South America

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — Chileans will vote for a new president Sunday following a polarizing campaign in which the leading candidates vowed to chart starkly different paths for the region’s most economically advanced country staggered by a recent wave of social unrest.

Pre-election polls point to a large number of undecided voters but consistently have favored two of the seven candidates running: former student protest leader Gabriel Boric and his ideological opposite, José Antonio Kast, who has a history of defending Chile’s military dictatorship.

SANTIAGO, Nov 20 (Reuters) - For many Chileans, Plaza Baquedano, a broad rotary in central Santiago that for decades served as a center of social protest, has become a powerful symbol of hope.

For two years, city residents have regularly gathered here to protest pensions that are too low, public transit fees that are too high and, more generally, an old-guard political class that just does not get it.

The statue of a nineteenth-century general that sat at the plaza's center has been removed, and its plinth is now covered in left-wing political literature.

SANTIAGO, Nov 19 (Reuters) - Chile's centrist presidential candidates are lagging behind the polarized favorites on the right and left ahead of Sunday's election, but could play roles as kingmakers in an expected second-round run-off.

Yasna Provoste, 51, a former teacher, sits in third place in opinion polls for the powerful center-left Christian Democratic party, behind hard-right front-runner Jose Antonio Kast and leftist former student protest leader Gabriel Boric.

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — The area deforested in Brazil’s Amazon reached a 15-year high after a 22% jump from the prior year, according to official data published Thursday.

The National Institute for Space Research’s Prodes monitoring system showed the Brazilian Amazon lost 13,235 square kilometers of rainforest in the 12-month reference period from Aug. 2020 to July 2021. That’s the most since 2006.

BOGOTA, Nov 18 (NNN-AGENCIES) — A Colombian nun who was kidnapped and held by armed groups in Mali for more than four years has returned home.

Sister Gloria Cecilia Narvaez, 59, was greeted by a dozen fellow nuns, singing “Welcome, welcome, our heart welcomes you”, as she arrived at Bogota airport on Tuesday.

She was freed on Oct 9 following a joint effort by the governments of Mali and Colombia.

While details of how her release was secured remain unclear, the Colombian police had previously said the group that abducted her had demanded a ransom.

HAVANA, Nov 16 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Cuban security forces foiled a planned mass protest on Monday, with police flooding Havana’s streets and prominent dissidents arrested or confined to their homes to prevent them from staging
the banned rights gathering.

  Friends and family members said those detained included opposition figure Manuel Cuesta Morua, 58, the leader of the Ladies in White rights movement Berta Soler, and her husband Angel Moya — a former political prisoner.

NORTE DE SANTANDER, Colombia, Nov 16 (Reuters) - Camouflaged Colombian troops with guns and anti-COVID masks creep through dense vegetation in suffocating heat, ready for their many enemies crisscrossing the Venezuelan border.

The soldiers are part of a 14,000-strong military unit created last month to stem rising bloodshed in the northeastern province of Norte de Santander: Colombia's new epicenter of conflict, fueled by rising cocaine production.

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — President Alberto Fernández suffered a severe setback in Argentina’s midterm elections held Sunday amid widespread anger over high inflation and rising poverty, with his governing coalition losing control of the Senate and threatened with falling from its position as the biggest bloc in the Chamber of Deputies.

BUENOS AIRES, Nov 14 (Reuters) - Argentines headed out to vote on Sunday in midterm elections that will establish the power balance in Congress, with the ruling Peronist party battling to avoid damaging losses that could erase its majority in the Senate held for almost 40 years.

The vote sees half the seats in the lower Chamber of Deputies up for grabs and a third in the Senate, with voters focused on rampant inflation running above 50% and high poverty levels arising from the COVID-19 pandemic.

QUITO, Ecuador (AP) — A prolonged gunbattle between rival gangs inside Ecuador’s largest prison killed at least 68 inmates and wounded 25 on Saturday, while authorities said it took most of the day to regain control at the Litoral Penitentiary, which recently saw the country’s worst prison bloodbath.