This Week In Latin America

Fifa scandal exposes extent of regional corruption

It is hard to think of a US action more popular in Latin America than the Department of Justice’s arraignment of top-ranking officials from the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (Fifa), the governing body of world football, last week. Of the 14 men named as defendants in the US-led investigation all bar two are citizens of Latin America and the Caribbean. Nowhere is the grim satisfaction among the region’s legion of football fans greater than in the two powerhouses of world football: Brazil and Argentina. Domestic probes into corruption in the game in both countries have failed to result in any of the game’s top-ranking administrators facing charges for the widespread corruption afflicting the sport here. That may now be about to change, with public tolerance of corruption in the region at an all-time low.

Is Argentina’s presidential election becoming a two-horse race?

The third-placed candidate in Argentina’s presidential election contest on 25 October, Sergio Massa, is losing ground to the two leading candidates, Daniel Scioli and Mauricio Macri, opinion surveys suggest. On 26 May, Humberto Zúccaro, the mayor of Pilar in the province of Buenos Aires, announced his decision to abandon Massa’s Frente Renovador (FR) and return to Scioli and President Cristina Fernández’s ruling Frente para la Victoria (FPV) - two rival factions in the Partido Justicialista (PJ, Peronist). The danger for Massa is that as he slips in the opinion polls, others may follow Zúccaro’s lead, jumping ship to either the FPV or Macri’s centre- right opposition party Propuesta Republicana (PRO).

Guatemala in turmoil: first Baldetti, next Pérez Molina?

week that he was intending to resign. Insistent that he would remain in office to serve out the rest of his four-year term, which ends in January 2016, Pérez Molina made the remarks after yet another historic turnout of anti-government protesters – the latest following the corruption ring, La Línea, uncovered last month at the national tax authority (SAT) allegedly headed up by Juan Carlos Monzón, the former private secretary to former vice-president Roxana Baldetti. This has already forced out Baldetti [WR- 15-19] and seen Alejandro Sinibaldi quit as the ruling Partido Patriota (PP)’s presidential candidate ahead of general elections on 6 September. With another cabinet minister forced to step aside last week over alleged corruption, and a further three facing possible legal action, President Pérez Molina is facing the biggest political crisis of his mandate.

Bachelet, unlike Rousseff, tries to grasp the nettle

Pushed against the ropes, Chile’s President Michelle Bachelet has come out swinging, replacing her most senior cabinet ministers, announcing plans for a constitutional reform and rushing out an anti-corruption initiative. Bachelet could never have predicted such a precipitate fall in popularity, to just 29%, barely a year after taking office with an emphatic 62% of the vote to secure a second term. Bachelet’s proactive response stands in stark contrast, however, to that of Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff, who is suffering a similar fate – a sharp decline in popularity in the wake of a serious corruption scandal and being beset by economic and political difficulties – but has looked paralysed.

Costa Rica’s opposition unites to isolate Solís

Costa Rica’s President Luis Guillermo Solís cut a lonely figure as he delivered his state-of-the-nation address to the 57-seat unicameral legislative assembly on 1 May. Solís became the first representative of the centre-left Partido Acción Ciudadana (PAC) to don the presidential sash a year earlier, breaking a political duopoly that had held sway over Costa Rican politics since 1930. But with the PAC winning just 13 seats, Solís faced being hamstrung unless his government could display a striking aptitude for consensus-building with the eight opposition parties in the legislative assembly. It has failed in this regard. Six of these parties just forged an alliance to control the legislative leadership positions, marginalising the PAC, and leaving Solís and his government’s reform agenda high and dry.

Honduran supreme court lifts constitutional ban on re-election

Events in Honduras in late April have begun to look like a mirror image (that is, an image in reverse) of those that led in June 2009 to the ouster of President Manuel Zelaya (2006-2009). The constitutional panel of the supreme court has ruled ‘inapplicable’ the very constitutional provisions whose violations by Zelaya triggered his removal from office. As in 2009, the course of current events has been anything but straightforward — to the point that Zelaya has become one of the most vocal critics of the court’s ruling, on the grounds that it is “illegal and arbitrary”.