Washington  - Latin America will follow the rest of the world into recession this year, despite governments' best efforts to insulate the region from the worst effects of a devastating global financial crisis, the International Monetary Fund said Wednesday.

South America and Mexico will contract 1.6 per cent in 2009 before recovering slightly to 1.6-per-cent growth next year. The slowdown follows a growth rate of 4.2 per cent in
2008, according to the IMF's updated World Economic Outlook.

Santiago  - The ongoing world economic crisis could cause another 3 million people to lose their jobs in Latin America's urban areas alone, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) said Friday.

It could also add another 10 to 15 million people to the poverty rolls, which already include 190 million people across Latin America.

The problem is projected to persist until late 2010, an ECLAC official, Jurgen Weller, told German Press Agency dpa.

London  - Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner praised Thursday what she perceived as Latin American successes in the Group of 20 (G20) summit in London.

She highlighted the elimination of a graph from the summit's final document that had favoured the flexibility of labour laws.

In comments to reporters at the end of the summit, Fernandez de Kirchner said she asked that the paragraph be scrapped based on Argentina's "disastrous" experience with such practices.

Vina del Mar, Chile  - US Vice President Joe Biden, in Chile to discuss world economic issues as well as relations within the Americas, Friday proposed that Latin America and the United States "work together, as partners," and move "toward a new day" in their relations.

Biden arrived in Chile Friday, where he was to meet with President Michele Bachelet ahead of a so-called Progressive Leaders' Summit in the seaside resort of Vina del Mar intended to prepare for next week's G20 summit in London on the global financial crisis.

Washington - US Defence Secretary Robert Gates accused Iran on Tuesday of "meddling" in Latin America and said it was a greater concern than Russia's naval visit to Venezuela last year.

"I'm concerned about the level of frankly subversive activity that the Iranians are carrying on in a number of places in Latin America, particularly South America and Central America," Gates told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The Iranians have opened "a lot of" offices that serve as fronts to "interfere in what is going on in some of these countries," Gates said.

Mexico City  - The year 2008 showed terrible violence from Latin American drug gangs, with over 5,500 dead in Mexico alone as drug traffickers fought each other for control and challenged the power of governments as far south as Argentina.

This was the year that the United States approved the Merida Initiative to assist Mexico and Central America, mainly, in the fight against drug gangs. The US supplied equipment and logistics worth 465 million dollars.

And it was also the year that Bolivia expelled from its territory the staff of the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), accusing them of an alleged conspiracy against the Bolivian government.