We Need Walter Mercado’s Optimism
The Puerto Rican astrologer’s affirmations brought the Latinx community together and made me, an awkward teenager, feel less alone.
I was transported back to my childhood in Florida when news of the death of Walter Mercado, a beloved Puerto Rican astrologer, swept across the internet on Sunday. Suddenly I could hear my father’s radio alarm clock cutting into the morning silence and the walls of our bedrooms at full volume, jolting the household awake at what felt like an ungodly hour.
I saw myself moving through my morning rituals — brushing my teeth, getting dressed for school, eating breakfast — to the soundtrack of a morning talk show that consisted mostly of two men arguing about Cuban politics, with Mr. Mercado’s horoscope predictions sprinkled between segments.
I’d wait for him to make his way through the zodiac to my sign, Cancer. “Your friends will multiply today, and Mars will ignite your house of passion,” he’d say. I’d pile into my mom’s car with gusto, ready to conquer the world. If you’re Latinx and grew up between the 1970s and ’90s, Mr. Mercado was most likely a fixture in your home, too.
Surely there have been other Latin American astrologers, but none as revered or fabulous. He defied categorization. “He was our Oprah, Mr. Rogers, Liberace and spiritual adviser all rolled into one,” said Cristina Costantini, a co-director of a forthcoming documentary about Mr. Mercado. His was a gentle, decidedly positive brand of astrology. In those days we had only ourselves or the universe to blame for our poor judgment and broken electronics — not Mercury retrograde.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/05/opin ... 3053091106
SOUTH AMERICA
Latin Americans Are Furious
People are no longer remaining silent in the region, and continued government attempts at repression will only make matters worse.
There is a rage brewing in Latin America.
Aware that they don’t live in real democracies, the people of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia are taking to the streets. In Chile, Ecuador and Haiti, citizens are angry about social inequality and the lack of economic opportunity.
Meanwhile, Argentina’s government is turning back to the Peronist-Kirchnerian left, and Mexico’s drug-related violence continues to spiral out of control. Other countries in the region aren’t faring much better.
Within this chaotic atmosphere in Latin America, there are three major aspects at play: Inequality, protests and social media, and authoritarian leanings.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/08/opin ... ogin-email
People are no longer remaining silent in the region, and continued government attempts at repression will only make matters worse.
There is a rage brewing in Latin America.
Aware that they don’t live in real democracies, the people of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia are taking to the streets. In Chile, Ecuador and Haiti, citizens are angry about social inequality and the lack of economic opportunity.
Meanwhile, Argentina’s government is turning back to the Peronist-Kirchnerian left, and Mexico’s drug-related violence continues to spiral out of control. Other countries in the region aren’t faring much better.
Within this chaotic atmosphere in Latin America, there are three major aspects at play: Inequality, protests and social media, and authoritarian leanings.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/08/opin ... ogin-email
The Coup Temptation in Latin America
Overlooking the tragic lessons of the region’s dictatorial past, politicians are turning again to the armed forces to resolve crises.
Excerpt:
Establishing a civilian rule is a long and difficult process. Each time military officials step in to resolve a crisis, no matter how benign or even democratic their motives may appear to be, the process of institutionalizing civilian control is undermined. Only recently has Latin America began to break out of this vicious cycle. After 1980, the number of coups declined significantly. At least partly as a result, the last three decades have been the most democratic in Latin American history. The renewed willingness to accept and even seek out military intervention is deeply troubling.
The political scientist Alfred Stepan, an expert on Latin American militaries, wrote during the 1980s that the key to preserving the region’s new democracies lay in ensuring that no civilian group knocked on the barracks door. In other words, politicians from across the political spectrum must agree that under no circumstance will they seek out or support a coup. Without civilian allies, militaries rarely intervene. These lessons are especially important today as Latin America enters a period of heightened polarization and unrest.
The lessons extend to the international community. If foreign governments choose sides in the region’s conflicts, tolerating coups that favor their ideological allies rather than consistently defending democracy, it will encourage a return to the violence and instability that Latin Americans struggled so hard to end.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/opin ... 0920191126
Overlooking the tragic lessons of the region’s dictatorial past, politicians are turning again to the armed forces to resolve crises.
Excerpt:
Establishing a civilian rule is a long and difficult process. Each time military officials step in to resolve a crisis, no matter how benign or even democratic their motives may appear to be, the process of institutionalizing civilian control is undermined. Only recently has Latin America began to break out of this vicious cycle. After 1980, the number of coups declined significantly. At least partly as a result, the last three decades have been the most democratic in Latin American history. The renewed willingness to accept and even seek out military intervention is deeply troubling.
The political scientist Alfred Stepan, an expert on Latin American militaries, wrote during the 1980s that the key to preserving the region’s new democracies lay in ensuring that no civilian group knocked on the barracks door. In other words, politicians from across the political spectrum must agree that under no circumstance will they seek out or support a coup. Without civilian allies, militaries rarely intervene. These lessons are especially important today as Latin America enters a period of heightened polarization and unrest.
The lessons extend to the international community. If foreign governments choose sides in the region’s conflicts, tolerating coups that favor their ideological allies rather than consistently defending democracy, it will encourage a return to the violence and instability that Latin Americans struggled so hard to end.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/opin ... 0920191126
Conflicts Over Indigenous Land Grow More Violent in Central America
Faced with government inaction, some activists try to reclaim ancestral lands on their own. Often, they pay a high price.
TÉRRABA, Costa Rica — For decades, members of the Brörán tribe in southern Costa Rica longed to take back what they considered ancestral land from the farmers who also claimed it. One weekend last month, they acted, entering several farms, hanging up signs and vowing to stay put.
It was not long, they said, before group of agitated farmers came out on horseback, motorbikes and in pickups. Armed with machetes, sticks and firearms, the farmers huddled at the top of the mountain for hours, hurling threats, as Indigenous leaders implored the police to come help.
Elides Rivera, a local Indigenous land rights leader, still has the voice recording of the call for help she made to a local police commander: “I beg you with all, all my heart.”
But soon after, a brawl broke out, and it ended in the death of her nephew, Jerhy Rivera, 45, who was an Indigenous activist in the community.
Mr. Rivera’s death came just a few weeks after another Indigenous man in a nearby town was shot in a dispute over land, and a year after a land rights leader in that town was gunned down in his home.
Over the past five years, conflicts over land and natural resources in the region have led to about 200 confrontations and the deaths of 60 Indigenous people, according to the Business & Human Rights Resource Center, a London organization.
Four Indigenous people were killed in an attack in Nicaragua in January, and at least a dozen more died in Colombia in just the first two weeks of this year, according to the United Nations.
The deaths in Latin America are the result of increasingly violent clashes between people who have lived on the land for thousands of years and settlers who have arrived much more recently.
From Mexico to Brazil, Indigenous tribes moving against stop ranchers, loggers, miners and other business interests — sometimes aggressively — are hoping to reclaim their community land.
Sometimes, they are dying for it.
And when they do, the newcomers to Indigenous lands rarely seem to pay a legal price.
