BRASILIA (Reuters) – Some forty years ago, Dilma Rousseff was a guerrilla fighter working clandestinely to bring a version of Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s communist revolution to Brazil.

How times change. When Rousseff makes her first visit to Cuba next week as Brazil’s president, she’ll have capitalism on her mind, specifically the building of a container terminal at the port of Mariel aimed at future trade with the United States when Washington one day lifts its 50-year-old embargo on Cuba.

The $800 million modernization of the natural harbor west of Havana is being done by Brazilian engineering firm Odebrecht with funding from Brazil’s state development bank BNDES. It is part of a vast and growing constellation of Brazilian-run projects in Latin America, Africa and elsewhere that has paralleled Brazil’s recent rise as an economic power.

The business-focused nature of Rousseff’s Cuba trip highlights a shift in Brazil’s foreign policy since she took office early last year, with trade trumping all other considerations.

Her predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva valued commercial ties too but also sought more overtly political relations with controversial leaders such as Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – whom Rousseff has all but ignored since taking office.

Rousseff’s interest in business ventures abroad has been heightened by the global slowdown that brought the booming economy of Latin America’s largest nation to a halt in the third quarter of 2011, forcing her to focus on restoring growth.

Her first major trip abroad after taking office in January 2011 was to China, which dislodged the United States as Brazil’s top trading partner in 2009.

BRASILIA (Reuters) – At first blush, it might seem like the clock is ticking on Fernando Bezerra’s days as a Brazilian Cabinet minister.

Bezerra has been fighting sensational charges of nepotism and other ethics breaches in the Brazilian press. The most egregious accusation: that he used his power to direct a disproportionate share of funds for natural disaster prevention to his home state, instead of states where dozens of people have died in recent weeks from predictable seasonal floods.

Yet it appears that Bezerra, who has denied any wrongdoing, and most other ministers under a cloud of suspicion are going to keep their jobs. President Dilma Rousseff is backing off her plans for a major Cabinet reshuffle early this year, having decided that she needs their parties’ support to pass key economic legislation.

Rousseff fired six ministers because of corruption or ethics breaches in 2011, a stance that marked a departure from politics as usual and boosted her popularity ratings. Top aides have said since September that Rousseff was going to undertake an even broader purge shortly after her first anniversary in power on January 1, even if it meant losing the support of some junior partners in her 17-party coalition.

Brazil’s slowing economy, which flatlined in the third quarter and is still weak, appears to have changed her plans.

Rousseff will likely need all the support she can muster in order to keep inflation under control and pass legislation Brazil needs to modernize its mining and energy sector, and prepare to host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics.

“She has adopted a defensive position, because she is vulnerable,” said political scientist Bolivar Lamounier.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – British-born journalist and atheist intellectual Christopher Hitchens, who made the United States his home and backed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, died on Thursday at the age of 62.

Hitchens died in Houston of pneumonia, a complication of cancer of the esophagus, Vanity Fair magazine said.

“Christopher Hitchens – the incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant – died today at the age of 62,” Vanity Fair said.

A heavy smoker and drinker, Hitchens cut short a book tour for his memoir “Hitch 22″ last year to undergo chemotherapy after being diagnosed with cancer.

As a journalist, war correspondent and literary critic, Hitchens carved out a reputation for barbed repartee, scathing critiques of public figures and a fierce intelligence.

In his 2007 book “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” Hitchens took on major religions with his trenchant atheism. He argued that religion was the source of all tyranny and that many of the world’s evils have been done in the name of religion.

The son of a British naval officer, Hitchens studied at Oxford University and worked as literary critic for the New Statesman magazine in London before moving to New York to work as a journalist in 1981. He settled in Washington the following year, initially as correspondent for the left-wing magazine The Nation. He retained his British citizenship when he became an American citizen in 2007.

BOGOTA (Reuters) – Colombia’s ex-president Alvaro Uribe is fuming about the direction his successor is taking.

And he’s letting everyone know tweet-by-tweet.

Snide messages to his 470,000-plus Twitter followers are keeping Uribe in the limelight to the discomfort of current President Juan Manuel Santos, Uribe’s former defense minister.

The microblogging feud, ironically, is helping Santos break with his past in violence-ridden Colombia and forge his own path as leader of a booming mineral-rich economy.

Uribe has railed in particular at Santos’ flagship legislation that provides reparations to victims of Colombia’s armed conflict and the restoration of lands seized from peasants by right-wing paramilitaries and landowners.

The former president, whose U.S.-backed crackdown on leftists guerrillas is credited with making Colombia a safer place, sees the law as a concession to the guerrillas.

“Churchill: appeasement of terrorists makes them grow,” he tweeted on May 23 from London, paraphrasing Britain’s wartime Conservative leader.

BOGOTA, June 8 (Reuters) – Colombia became the first major Latin American nation to publicly endorse Mexican central bank chief Agustin Carstens for the International Monetary Fund’s top job on Wednesday, calling on others to do the same.

The Colombian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that a dozen other Latin American nations now back Carstens, who is seen as the underdog candidate in the race to succeed Dominique Strauss-Kahn to head the Washington-based IMF.

The Latin American group backing Carstens includes Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru, Panama, Uruguay, Mexico, Paraguay, Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua, the statement said.

“Colombia expresses support for the aspiration of Agustin Carstens and invites other governments of the Americas to join in backing this bid,” Foreign Minister Maria Angela Holguin said in the statement, which called on other Latin American nations to support the Mexican.

Holguin, who was in El Salvador at a meeting of the Organization of American States, said that emerging markets need more say in multilateral institutions.

The IMF job fell vacant after Strauss-Kahn was arrested on charges of sexually assaulting a hotel maid in New York.

Carstens has been on a global tour to drum up support for his bid to lead the IMF against French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde. He has not visited Colombia.

