Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

The Trump administration has again tightened rules on issuing visas, but this time it's

gone after the kind given to highly skilled workers. It's not clear just how much that

will hobble industries such as tech, but it seems certain to delight President Trump's

base. Southern France is Europe's biggest tourist

draw, or it usually is. This year things are rather different. Pretty much the only visitors

are French. The Riviera feels a little like it must have done in the 1950s. Great for

tourists, terrible for business.

We've stopped though. With more than 2 million infections and 100,000 deaths, Latin America

has become a new center of the pandemic. We've seen a persistent and progressive increase

in cases in central and south America and it is of deep concern. A lot of attention has

been on Brazil, second only to America in numbers of infections and deaths. But the

coronavirus is also ripping through Brazil's neighbors in a region with high urbanization

and inequality, where social distancing is less easy to enforce. We have big cities like

Rio, São Paulo, Lima, where they are surrounded by belt of poverty and inequity. Lockdowns

in Latin America have been varied, but many share one trait. So far they haven't worked.

That's why it's so worrying that countries in the region are already starting to open

up. Richard Enzer is our Mexico City bureau chief.

We are now at a point where the daily number of cases being reported in Latin America is

worse than the outbreak in Europe was at the peak in April and the same with the American

outbreak in its peak. Latin America, what it's going through right now is worse than anything

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