Category World News

A  judge in Peru has rejected a bid to prevent former President Dina Boluarte from leaving the country while state prosecutors investigate her for alleged abuse of office and money laundering.

Boluarte, one of the world’s least popular leaders, was ousted from the presidency last week when Congress voted 122 to zero in favour of her removal.

She left office with approval ratings ranging between 2 and 4 percent amid growing unrest over insecurity, as transport workers and young people protested rising extortions and murders.

On Wednesday, Judge Fernando Valdez struck down the request from Peru’s State Prosecutor’s Office in a hearing, arguing that Boluarte did not present a flight risk and the request was “unfounded”.

Boluarte, who faces a series of criminal accusations, has denied wrongdoing.

Prosecutors had sought to prevent Boluarte from leaving the country over investigations that she allegedly collected money from a criminal group and failed to notify Congress during a surgery.

In the latter case, Boluarte is accused of abandoning her post for two weeks in July 2023 while she underwent a rhinoplasty. Prosecutors say she did not notify Congress, nor appoint a caretaker president.

Other allegations concern questions of corruption: There has been scrutiny over the origins of her collection of luxury Rolex watches.

Her government is also accused of using excessive force against the deadly protests that erupted in support of her predecessor, Pedro Castillo, who was also impeached and removed from office in December 2022.

On the night of her removal from office last week, a crowd had gathered outside Ecuador’s embassy in Lima amid speculation that Boluarte could seek asylum with the neighbouring country.

The head of the United States Treasury, Scott Bessent, has announced he is working to corral the private sector around a new $20bn “facility” to support Argentina’s embattled economy.

“We are working on a $20bn facility that would be adjacent to our swap line, of private banks and sovereign wealth funds that I think would be more aimed at the debt market,” he told reporters on Wednesday in Washington, DC.

Bessent added that he had spent “weeks” working on the private-sector solution to Argentina’s upcoming debt payments, which would come on top of the $20bn currency swap the US Treasury recently set up to prop up the country’s peso.

“So that would be a total of 40 billion for Argentina,” he said, in remarks that triggered a rebound on Argentinian stocks.

Bessent’s comments mark the latest round of US support for Argentina’s right-wing populist leader Javier Milei, whose party faces an uphill battle in the country’s midterm elections later this month.

Milei enacted sweeping budget cuts after taking office in 2023 in a bid to quell inflation and turn the Argentinian economy around, drawing fierce opposition and widespread protests.

But US President Donald Trump, a fellow right-wing leader, has maintained close relations with Milei. In 2024, a presidential spokesperson for Milei revealed that Trump called the Argentinian leader his “favourite president”.

On Tuesday, President Trump once again hosted Milei at the White House and threw his support behind him before the elections.

He also suggested that the US’s economic support was contingent on Milei’s continued success at the ballot box.

“If he does win, we’re going to be very helpful,” Trump said. “And if he doesn’t win, we’re not going to waste our time, because you have somebody whose philosophy has no chance of making Argentina great again.”

Trump repeated the sentiment several times during Tuesday’s meeting. “If he loses, we are not going to be generous with Argentina,” he warned.

But in his comments on Wednesday, Bessent appeared to walk back some of the implications of those statements.

He clarified that the US would continue to support Argentina financially as long as President Milei’s government pursues “good policies”, regardless of the outcome of this month’s election.

The strong showing of US support this week unfolded on the sidelines of the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank in Washington, DC.

The IMF, which has its own multibillion-dollar loan programme with Buenos Aires, has supported the US’s bilateral support for Argentina’s economy.

In a broadcast interview on Wednesday, Milei said he was confident of US financial support so long as he remains in office. He also pledged to maintain his libertarian agenda.

“We continue to advance the ideas of freedom, so at least until 2027 we have that support assured,” he said, according to the dubbed-over voiceover of an English interpreter.

Milei, an economist, voiced hope that the midterm elections would increase his base to allow him to pursue his policies.

“I have no intention of changing course until the end of my term,” he said. “I am committed to the agenda of lowering taxes, deregulating and keeping the economy growing.”

Bessent said Milei would continue to enjoy US support for as long as he had a blocking veto on legislation in Argentina’s Congress.

The European Commission and Spain’s government have dismissed US President Donald Trump’s latest threat to impose higher tariffs on Madrid over its refusal to meet his proposed NATO target for defence spending.

Trump said on Tuesday that he was “very unhappy” with Spain for being the only NATO member to reject the new spending objective of 5 percent of economic output, adding that he was considering punishing the Mediterranean country.

“I was thinking of giving them trade punishment through tariffs because of what they did, and I think I may do that,” Trump added. He had previously suggested making Spain “pay twice as much” in trade talks.

Trade policy falls under the remit of Brussels, and the European Commission would “respond appropriately, as we always do, to any measures taken against one or more of our member states”, commission spokesperson Olof Gill said in a press briefing on Wednesday.

The trade deal between the European Union and the United States signed in July was the right platform to address any issues, Gill added.

“The defence spending debate is not about increasing spending for the sake of increasing it, but about responding to real threats,” Spain’s Economy and Trade Ministry said in a statement.

“We’re doing our part to develop the necessary capabilities and contribute to the collective defence of our allies.”

