News about the Americas from The Economist January 30 Issue

Below you will find the Economist's digest items about the Americas from their January 30, 2010 edition.  Please note that a subscription is needed to access their website.

• Two weeks after an earthquake hit Haiti, followed by massive aftershocks and killing up to 300,000 people, international help began to reach substantial numbers of survivors. UN peacekeepers fired tear-gas at a crowd who mobbed aid workers distributing food supplies.
• Manuel Zelaya, who was deposed as president of Honduras in a coup and has spent months holed up in the Brazilian embassy, went into exile in the Dominican Republic. This was part of a reconciliation plan agreed by the newly elected president, Porfirio Lobo. Honduras’s Supreme Court and Congress absolved the military officers who removed Mr Zelaya from power of any wrongdoing.
• Venezuela’s vice-president and defence minister, Ramón Carrizález, resigned, denying rumours of a split with President Hugo Chávez. Meanwhile, the government ordered cable-television providers to stop carrying a pro-opposition channel, RCTV. There were big protests over this and over electricity blackouts, water shortages and rising crime.
• The United States asked Guatemala to extradite Alfonso Portillo—an ex-president who had previously been extradited to Guatemala from exile in Mexico—on money-laundering charges.
• Germany issued an arrest warrant for Jorge Rafael Videla, a former dictator of Argentina currently held in custody there, on charges of murdering a German man. And Brazil extradited a former Uruguayan military officer to Argentina over alleged abuses against dissidents in Argentina’s “dirty war” during the 1976-83 dictatorship.

You will also find in depth articles about Haitian leaders wonder how to rebuild a country in ruins; Hugo Chávez worrying ever less about maintaining a semblance of democracy; and an examination about why economic liberalism (what we would call conservative economic policies in the United States) is taboo in socially liberal Brazil. 

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