Authorities in Mexico have reportedly arrested a former public official accused of embezzling more than US$1 million from the country’s corruption-riddled state-owned oil company.

As the coronavirus is keeping the world locked down, some governments are using the pandemic as an excuse to crack down on press freedom and access to information. 

With Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro claiming that COVID-19 is just a “little flu” and refusing to impose stronger measures to fight the pandemic, some criminal gangs have started imposing their own “coronavirus curfew” in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas.

Hundreds of prisoners have escaped from four open prisons in south-east Brazil after they were told they will no longer be able to leave the facility and nobody can visit them due to the coronavirus outbreak, the Secretariat of Public Security of Sao Paulo announced on Tuesday.

A Brazilian lawmaker proposed on Tuesday a bill suggesting that politicians convicted of corruption should be punished with amputation of both hands,Reuters reported.

Experts have warned that Brazil’s decision to remove checks on timber exports will drastically exacerbate illegal deforestation in the Amazon.

A Brazilian court has sent a former shipbuilding firm consultant to jail for 19 years after judges found him guilty of bribing officials of the state-controlled oil company Petrobras in order to obtain construction contracts. 

Brazil’s State Prosecution Office has filed a criminal complaint against Glenn Greenwald, journalist and co-founder of the Intercept on Tuesday, accusing him of having illegally obtained a series of online chats between prosecutors and the judge who was overseeing Brazil’s biggest corruption case, Operation Car Wash.  

When officers entered on Sunday morning one of the prison blocks in Pedro Juan Caballero, Paraguay, they found it completely empty apart from one inmate trying to disappear through a tunnel that was dug from one of the cells to the outside of the prison walls.

Brazil's President signed on Wednesday a new anti-crime bill which introduces harsher punishments for corruption, gang violence and organized crime.

Brazilian investigators raided on Wednesday a number of properties connected to President Jair Bolsonaro’s son Flávio, a senator, who is suspected of having overseen a corruption racket during his tenure as a Rio congressman, according to local reports. 

A Peruvian judge has ordered 14 lawyers to be detained as an investigation is conducted involving alleged favoritism in the awarding of public-works contracts with a value of at least US$250m to Brazilian construction company Odebrecht, according to Al Jazeera.

Activists are outraged with Friday’s murder of an indigenous “Amazon Guardian” allegedly by illegal loggers he fought against.

Brazilian investigators started looking into the role of the leader of the Social Liberal Party, or PSL, in alleged campaign finance fraud, Reuters reported on Tuesday.

The Attorney General’s Office (PGR) of the Dominican Republicconfirmed Thursday that the Brazilian construction giantOdebrecht S.A. did not pay a US$32 million installment of a corruption fine, thus creating a possibility for the lawsuit to be reopened.

Organized crime groups have over the past decade killed more than 300 people who tried to prevent the deforestation of the Amazon, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported on Tuesday.

Brazilian construction conglomerateOdebrecht SA agreed to pay US$50 million to NGO and charities as part of a settlement to resolve allegations that its subsidiary bribed public officials in two projects financed by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the IDB Group, which is the leading source of development finance for Latin America and the Caribbean, said in astatement on Wednesday.

Organized crime is to be blamed for the Amazon deforestation and that’s a transnational problem, Brazilian Attorney General said on Monday at the start of a two-day meeting with Eurojust.

A collaboration between law enforcement from the United States and Brazil resulted in the arrests of alleged human smugglers who ran a significant international trafficking operation, stated the United States Department of Justice in a press release Tuesday.

 Brazilian authorities have arrested more than 115 suspected members of various criminal gangs, as well as government officials allegedly linked to organized crime and corruption, policeannounced Thursday.