BUENOS AIRES, Jan 11 (Reuters) – Argentina is facing a historic heat wave with temperatures soaring above 40 degrees Celsius (104°F), making the country for a while the hottest place on the planet, straining power grids and forcing residents to seeking sanctuary in the shade.

With temperatures up around 45°C (113°F) in parts of the South American nation, hundreds of thousands of people were left without electricity when power grids failed in and around populous capital city Buenos Aires.

“I came home and we were without electricity and the house was a furnace,” said Jose Casabal, 42, who whisked his children off to find somewhere to cool down. “So I took them off to their grandmother’s house to swim in the pool.”

The temperatures in Argentina, where dry hot weather driven by the La Nina weather pattern is already hitting crops, meant that for several hours it was the hottest place on earth, taking over from parts of Australia that cooled during its night.

“Even early morning it was very hot, around 31 degrees,” said Gustavo Barrios, 34, from Tigre as he sat in the shadow of some trees. “I do not have air conditioning at home and we were with just the fan blowing hot air. It’s unbearable.”

Local leaders warned residents to stay out of the sun in the hottest part of the day, wear light clothes and stay hydrated.

BARINAS, Venezuela/CARACAS, Jan 11 (Reuters) – A big win for Venezuela’s fractured opposition in a stronghold of the ruling socialist party on Sunday has given it fresh hope that electoral triumphs are within its grasp if it can both unite and mobilize voters.

Sergio Garrido, an opposition leader, scored a surprise win in a rerun of gubernatorial elections in Barinas state – the birthplace of Venezuela’s former socialist leader Hugo Chavez – with a strong 55% showing, defeating former vice president and foreign minister Jorge Arreaza, who managed a distant 41.2%.

The total number of registered voters in Barinas, a state with about a million inhabitants, surged to 311,595 on Sunday from 278,666 in November, an uptick attributed mainly to grass roots organization by the opposition.

The vote marks the first time Venezuela’s ruling Socialist party has yielded power to an opposition candidate in Barinas and is a sign of erosion in its support and rising abstention among its usual electorate, analysts said.

The opposition victory won praise from the United States, which has struggled to get much traction against President Nicolas Maduro since declaring his 2018 re-election to be fraudulent.

“Disqualifications of opposition candidates, media censorship, voter intimidation, & other authoritarian tactics could not subvert the will of Venezuelan voters,” tweeted Brian Nichols, the U.S. State Department’s assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs.

While the result leaves the ruling party in control of most governorships, it represents a symbolic victory for the opposition, which now controls four of the country’s 23 governorships, the same number as in 2017.

To have any chance of replicating Sunday’s victory more widely, the opposition must refocus itself on winning power at the ballot box after years of boycotts, unify its leadership across the country and prepare for an upcoming presidential election in 2024, seen as a way out of Venezuela’s long political impasse, analysts said.

“When a region is upset, it finds a way to channel that discomfort,” said Jhon Magdaleno, a political scientist and director of the local consultancy Polity. “Barinas was an example of rebuilding (by the opposition). Garrido ended up being backed by multiple political parties.”

DISILLUSIONMENT

Many Venezuelans have grown disillusioned with politics amid a long economic recession and hyperinflation in the country, a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). At least five million citizens have emigrated because of the crisis.

The opposition’s strategy has experienced ups and downs in recent years. It refused to participate in Venezuela’s 2018 presidential and 2020 parliamentary elections, arguing that a fair vote was impossible because of interference from Maduro.

But in 2021, after U.S. sanctions made no headway in securing Maduro’s ouster, opposition parties opted to roll the dice on the ballot box.

After a weak showing in November regional elections in which the ruling socialists won 19 of 23 states in play, the opposition said it would aim to rebuild, and its leader Juan Guaido on Monday said he would prioritize unity.

“We have to do what we have done well in the past: organize, mobilize and send clear messages to citizens,” Guaido told reporters in Caracas.

The Barinas vote was repeated under Supreme Court orders after it disqualified the initial opposition candidate following an order by the country’s comptroller general saying he was under investigation and was disqualified from running.

“This situation must serve to face the upcoming challenge: to reunify and strengthen the democratic alternative,” Guaido said, adding that the opposition would aim to reach a consensus on whether to seek a recall vote against Maduro.

