Beat Strebel, Head of Swiss Re America’s Latin American unit

Staying profitable in the region entails long term commitment and intelligent manoeuvring around crises and market cycles

Latin America has long had the reputation as a difficult, frustrating operating environment for foreign businesses: in short, not an easy place to make a profit. Over the last few years, this impression has been further reinforced by the long stalled privatisation of the state reinsurance organisation in Brazil (Instituto de Resseguros do Brasil or IRB), the financial crisis in Argentina in 2002 and, much more recently, the nationalisation of Bolivia’s oil fields and the cancellation of foreign oil companies’ operating contracts in Venezuela and Ecuador.