Dealflow.la #16 - Impeached former President Castillo 🇵🇪 asked Mexico 🇲🇽 for asylum, Docket 🇧🇷 raised a $21M Series B, and Uruguay 🇺🇾 players charged for confronting World Cup 🇶🇦 referee.

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Dec 09, 2022

Funding

Lastro 🇧🇷 raised a $4 Million Seed Round from QED Investors 🇺🇸, Canary 🇧🇷, and 1Sharp Ventures 🇺🇸 to bring together everything needed to manage one's rental portfolio. The company's platform includes integrated payments that simplify managing rental properties and helps landlords streamline workflows by organizing lease contract information in a cloud-based system, automating rent charging processes, monitoring tenant obligations, and generating customized reports, enabling landlords to keep track of all their contracts and rentals.

Kredito 🇨🇱 raised a $6 Million Seed round with funding from Grupo Penta 🇪🇸, Genesis Ventures 🇨🇱, and Amarena 🇨🇱 to democratize working capital for businesses with their AI-based fintech platform. The company's platform leverages technology to develop various loan products at attractive rates and debit card products, providing small and medium businesses with working capital.

Smart Break 🇧🇷 raised a $7 Million Venture round led by Headline 🇺🇸 with funding from UVC Investimentos 🇧🇷, Columbia Angels 🇺🇸, and Anjos do Brasil 🇧🇷 to build their autonomous mini markets stores intended for residential and corporate condominiums.

Senhasegura 🇧🇷 raised a $13 Million Later Stage round with funding from Graphine Ventures 🇺🇸 to help organizations build sovereignty and security over access and privileged information with access management solutions. The company's platform helps protect the entire development and operations pipeline, isolates, monitors, and logs all privileged cloud access, manages all devices connected to the environment and their respective credentials, and provides an intuitive user interface, enabling clients to secure storage, access segregation and full traceability of use.

Docket 🇧🇷 raised a $21 Million Series B round with funding from Wayra 🇪🇸, Valor Capital Group 🇺🇸, TM3 Capital 🇧🇷, ONEVC 🇧🇷, InovaBRA 🇧🇷, and Gerdau Next Ventures 🇧🇷 to automate the procurement of documents throughout Brazil. The company's platform uses artificial intelligence to search, manage and analyze documents, optimize operations and help to reduce costs in an agile and intelligent way, enabling companies to focus on people, processes, and products, generating value for the client's business models.

Sociopolitical News

🇦🇷 Argentina

Heatwave sweeps South America as Argentina hits 43 ºC/109.4 ºF. (The Guardian)
Argentina’s VP Fernández guilty in $1B fraud, gets 6 years. Argentine Vice President Cristina Fernández was convicted and sentenced Tuesday to six years in prison and a lifetime ban from holding public office for a fraud scheme that embezzled $1 billion through public works projects during her presidency. A three-judge panel found the Peronist leader guilty of fraud but rejected a charge of running a criminal organization, for which the sentence could have been 12 years in prison. It was the first time an Argentine vice president has been convicted of a crime while in office. Fernández lashed out at the verdict, describing herself as the victim of a “judicial mafia.” She also later announced that she would not run next year for the presidency, a post she previously held in 2007-2015. (AP)
One passenger was killed and four more injured after a "rogue wave" hit a cruise ship bound for Antarctica, travel company Viking has said. The Norwegian-flagged Viking Polaris was caught in a storm as it sailed towards Ushuaia, Argentina on Tuesday. The victim was a US woman who died after being struck by shattered glass, Argentinian media report. (BBC)

🇧🇴 Bolivia

Bolivia's leftist President Luis Arce said Friday a bill had been approved to hold a national census in March 2024 after weeks of deadly protests over the count. "We passed this Census Law so people's blood will not be spilled. The census will take place on March 23, 2024," the president said in a televised message. For almost five weeks, the economic hub of Santa Cruz was rocked by unrest over fears a new census to update spending allocation and the number of seats the region would be entitled to in parliament, would not take place before Bolivia’s 2025 elections. (France24)