“I told you these criminals would keep coming,” Ms. Rivera said in a follow-up message to the police commander. “Thank you. Today, you let them kill Jerhy.”
Mr. Rivera, a father of four, sold chickens and worked to promote awareness about his tribe. In 2013, he was beaten in a dispute with loggers.
Mr. Rivera was a member of one of the nearly 800 Indigenous tribes in Latin America. Many of them were never colonized after the arrival of the Spanish and the Portuguese to the continent, and maintained their languages and traditions.
Although some groups enjoy protections similar to that afforded Native American reservations in the United States, enforcement can be lax.
That can be particularly true in areas that are remote, or are rich in natural resources.
In Nicaragua, home of the Miskitu, the government has spoken against illegal land grabs by settlers, but has done nothing to stop it, said Laura Hobson Herlihy, a lecturer at the University of Kansas.
Four Indigenous people were killed in the country in January.
“This is a humanitarian crisis,” said Lottie Cunningham, a Miskitu human rights lawyer on Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast.
With no legal avenue to turn to, Indigenous communities sometimes team up to clear land of newcomers, a process they call “sanamiento.” In Costa Rica, it’s called “recovery.”
“They had shirts that said, ‘sanamiento’ across the back,” Ms. Herlihy said. “I used to tell them, ‘Dude, that’s a target on your back. That is just so dangerous. It gets so many people killed.”
In many cases, settlers occupying Indigenous land did not know that their land purchases were against the law. Many invested their life savings into the land deals and are unwilling to go without a fight.
Víctor Hugo Zúñiga, a 38-year-old father of three, is one of the thousands of non-Indigenous farmers living on disputed land in Costa Rica. He says the government gave his father land in the town of Olán back in 1972, five years before Indigenous reservations were established.
“We didn’t take it away from any Indigenous person,” he said. “Now after 45 years of living here, how are we usurpers?”
Most of the farmers in the disputes have nowhere else to go, he said.
Costa Rica, like Nicaragua, began offering special protections to Indigenous people and their lands in the 1970s.
Marcos Guevara, a professor of anthropology at the University of Costa Rica who studied Indigenous issues for more than 30 years, says the eruption of violence has been simmering for decades because of poorly enforced government policy.
When the government gave Indigenous groups swaths of land in 1977, farmers were supposed to be compensated, but few were.
“These are problems that the state itself created,” Mr. Guevara said.
Minor Mora, 61, a local farmer and member of the Buenos Aires Farmers Commission, said there are around thousands of non-Indigenous people living on Indigenous land in Costa Rica. The government, should help compensate or relocate them, he said.
“They all just kick the ball forward,” Mr. Mora said.
The Brazilian government’s role in the disputes has been even more contentious. Land invasions are on the rise across Brazil, where President Jair Bolsonaro favors ending protections for Indigenous lands. He says they impede economic growth.
In Mexico, the vast majority of the 14 environmental defenders killed in 2018 were members of Indigenous groups.
Worldwide, Central and South American Indigenous groups are the most under attack, according to the Business & Human Rights Resource Center, which maintains a database of attacks and killings of human rights activists.
With 54 violent incidents against Indigenous groups fighting businesses last year, Central America led the world last year in the number of such confrontations, according to Adam Barnett, the group’s spokesman. Honduras, he said, had the most.
The issue exploded internationally in 2016, when a Lenca woman fighting a dam in Honduras, Berta Caceres, was murdered. Seven men were convicted in that case.
The killings have been all the more alarming in Costa Rica, which has escaped the rampant violence elsewhere in Central America.
Cindy Vargas, 35, a member of a group of Brörán women called Ruta de las Aves, said that Costa Rica was sold as a multiethnic and multicultural country, but that it did not extend much beyond folklore.
“They see Indigenous people as the ones who dress up, make traditional food and dance,” Ms. Vargas said. “Costa Rica is a country with a double standard. They only care about the folklore, but not about applying rights in Indigenous territories.”
One of the plots of land seized by the Indigenous the weekend Mr. Rivera died had belonged to her grandfather, she said.
After his death, one man turned himself in to the police and claimed he had shot the Indigenous leader in self-defense. After a brief detention, he was released.
In January, just after the New Year, Mark Rivas, a 33-year-old Miskitu youth leader, was found dead in his home in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua. Even before the police investigated the case, the local government-affiliated radio station had declared it a suicide, his father, Carlos Hendy Thomas, said.
“We speak for the land, for the forests, and to silence us, they kill us,” Mr. Hendy said. “That is the only way to shut us up.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/worl ... 3053090309
Faced with government inaction, some activists try to reclaim ancestral lands on their own. Often, they pay a high price.
TÉRRABA, Costa Rica — For decades, members of the Brörán tribe in southern Costa Rica longed to take back what they considered ancestral land from the farmers who also claimed it. One weekend last month, they acted, entering several farms, hanging up signs and vowing to stay put.
It was not long, they said, before group of agitated farmers came out on horseback, motorbikes and in pickups. Armed with machetes, sticks and firearms, the farmers huddled at the top of the mountain for hours, hurling threats, as Indigenous leaders implored the police to come help.
Elides Rivera, a local Indigenous land rights leader, still has the voice recording of the call for help she made to a local police commander: “I beg you with all, all my heart.”
But soon after, a brawl broke out, and it ended in the death of her nephew, Jerhy Rivera, 45, who was an Indigenous activist in the community.
Mr. Rivera’s death came just a few weeks after another Indigenous man in a nearby town was shot in a dispute over land, and a year after a land rights leader in that town was gunned down in his home.
Over the past five years, conflicts over land and natural resources in the region have led to about 200 confrontations and the deaths of 60 Indigenous people, according to the Business & Human Rights Resource Center, a London organization.
Four Indigenous people were killed in an attack in Nicaragua in January, and at least a dozen more died in Colombia in just the first two weeks of this year, according to the United Nations.
The deaths in Latin America are the result of increasingly violent clashes between people who have lived on the land for thousands of years and settlers who have arrived much more recently.
From Mexico to Brazil, Indigenous tribes moving against stop ranchers, loggers, miners and other business interests — sometimes aggressively — are hoping to reclaim their community land.
Sometimes, they are dying for it.
And when they do, the newcomers to Indigenous lands rarely seem to pay a legal price.
“I told you these criminals would keep coming,” Ms. Rivera said in a follow-up message to the police commander. “Thank you. Today, you let them kill Jerhy.”
Mr. Rivera, a father of four, sold chickens and worked to promote awareness about his tribe. In 2013, he was beaten in a dispute with loggers.
Mr. Rivera was a member of one of the nearly 800 Indigenous tribes in Latin America. Many of them were never colonized after the arrival of the Spanish and the Portuguese to the continent, and maintained their languages and traditions.
Although some groups enjoy protections similar to that afforded Native American reservations in the United States, enforcement can be lax.
That can be particularly true in areas that are remote, or are rich in natural resources.
In Nicaragua, home of the Miskitu, the government has spoken against illegal land grabs by settlers, but has done nothing to stop it, said Laura Hobson Herlihy, a lecturer at the University of Kansas.
Four Indigenous people were killed in the country in January.
