South America

24 June 2022; MEMO: Suriname said it cancelled its decision to open its embassy in Jerusalem, Israeli media reported on Friday, Anadolu News Agency reports.

According to Israel's Channel 12, Suriname's President, Chan Santokhi, referred the decision to the lack of funds to build an embassy.

QUITO, June 22 (Reuters) - Thousands of indigenous protesters held a peaceful march through Ecuador's capital, Quito, on Wednesday to demand that President Guillermo Lasso address price rises that have ignited 10 days of demonstrations across the country.

Disquiet over costs for fuel, food and other basics has exploded into sometimes-violent protests in several cities, led largely by major indigenous groups who traveled to Quito to protest.

QUITO, June 20 (Reuters) - Thousands of indigenous demonstrators marched through Ecuador's capital on Monday urging President Guillermo Lasso to agree to demands for economic and social support, the latest in a series of protests that have injured dozens and disrupted the economy.

Amid a surge in the cost of living, the protests began last Monday with a list of 10 demands, including a fuel price cut, preventing further expansion of Ecuador's oil and mining industry, and more time for small and medium-sized farms to pay off debt.

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.