This summer, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe went on a five-nation tour of Latin America, visiting Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago, Colombia, Chile and Brazil. In an email interview, Melba Falck Reyes, professor in the Pacific studies department at the University of Guadalajara, discussed Japan’s ties with Latin America. WPR: What are de main outcomes of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s recent Latin America tour? Melba Falck Reyes: With this visit Abe was seeking to consolidate and deepen relations with these countries, emphasizing four main areas: economic relations, cooperation, political dialogue and peace, stability and prosperity of the international community. Regarding [...]
On Sept. 8, just three days before the anniversary of the 1973 military coup that deposed Chile’s socialist President Salvador Allende, an explosion rocked a metro station at an upscale shopping center in the capital, Santiago. The blast injured 14 people, two of them seriously, and sent authorities scrambling to investigate Chile’s worst bomb attack in more than two decades. The country’s deputy interior minister, Mahmud Aleuy, declared that the blast was the work of “demented criminals,” but the facts pointed to a much more troubling explanation. It wasn’t common criminals, demented or otherwise, who had carried out the attack. [...]
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 [...]
