Blog, Latin America: Week in Review
U.S. asks Venezuelan Diplomat to Leave
January 9, 2012 By Staff
Today in Latin America
Top Story — U.S. State Department officials announced on Sunday that Venezuelan consul general Livia Acosta Noguera has been expelled from her post in Miami, a decision likely to heighten tensions between the U.S. and Venezuelan governments. The Venezuelan government was reportedly notified of the decision Friday and Acosta was asked to leave the U.S. by Tuesday. Allegations in a Univision television broadcast last month that Acosta was present during discussions of a plot to cyberattack the U.S. have been dismissed by Venezuela as false. However, the Univision report prompted four U.S. congress members to call for an investigation of Acosta, asking that she be expelled if the allegations were true. State Department officials declined Sunday to give a reason for Acosta’s dismissal. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez did not mention the incident during his six-hour Aló Presidente television broadcast on Sunday afternoon.
Read more from the Miami Herald.
Headlines from the Western Hemisphere
North America
- Authorities in Mexico’s Coahuila state discovered five severed heads accompanied by messages referring to drug gangs late Friday and early Saturday.
- At least eight people were killed in a 24-hour period in Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez, according to Chihuahua state police.
- Gunmen killed a Mexican municipal worker and journalist in Cadereyta, Mexico on Sunday.
- Mexican President Felipe Calderón on Saturday belatedly inaugurated a monument commemorating the country’s 2010 bicentennial.
Caribbean
- Jamaican Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller said in her inaugural address Thursday that it was time to remove Britain’s Queen Elizabeth as head of state and make Jamaica a republic.
- A Puerto Rican police officer was suspended Friday after he used his patrol car’s loudspeaker to demand the resignation of the superintendent during a funeral.
Central America
- Guatemalan authorities reported on Sunday that at least 19 people were murdered in Guatemala in the previous 24 hours.
- Former Salvadoran military official Inocente Orlando Montano, thought to be responsible for the death of six Jesuit priests and two women in 1989 will return to a Massachusetts court on Wednesday for lying on immigration documents.
- Costa Rican police unearthed a ton of cocaine buried on the Pacific coast beach of Parrita, according to an announcement Saturday.
Andes
- A Manhattan federal court judge ruled Friday that Chevron could not block Ecuadorian plaintiffs from collecting an $18 billion award for damages to the Amazon rain forest by Chevron-owned Texaco.
- Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez prepared to welcome Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Caracas on Sunday as Ahmadinejad begins a tour of Latin America.
- The Peruvian and Venezuelan governments have signed an accord to lower tariffs and collaborate on trade.
- Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez was back on the air and on television Sunday after a seven-month hiatus to treat his cancer.
- A Texas teenager mistakenly deported to Colombia was returned home on Friday.
Southern Cone
- An indigenous child was allegedly murdered and burned in the state of Maranhão in the Brazilian Amazon.
- The home of a Mapuche Indian leader was destroyed in a suspected arson in Chile’s Araucania region on Sunday as seven firefighters killed last week were buried.
- A spokesperson for Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner said that the president did not have thyroid cancer, as the government had previously announced.
- Brazilian tourists spent $20 billion abroad last year, mostly in the U.S. and France.
Image: chavezcandanga @ Flickr.
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