Pet care in Latin America

Man’s best amigo

Profits from pooches are more than petty cash

Sep 17th 2011 | MEXICO CITY

BLISS spreads across Lalo’s face as his glossy black locks are blown dry by cooing stylists. Dogs big and small are beautified for 100 pesos ($7.70) in the back of a perspex-walled van run by Fluffy Shower, a mobile pet-salon that visits Mexico City’s posh neighbourhoods to apply shampoo and ribbons to upper-class animals. The sharpest dogs sport green, white and red jerseys to mark Independence Day on September 16th. Next month pet boutiques will sell Halloween pumpkin outfits and dainty witches’ hats.

Pet care is booming in emerging markets, as the growing middle class stops buying dogs for security (or dinner) and starts doting on them. Nowhere has the fashion taken off as quickly as in Latin America. In the past five years spending on pet food and knick-knacks has risen by 44%, to $11 billion, according to Euromonitor, a market-research firm, which estimates that Chile has more pet dogs per person than any other country. Latin pets may be the world’s most fashionable. As Mexico’s rainy season tails off, dogs are stepping out of designer shoes to show off painted claws.

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Guatemala's presidential election

The return of the iron fist

A former general promises a crackdown on violence

Sep 10th 2011 | GUATEMALA CITY | from the print edition

FROM hoardings plastered all over Guatemala, the stern face of Otto Pérez Molina stares out beside the clenched-fist logo of his Patriot Party. General Pérez, as he was known until hanging up his rifle in 2000, was once the Guatemalan army’s intelligence director. After coming second in the 2007 presidential race, he is the front-runner in this year’s election on September 11th. Should he win, he will be the first military man to become president since army rule ended in 1986. He promises to crush crime with amano dura, or iron fist, by extending sentences, hiring 10,000 police, expanding video surveillance and lowering the age of criminal responsibility.

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Guatemalan opinion polls

The Sandra Torres question

Sep 10th 2011, 10:41 by T.W. | GUATEMALA CITY

GUATEMALA goes to the polls on Sunday to elect a new president. The favourite is Otto Pérez Molina, a retired general, whom we look at in detail in this week’s print edition. Absent from the ballot is Sandra Torres, the former first lady, who divorced Álvaro Colom, the president, in April in order to get around a constitutional ban on relatives of the president running to succeed him. The Constitutional Court threw out her candidacylast month, leaving the ruling party without a candidate.

Ms Torres had been Mr Pérez’s closest rival, according to most surveys. And yet oddly, her disqualification appears to have damaged him in the polls. According to one tracking poll published in Siglo 21, a newspaper, back in July Mr Pérez was on 53%, with Ms Torres on 16%. The same newspaper reported a couple of days ago that, with Ms Torres out of the race, Mr Pérez’s share had fallen eight points, to 45%.

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Mexico's economy

Making the desert bloom

The Mexican economy has recovered somewhat from a scorching recession imported from America, but is still hobbled by domestic monopolies and cartels

Aug 27th 2011 | SALTILLO

HOT and high in the Sierra Madre, the city of Saltillo is a long way from Wall Street. Stuffed goats keep an eye on customers in the high-street vaquera, or cowboy outfitter, where workers from the local car factories blow their pesos on snakeskin boots and $100 Stetsons. Pinstriped suits and silk ties are outnumbered by checked shirts and silver belt-buckles; pickups are prized over Porsches.

The financial crisis of 2008 began on the trading floors of Manhattan, but the biggest tremors were felt in the desert south of the Rio Grande. Mexico suffered the steepest recession of any country in the Americas, bar a couple of Caribbean tiddlers. Its economy shrank by 6.1% in 2009 (see chart 1). Between the third quarter of 2008 and the second quarter of 2009, 700,000 jobs were lost, 260,000 of them in manufacturing. The slump was deepest in the prosperous north: worst hit was the border state of Coahuila. Saltillo, its capital, had grown rich exporting to America. The state’s output fell by 12.3% in 2009 as orders dried up.

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Also read a good accompanying leader (not by me) here

Nicaragua's presidential election

Ortega goes capitalist

Looking for alternatives to Venezuela

Aug 27th 2011 | MANAGUA

Daniel offers fat margins

FOR more than a year, giant billboards around Managua have been urging voters to re-elect Daniel Ortega, who is poised to win a third, unconstitutional presidential term in November. The posters portray the former guerrilla, who helped to overthrow the Somoza dictatorship in 1979 and still leads the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), as a socialist. Yet in a smart hotel in the capital, Mr Ortega’s ministers were busy this month wooing the fat cats of the capitalist world. Incentives to invest in the socialist republic included lengthy exemptions from taxes.

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Mexican motorbikes

Buzzing into Brazil

The bike that conquered Mexico

Aug 20th 2011 | MEXICO CITY

STROLL around any Mexican city for a while and you will notice a background hum like a swarm of angry bees. The ubiquitous buzz is the sound of the Italika motorbike, a jazzily coloured, modestly priced machine that has grabbed two-thirds of Mexico’s bike market since its launch six years ago. More than 1m have been sold.

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Mexico's presidential race

A flash in the PAN

The ruling party’s best hope

Aug 20th 2011 | MEXICO CITY

TWO of Latin America’s three biggest economies, Brazil and Argentina, are headed by women (see article and article). Might Mexico make it a clean feminist sweep next year? The ruling National Action Party (PAN) has been struggling to find a popular candidate for the presidential election in 2012 (the constitution bars the president, Felipe Calderón, from seeking a second term). The opposition has mocked the PAN’s hopefuls as the “seven dwarves”. The American ambassador privately described them as “grey”. (He was withdrawn soon after the offending cable was leaked.) But polls suggest that Josefina Vázquez Mota, the PAN’s leader in the Chamber of Deputies, is emerging as a possible technicolour candidate.

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