Univision News

Brazil’s rotting jet carcasses are littering the tarmacs of major airports and there is now a rush to clean them up before the 2016 Olympics. (Photo: Flickr) 

By STEPHEN KEPPEL
Channel: Economics 

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What we are reading this week
***Can Chile import innovation?, Return of the Currency Wars, Rotting Jet Carcasses in Brazil, S. American hackers arrested by Interpol, Does Chávez have only a year to live?, Romney back in the lead, Guate bonds rally on tough talk, Sheriff Arpaio vs Jorge Ramos, BofA CEO Moynihan visits Haiti, US Auto Sales Surge in Feb y mucho mas…

SOUTH AMERICA

Start-Up Chile: Can Chile import innovation? Every country wants to create the next Silicon Valley, but no one really knows how to do it. Some have tried the top-down approach of building the research university and technology park, granting tax breaks and offering matching investments. But it hasn’t worked. It turns out that to innovate what you really need are people, more specifically, entrepreneurs. Latin America has an abundance of natural resources but it is lacking in innovative entrepreneurs. So, how do you increase entrepreneurship? If you are lacking in products like wheat or oil you can import them but can you import something like innovation? The Chilean government is betting that you can…via Univision News

The currency wars are back – Here we go again. “It’s like September 2010 all over again. The real is up against the dollar, Brazil’s Finance Minister Guido Mantega is evangelising about a global ‘currency war’ while his government introduces a series of rather ineffective capital controls. On Thursday, Brazil’s government extended the 6 per cent IOF transactions tax to foreign borrowing of up to three years. Previously, the tax had only applied to loans with maturities of less than two years. And the result? Well, the real actually strengthened about 0.3 per cent to 1.71 per dollar on Thursday”…via Beyond Brics

Gap to expand in Latin America - The Gap store in Santiago, Chile, which opened in October, was among the leading franchise performers out of 200 stores worldwide, according to Stefan Laban, managing director of strategic alliances for Gap. The San Francisco-based company opened Gap and Banana Republic stores in Panama and will expand to Colombia, Uruguay and Peru, it said in a statement today. According to Bloomberg “The company will probably expand to Brazil as well, Laban said. ‘We’re kind of making our way around Brazil,’ Laban said in an interview yesterday in Panama City.”…via Bloomberg

Jetblue to start Ft Lauderdale-Bogota service in May - The New York based value carrier said Thursday it plans to start new daily nonstop service between Fort Lauderdale International and Bogota’s El Dorado International airports May 7. To launch the new route, JetBlue has sale fares from $99 one-way available for purchase through March 11 for travel May 7 to June 12. JetBlue, which currently flies from Orlando International Airport to Bogota, will operate Airbus 320 aircraft on the new South Florida route. “We’ve been flying to Colombia for more than three years and could not be more pleased with the reception we’ve received,” said John Checketts, JetBlue’s director of route planning, in a statement. “Bogota is a beautiful destination with strong ties to our Florida customers”…via The Sun-Sentinel

Brazil’s rotting jet carcasses litter tarmacs–Bankruptcies over the decades have stranded hundreds of planes in legal limbo, alongside dozens of smaller aircraft captured in drug-smuggling busts. There is now a rush to clean them up before next summer’s Olympics. John Lyons writes “At airfields from the muggy Amazon to bustling São Paulo, weather-stained aircraft missing doors, engines and even the odd nose cone rust away in plain sight. The failed fleet includes everything from weather-beaten Boeing 737s in Rio de Janeiro to a World War II-era Douglas C-47 cargo prop idled in the Amazonian outpost of Tabatinga. It has been sitting there for 16 years. Brazil’s jet junkyards are becoming an Olympian problem. Some are blocking expansions to handle planeloads of World Cup and Olympics fans”…via The Wall Street Journal

Interpol arrests Anonymous hackers in South America – “People identifying themselves as activists in the Anonymous hacker movement said Wednesday it wasn’t technical prowess but police infiltration that yielded 25 arrests in a sweep in Europe and South America. In conversations in an online chat room where Spanish-speaking activists in the Americas and Spain regularly gather, they said nearly all of those arrested had been active on a single website used by the group. Interpol, which announced the arrests Tuesday, did not say how it encountered the 25 suspects, who it says were involved in cyberattacks originating from Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Spain that targeted sites including Colombia’s defense ministry and presidency and Chile’s Endesa electricity company and national library”…via The AP