“This is a humanitarian crisis,” said Lottie Cunningham, a Miskitu human rights lawyer on Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast.
With no legal avenue to turn to, Indigenous communities sometimes team up to clear land of newcomers, a process they call “sanamiento.” In Costa Rica, it’s called “recovery.”
“They had shirts that said, ‘sanamiento’ across the back,” Ms. Herlihy said. “I used to tell them, ‘Dude, that’s a target on your back. That is just so dangerous. It gets so many people killed.”
In many cases, settlers occupying Indigenous land did not know that their land purchases were against the law. Many invested their life savings into the land deals and are unwilling to go without a fight.
Víctor Hugo Zúñiga, a 38-year-old father of three, is one of the thousands of non-Indigenous farmers living on disputed land in Costa Rica. He says the government gave his father land in the town of Olán back in 1972, five years before Indigenous reservations were established.
“We didn’t take it away from any Indigenous person,” he said. “Now after 45 years of living here, how are we usurpers?”
Most of the farmers in the disputes have nowhere else to go, he said.
Costa Rica, like Nicaragua, began offering special protections to Indigenous people and their lands in the 1970s.
Marcos Guevara, a professor of anthropology at the University of Costa Rica who studied Indigenous issues for more than 30 years, says the eruption of violence has been simmering for decades because of poorly enforced government policy.
When the government gave Indigenous groups swaths of land in 1977, farmers were supposed to be compensated, but few were.
“These are problems that the state itself created,” Mr. Guevara said.
Minor Mora, 61, a local farmer and member of the Buenos Aires Farmers Commission, said there are around thousands of non-Indigenous people living on Indigenous land in Costa Rica. The government, should help compensate or relocate them, he said.
“They all just kick the ball forward,” Mr. Mora said.
The Brazilian government’s role in the disputes has been even more contentious. Land invasions are on the rise across Brazil, where President Jair Bolsonaro favors ending protections for Indigenous lands. He says they impede economic growth.
In Mexico, the vast majority of the 14 environmental defenders killed in 2018 were members of Indigenous groups.
Worldwide, Central and South American Indigenous groups are the most under attack, according to the Business & Human Rights Resource Center, which maintains a database of attacks and killings of human rights activists.
With 54 violent incidents against Indigenous groups fighting businesses last year, Central America led the world last year in the number of such confrontations, according to Adam Barnett, the group’s spokesman. Honduras, he said, had the most.
The issue exploded internationally in 2016, when a Lenca woman fighting a dam in Honduras, Berta Caceres, was murdered. Seven men were convicted in that case.
The killings have been all the more alarming in Costa Rica, which has escaped the rampant violence elsewhere in Central America.
Cindy Vargas, 35, a member of a group of Brörán women called Ruta de las Aves, said that Costa Rica was sold as a multiethnic and multicultural country, but that it did not extend much beyond folklore.
“They see Indigenous people as the ones who dress up, make traditional food and dance,” Ms. Vargas said. “Costa Rica is a country with a double standard. They only care about the folklore, but not about applying rights in Indigenous territories.”
One of the plots of land seized by the Indigenous the weekend Mr. Rivera died had belonged to her grandfather, she said.
After his death, one man turned himself in to the police and claimed he had shot the Indigenous leader in self-defense. After a brief detention, he was released.
In January, just after the New Year, Mark Rivas, a 33-year-old Miskitu youth leader, was found dead in his home in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua. Even before the police investigated the case, the local government-affiliated radio station had declared it a suicide, his father, Carlos Hendy Thomas, said.
“We speak for the land, for the forests, and to silence us, they kill us,” Mr. Hendy said. “That is the only way to shut us up.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/worl ... 3053090309
As Bolsonaro Keeps Amazon Vows, Brazil’s Indigenous Fear ‘Ethnocide’
President Jair Bolsonaro is moving aggressively to open up the Amazon rainforest to commercial development, posing an existential threat to the tribes living there.
URU EU WAU WAU TERRITORY, Brazil — The billboard at the entrance of a tiny Indigenous village in the Amazon has become a relic in less than a decade, boasting of something no longer true.
“Here, there is investment by the federal government,” proclaims the sign, erected in 2012, which is now shrouded by fallen palm tree fronds.
In fact, this tiny hamlet in Rondônia state, called Alto Jamari, home to some 10 families of the Uru Eu Wau Wau tribe, is barely surviving, just like scores of other struggling villages in the region that for decades have served as havens for Indigenous culture and bulwarks against deforestation in Brazil.
Federal aid is drying up at the same time that more outsiders are trespassing on their lands, eager to illegally exploit the forest’s resources, and as the coronavirus poses a deadly threat, having already reached a few remote villages.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/19/worl ... 778d3e6de3
President Jair Bolsonaro is moving aggressively to open up the Amazon rainforest to commercial development, posing an existential threat to the tribes living there.
URU EU WAU WAU TERRITORY, Brazil — The billboard at the entrance of a tiny Indigenous village in the Amazon has become a relic in less than a decade, boasting of something no longer true.
“Here, there is investment by the federal government,” proclaims the sign, erected in 2012, which is now shrouded by fallen palm tree fronds.
In fact, this tiny hamlet in Rondônia state, called Alto Jamari, home to some 10 families of the Uru Eu Wau Wau tribe, is barely surviving, just like scores of other struggling villages in the region that for decades have served as havens for Indigenous culture and bulwarks against deforestation in Brazil.
Federal aid is drying up at the same time that more outsiders are trespassing on their lands, eager to illegally exploit the forest’s resources, and as the coronavirus poses a deadly threat, having already reached a few remote villages.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/19/worl ... 778d3e6de3
‘Gracias China!!!’
While the U.S. leadership in Latin America is being called into question, Beijing is positioning itself to carry the mantle.
“Gracias China!!!,” Marcelo Ebrard, the foreign minister of Mexico, posted on Twitter on April 1, along with a photo of the plane that carried 100,000 masks, 50,000 test kits and five ventilators donated from China. Mexico may see as many as 700,000 cases of Covid-19, while the country has a mere 5,500 ventilators. Even though this will without a doubt have an impact on the United States, which shares a 2,000-mile border and robust trade with Mexico, it’s Beijing, not Washington, that is fast-tracking hundreds of ventilators to help the country meet its vulnerability.
In another era, Mr. Ebrard would have expressed gratitude to his neighbor to the north and highlighted the enduring partnership with the United States. But now China is stepping in to fill a void left by President Trump, who has alienated longtime partners and undermined the country’s standing in Latin America and the Caribbean.
This is not the first time that China has lent a helping hand to the region. Following the Great Recession of 2008, China, which financed a global stimulus representing 7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, buoyed Latin American economies by devouring commodities like oil, timber and metallic minerals.
China is now the second-largest trading partner in the region, and it has surpassed the United States to become the top trading partner of major economies, including Brazil, Chile, Peru and Uruguay. Since 2017, 19 nations in the region have signed on to the Chinese government’s Belt and Road Initiative, a multibillion-dollar network of investment and infrastructure projects. The influx of financing and development assistance has afforded access to critical financing for cash-strapped and heavily indebted governments, which have faced growing public demand for paved roads, modern public transport and improved services.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/21/opin ... 778d3e6de3
While the U.S. leadership in Latin America is being called into question, Beijing is positioning itself to carry the mantle.
