When I was looking into it I found that wiki tells quite a bit of info. Also there are usually (I think .es included) English websites that can register for you. Some of the domains require you to be a resident of that country or have a business there, and some companies can register for you but with their name. Maybe I am paranoid but I don't feel safe having online identity of a company in the hands of some other company.

Based on your suggestion, here is a page with some really useful inter-wiki links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain

https://www.gandi.net/domain/buy/search/ is a serious French company selling some generic and european domains.

It gets high reviews from Slashdot also: http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/03/0353231

Gandi is by far my favorite registrar. I started moving my domains away from GoDaddy and to Gandi after CNET did interviews with several registrars to find out which were the most friendly to free speech: http://www.news.com/2100-1025_3-6155614.html

it depends on the countries that you want domains for.

For a decent price (certainly not the cheapest to my knowledge) I was able to register domains for Taiwan, mainland China, Japan, and the EU at godaddy.com (I was more interested in a domain registar I can somewhat trust than price).

To my knowledge right now (someone can correct me), most governments are too inefficient to able able to enforce special rules with certain domains (such as having a company setup in country x)

Go to eurodns.com They're with asiadns.com and will get you just about all the country specific domains.