Small, landlocked Paraguay has been engulfed in a political storm that has seen both its president and vice president nearly impeached in recent weeks. The crisis began on July 23 when Pedro Ferreira, the head of the National Electricity Administration, the state-owned energy company known as ANDE, resigned. Ferreira claimed that he was being pressured to add his signature to a secret energy deal with Brazil that had been negotiated behind closed doors by high-ranking officials in May. Ferreira described the deal as constituting “high treason.” The agreement, which was cancelled by Paraguay and Brazil on Aug. 1 as the [...]
Editor’s Note: This article is part of a new series on prison conditions and criminal justice policy around the world. Sixty-two people are dead following a riot at a prison in northern Brazil earlier this week. Fifty-eight inmates were killed when a fight broke out between rival gangs at a prison in Altamira, in Para state, including 16 who were beheaded. Four more inmates were murdered while being transferred to a different facility. In an email interview with WPR, Robert Muggah, co-founder and research director at the Igarape Institute in Rio de Janeiro, explains why deadly prison riots are so [...]
After 20 years of on-and-off negotiations, leaders from the European Union and South America’s Mercosur trade bloc announced late last month that they had reached a sweeping trade agreement encompassing 800 million people and almost a quarter of the global economy. Hailed on both sides of the Atlantic as a “landmark,” the accord must still be ratified by the negotiating parties’ legislatures, and it faces stiff opposition in key European countries like France and Ireland as well as in the four Mercosur member states of Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. In an email interview with WPR, Bruno Binetti, a Buenos [...]