“Gracias China!!!,” Marcelo Ebrard, the foreign minister of Mexico, posted on Twitter on April 1, along with a photo of the plane that carried 100,000 masks, 50,000 test kits and five ventilators donated from China. Mexico may see as many as 700,000 cases of Covid-19, while the country has a mere 5,500 ventilators. Even though this will without a doubt have an impact on the United States, which shares a 2,000-mile border and robust trade with Mexico, it’s Beijing, not Washington, that is fast-tracking hundreds of ventilators to help the country meet its vulnerability.
In another era, Mr. Ebrard would have expressed gratitude to his neighbor to the north and highlighted the enduring partnership with the United States. But now China is stepping in to fill a void left by President Trump, who has alienated longtime partners and undermined the country’s standing in Latin America and the Caribbean.
This is not the first time that China has lent a helping hand to the region. Following the Great Recession of 2008, China, which financed a global stimulus representing 7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, buoyed Latin American economies by devouring commodities like oil, timber and metallic minerals.
China is now the second-largest trading partner in the region, and it has surpassed the United States to become the top trading partner of major economies, including Brazil, Chile, Peru and Uruguay. Since 2017, 19 nations in the region have signed on to the Chinese government’s Belt and Road Initiative, a multibillion-dollar network of investment and infrastructure projects. The influx of financing and development assistance has afforded access to critical financing for cash-strapped and heavily indebted governments, which have faced growing public demand for paved roads, modern public transport and improved services.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/21/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Virus Gains Steam Across Latin America
Inequality, densely packed cities, legions of informal workers and weak health care systems have undermined efforts to fight the pandemic, as some governments have fumbled the response.
MEXICO CITY — By late March, the Mexican government calmly predicted that its coronavirus outbreak would peak in April.
A few weeks later, it changed its prediction to mid-May.
And then to late May. And then to June.
Now, with new infections surging and the government facing growing anger, even ridicule, over its constant guesswork, many Mexicans have drawn their own conclusion: No one really knows.
“Obviously, prediction is not a guarantee of precision,” Hugo Lopez Gatell, the federal health official in charge of the nation’s virus response, has acknowledged.
Mexico, like the rest of Latin America, has quickly become a focal point of the pandemic, a worrisome frontier for a virus that has claimed the lives of more than 460,000 people and infected more than nine million worldwide.
The coronavirus was always going to hit Latin America hard. Even before it arrived, experts warned that the region’s combustible blend of inequality, densely packed cities, legions of informal workers living day-to-day and health care systems starved of resources could undermine even the best attempts to curb the pandemic.
But by brushing off the dangers, fumbling the response, dismissing scientific or expert guidance, withholding data and simply denying the extent of the outbreak altogether, some governments have made matters even worse.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Inequality, densely packed cities, legions of informal workers and weak health care systems have undermined efforts to fight the pandemic, as some governments have fumbled the response.
MEXICO CITY — By late March, the Mexican government calmly predicted that its coronavirus outbreak would peak in April.
A few weeks later, it changed its prediction to mid-May.
And then to late May. And then to June.
Now, with new infections surging and the government facing growing anger, even ridicule, over its constant guesswork, many Mexicans have drawn their own conclusion: No one really knows.
“Obviously, prediction is not a guarantee of precision,” Hugo Lopez Gatell, the federal health official in charge of the nation’s virus response, has acknowledged.
Mexico, like the rest of Latin America, has quickly become a focal point of the pandemic, a worrisome frontier for a virus that has claimed the lives of more than 460,000 people and infected more than nine million worldwide.
The coronavirus was always going to hit Latin America hard. Even before it arrived, experts warned that the region’s combustible blend of inequality, densely packed cities, legions of informal workers living day-to-day and health care systems starved of resources could undermine even the best attempts to curb the pandemic.
But by brushing off the dangers, fumbling the response, dismissing scientific or expert guidance, withholding data and simply denying the extent of the outbreak altogether, some governments have made matters even worse.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/worl ... 778d3e6de3
The Coronavirus Unleashed Along the Amazon River
As the pandemic assails Brazil, the virus is taking an exceptionally high toll on the Amazon region.
THE VIRUS SWEPT THROUGH THE REGION like past plagues that have traveled the river with colonizers and corporations.
It spread with the dugout canoes carrying families from town to town, the fishing dinghies with rattling engines, the ferries moving goods for hundreds of miles, packed with passengers sleeping in hammocks, side by side, for days at a time.
The Amazon River is South America’s essential life source, a glittering superhighway that cuts through the continent. It is the central artery in a vast network of tributaries that sustains some 30 million people across eight countries, moving supplies, people and industry deep into forested regions often untouched by road.
But once again, in a painful echo of history, it is also bringing disease.
As the pandemic assails Brazil, overwhelming it with more than two million infections and more than 84,000 deaths — second only to the United States — the virus is taking an exceptionally high toll on the Amazon region and the people who have depended on its abundance for generations.
In Brazil, the six cities with the highest coronavirus exposure are all on the Amazon River, according to an expansive new study from Brazilian researchers that measured antibodies in the population.
The epidemic has spread so quickly and thoroughly along the river that in remote fishing and farming communities like Tefé, people have been as likely to get the virus as in New York City, home to one of the world’s worst outbreaks.
“It was all very fast,” said Isabel Delgado, 34, whose father, Felicindo, died of the virus shortly after falling ill in the small city of Coari. He had been born on the river, raised his family by it and built his life crafting furniture from the timber on its banks.
In the past four months, as the epidemic traveled from the biggest city in the Brazilian Amazon, Manaus, with its high-rises and factories, to tiny, seemingly isolated villages deep in the interior, the fragile health care system has buckled under the onslaught.
Cities and towns along the river have some of the highest deaths per capita in the country — often several times the national average. In Manaus, there were periods when every Covid ward was full and 100 people were dying a day, pushing the city to cut new burial grounds out of thick forest. Grave diggers lay rows of coffins in long trenches carved in the freshly turned earth.
Down the river, hammocks have become stretchers, carrying the sick from communities with no doctors to boat ambulances that careen through the water. In remote reaches of the river basin, medevac planes land in tiny airstrips sliced into the lush landscape only to find that their patients died while waiting for help.
The virus is exacting an especially high toll on Indigenous people, a parallel to the past. Since the 1500s, waves of explorers have traveled the river, seeking gold, land and converts — and later, rubber, a resource that helped fuel the Industrial Revolution, changing the world. But with them, these outsiders brought violence and diseases like smallpox and measles, killing millions and wiping out entire communities.
Multi media and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... 778d3e6de3
As the pandemic assails Brazil, the virus is taking an exceptionally high toll on the Amazon region.
THE VIRUS SWEPT THROUGH THE REGION like past plagues that have traveled the river with colonizers and corporations.
It spread with the dugout canoes carrying families from town to town, the fishing dinghies with rattling engines, the ferries moving goods for hundreds of miles, packed with passengers sleeping in hammocks, side by side, for days at a time.