Spain has more than doubled nominal defence spending from 0.98 percent of gross domestic product in 2017 to 2 percent this year, equivalent to about 32.7bn euros ($38bn).

Defence Minister Margarita Robles said allies weren’t discussing the 5 percent target for 2035 in Wednesday’s meeting because they were prioritising the present situation in Ukraine, but wouldn’t completely rule out a shift in Spain’s position.

Targeted tariffs by the US against individual EU member states are rare, but there are precedents, said Ignacio Garcia Bercero, a senior fellow at the Brussels-based economic think tank Bruegel.

In 1999, the US hit the EU with 100 percent punitive tariffs on products such as chocolate, pork, onions and truffles in retaliation for an EU import ban on hormone-treated beef. But those tariffs excluded Britain, which at the time was still a member of the trade bloc.

The US could impose anti-dumping penalties on European products that are mostly produced in Spain, said Juan Carlos Martinez Lazaro, professor at Madrid’s IE business school.

In 2018, Washington imposed a combination of duties of more than 30 percent on Spanish black table olives at the request of Californian olive growers. Spain’s share of the US market plummeted from 49 percent in 2017 to 19 percent in 2024.

Kenyans are wont to refer to Raila Odinga, the long-reigning 80-year-old opposition leader who died on Wednesday, as the “Enigma of Kenyan politics,” a reference to the title of a 2006 biography of him penned by the Nigerian author, Babafemi Badejo. His unequalled ability to survive, even thrive, at the top of the country’s political landscape for decades confounded his rivals and inflicted headaches on the regimes he plagued. But I think he would be best remembered as more mirror than mystery: the personification of Kenya’s tragedy.

The son of Kenya’s first vice president, he carved out a path as a crusader for freedom and better governance that led him from the country’s prisons and torture chambers to some of the highest political offices in the land. But at the end of his life, the compromises he had made to get there, the handshakes that peppered his career, had taken their toll, with a new generation shunning him, considering him part of the problem.

Throughout his long career, he was inseparable from the fight for a better Kenya. From the struggle for the restoration of multiparty democracy in the 1990s to the 25-year battle for a new constitution, he was never far from the limelight. Few could match his ability to mobilise Kenyans or the sway he held over his supporters. Despite believing Kenya needed to ditch its presidential system for a parliamentary one, a position he argued vociferously during the constitutional conference in 2003, he ran for president in every election since 1997 with the exception of the 2002 one, when his proclamation of “Kibaki Tosha” was sufficient to propel Mwai Kibaki to the office.

He was a man Kenya seemed content to celebrate but determined to frustrate. He was arguably robbed of the presidency on at least two, perhaps three, of those attempts, in 2007, 2013 and 2017. His refusal to meekly accept the injustice led to his opponents, and even The New York Times, branding him “a perennial loser”. His resort to the street as an avenue to protest not just the electoral controversies, but terrible state policies, also led to accusations of being a dangerous instigator of political violence, though in truth, the violence associated with Kenyan political demonstrations almost always comes from the state.

However, it is also important to recall that for all his legendary contributions and deeply held beliefs, he was prone to startling bouts of hypocrisy. It is a potent illustration of how power in Kenya corrupts even its greatest reformers. In 2000, after his handshake with the dictatorship of Daniel arap Moi, which would eventually see him appointed to his cabinet, he called for his erstwhile comrades in the opposition to be charged with treason for holding unauthorised antigovernment rallies. In 2006 he boasted that, as part of the Rainbow Coalition that had ended Moi’s KANU party’s grip on power, he had blocked action by the Kibaki administration to hold the dictator accountable for some of the looting that had happened during his 24 years in power. In early 2008, the standoff between him and Kibaki over the bungled December 2007 presidential election would cost 1,300 Kenyans their lives and see hundreds of thousands displaced. Yet a few months later, following yet another handshake resulting in Raila becoming only the second person in Kenya’s history to be appointed prime minister, his family and close associates were implicated in a maize subsidy scam that left a third of the country starving.

For his reputation, the straw that broke the camel’s back was his infamous 2018 handshake with President Uhuru Kenyatta, which again came after the state’s violent repression following the historic annulment of the 2017 presidential election. It was widely seen as a betrayal of his supporters, more than 70 of whom had been murdered by security forces while protesting the hasty repeat election, which Raila boycotted, and its aftermath. Following that, though he still had enough in the tank for a final run at the presidency, he was largely a spent force. His challenge to the William Ruto regime in the latter part of 2022 and into 2023 was a pale shadow of the protests he had commanded in previous years and was eclipsed by the Gen Z uprising a year later.

Raila’s life epitomised both the promise and disappointment of Kenya, which was born in struggle, nurtured in hope and ruined by betrayal. The true tragedy, however, lies not in his compromises, but in a system that made, and continues to make, integrity nearly impossible. Despite his tremendous achievements which made him stand out among his contemporaries, not just in Kenya but across the continent and the globe, his trajectory sadly traced a path that too many of Kenya’s – and Africa’s – most promising politicians have walked. His death is a big blow to the country, and he will undoubtedly be remembered fondly by many. But perhaps it should also be with a tinge of sadness and anger for what could have been but for Kenya itself.