Yesterday in the Chilean capital city of Santiago, Presidenta Michelle Bachelet met with Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Alejandro Gonzalez to talk trade. 
The Common Market of the South, commonly known as the MERCOSUR, is setting up it's own Parliament today in Brasilia, Brazil. The body will begin working in March of 2007 from its base in the Uruguayan capital city of Montevideo.
Yesterday was Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's funeral. Those who attended the funeral, including the widow of the man who ruled the Southern Cone nation for 17 years thanks to a coup he orchestrated, were somber and tearful, until the current Chilean Minister of Defense appeared. Vivianne Blanlot, who was sent to the funeral as the only official representative of the government of Chile under Presidenta Michelle Bachelet, was booed and told to get out of the area by mourners. Blanot remained and did not react.
Coming by any means at their disposal including by foot and by bike, hundreds of thousands are at the Basílica de Guadalupe in Mexico City to celebrate the Virgin of Guadalupe. Today markes the 475th anniversary of the alleged apparition of the Marian image to Juan Diego in 1531. The legend claims that the image apppeared to the Indigenous man in his shawl. The shawl is now in the basilica. Last night, as is traditional , Las Mañanitas was sung.
Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator who overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in 1973 and ruled with impunity for 17 years Pinochet has passed. Chileans I spoke to, both in the United States and inside Chile, first expressed disbelief, because of the countless hospitalizations false alarms, then happiness. Yes, I know it's not nice to celebrate the dead, but Pinochet, who has been linked to thousands of deaths and disappearances, and the immunity he created for himself within Chile has been a painful sore on the Southern Cone nation.