The Amazon River is South America’s essential life source, a glittering superhighway that cuts through the continent. It is the central artery in a vast network of tributaries that sustains some 30 million people across eight countries, moving supplies, people and industry deep into forested regions often untouched by road.
But once again, in a painful echo of history, it is also bringing disease.
As the pandemic assails Brazil, overwhelming it with more than two million infections and more than 84,000 deaths — second only to the United States — the virus is taking an exceptionally high toll on the Amazon region and the people who have depended on its abundance for generations.
In Brazil, the six cities with the highest coronavirus exposure are all on the Amazon River, according to an expansive new study from Brazilian researchers that measured antibodies in the population.
The epidemic has spread so quickly and thoroughly along the river that in remote fishing and farming communities like Tefé, people have been as likely to get the virus as in New York City, home to one of the world’s worst outbreaks.
“It was all very fast,” said Isabel Delgado, 34, whose father, Felicindo, died of the virus shortly after falling ill in the small city of Coari. He had been born on the river, raised his family by it and built his life crafting furniture from the timber on its banks.
In the past four months, as the epidemic traveled from the biggest city in the Brazilian Amazon, Manaus, with its high-rises and factories, to tiny, seemingly isolated villages deep in the interior, the fragile health care system has buckled under the onslaught.
Cities and towns along the river have some of the highest deaths per capita in the country — often several times the national average. In Manaus, there were periods when every Covid ward was full and 100 people were dying a day, pushing the city to cut new burial grounds out of thick forest. Grave diggers lay rows of coffins in long trenches carved in the freshly turned earth.
Down the river, hammocks have become stretchers, carrying the sick from communities with no doctors to boat ambulances that careen through the water. In remote reaches of the river basin, medevac planes land in tiny airstrips sliced into the lush landscape only to find that their patients died while waiting for help.
The virus is exacting an especially high toll on Indigenous people, a parallel to the past. Since the 1500s, waves of explorers have traveled the river, seeking gold, land and converts — and later, rubber, a resource that helped fuel the Industrial Revolution, changing the world. But with them, these outsiders brought violence and diseases like smallpox and measles, killing millions and wiping out entire communities.
Multi media and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... 778d3e6de3
A Pre-Columbian Bestiary
Fantastic creatures of indigenous Latin America
When the news grows seemingly more tumultuous by the day, a temporary escape from this world can sound pretty tempting. Ilan Stavans did just that during a shamanic ceremony in Colombia a few years ago, when he ingested the hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca. He “felt unconfined, physically as well as spiritually,” and envisioned himself as a number of supernatural creatures. The experience led him to dive into magical realist literature, in which new worlds and creatures abound. Here he writes of six such beings, accompanied by Mexican artist Eko’s visual imaginings
A few years ago, during a shamanic ceremony in Colombia, I ingested ayahuasca, made of Banisteriopsis caapi, a South American vine employed for hallucinogenic purposes. Ayahuasca is a “plant teacher.” It pushes the mind into unforeseen realms. No wonder indigenous tribes in the Amazon make it an essential companion for religious quests.
Using words to describe what I went through defeats the experience. I wrestled with this challenge in my book The Oven: An Anti-Lecture (2018), which also became a one-man theater show staged across the United States. The extraordinary out-of-body education the drug afforded me left a deep mark. I felt unconfined, physically as well as spiritually—and at one point, I miraculously underwent a mutation that turned me into a jaguar roaming for prey in a vast landscape.
Once I got home, I immediately reread the Popol Vuh (1554–58), the sacred origin book of the Maya. I became fascinated by the multiple adventures of Hunahpu and Ixb’alanke, twins who at one point traverse the underworld, known as Xibalba—a habitat as intricate as Dante’s hell—where they face, among dozens of other creatures, bat monsters called camazotz. In the narrative, these creatures have the terrifying strength of the Cyclops in Homer’s The Odyssey.
I soon realized that in the shamanic ceremony, I had also visualized myself into an assortment of other creatures, a few of them impossible to describe: part human, part deity, with a few recognizable features but many more I had never encountered before. I delved into pre-Columbian sources in search of them—encyclopedias, testimonies of the Spanish conquest, historical chronicles of life in colonial times under European rule. What I found astonished me: the sources I looked at were themselves inconsistent and described these beasts in fanciful fashion.
It took me time to understand that this ethereal quality is precisely what makes these creatures distinct. I felt the inescapable urge to retell Popol Vuh for a contemporary readership; I also got the inspiration that led me to compile an anthology of pre-Hispanic imaginary beings, quoting from both real and fabricated sources.
In the land of Magical Realism, what better way to pay tribute to these creatures than to celebrate their insubstantial status? Julio Cortázar, in his 1967 book, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, writes: “I have always known that the big surprises await us where we have learned to be surprised by nothing, that is, where we are not shocked by ruptures in the order.”
I grew up in Mexico, so I know how elusive is the line between fact and fiction. Latin America is where what is known and what is hoped for intermingle. Needless to say, fantastic animals have always been companions to human civilization. The Bible is full of them, not only unicorns and cockatrices (in the King James Version, 1611), angels and cherubim, but also Behemoth and Leviathan, and, obviously, the Almighty, an omniscient being with anthropomorphic qualities whose only limitation appears to be—surprisingly—not to have been able to clone itself.
The Greeks had sirens, centaurs, satyrs, chimeras, basilisks, phoenixes, Pegasus, Medusa, Cerberus, and other entities. The Middle Ages were a fertile era for the creation of these creatures too: golems, dragons, and griffins, among others, would all be considered cryptids today.
Modernity added its own contributions, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1823), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and the massive black earthworm known as Mihocão. The production of fantastic creatures has only intensified over the past century, especially in the English-speaking world, with J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937), C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–56), and, more recently, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter saga (1997–2007).
Of course, what is fantastic to one culture is mundane to another. I ask myself, What did the indigenous people of Hispaniola, the first Caribbean island on which Columbus set foot, think of the Italian explorer and his companions? They probably believed the visitors were ether demons or gods. As the Talmud (Tractate Berakhot) argues, we don’t see the world as it is; instead, we see it as we are.
The Americas have long been a popular location to find monstrosities. Scientists like Charles Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt and writers like André Breton, D. H. Lawrence, and Allen Ginsberg all presented these continents as puzzling, deceptive places. This isn’t surprising; even today, the so-called New World remains a testing ground in which Europe envisions all sorts of enigmatic occurrences.
Jorge Luis Borges, along with Margarita Guerrero, edited the 1959 anthology Manual de zoología fantástica (Manual of Fantastic Zoology), expanded in 1967 and again in 1969 under a different title: The Book of Imaginary Beings. It includes creatures like the pygmies mentioned by Aristotle and Pliny; the chimera, a beast with the head of a goat sprouting from its back, a lion’s head at its front, and a snake’s head on its tail; and Emanuel Swedenborg’s angels, “the perfect souls of the blessed and wise, living in a Heaven of ideal things.”
