Peru PM warns gas sector: pay higher taxes or face nationalization

Peruvian Prime Minister Guido Bellido on Sunday said that companies which exploit natural gas in Peru will need to agree to pay higher taxes or else face nationalizations, a sharp warning to the sector from the new leftist government. Bellido told Reuters in August that the government was planning to participate more deeply in the main industries,

European Union-style bloc pitched for Latin America, Caribbean

Latin American and Caribbean nations should aspire to a bloc like the European Union, Mexico’s president and other leaders said at a summit on Saturday, in a bid to wrest influence away from the Washington-based Organization of American States (OAS). For years, a few of the region’s leftist standard-bearers who attended the gathering of the

Record number of environmental activists murdered

A record number of activists working to protect the environment and land rights were murdered last year, according to a report by a campaign group. 227 people were killed around the world in 2020, the highest number recorded for a second consecutive year, the report from Global Witness said. Almost a third of the murders

Tokyo Covered Up Arrival of Deadly New COVID Variant Just Before the Olympics

Three days before the Olympics began, on July 20, Japan’s National Institute of Infectious Diseases (NIID) reported to an international organization that the highly infectious Lambda variant had been detected in an airport test in Japan for the first time, but did not announce it widely to the public. The report was submitted to an international COVID-19

Peru arrests state hospital workers for charging COVID-19 patients $21,000 per bed

Peruvian police said on Wednesday they had dismantled an alleged criminal ring that had charged as much $21,000 per bed for seriously ill COVID-19 patients in a state-run hospital, aggravating care in a country hit by one of the world’s deadliest outbreaks of the virus. Authorities arrested nine people in an early morning raid on

Peru: Pedro Castillo declared president

After over a month of uncertainty over election results, Peru’s election body confirmed socialist Pedro Castillo as the next president. Former school teacher Pedro Castillo has won the disputed election in Peru and will become the country’s next president, election officials said on Monday. The presidential vote, which had taken place on June 6, had been held up by claims

‘Deadlier’ than delta: Lambda covid variant detected across 30 countries

Lambda accounts for nearly 82 per cent of the coronavirus case samples reported during May and June in Peru, Euro News reported citing the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) A new COVID-19 strain called ‘Lambda’ is much more dangerous than the Delta variant, said the UK Health Ministry adding that it has been detected in more than 30

Peru: Fujimori cries electoral fraud – and unleashes torrent of racism

Claims of rightwing candidate, trailing Pedro Castillo in the polls, emboldens far right, who have vowed not to accept result The prospect of the son of illiterate Andean peasants becoming president as his rival cries fraud has shaken Peru’s entrenched class system and its fragile democracy, letting loose a torrent of racism in the bicentennial

A silent decimation: South America’s losing battle against Covid

Strained and underfunded health systems, economics and misinformation have all led to a surge in deaths The cold, tired and desperate relatives camped outside the Barrio Obrero general hospital in Asunción don’t need charts or datasets to confirm what they can see with their own eyes. As Paraguay records the world’s highest daily proportion of Covid deaths,

Peru: Leftist Castillo wins popular vote in presidential race

Leftist candidate Pedro Castillo has won the most votes in Peru’s close-run presidential run-off election. With all ballots now counted, Mr Castillo has just over 50% of the votes – 44,000 more than right-wing contender Keiko Fujimori. But Mr Castillo cannot be declared the winner until electoral authorities have finished processing a slew of legal