South America

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Colombia will be governed by a leftist president for the first time after former rebel Gustavo Petro narrowly defeated a real estate millionaire in a runoff election that underscored people’s disgust with the country’s traditional politicians.

Petro’s third attempt to win the presidency earned him 50.48% of the votes Sunday, while political outsider Rodolfo Hernández got 47.26%, according to results released by election authorities.

QUITO, June 18 (Reuters) - Ecuador's President Guillermo Lasso has declared a state of exception in three of the Andean country's provinces, in a bid to calm protests called by indigenous groups in rejection of the government's economic policies.

The measure will last for 30 days in the provinces of Imbabura, Cotopaxi, and Pichincha - areas that include capital city Quito - which have seen greater violence amid protests, with attacks on flower farms and damage to infrastructure, while police officers have also been detained by protesters.

SAO PAULO (AP) — Before disappearing in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, Bruno Pereira was laying the groundwork for a mammoth undertaking: a 350-kilometer (217-mile) trail marking the southwestern border of the Javari Valley Indigenous territory, an area the size of Portugal.

The purpose of the trail is to prevent cattle farmers from encroaching on Javari territory — and it was just the latest effort by Pereira to help Indigenous people protect their natural resources and traditional lifestyles.

ATALAIA DO NORTE, Brazil, June 15 (Reuters) - Police have found human remains in their search for British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian indigenous expert Bruno Pereira after a suspect confessed to killing them in the Amazon rainforest, investigators said on Wednesday.

The suspect, a fisherman who had clashed with Pereira over his efforts to combat illegal fishing in indigenous territory, led police to a remote burial site where the remains were unearthed, detective Eduardo Fontes told a news conference.

BOGOTA, June 14 (NNN-Xinhua) — Colombia’s army has killed the leader of the dissident faction of the former guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), President Ivan Duque said.

While celebrating his birthday with other rebels at a house in a rural area of the southwest department of Cauca, Leider Johany Noscue Bototo, alias “Mayimbu,” was located by military intelligence and was identified by a tattoo of his name on his right arm, Duque said at the government headquarters in the capital Bogota.

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — With jokes, upbeat Caribbean music and vacation scenes of sun-kissed beaches and palm trees, Haitian influencers on YouTube and TikTok advertise charter flights to South America.

But they are not targeting tourists.

Instead, they are touts for a thriving, little-known shadow industry that is profiting from the U.S. government sending people back to Haiti, a country besieged by gang violence.

LIMA, May 22 (Reuters) - Peru's President Pedro Castillo shuffled his Cabinet on Sunday, including replacing the interior minister and the important mining minister amid rising tensions over protests in the world's second largest copper producing country.

Castillo has shuffled his ministerial team multiple times since coming into office in the middle of last year as he has battled against falling popularity, a hostile Congress, corruption probes and community tensions hitting mining.

SAO PAULO, May 23 (Reuters) - Former Sao Paulo Governor Joao Doria, who won the presidential primary for the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), said on Monday he was dropping out of the race, as centrist parties keep up their search for a strong candidate in a polarized election.

Doria, who stepped down as governor to run, threw in the towel after opinion surveys for the October election showed him consistently with just 2-3% of voter support.

"I understand that I am not the choice of the PSDB leadership," Doria told reporters.

BRASILIA, May 23 (Reuters) - Brazil's top public prosecutor said President Jair Bolsonaro has committed no crime by questioning the legitimacy of the voting system or suggesting he might not concede defeat in the October elections as former U.S. President Donald Trump did in 2020.

Prosecutor General Augusto Aras, appointed by Bolsonaro in 2019, said in an interview with Reuters that threatening not to accept defeat was political rhetoric and not in itself a prosecutable crime.

CARACAS, May 23 (Reuters) - Iranian state firms have started preparations to revamp Venezuela's largest oil refinery, the 955,000-barrel-per-day Paraguana Refining Center, four people close to the talks said, following a contract to repair its smallest facility.

A deal would deepen an energy relationship that has become a lifeline for Venezuela's dilapidated oil industry amid a crisis caused by decades of mismanagement and underinvestment, and aggravated by U.S. sanctions on the South American country.