The U.S. Federal Reserve (FED) raised interest rates by 0.25 percentage points on Wednesday. That decision has consequences for countries across the world, including Argentina and local financial assets, because it affects the cost of money and the direction of capital flows. Economist Federico Glustein pointed out that a 0.25% rate hike is related to the US monetary contraction process. But he anticipates that this new increase will mean a decrease in global liquidity volumes, which will also drive a downward trend in financial assets. However, this has been reversed in recent months, and the prospect of the Federal Reserve not raising the interest rate as much helps.

“There were grave episodes of use of excessive force,” the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) concluded in a report. “We reject the supposed findings of extrajudicial killings and the ‘massacre’ description,” she said at a press conference. “There were serious human rights violations that must be investigated with due diligence and an ethno-racial approach,” said Margarette May Macaulay, head of the IACHR, which is the human rights arm of the Washington-based Organization of American States. “The deaths could constitute extrajudicial executions.”Bolaurte played down the wording of the IACHR’s report, saying it did not “confirm” the occurrence of human rights violations, but that they “could have happened.”The report affirmed that rights violations took place. The commission’s report follows a Human Rights Watch publication, which concluded that Peru’s security forces were responsible for protest deaths.

More than half of the 1.5 million foreigners in Peru, mostly from Venezuela, are in the country under an irregular immigration status, Peru’s interior minister said Wednesday. The Peruvian government has said it is working with representatives from Chile, Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela to evaluate the creation of a “humanitarian corridor” to allow the migrants to travel back to Venezuela. Around 150 Venezuelans will go back to their country on a flight from the Chilean city of Arica, which borders Peru, this weekend, Peruvian Foreign Minister Ana Cecilia Gervasi also told Congress. Most of Peru’s undocumented population arrived in the country after the government began granting Venezuelan migrants temporary residency in 2017, Romero said, with many migrants’ temporary residency since expiring. To combat the issue, Peru’s government has set a deadline to allow foreigners to regularize their immigration status.

Lionel Messi’s troubled stint at Paris Saint Germain is over, and the French team will not renew his contract when it ends in June this year, sports media in Europe and Argentina have reported. “Behind the scenes, it’s now understood that Leo’s father Jorge communicated the decision to PSG already one month ago due to the project. It was the final breaking point.”Neither Messi nor PSG had made official statements at the time of writing. According to Romano, PSG had decided to cancel one of the team’s two days off, giving players just Tuesday to rest. According to French media reports, PSG’s sports manager Luis Campos informed Messi of the sanction on Monday afternoon.

Mexico, for its part, will continue accepting back migrants returned to the country on humanitarian grounds, both nations said in a joint statement. The announcement comes as the US prepares for the end of the Title 42 policy and a possible subsequent spike in illegal border crossings. A U.S. official said last week that the country intends to continue expelling migrants of those four nationalities back to Mexico after the program’s end date. Tuesday’s announcement indicates that a U.S. humanitarian parole program providing legal migration pathways for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans will continue after May 11. Sherwood-Randall told Mexican authorities that “the humanitarian parole program will continue,” Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard told journalists following the meeting.

Brazil’s federal police on Wednesday raided former President Jair Bolsonaro’s home in Brasilia as part of a probe into a group suspected of adding false vaccine data into the government’s COVID-19 database, two sources familiar with the matter said. Two of Bolsonaro’s closest aides, Mauro Cid and Max Guilherme, have been arrested in the same operation, the sources added. A spokesman and a lawyer for Bolsonaro did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Police said the “false data” were allegedly added to the database between November 2021 and December 2022, when Bolsonaro was president, to alter immunization statuses of still unnamed people. Bolsonaro while in office was a vocal skeptic of COVID-19 vaccines who vowed to never get the jab.

National deputies of the ruling coalition Frente de Todos (FdT) officially presented a bill today that aims to declare lithium natural reserves —mostly located in the northern provinces— as a “strategic resource,” and described its exploitation and exploration as a key for the development of the country. “Not only do we fail to industrialize it in our country, but they loot, leave us with contamination, and take it at bargain prices. “It’s time to break away with the extractivist-exporter model, change the mining code, amend the Mining Investments law, and move forward with a model of national development and defense of our sovereignty,” said Alderete. In a press release, Alderete explained that lithium “became in recent years one of the minerals that sparked the most interest in the world. Argentina, Chile and Bolivia are home to around 50 million tonnes of lithium resources, studies by the US Geological Survey show, and the provinces surrounding the tri-border region are known as South America’s lithium triangle.