Perhaps most vividly, in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in 1967, a series of bizarre creatures visit the town of Macondo, including the gypsy Melquíades, who dies dozens of times yet is always youthful, and the naïve and angelic Remedios la Bella, whose out-of-this-world beauty ultimately makes her fly into the sky—neither of which is portrayed as monstrous.
In truth, my interest in pre-Columbian creatures dates back further than my ayahuasca experience, to the late 20th century, when I first read Moacyr Scliar’s The Carnival of the Animals (1968), which is full of the most whimsical American fauna. In my personal library, I have an array of volumes that attempt to portray them, a few of them lavishly illustrated. I have acquired artesanías that are the equivalent of action figures.
The six selections described below are all American creatures, both existent and invented by me, grounded in oral tradition but also traced in texts, real and imagined as well as the quotes, dating back to the 16th century, although some came to be—and were certainly recorded in historical documents—after the Conquest and during the colonial period that stretched until 1810.
In my childhood and in travels during my adult years, I have personally seen a handful of these creatures with my own eyes. During a night of conversation, I described them in detail to the legendary Mexican artist Eko. His superb depictions, included here, are approximations based on indigenous codices.
Descriptions of each creature and their significance at:
https://theamericanscholar.org/a-pre-co ... y3OFChKgU4
Fantastic creatures of indigenous Latin America
When the news grows seemingly more tumultuous by the day, a temporary escape from this world can sound pretty tempting. Ilan Stavans did just that during a shamanic ceremony in Colombia a few years ago, when he ingested the hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca. He “felt unconfined, physically as well as spiritually,” and envisioned himself as a number of supernatural creatures. The experience led him to dive into magical realist literature, in which new worlds and creatures abound. Here he writes of six such beings, accompanied by Mexican artist Eko’s visual imaginings
A few years ago, during a shamanic ceremony in Colombia, I ingested ayahuasca, made of Banisteriopsis caapi, a South American vine employed for hallucinogenic purposes. Ayahuasca is a “plant teacher.” It pushes the mind into unforeseen realms. No wonder indigenous tribes in the Amazon make it an essential companion for religious quests.
Using words to describe what I went through defeats the experience. I wrestled with this challenge in my book The Oven: An Anti-Lecture (2018), which also became a one-man theater show staged across the United States. The extraordinary out-of-body education the drug afforded me left a deep mark. I felt unconfined, physically as well as spiritually—and at one point, I miraculously underwent a mutation that turned me into a jaguar roaming for prey in a vast landscape.
Once I got home, I immediately reread the Popol Vuh (1554–58), the sacred origin book of the Maya. I became fascinated by the multiple adventures of Hunahpu and Ixb’alanke, twins who at one point traverse the underworld, known as Xibalba—a habitat as intricate as Dante’s hell—where they face, among dozens of other creatures, bat monsters called camazotz. In the narrative, these creatures have the terrifying strength of the Cyclops in Homer’s The Odyssey.
I soon realized that in the shamanic ceremony, I had also visualized myself into an assortment of other creatures, a few of them impossible to describe: part human, part deity, with a few recognizable features but many more I had never encountered before. I delved into pre-Columbian sources in search of them—encyclopedias, testimonies of the Spanish conquest, historical chronicles of life in colonial times under European rule. What I found astonished me: the sources I looked at were themselves inconsistent and described these beasts in fanciful fashion.
It took me time to understand that this ethereal quality is precisely what makes these creatures distinct. I felt the inescapable urge to retell Popol Vuh for a contemporary readership; I also got the inspiration that led me to compile an anthology of pre-Hispanic imaginary beings, quoting from both real and fabricated sources.
In the land of Magical Realism, what better way to pay tribute to these creatures than to celebrate their insubstantial status? Julio Cortázar, in his 1967 book, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, writes: “I have always known that the big surprises await us where we have learned to be surprised by nothing, that is, where we are not shocked by ruptures in the order.”
I grew up in Mexico, so I know how elusive is the line between fact and fiction. Latin America is where what is known and what is hoped for intermingle. Needless to say, fantastic animals have always been companions to human civilization. The Bible is full of them, not only unicorns and cockatrices (in the King James Version, 1611), angels and cherubim, but also Behemoth and Leviathan, and, obviously, the Almighty, an omniscient being with anthropomorphic qualities whose only limitation appears to be—surprisingly—not to have been able to clone itself.
The Greeks had sirens, centaurs, satyrs, chimeras, basilisks, phoenixes, Pegasus, Medusa, Cerberus, and other entities. The Middle Ages were a fertile era for the creation of these creatures too: golems, dragons, and griffins, among others, would all be considered cryptids today.
Modernity added its own contributions, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1823), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and the massive black earthworm known as Mihocão. The production of fantastic creatures has only intensified over the past century, especially in the English-speaking world, with J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937), C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–56), and, more recently, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter saga (1997–2007).
Of course, what is fantastic to one culture is mundane to another. I ask myself, What did the indigenous people of Hispaniola, the first Caribbean island on which Columbus set foot, think of the Italian explorer and his companions? They probably believed the visitors were ether demons or gods. As the Talmud (Tractate Berakhot) argues, we don’t see the world as it is; instead, we see it as we are.
The Americas have long been a popular location to find monstrosities. Scientists like Charles Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt and writers like André Breton, D. H. Lawrence, and Allen Ginsberg all presented these continents as puzzling, deceptive places. This isn’t surprising; even today, the so-called New World remains a testing ground in which Europe envisions all sorts of enigmatic occurrences.
Jorge Luis Borges, along with Margarita Guerrero, edited the 1959 anthology Manual de zoología fantástica (Manual of Fantastic Zoology), expanded in 1967 and again in 1969 under a different title: The Book of Imaginary Beings. It includes creatures like the pygmies mentioned by Aristotle and Pliny; the chimera, a beast with the head of a goat sprouting from its back, a lion’s head at its front, and a snake’s head on its tail; and Emanuel Swedenborg’s angels, “the perfect souls of the blessed and wise, living in a Heaven of ideal things.”
Perhaps most vividly, in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in 1967, a series of bizarre creatures visit the town of Macondo, including the gypsy Melquíades, who dies dozens of times yet is always youthful, and the naïve and angelic Remedios la Bella, whose out-of-this-world beauty ultimately makes her fly into the sky—neither of which is portrayed as monstrous.
In truth, my interest in pre-Columbian creatures dates back further than my ayahuasca experience, to the late 20th century, when I first read Moacyr Scliar’s The Carnival of the Animals (1968), which is full of the most whimsical American fauna. In my personal library, I have an array of volumes that attempt to portray them, a few of them lavishly illustrated. I have acquired artesanías that are the equivalent of action figures.
The six selections described below are all American creatures, both existent and invented by me, grounded in oral tradition but also traced in texts, real and imagined as well as the quotes, dating back to the 16th century, although some came to be—and were certainly recorded in historical documents—after the Conquest and during the colonial period that stretched until 1810.
In my childhood and in travels during my adult years, I have personally seen a handful of these creatures with my own eyes. During a night of conversation, I described them in detail to the legendary Mexican artist Eko. His superb depictions, included here, are approximations based on indigenous codices.