Argentina will pay the price for cooking its books- “History has left Argentines with more than their share of economic trauma. Having twice suffered destructive bouts of hyperinflation in the late 1980s, they are sensitive to rising prices. When they spot inflation their instinct is to dump the peso and buy dollars. But after the economy collapsed in 2001-02, horror at mass unemployment temporarily eclipsed the public’s fear of inflation. That has been the successful political calculation of the president, Cristina Fernández, and her late husband and predecessor, Néstor Kirchner. For years they stoked an overheating economy with expansionary policies. Faced with the resulting rise in inflation, their officials resorted to price controls—and to an extraordinarily elaborate deception to conceal the rise”…via The Economist

Spotlight on Chávez:
Does Hugo Chávez have only a year to live? Wikileaks publishes new details on Chavez cancer and succession struggle. Casto Ocando writes “The health condition of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez could be worse than what has been published so far, with possible carcinogenic tumors in both prostate and colon, and a potential metastasis to lymph nodes and bone marrow according to an intelligence report leaked Monday. Chavez, who has publicly said that he has been cured from cancer, could have a life expectancy ranging from two years, according to Cuban doctors who treat him, to a year, according to the testimony of Russian doctors who participated in the first two operations in Cuba on the Venezuelan president, said the report, which was sent to consulting agency Stratfor and is attributed to a ‘well-connected Venezuelan source who works with Israel’”…via Univision News

Following operation, Chávez says he’s like a flying condor– Manuel Rueda writes “President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela seems to be in good spirits after Cuban doctors operated on a lesion in his pelvic area — and he is making sure the world knows it.On Wednesday, the bombastic president made several tweets about his health condition, and also wrote about programs on Venezuela’s state-run television that he was apparently watching from his hospital room in Cuba.’Good evening my dear compatriots,’ Chavez tweeted Wednesday evening. ‘Here I am, lifting my flight like a Condor! I send you all my supreme love! We will live and we will be victorious’…Univision News

Top Tweets: #Romney

@TheEconomist: Mr #Romney badly needed to demonstrate his appeal to Midwestern voters in Michigan. He failed to do so convincingly http://econ.st/ybevhw

@MexicanMitt: I PAID ALOT OF MONEY FOR THIS, gueyes better watch it! Mexclusive Video: @MexicanMitt #Romney for President The Musical http://is.gd/R5MLUs

@RasmussenPoll: National #GOP: #Romney 40%, #Santorum 24%, #Gingrich 16%, #Paul 12%… http://tinyurl.com/3u8ap78

@UnivisionNews: Arizona newspaper’s endorsement of Romney warns him on #immigrationhttp://uninews.us/x4SvsQ by @jordanfabian

NORTH and CENTRAL AMERICA

Drug crackdown fuels Guatemala bond rally –“Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina is sparking a bond rally by pledging to tame drug violence that has pushed the murder rate up 60 percent in the past decade and cut into economic growth. Yields on the government’s dollar-denominated bonds due 2013 have tumbled 81 basis points, or 0.81 percentage point, to 3.12 percent since the Nov. 6 election of the ex-army general, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Perez Molina, who was sworn in Jan. 14, says he’ll boost tax collection to fund his push to root out Mexican cartels that slip through Guatemala’s jungles as they ferry U.S.-bound cocaine from South America”…via Bloomberg

Video of the Week - Sheriff Joe Arpaio goes at it with Univision’s Jorge Ramos- In a contentious ten-minute interview, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio talks to Jorge Ramos about his bad reputation among Latinos and dismisses the Justice Department’s investigation into allegations of racial profiling in his department…via Univision News

Drug gangs pose increasing threat to democracy in Latin America- Cartels are influencing elections by threatening politicians and even running their own candidates, OAS Secretary for Multidimensional Security Adam Blackwell said this week. He was speaking at an OAS conference on transnational crime in Mexico City. Mexican President Felipe Calderon told delegates that countries in the Americas needed to work together to defeat gangs. “In the face of transnational organised crime, we must create an international front where societies and governments are not faced with resolving this challenge alone,” he said…via the BBC

