☀ Domingo Brief — Illicit Gold Mining Takes a Hit

Welcome back to the Domingo Brief! This week, we’re keeping up with Daniel Noboa’s government shake-up, Chevron’s license reversal in Venezuela, and more.

Trivia of the Week 🎯

Two-thirds (66%) of you guessed the Falkland Islands as the South Atlantic island group which became the subject of a 10-week war between Argentina and the United Kingdom in 1982. The conflict occurred during Argentina’s military dictatorship, when government forces invaded and occupied the Falkland Islands (known as las Islas Malvinas in Spanish). In response, the British dispatched a naval task force to carry out an amphibious assault on the islands, lasting 74 days and resulting in an Argentine surrender and the return of the islands to the British. Argentina long claimed that the islands are Argentine territory, while the British have overseen control of the territory as a Crown colony since 1841. Falklanders are largely descendants of British settlers and strongly favor British sovereignty.

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

🇪🇨 Ecuador’s government has launched a “modernization” efficiency plan which resulted in a drastic reduction in the size of the cabinet and the dismissal of 5K public employees. The number of government ministries will fall from 20 to 14, with significant and somewhat strange mergers, like that of the Ministry of the Environment with the Ministry of Mines. The restructuring plan mirrors one carried out by Noboa’s Argentine counterpart Javier Milei at the start of his presidency, while reflecting Noboa’s own efforts to reduce the fiscal deficit as part of the $5B credit agreement Ecuador signed with the International Monetary Fund last year.

🇭🇳 Libertad y Refundación, the ruling party of Honduras, has paralyzed talks within government to approve a real-time vote tracking and disclosure system ahead of the country’s upcoming elections in November of this year. The ruling party’s justification relies on a refusal to allow human intervention to review potential errors in the system’s live reporting during the election process, citing the resultant possibility of electoral fraud. Nonetheless, members of the National Electoral Council refute the validity of the ruling party’s claims, pointing that human intervention is present at other stages of the electoral process, and argue that the governmental paralysis is mostly due to distrust between political parties.

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