🇧🇷 Brazil

Tournament favorite Brazil out of World Cup after losing to Croatia on penalties. (CNN)
President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's election team sued President Jair Bolsonaro, his running mate, and two of his sons for abuse of power and attacks on Brazil's voting system, both during the October election campaign. The two lawsuits, filed in the electoral court, seek to ban the four men from running for office in the future. Bolsonaro and his vice-presidential candidate, retired army general Walter Braga Neto, narrowly lost the election. (Reuters/US News)
Petrobras’s chief executive will leave the Brazilian state-controlled oil and gas producer after only a short tenure, ahead of a possible shift in corporate strategy under president-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. (FT)
Brazil runs the risk of losing control over its vast Amazon rainforest region to organized crime and traffickers who use the lawless region to smuggle drugs, a Supreme Court judge warned on Wednesday. (Reuters/US News)
Brazil's President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is expected to travel to the United States to meet U.S. President Joe Biden in January. (Reuters)

🇨🇱 Chile

Chile will drop tariffs on all imports except sugar and facilitate EU investment, the European Commission said. Brussels considers the Latin American country as a vital strategic partner as it seeks to diversify resources imports away from China. In return, Chile will secure more favorable access for its exports, particularly food, and professional services. (FT)
Macquarie Group, a global financial services group providing clients with asset management, leasing and asset financing, market access, commodity trading, renewables development, specialist advice, and access to capital and principal investment in South America, has opened an office in Santiago. The new office is in the Titanium La Portada building and is currently home to two divisions of the firm, Macquarie Capital and Macquarie Asset Management, both of which are looking to accelerate investment across the region. (BNA Americas)

🇨🇴 Colombia

Colombia's military will keep up offensive operations against illegal armed groups until they demonstrate the will to negotiate for peace, President Gustavo Petro said on Tuesday, after FARC dissidents attacked and killed six soldiers. An attack by dissidents of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who reject a 2016 peace deal with the government, took place in the municipality of Buenos Aires, in Cauca province, an important region for producing coca, the chief ingredient in cocaine. (Reuters)
Opponents of Colombia President Gustavo Petro on Monday insisted that people jailed for participating in anti-government protests in 2021 were in prison for breaking the law, not demonstrating, after Petro announced plans to name dozens of youths as peace managers, paving the way for their release. (Reuters)

🇪🇨 Ecuador

Ecuadorean President Guillermo Lasso on Wednesday asked Congress for changes to the country's constitution to allow the military to support police work in the fight against organized crime and drug trafficking. Lasso, a former conservative banker who has held office since May 2021, wants to crack down on growing crime, including in prisons, arguing that violence plagues the South American country. (Reuters/US News)

🇸🇻 El Salvador

El Salvador President Nayib Bukele has deployed 10,000 security forces to confront the threat from gangs in a suburb of the capital, San Salvador. Soldiers and security agents surrounded the municipality of Soyapango on Saturday to remove gang members in the area, according to a statement issued by the presidency. “Ordinary citizens have nothing to fear and can continue to live their lives as usual,” Bukele said on the site. He said the operation is against criminals, not against “honest citizens.” This is the latest move in Bukele’s Territorial Control Plan, a strategy for the recovery of places that have been dominated by gangs. His campaign against violence toughened in March after 62 people were slaughtered in some of the worst bloodshed since the nation’s civil war ended three decades ago. (Bloomberg)

🇬🇹 Guatemala

Judge orders Guatemalan newspaper chief to stand trial. The director of a Guatemalan investigative newspaper will stand trial on charges of money laundering, influence peddling and blackmail, a judge ruled Thursday. José Rubén Zamora of El Periodico has been held for four months amid criticism that his arrest was politically motivated by an administration interested in silencing critical journalists. Prosecutors accuse Zamora of asking a friend to deposit a $38,000 donation to hide the source of the funds. Zamora has said the money from a donor who wished to remain anonymous was to keep the newspaper running during a financial crisis after the government pulled its advertising. (AP)

🇭🇳 Honduras

Honduras suspends rights in 2 big cities amid gang crackdown. Honduras became the second country in Central America to impose a state of exception suspending some constitutional rights to help fight street gangs when a decree took effect Monday. The extraordinary measures target the capital Tegucigalpa and the northern business hub of San Pedro Sula, which have both struggled under the sway of powerful gangs like Barrio 18 and MS-13. (AP)

