In July, just days before a New York court ruling put Argentina in default on a $539 million payment to creditors, Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner signed an agreement with Chinese President Xi Jinping whereby China would loan Argentina $11 billion worth of yuan, which the latter could use to either bolster its currency reserves or pay for imported Chinese goods. The first installment of $1 billion is expected by year’s end, according to the Buenos Aires daily La Nacion. The currency swap deal, as well as a secretive deal for a Chinese satellite-tracking station in Argentina, have drawn [...]
Last month, Colombia signed a deal with the European Union on crisis management and counterinsurgency cooperation. In an email interview, Arlene Beth Tickner, professor at the University of the Andes in Colombia, discussed Colombia’s military cooperation. WPR: How extensive is Colombia’s military cooperation, and what countries are its main military partners? Arlene Beth Tickner: Since the mid-2000s, Colombia has received increasing numbers of requests for security cooperation from governments of distinct ideological stripes throughout Latin America and other parts of the globe. Between 2009 and 2013 alone, it provided police and military training to nearly 22,000 individuals from 47 different [...]
Luis Otsuka, the president of a federation of small-scale gold miners in Peru’s Madre de Dios region called FEDAMIN, is one of tens of thousands of miners who are struggling to continue their lucrative activity in the face of a government initiative to reign in illegal mining. “In 1987, the government gave me a loan to purchase mining equipment. Now the government wants to destroy that same machinery,” he says. Otsuka and his fellow miners have spent much of the past year protesting a government crackdown on illegal mining and new legislation regulating legal mining. Over the past decade, a [...]