Descriptions of each creature and their significance at:
https://theamericanscholar.org/a-pre-co ... y3OFChKgU4
Brazil Fires Burn World’s Largest Tropical Wetlands at ‘Unprecedented’ Scale
The blazes in Brazil, often intentionally set, have scorched a record-setting 10 percent of the Pantanal, one of the most biologically diverse habitats on the planet.
PORTO JOFRE, Brazil — A record amount of the world’s largest tropical wetland has been lost to the fires sweeping Brazil this year, scientists said, devastating a delicate ecosystem that is one of the most biologically diverse habitats on the planet.
The enormous fires — often set by ranchers and farmers to clear land, but exacerbated by unusually dry conditions in recent weeks — have engulfed more than 10 percent of the Brazilian wetlands, known as the Pantanal, exacting a toll scientists call “unprecedented.”
The fires in the Pantanal, in southwest Brazil, raged across an estimated 7,861 square miles between January and August, according to an analysis conducted by NASA for The New York Times, based on a new system to track fires in real time using satellite data. That’s an area slightly larger than New Jersey.
The previous record was in 2005, when approximately 4,608 square miles burned in the biome during the same period.
And to the north, the fires in the Brazilian Amazon — many of them also deliberately set for commercial clearing — have been ruinous as well. The amount of Brazilian rainforest lost to fires in 2020 has been similar to the scale of the destruction last year, when the problem drew global condemnation and added to the strains between Brazil and its trading partners, particularly in Europe.
The enormous scale of the fires in the Amazon and the Pantanal, several of which were visible to astronauts in space, has drawn less attention in a year overwhelmed by the coronavirus pandemic, the protests over police brutality and the coming American election.
But experts called this year’s blazes in the Pantanal a particularly jarring loss and the latest ecological crisis that has unfolded on the watch of President Jair Bolsonaro, whose policies have prioritized economic development over environmental protections.
Photos and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/worl ... 778d3e6de3
The blazes in Brazil, often intentionally set, have scorched a record-setting 10 percent of the Pantanal, one of the most biologically diverse habitats on the planet.
PORTO JOFRE, Brazil — A record amount of the world’s largest tropical wetland has been lost to the fires sweeping Brazil this year, scientists said, devastating a delicate ecosystem that is one of the most biologically diverse habitats on the planet.
The enormous fires — often set by ranchers and farmers to clear land, but exacerbated by unusually dry conditions in recent weeks — have engulfed more than 10 percent of the Brazilian wetlands, known as the Pantanal, exacting a toll scientists call “unprecedented.”
The fires in the Pantanal, in southwest Brazil, raged across an estimated 7,861 square miles between January and August, according to an analysis conducted by NASA for The New York Times, based on a new system to track fires in real time using satellite data. That’s an area slightly larger than New Jersey.
The previous record was in 2005, when approximately 4,608 square miles burned in the biome during the same period.
And to the north, the fires in the Brazilian Amazon — many of them also deliberately set for commercial clearing — have been ruinous as well. The amount of Brazilian rainforest lost to fires in 2020 has been similar to the scale of the destruction last year, when the problem drew global condemnation and added to the strains between Brazil and its trading partners, particularly in Europe.
The enormous scale of the fires in the Amazon and the Pantanal, several of which were visible to astronauts in space, has drawn less attention in a year overwhelmed by the coronavirus pandemic, the protests over police brutality and the coming American election.
But experts called this year’s blazes in the Pantanal a particularly jarring loss and the latest ecological crisis that has unfolded on the watch of President Jair Bolsonaro, whose policies have prioritized economic development over environmental protections.
Photos and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Legal Abortion, Once a Long Shot in Catholic Argentina, Now Within Reach
A bill before the Senate would make abortion legal in the predominantly Catholic nation, the homeland of Pope Francis. Its approval likely would have significant effect across Latin America.
BUENOS AIRES — A vote to legalize abortion in Argentina was balanced on a knife’s edge Tuesday as the Senate debated a bill that would make this largely Catholic nation, homeland of Pope Francis, the largest in Latin America to take that step.
Legalization in Argentina would reverberate across a region where powerful forces oppose abortion, notably the long-dominant Roman Catholic Church and the fast-growing evangelical Protestant churches.
With the bill having cleared the lower house of Argentina’s Congress and the president vowing to sign it, all eyes were on the Senate, where its fate appears to rest in the hands of a handful of lawmakers who remain undecided or are keeping their positions under wraps.
As crowds on both sides of the issue gathered on the plaza and streets outside Congress, senators began debating the measure Tuesday afternoon, and the too-close-to-call vote was expected early Wednesday. The bill would allow abortion on request up to 14 weeks into pregnancy, with exceptions to the limit in cases of rape or health risk.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/worl ... 778d3e6de3
******
Ancient DNA Is Changing How We Think About the Caribbean
New research delivers surprising findings about Indigenous people in the region before contact with Europeans.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus touched land for the first time in the Americas, reaching the Bahamas, Hispaniola (present-day Dominican Republic and Haiti) and eastern Cuba. After he returned to Spain he reported that he had encountered islands rich in gold. A few years later his brother Bartholomew, who also traveled to the Americas, reported that Hispaniola had a large population whose labor and land could be put to the advantage of the Spanish crown. He estimated the population at 1.1 million people.
Was this figure accurate? It soon was a matter of dispute. Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish monk and colonist who became the first chronicler of the human disaster that unfolded in the Americas after the arrival of Europeans, estimated a far larger number: three million to four million.
The population size of “pre-contact” Hispaniola would continue to be a contested issue until the present day, not least because of its profound emotional and moral resonance in light of the destruction of that world. Modern scholars have generally estimated the population at 250,000 to a million people.
Some of the arguments for large population numbers in the pre-contact Americas have been motivated by an attempt to counter a myth, perpetuated by apologists for colonialism like the philosopher John Locke, that the Americas were a vast “vacuum domicilium,” or empty dwelling, populated by a handful of Indigenous groups whose displacement could be readily justified. In a similar vein, some of the arguments for large population sizes have been motivated by a desire to underscore how disastrous the arrival of Europeans was for Indigenous people.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23/opin ... 778d3e6de3
A bill before the Senate would make abortion legal in the predominantly Catholic nation, the homeland of Pope Francis. Its approval likely would have significant effect across Latin America.
BUENOS AIRES — A vote to legalize abortion in Argentina was balanced on a knife’s edge Tuesday as the Senate debated a bill that would make this largely Catholic nation, homeland of Pope Francis, the largest in Latin America to take that step.
Legalization in Argentina would reverberate across a region where powerful forces oppose abortion, notably the long-dominant Roman Catholic Church and the fast-growing evangelical Protestant churches.
With the bill having cleared the lower house of Argentina’s Congress and the president vowing to sign it, all eyes were on the Senate, where its fate appears to rest in the hands of a handful of lawmakers who remain undecided or are keeping their positions under wraps.
