☀ Domingo Brief — Colombia’s Box-Office Boom

Welcome back to the Domingo Brief! This week, we’re following Javier Milei’s milestone moment, Ecuadorian debt-for-nature swaps, and more.

Trivia of the Week 🎯

Just over 31% of you correctly answered Avianca as the Latin American airline that is the world’s second-oldest extant airline (after the Dutch flag carrier KLM). Avianca has been the flag carrier of Colombia since 1919, when it was initially founded under the name SCADTA. It is the oldest airline in the Western Hemisphere and the second-largest in South America after Chile’s LATAM, and operates the most extensive network of destinations in the Americas along with its subsidiaries.

Each week, tune back in for the answer to the previous week’s trivia question. No cheating!

🇦🇷 Argentina notched its first quarterly economic expansion since entering a recession late last year, a milestone for President Javier Milei’s bid to end the country’s long-running economic malaise. Gross domestic product (GDP) expanded 3.9% from July to September versus the previous quarter, coming after three consecutive quarter-on-quarter declines. The economic rebound arrives as Milei marks one year in office, during which he brought down Argentina’s triple-digit annual inflation through massive fiscal spending cuts and strong deregulation.

🇧🇷 Brazil’s electric energy agency Aneel has met with representatives of the State Grid Corporation of China to outline construction plans for Brazil’s most significant energy transmission project. The 1.4K network is expected to start operations by March 2030, spanning the states of Goiás, Tocantins, and Maranhão. The $3B project is expected to meet the electricity needs of approximately 12M people in key population centers like Brasília.

🇨🇴 Colombia has apparently received a $51.8M boost to its economy from Netflix’s adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the seminal 1967 novel from national writer Gabriel García Márquez. The economic boost includes the impact of Netflix’s spending on both production and downstream supply chain after the streaming giant agreed to film the entire series in Colombia, with the novel’s mythical town of Macondo recreated and built by locals.

🇪🇨 Ecuador has completed its second debt-for-nature swap, unlocking $460M for Amazon conservation projects. By taking out a $1B loan to repurchase roughly $1.5B of its existing discounted bonds, the country will reduce its debt by $527M and save $800M by 2035. The funds are intended for investment in terrestrial and freshwater ecosystem preservation in the rainforest, which covers over half of the country’s total continental territory and represents one of the most biodiverse regions in the world.

🇲🇽 Mexico has imposed a 35% import tariff on readymade goods to protect the national textile industry. The measure seeks to eradicate unfair competition in the textile industry, in which companies deceitfully import unfinished products and sell them on the national market without paying taxes, providing cheaper products than those of Mexican companies. The tariffs will promote the development of the national industry and privilege trade with markets with which Mexico has free trade agreements (FTAs), markets which are excluded from the protectionist measures.

🇵🇷 The United States Department of Energy has made $365M available to install solar and battery storage systems across Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico’s Housing Administration will manage $190M for use in public housing and subsidized multi-family housing properties, with a further $175M earmarked for healthcare centers. The announcement comes as the island continues to struggle with chronic power outages following the destruction wrought by Hurricane Maria in 2017, along with an ongoing lack of maintenance and investment in its electric grid.

Venture Capital

🇧🇷 Brazilian-American climate tech Terradot raised $58M in a Series A round led by John Doerr. Founded in 2022, Terradot removes carbon from the atmosphere by applying rock powder in agricultural soils. It is currently running pilot operations in Brazil and has acquired contracts with Google and the Frontier Climate initiative.

🇧🇷 Onze secured a $7M Series B extension round led by Bewater. The 2009-founded Brazilian fintech connects real estate developers with capital markets, operating in over 100 cities across 25 Brazilian states and managing over R$33B in sales value across 830 projects.

Domingo Dispatch 🗞️

🇧🇷 BTG Pactual’s Mariana Oiticica Steers Private Banking Through Generational Change (Thomas Monteiro, Global Finance Magazine)

🇲🇽 ’The military has been inserted into the economy’: how the army became ubiquitous in Mexican life (Thomas Graham, The Guardian)

Visualizing Latin America via AI

Our big thanks to Ignacio Gutierrez for his help with this week’s Domingo Brief.

We at Latinometrics hope you realize Latin America’s potential this week.