The General Confederation of Labor’s (CGT) Joint Secretary General Héctor Daer, called for reducing the 48-hour working week in an event today for International Workers Day in Buenos Aires City. “The 48-hour working week is anachronistic because worker productivity has grown exponentially, so we have to discuss and modify it,” he said, in the Defensores de Belgrano football club. Currently, Argentina’s law allows a maximum of eight daily work hours six days a week or 48 hours a week total. Left-wing coalition Frente de Izquierda has proposed to reduce it to six hours a day or 30 hours a week. The labor leader mentioned the current “inflation process,” which he said was a “macroeconomic” issue, but he also blamed businessmen for it.

Argentine officials will begin by outlining a negotiation to boost bilateral trade that will exclude the dollar, a difficult issue for Argentina, and one which Brazil is willing to agree to. Beyond the financing lines, the agreement that Argentina and Brazil intend to sign involves excluding the dollar as payment currency for foreign trade, a mechanism similar to the swaps with China. Argentine importers will be able to pay for their purchases in pesos and the Brazilian government will convert them into reais. According to the Brazilian Vice Minister of Finance, around 210 Brazilian companies trade with Argentina. Will the volume of pesos obtained from the sale, when it is converted to [Brazilian] real, be enough to pay the debt?

The government made this decision after a week in which the value of the informal and financial dollars recorded jumps that exceeded double digits in a few days. Financial dollars (the blue-chip swap rate and the MEP dollar) also recorded increases between 6.4% and 7.7% between Monday and Wednesday. The changes published today by the CNV are:Those who have short-term loans in force (taken or granted) will not be able to purchase financial dollars. In the Argentine market short-term loans that use financial assets as collateral are called “cauciones,” which operate similarly to margin loans. Some shareholders, managers, and employees of financial brokers may not buy and sell bonds in the same financial market in which the Central Bank intervenes by buying and selling bonds to control the value of financial dollars.

Former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro stole the show on Monday at Brazil’s largest agribusiness fair where he was acclaimed by supporters from the country’s strong farm sector. Bolsonaro criticized the decision by Lula to recognize new Indigenous reservations, a constant complaint by farmers in Brazil’s expanding agricultural frontier. The deep-pocketed and powerful farm sector was a major supporter of Bolsonaro’s 2018 election. Bolsonaro faces legal risks that could ban him from running in the 2026 election. Agriculture Minister Carlos Favaro wished the farmers success and said he looked forward to attending next year.

Paraguayan conservative economist Santiago Peña won the country’s presidential election on Sunday, tightening the ruling Colorado Party’s political grip in the country. “Thank you for this Colorado victory, thank you for this Paraguayan victory,” Peña said in a speech. Colorado and right-wing party candidates also performed strongly in congressional elections and governor races, with some provinces recording a historic Colorado majority over opposition rivals. “But not voting makes me part of the problem.”The Colorado Party has dominated politics in the landlocked South American country since the 1950s. Taiwan and ChinaThe build-up to the election has been dominated by the economy, corruption allegations and the candidates’ views on Taiwan.

Paraguayan voters head to the polls today to elect its next president, Congress representatives, governors, and local authorities. The Colorado Party has ruled Paraguay for the past seven decades, with an exception between 2008 and 2013, when leftist Fernando Lugo was in power. The Herald spoke to Magdalena Lopez, the coordinator of the Social Studies on Paraguay Research Group at the University of Buenos Aires. The Concertation coalition includes 23 parties and two movements united in opposition to the Colorado Party. 13 out of 17 departments in the country are run by governors belonging to the Colorado Party.

Argentina’s Trade Secretariat fined multinational companies Coca-Cola and Danone for selling products with monthly price increases up to 10 times over the limit established by the Precios Justos (Fair Prices) agreement. Danone was fined AR$45 million (US$205,397 at the official rate, US$103,199 at the MEP rate) while Coca-Cola was fined AR$40 million (US$205,397 at the official rate, US$91,732 at the MEP rate). In a press release, the Trade Secretariat said that the fined companies raised prices by up to 32.8%. However, the agreement is only applied in supermarkets and not smaller grocery stores. The Trade Secretariat said that it found, during price monitoring operations in grocery stores, that the suppliers were charging their products with markups well above the cap.

Exporters are required to change dollars from overseas earnings into pesos, either at the official exchange rate or, in some cases, at special sector-specific rates. “They leave [the dollars] overseas or they convert them to the blue-chip swap rate,” a Customs press release stated. The blue-chip swap rate, also known as contado con liqui or CCL, is used exclusively in the financial world. Exporters receive less than half as many pesos per dollar at the official exchange rate: at the time of writing, the blue-chip swap rate is AR$453 per dollar, while the official exchange rate is AR$222. Exporters of certain agricultural goods can use the “agro dollar III” exchange rate of AR$300.