🇲🇽 Mexico

Peru's impeached former president asks Mexico for asylum. Castillo met with Mexico's ambassador to Peru while in detention in Lima Thursday, per tweets from Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard, who shared a copy of Castillo's legal request for asylum in the country that stated he was "at grave risk" in the Peruvian capital. Castillo was arrested Wednesday after he announced he was dissolving Congress as lawmakers debated whether to impeach him. The 53-year-old left-wing former school teacher faces criminal charges of "rebellion and conspiracy," which he denies. (Axios)
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Friday there are two remaining parties bidding to buy the Mexican retail arm of U.S. banking giant Citigroup. Lopez Obrador expects the bid for one of Mexico's biggest banks to be resolved in the beginning of 2023, he said during a regular news conference. Citigroup Chief Executive Officer Jane Fraser has been looking to simplify the firm by selling off some its international operations.(Reuters/US News)
Mexico’s ruling party quickly pushed through an electoral reform Wednesday that reduces funding for the country’s electoral oversight agency. Officials said the changes will also make it easier for millions of Mexican migrants living abroad to vote in domestic elections via the internet. Mexicans living abroad — mostly in the United States — could already vote online, but could only do so with their voter ID cards, which have to be renewed periodically in person. The changes allow potential voters to use other documents like passports or consular ID cards. (ABC)

🇳🇮 Nicaragua

This week, air connectivity between Nicaragua and the United States increased by more than 73% with the return of American Airlines and Spirit to Managua (MGA). Now, three airlines will offer flights between the state of Florida and Augusto C. Sandino International Airport (MGA). (Aviacionline)

🇵🇾 Paraguay

Paraguay votes down a crypto regulatory bill in a blow to crypto mining industry. The bill would have capped how much the grid operator can charge bitcoin miners for electricity. (CoinDesk)

🇵🇪 Peru

Pedro Castillo began Wednesday as the beleaguered but still lawful president of Peru. By the day’s end, he was out of office and behind bars, ousted by furious legislators after he tried to dissolve the Congress of the Republic of Peru without the constitutional authority or the political support to succeed. Castillo was arrested in Lima after lawmakers, including several erstwhile allies, voted overwhelmingly to remove him. Vice President Dina Boluarte was sworn as Peru’s first female president. Castillo’s dramatic ouster — and the sight of him in custody — came as a relief to Peruvians ground down by the continuous fire hose of his corruption scandals, verbal gaffes, and ineptitude. But in his 17 months in office, analysts say, he caused deep and lasting damage to this South American nation’s economy and institutions. (Washington Post)
Prosecutor's office in Peru says ousted President Castillo detained for investigation of alleged crime of rebellion. (ABC)
From President to prisoner - the rapid descent of Peru's Pedro Castillo. (NPR)
Who is Dina Boluarte, Peru’s ‘accidental president’? Former vice president, who takes helm after day of political chaos, faces myriad challenges in deeply divided nation. (Al Jazeera)
New Peru president appears with military to cement power. (AP)

🇺🇾 Uruguay

Uruguay players charged for confronting World Cup referee. Four Uruguay players were charged with offensive behavior by FIFA on Monday for their angry pursuit of the referee after being eliminated from the World Cup. The Uruguayan soccer federation also faces an extra charge of discrimination, FIFA said without giving details. The Uruguay team thought it should been awarded a penalty kick in stoppage time of its 2-0 victory over Ghana on Friday. One more goal would have sent Uruguay to the round of 16 instead of South Korea. (AP)
South America's major Mercosur trade bloc, which includes regional powerhouses Brazil and Argentina, has been rattled by one of its smaller members, Uruguay, seeking to strike its own free-trade deals, leaders said at a summit on Tuesday. At the meeting in the Uruguayan capital Montevideo, the leaders sought to pressure their host over plans for go-it-alone trade deals with China and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). "The solution is not for each one of us just to do our own thing," said Argentine President Alberto Fernandez, chiding Uruguay. (Yahoo/Reuters)
- Another Perspective: South American Trade Partners Pile Pressure on Rebel Uruguay (Bloomberg)

🇻🇪 Venezuela

Chevron to take control of Venezuelan oil facility this week. Chevron official, minister to visit Petropiar upgrader Dec. 7 Facility will be used to process crude under sanctions waiver. (Bloomberg)
An oil spill has polluted more than 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) of coastline at the city of Lechería, one of Venezuela’s top tourist destinations, the city’s mayor said Tuesday. Mayor Manuel Ferreira called it a “catastrophic scene.” “The authorities in the area of oil production have not given us information, but the reality speaks for itself,” Ferreira lamented in a Twitter post. He ordered the beaches closed for at least 72 hours in the resorts of Los Canales, Lido and Cangrejo. (AP)
Long lines for motorists at Venezuela's refueling stations are back due to repeated outages at state oil company PDVSA's refineries and a lack of diesel and gasoline imports. In 2020 and again in 2021, drivers had to line up for days to get gasoline and farmers halted work because of insufficient diesel. The shortages had eased earlier this year as imports of Iranian crude boosted refinery output. (Reuters/Yahoo)

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