SANTIAGO/BOGOTA (Reuters) – The stock markets of Chile, Peru and Colombia merged on Monday to become Latin America’s second-largest exchange, but trading was limited and faces tax hurdles coupled with political uncertainty in Peru.

The Integrated Latin American Market (MILA) allows cross-border electronic trading of shares of 565 companies listed in the three bourses, which have a combined market capitalization of $691 billion.

That’s greater than the Mexican stock market’s $453.5 billion and second only to Brazil’s bourse with $1.5 trillion.

Brokers said that the first “symbolic’ trades were by Colombian brokers who bought shares in Chilean airline LAN, electricity generator Endesa Chile and Peruvian zinc producer Volcan.

Officials said that MILA would boost liquidity and initial public offerings, providing a source of cheaper capital to companies in the fast-growing countries.

“Investors will be able to diversity portfolios with access to a much larger market that will be absolutely transparent and straightforward,” said the head of the Bogota stock market, Juan Pablo Cordoba.

Traders said that a major hurdle is the lack of a common tax regime between the three countries, besides having different credit ratings and securitization rules.

BOGOTA, May 26 (Reuters) – Thousands of demonstrators blocked highways in Colombia’s main oil and coal producing provinces on Wednesday to protest legislation that would share royalty income more evenly with other regions of the country.

Protesters stopped traffic with barricades of branches and stones across roads. “Don’t take our royalties away,” said a sign carried by one demonstrator in Arauca province.

The protests have not immediately affected oil and coal production or exports, an energy spokesman, and coal and oil industry sources said.

Colombian police said there were protests in the main coal-producing provinces of Cesar and Guajira, and Meta, Casanare and Arauca, which produce the bulk of Colombia’s oil, as well as other districts.

Colombia’s Congress is debating a government proposal that would change the management of oil and mining royalties, a key fiscal reform in President Juan Manuel Santos drive to make the Andean country more attractive to foreign investors.

The proposal sent to Congress soon after Santos took office last August would centralize how royalties are managed to more evenly distribute around $3 billion a year nationwide and stamp out local corruption.

While Santos has a wide majority in Congress, the royalties bill has faced opposition from officials in petroleum-producing areas who say it dilutes their authority.

WASHINGTON, May 12 (Reuters) – Mexico has launched an ad campaign to counter its image as a dangerous country and the negative impact on its vital tourist industry of U.S. travel alerts warning Americans of violence south of the border.

“Those travel alerts that were headlining ‘If you want to stay alive, don’t travel to Mexico,’ we felt they were not only totally inaccurate but irresponsible,” Mexico Tourism Board CEO Rodolfo Lopez-Negrete told Reuters on Thursday.

Mexico is spending millions of dollars on print media and billboard ads in U.S. cities showing its ancient pyramids and sunny beaches to sway Americans from canceling their visits.

While thousands of American tourists have been scared away by the brutal drug war raging in parts of Mexico, Lopez-Negrete said the volume of people visiting Mexican resorts was back up to 2008 levels, although revenues were down because hotels were offering cheaper deals to draw wavering tourists.

“We were able to drive volume upwards at a cost of lower pricing but we are happy with that because as in any other business, volume comes back first, then you start escalating to the proper pricing,” he said. “That’s the strategy.”

Lopez-Negrete said the inaccurate travel alerts were hurting tourism, which accounts for 9 percent of Mexico’s economic output and is its third biggest source of foreign currency.

The drug violence is occurring far from the most popular resorts such as Cancun, Huatulco, Ixtapa, Puerto Vallarta and Los Cabos, the Mexican official said, urging U.S. authorities to be more specific in their alerts.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Latin America has taken big strides in building democracy and expanding free trade but the rich don’t pay enough in taxes and there is too much violence, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Wednesday.

With the exception of Cuba, Latin America is enjoying an unprecedented period of democratic rule and strong economic growth, Clinton and other U.S. officials told a conference of the Council of the Americas business forum.

But she said education and fiscal policies remain weak, and the gap between rich and poor remains huge in a region where tens of millions of people live in poverty.

“There are still too few people of means paying their fair share of taxes to their government in order to support services for those who will otherwise be mired in generational poverty,” Clinton said. “And there is too much violence.”

President Barack Obama in March announced a plan to work with countries fighting organized crime and drug cartels behind a brutal wave of violence in Mexico and Central America.

More than 38,000 people have been killed in drug violence in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon sent the army to fight the cartels on taking office in late 2006.

Clinton said the United States and Mexico are resolving a dispute over cargo trucks that cross their border to make it safer and end Mexican retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – AOL Inc has agreed to buy The Huffington Post, the influential and rapidly growing news, analysis and lifestyle website, for $315 million, the struggling U.S. Internet company announced on Monday.

The move will create a media group that will have a combined base of 117 million visitors a month in the United States, and reach 270 million people globally, AOL said in a statement.

The deal follows efforts by AOL’s chief executive Tim Armstrong to turn around the dial-up Internet access business by trying to turn it into a media and entertainment powerhouse, despite difficulties in attracting investors.

AOL suffered sharp declines in advertising sales and dial-up subscriptions in the fourth quarter of 2010, driving overall revenue down 26 percent.

Arianna Huffington, co-founder of The Huffington Post, said on her blog that she would lead a newly formed The Huffington Post Media Group, which will integrate all Huffington Post and AOL content, as its president and editor-in-chief.

“By combining HuffPost with AOL’s network of sites, thriving video initiative, local focus and international reach, we know we’ll be creating a company that can have an enormous impact, reaching a global audience on every imaginable platform,” she said.

Approximately $300 million will be paid in cash in the purchase, which has been approved by the boards of directors of both companies and shareholders of The Huffington Post, though it still needs government approvals, AOL said.