Bank of America CEO visits brother and school in Haiti – “Some two decades ago, Brian Moynihan’s younger brother Patrick came to him for advice. Patrick who had been a trader wanted to move to Africa to work as a missionary. Moynihan, now the chief executive of Bank of America Corp, instead suggested moving to Haiti to run a Catholic school that he had long helped fund. The Louverture Cleary School has been a long-time - but little-known - passion for the leader of the second-largest U.S. bank by assets. And while the bank doesn’t have operations in the country, Moynihan said he has for years seen a big need for helping out there. On Thursday, he will visit the country and the school for the first time - and get the chance to see his brother. At a conference in Port-au-Prince, Bank of America is launching a global initiative to mentor women in developing countries. Moynihan will be one of the closing speakers on Thursday”…via Reuters

Vroom. US Auto sales surge in February - Auto sales jumped 16 percent last month to the highest level since before the recession, helped by declining unemployment and improving consumer confidence even as gasoline prices topped $4 a gallon in parts of the country. The seasonally adjusted, annualized selling rate for new vehicles, a closely watched indication of the auto industry’s health, climbed to 15.1 million in February. It was the first time the rate reached that level since 2008…via The New York Times

Expedition sails towards remote and uninhabited Mexican island- In the early 1900’s some 100 Mexican workers and their families lived here, receiving supplies from the Mexican government. But when supplies stopped arriving, a desperate struggle for survival broke out. A small team of artists and scientists sailed off toward the remote Clipperton island this week, in a rare, multidisciplinary expedition that will investigate the island’s dramatic history and how it has been affected by global warming. Currently uninhabited, Clipperton lies about 900 miles off the coast of Mexico, surrounded by the blue waters of the Pacific Ocean. Scientists say the tropical island provides an interesting example of how a terrestrial ecosystem survives in the middle of the ocean. It is also a thermometer of sorts for how global warming affects the planet…via Univision News

Will Mexican expats vote? “The 12m or so Mexicans who live in the United States are equal to a tenth of Mexico’s population, and the remittances they send home make up over 2% of the economy. But when it comes to politics, they are far less influential. At the latest presidential election in 2006, they had the right to vote for the first time, but only 57,000 applied to do so.This year’s election, on July 1st, is no different. On February 17th the electoral authority announced that only 62,000 expatriates had registered before the deadline. Three-quarters were in the United States (mainly California, Texas and Illinois)”…via The Economist

US panel passes bill on Iran-Latin America links - US House of Representatives subcommittee passed a bill Thursday requiring the State Department to report to Congress on Iran’s activities in Latin America. The bill, which was approved by a voice vote in the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on terrorism, was pushed by Republicans and some Democrats as a signal of concern over Iran’s links in the region. The bill says Iran has doubled the number of embassies it has in Latin America, from five in 2005 to 11 currently, and recalls the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires, allegedly backed by Iran, that killed 85 people…via AFP

Spotlight on Republican Primary:
Romney exhales after Mich., Ariz. wins, but Super Tuesday success won’t come easy– Romney does wins in Arizona and Michigan but his path to the nomination will be bumpy. Matt Jaffe writes “Mitt Romney had a great Tuesday night, trouncing Rick Santorum in Arizona and winning a nail-biter in his native state of Michigan. But while his victories have solidified his frontrunner status and averted all-out panic within his party, next Tuesday night -– Super Tuesday -– is not shaping up so well for the former Massachusetts governor”…via Univision News

Video - Is Mitt Romney trying to offend all Latinos? Rep. Luis Gutierrez, a high-profile Democrat and leading voice on immigration reform, took the House floor on Wednesday to accuse GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney of trying to offend Latinos with his tough rhetoric on immigration. “Fifty million is a lot of people to keep track of. Especially if you want to offend each and every one of us,” he said. “But to Mitt Romney’s credit — he’s trying.” One day after the Arizona presidential primary, Gutierrez slammed Romney for praising the state as a “model” immigration policy…via Univision News

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