Former Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos (YLB) Executive Manager Juan Carlos Montenegro Bravo was found dead Wednesday. He left a letter explaining that he would make a painful decision because he could not stand to be “humiliated by a rigged justice.”

Portugal’s oil company Galp Energia shares skyrocketed on Monday after the company announced that the first phase of its exploration in the Mopane field in offshore Namibia could contain some 10 billion barrels of oil.

Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa Friday issued a decree establishing yet another state of emergency due to a “serious internal commotion and public calamity” in the violence-torn South American country which is going through an energy crisis in addition to drug-trafficking gang crimes. Power cuts last up to about eight hours a day amid tight “rationing of electricity.”

The Búzios Field in the Santos Basin, the largest ultra-deepwater facility of that kind worldwide, produced 1 billion barrels of oil in March, the state-owned company Petrobras announced this week, Agencia Brasil reported. Petrobras operates the field in a consortium with Pré-Sal Petróleo (PPSA) and the Chinese companies CNOOC and CNODC.

Foreign Ministers Mauro Vieira of Brazil and Diana Mondino of Argentina met in Brasilia on Monday for talks aimed at bringing South America’s two largest countries closer together, despite the opposing views of presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Javier Milei, especially on each other.