivia's membership in the Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA in Spanish), a multilateral organization well grounded on the left side of the political aisle, composed of Venezuela, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Cuba, Antigua and Barbuda, Nicaragua, Grenada, Dominica, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saint Lucia, and Bolivia. This integration endeavor had its best moments many years ago, with Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro still alive.

In a statement, they referred to Paz as an "ultra-right-wing" politician who has made "unacceptable" statements against Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. By the way, considering the alignment that the President-elect initially shows with Washington, the future of Chinese and Russian interests in critical sectors like the lithium industry, which had been favored, everything indicates due to a markedly ideological assessment, by the Arce administration, would have to be seen.

Regional news brief

• The Colombian Attorney General's Office dismantled an impressive criminal conglomerate allegedly associated with the National Liberation Army, the oldest guerrilla group in the entire Western Hemisphere which was born with a left-wing vocation but over the years mutated towards other types of interests. The Colombian authorities ordered the arrest of eight people—two of them in Argentina—during the week, accusing them of designing "a money laundering scheme" to introduce illicit revenues into the Colombian financial system, valued at nearly 230 million dollars.
  

• The UN World Food Programme is distributing aid preventively in Haiti and Cuba—which includes electronic money and supplies—due to Tropical Storm Melissa, which is forecasted to make landfall in Cuba next Wednesday, already transformed into a fearsome hurricane. It will be a very hard blow for the Island despite all the safeguards taken, considering the very tough situation of socio-economic polycrisis affecting it. For the moment, the UN agency, in coordination with the Cuban government, has moved food supplies to sustain more than a quarter of a million people in eastern Cuba for about two months.
  

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The Trump vs. Petro show

Of course, nothing is a show here 👇

Breaking on the same issue: US is sending an aircraft carrier to Latin America in major escalation of military firepower.

This is all for today’s report.