the presidents of Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru met with little fanfare in Cartagena last week to seal an economic pact launched in 2012. They call their project the Pacific Alliance, and it will soon include Costa Rica

The four founding members are the most successful economies in Latin America; they boast the region's highest economic-growth rates and lowest inflation rates. Together, they represent 36 percent of the region's economy, 50 percent of its international trade, and 41 percent of all incoming foreign investment. If the Alliance were a country, it would be the world's eighth-largest economy and seventh-largest exporter. Its members lead the lists of the most competitive economies in Latin America and those where it’s easiest to do business.

the Pacific Alliance has already yielded more results in its 20 months of existence than similar initiatives that have been around for decades. The four countries have eliminated 92 percent of all import tariffs among them. Chile, Colombia, and Peru have linked their stock markets so that a company listed in one of the exchanges can be traded in the other two. Mexico is expected to follow suit this year, meaning this integrated stock market will rival that of Brazil as the largest in Latin America. The four countries have eliminated the need for business and tourist visas for visiting nationals of bloc members. In a break with tradition, the joint communiqués of Alliance presidents tend to be brief and concrete in terms of goals, timelines, and roadmaps.

The peso plunged 15 percent on Jan. 22 and 23, from around 6.9 pesos to the dollar to 8 pesos, according to Bloomberg News, and has since stablized. It closed on Friday at 8 pesos to the dollar. It weakened by a total of 19 percent in January.

Generous social spending after the economic collapse, like freezing household electricity rates, has widened Argentina’s budget deficit, encouraged energy consumption and increased the country’s dependence on energy imports, eroding the central bank’s hard currency reserves. Inflation is so high that it has become a heated political issue, with economists saying it exceeded 28 percent in 2013 and officials insisting it was 10.9 percent.

Spurred by a sense of injustice that has lingered for two centuries, the countries plan to compile an inventory of the lasting damage they believe they suffered and then demand an apology and reparations from the former colonial powers of Britain, France and the Netherlands.

“Our constant search and struggle for development resources is linked directly to the historical inability of our nations to accumulate wealth from the efforts of our peoples during slavery and colonialism,” said Baldwin Spencer, prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, in July this year. Reparations, he said, must be directed toward repairing the damage inflicted by slavery and racism.

“What happened in the Caribbean and West Africa was so egregious we feel that bringing a case in the I.C.J. would have a decent chance of success,” Mr. Day said. “The fact that you were subjugating a whole class of people in a massively discriminatory way has no parallel,” he added.

it is already cheaper than China for many industries serving the American market.

while Mexico’s economy is far from trouble free, its growth easily outpaced the giants of the hemisphere — the United States, Canada and Brazil — in 2011 and 2012, according to International Monetary Fund data, making the country more attractive to fortune seekers worldwide.

residency requests had grown by 10 percent since November, when a new law meant to streamline the process took effect. And they are coming from nearly everywhere.

No country in Africa, if not the world, has so thoroughly turned itself around in so short a time, and Kagame has shrewdly directed the transformation.

Kagame has made indisputable progress fighting the single greatest ill in Africa: poverty. Rwanda is still very poor — the average Rwandan lives on less than $1.50 a day — but it is a lot less poor than it used to be. Kagame’s government has reduced child mortality by 70 percent; expanded the economy by an average of 8 percent annually over the past five years; and set up a national health-insurance program — which Western experts had said was impossible in a destitute African country.

Progressive in many ways, Kagame has pushed for more women in political office, and today Rwanda has a higher percentage of them in Parliament than any other country. His countless devotees, at home and abroad, say he has also delicately re-engineered Rwandan society to defuse ethnic rivalry, the issue that exploded there in 1994 and that stalks so many African countries, often dragging them into civil war.

a document dated June 2012 shows that Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto's emails were being read. The document's date is a month before Pena Nieto was elected. The document on which Greenwald based the report includes communications from Pena Nieto indicating who he would like to name to some government posts among other information.

As for Brazil's leader, the June 2012 document "doesn't include any of Dilma's specific intercepted messages, the way it does for Nieto," Greenwald told The Associated Press in an email. "But it is clear in several ways that her communications were intercepted, including the use of DNI Presenter, which is a program used by NSA to open and read emails and online chats."

In July, Greenwald co-wrote articles in O Globo that said documents leaked by Snowden indicate Brazil was the largest target in Latin America for the NSA program, which collected data on billions of emails and calls flowing through Brazil.

things have gotten worse for Batista. Hit by mounting debt, a series of project delays and a crisis of confidence, his six publicly listed companies have suffered one of the most spectacular corporate meltdowns in recent history.

He pumped billions into the group's companies even as share prices plunged by as much as 90 percent.

His own fortune - the world's seventh-biggest last year, according to Forbes - has declined by more than $25 billion over the past 18 months.

Seven out of 10 Mexican adults over the age of 20 are either overweight or obese, according to the country's latest national health survey. An estimated 10 million Mexicans have diabetes, or roughly 9% of the population, the highest proportion in any country with more than 100 million inhabitants.

Mexico is second only to the U.S. in per capita soda intake

Last year, Latin America, anchored by Mexico, where Coca-Cola's biggest independent bottler is based, was Coke's second-most-profitable region, after Europe.

President Raúl Castro unleashed his fiercest and lengthiest public lecture to date on the demise of Cuban culture and conduct. In a speech to the National Assembly, Mr. Castro said that Cubans’ behavior — from urinating in the street and raising pigs in cities to taking bribes — had led him to conclude that, despite five decades of universal education, the island had “regressed in culture and civility.”

Cubans build houses without permits, catch endangered fish, cut down trees, gamble, accept bribes and favors, hoard goods and sell them at inflated prices, and harass tourists, Mr. Castro said.

And that is just the start: Islanders yell in the street, curse indiscriminately, disturb their neighbors’ sleep with loud music, drink alcohol in public, vandalize telephones, dodge bus fares and throw stones at passing trains, the president lamented. “They ignore the most basic standards of gentility and respect,” Mr. Castro continued. “All this is going on under our noses, without provoking any objection or challenge from other citizens.”