Speaking after his swearing-in as governor, Garrido said Venezuelans had realized that if Barinas had managed to vote out the socialists: “Why would the rest of the people of Venezuela not be able to?”

The loss of the governorship is also a sign of internal tensions in the ruling party and raises questions about the performance of regional leaders linked to the party, analysts said.

“There are areas that the ‘Chavismo’ has been losing, and the party knows it, so since 2015 it has applied the strategy of staying in power as a minority,” said Félix Seijas, director of the Delphos consultancy.

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Jan 10 (Reuters) – The outgoing leader of Haiti’s senate on Monday said he would continue to lead sessions despite his term in office expiring, amid continued weakening of state institutions following last year’s assassination of President Jovenel Moise.

Joseph Lambert, who led the senate for one year, said Haiti must hold elections in 2022 to restore state institutions whose legitimacy is increasingly in question.

“We are living in a vacuum, with no constituted power, everything has become illegal,” Lambert told reporters. “In any case, 2022 will be an election year.”

Haiti was supposed to hold elections in 2020 to form a new legislature, but the vote was suspended due to disputes about the legitimacy of the elections council.

The Caribbean nation was left in a political power vacuum when Moise in July was assassinated in a nighttime raid on his home.

Prime Minister Ariel Henry took office following Moise’s murder on promises to promptly hold elections, but that vote was also suspended after an August earthquake and no new date has been set. The country remains without an elections council.

“Our priority is elections,” said a spokesman for the prime minister’s office when asked about Lambert’s comments. “We need to create the (elections council) first to have credible, fair and clean elections.”

WASHINGTON/BRUSSELS, Jan 10 (Reuters) – Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega was sworn into office for his fourth consecutive term on Monday, hours after the United States and European Union imposed sanctions on several figures in his government following elections Washington has called a “sham”.

Ortega won the Nov. 7 poll after most of his political foes were jailed, prompting widespread condemnation. U.S. President Joe Biden called the election a “pantomime”, accusing the former Marxist guerrilla and Cold War adversary of the United States of growing authoritarianism.

Most Western and regional nations shunned the inauguration ceremony on Monday evening, though leftist leaders such as Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and Cuba’s President Miguel Diaz Canel flew in to show their support.

China, which recently established ties with Nicaragua, also sent a delegation.

In a measured speech mostly focused on the history of the Sandinista rebellion against former U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza, Ortega vowed to keep “growing dreams and building roads” for the Nicaraguan people.

But Ortega’s opponents say the leader now presides over a government akin to that of Somoza, who was toppled by Ortega’s leftist Sandinista guerrillas in 1979.Laura Chinchilla, the former president of Costa Rica, called Ortega a “dictator” ahead of the ceremony.

“He shows his back to a people who did not vote for him, isolated from the world that does not recognize his election, under a legacy of horror and pain,” Chinchilla said on Twitter.

Ortega’s government, in power since 2007, did not respond to a request for comment.

Earlier in the day, the United States and the European Union imposed sanctions on Nicaraguan officials, including the defense minister.

The sanctions come after a series of other actions Washington has coordinated with allies in recent months to increase pressure on Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo.

Ortega’s first stint in power ended in 1990 and upon returning as president in 2007, he quickly set about gaining control of key state institutions, analysts say.

Election observers from the European Union and the Organization of American States were not allowed to scrutinize November’s poll, and journalists were barred from entering Nicaragua.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States and partners would “continue to call out the Ortega-Murillo regime’s ongoing abuses and will deploy diplomatic and economic tools to support the restoration of democracy and respect for human rights in Nicaragua”.

The U.S. Treasury Department said in a separate statement it imposed sanctions on six Nicaraguan officials over accusations of state acts of violence, disinformation and targeting of independent media.

The Treasury action targeted the minister of defense as well as officials of the military, the company overseeing telecommunications and postal services, and the state-owned Nicaraguan Mining Company.

The U.S. State Department is also taking steps to impose visa restrictions on 116 people it accused of undermining democracy in Nicaragua, Blinken said, barring some mayors, prosecutors and police, prison and military officials, among others, from entering the United States.

Responding to the moves against him, Ortega said in his speech the United States and the European Union did not have the moral authority to impose sanctions.

“They don’t respect international laws,” Ortega said.