The Commodities Boom Is Over for Latin America

A pall was cast over the summit of Mercosur nations in Uruguay this week when Iván Heyn, Argentina’s Undersecretary for Foreign Trade, was found dead, hanged with a belt in his Montevideo hotel room. Heyn, only 34, was a rising star and close friend of the family of Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who was just sworn in Dec. 10 after her landslide re-election victory. Visibly upset, Fernández, who is taking over as chair of the South American trade alliance, could have been speaking in a personal as well as macroeconomic context when she told her fellow heads of state at the end of the summit on Dec. 21, “We have to protect each other.”