As crowds on both sides of the issue gathered on the plaza and streets outside Congress, senators began debating the measure Tuesday afternoon, and the too-close-to-call vote was expected early Wednesday. The bill would allow abortion on request up to 14 weeks into pregnancy, with exceptions to the limit in cases of rape or health risk.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/worl ... 778d3e6de3
******
Ancient DNA Is Changing How We Think About the Caribbean
New research delivers surprising findings about Indigenous people in the region before contact with Europeans.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus touched land for the first time in the Americas, reaching the Bahamas, Hispaniola (present-day Dominican Republic and Haiti) and eastern Cuba. After he returned to Spain he reported that he had encountered islands rich in gold. A few years later his brother Bartholomew, who also traveled to the Americas, reported that Hispaniola had a large population whose labor and land could be put to the advantage of the Spanish crown. He estimated the population at 1.1 million people.
Was this figure accurate? It soon was a matter of dispute. Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish monk and colonist who became the first chronicler of the human disaster that unfolded in the Americas after the arrival of Europeans, estimated a far larger number: three million to four million.
The population size of “pre-contact” Hispaniola would continue to be a contested issue until the present day, not least because of its profound emotional and moral resonance in light of the destruction of that world. Modern scholars have generally estimated the population at 250,000 to a million people.
Some of the arguments for large population numbers in the pre-contact Americas have been motivated by an attempt to counter a myth, perpetuated by apologists for colonialism like the philosopher John Locke, that the Americas were a vast “vacuum domicilium,” or empty dwelling, populated by a handful of Indigenous groups whose displacement could be readily justified. In a similar vein, some of the arguments for large population sizes have been motivated by a desire to underscore how disastrous the arrival of Europeans was for Indigenous people.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Argentina Legalizes Abortion, a Milestone in a Conservative Region
The Senate vote on Wednesday was a major victory for Latin America’s growing feminist movement, and its ripple effects are likely to be widespread.
BUENOS AIRES — Argentina on Wednesday became the largest nation in Latin America to legalize abortion, a landmark vote in a conservative region and a victory for a grass-roots movement that turned years of rallies into political power.
The high-stakes vote, during 12 hours of often dramatic debate in the Senate, gripped the nation and exposed the tensions between a conservative society long influenced by the Roman Catholic Church, and a more secular generation that is fired up by a growing feminist movement.
“When I was born, women did not vote, we did not inherit, we could not manage our assets, we could not have bank accounts, we didn’t have credit cards, we couldn’t go to university,” Senator Silvia Sapag said in an emotional speech after the vote. “When I was born, women were nobody.”
Now, she added, for all the women who fought for those legal rights and more, “let it be law.”
The effects of the legalization vote are likely to ripple across Latin America, galvanizing abortion-rights advocates elsewhere in the region. The symbol of that effort in Argentina — green handkerchiefs — has begun showing up in other countries where women have poured into the streets demanding greater support for their rights.
Argentine groups that had worked against the abortion legislation, with the active support of Pope Francis, vowed not to give up.
“This doesn’t end here,” said Ana Belén Marmora, an activist in the anti-abortion group Youth Front. “We will not allow our voices to be ignored like this.”
As she spoke, a sonogram was carried out on a pregnant woman on a stage as people cheered: “Long live life!”
But the mood outside the neo-Classical Palace of Congress, where tens of thousands gathered while the bill was being debated into the early hours, was one of elation. Many in the crowd were part of a grass-roots effort that had made a concerted push for women’s rights, and focused on abortion access as its main goal.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/30/worl ... ogin-email
The Senate vote on Wednesday was a major victory for Latin America’s growing feminist movement, and its ripple effects are likely to be widespread.
BUENOS AIRES — Argentina on Wednesday became the largest nation in Latin America to legalize abortion, a landmark vote in a conservative region and a victory for a grass-roots movement that turned years of rallies into political power.
The high-stakes vote, during 12 hours of often dramatic debate in the Senate, gripped the nation and exposed the tensions between a conservative society long influenced by the Roman Catholic Church, and a more secular generation that is fired up by a growing feminist movement.
“When I was born, women did not vote, we did not inherit, we could not manage our assets, we could not have bank accounts, we didn’t have credit cards, we couldn’t go to university,” Senator Silvia Sapag said in an emotional speech after the vote. “When I was born, women were nobody.”
Now, she added, for all the women who fought for those legal rights and more, “let it be law.”
The effects of the legalization vote are likely to ripple across Latin America, galvanizing abortion-rights advocates elsewhere in the region. The symbol of that effort in Argentina — green handkerchiefs — has begun showing up in other countries where women have poured into the streets demanding greater support for their rights.
Argentine groups that had worked against the abortion legislation, with the active support of Pope Francis, vowed not to give up.
“This doesn’t end here,” said Ana Belén Marmora, an activist in the anti-abortion group Youth Front. “We will not allow our voices to be ignored like this.”
As she spoke, a sonogram was carried out on a pregnant woman on a stage as people cheered: “Long live life!”
But the mood outside the neo-Classical Palace of Congress, where tens of thousands gathered while the bill was being debated into the early hours, was one of elation. Many in the crowd were part of a grass-roots effort that had made a concerted push for women’s rights, and focused on abortion access as its main goal.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/30/worl ... ogin-email
'Rivers of gold' rush through the Peruvian Amazon in stunning NASA photo
By Brandon Specktor - Senior Writer 3 days ago
They look like pools of pure gold; they're actually pits of toxic mud.
The Peruvian Amazon glitters like gold in a gorgeous new photo taken aboard the International Space Station.
While that glow is just sunlight reflecting off hundreds of pits of muddy water, there is plenty of gold in them thar hills. Each glistening pool is a gold-prospecting pit, according to NASA's Earth Observatory website, likely dug by independent miners looking to unearth some of the Amazon's ancient treasures.
"Each pit is surrounded by de-vegetated areas of muddy soil," Justin Wilkinson, a grant specialist at Texas State University, wrote for Earth Observatory. "These deforested tracts follow the courses of ancient rivers that deposited sediments, including gold."
Peru's Madre de Dios state, shown in this picture, is home to one of the largest independent gold mining industries on Earth, Wilkinson wrote. As many as 30,000 small-scale miners (working outside of government regulations) prospect illegally in the area, tearing up the rainforest with excavators and dump trucks in order to unearth the gold underneath.
Illegal mining can be a boon to impoverished workers in Madre de Dios, but a detriment to the Amazon; according to a 2011 study in the journal PLOS One, gold mining is the single greatest cause of deforestation in the region.
https://www.livescience.com/nasa-peru-a ... rm=5382448
By Brandon Specktor - Senior Writer 3 days ago
They look like pools of pure gold; they're actually pits of toxic mud.
The Peruvian Amazon glitters like gold in a gorgeous new photo taken aboard the International Space Station.
While that glow is just sunlight reflecting off hundreds of pits of muddy water, there is plenty of gold in them thar hills. Each glistening pool is a gold-prospecting pit, according to NASA's Earth Observatory website, likely dug by independent miners looking to unearth some of the Amazon's ancient treasures.
"Each pit is surrounded by de-vegetated areas of muddy soil," Justin Wilkinson, a grant specialist at Texas State University, wrote for Earth Observatory. "These deforested tracts follow the courses of ancient rivers that deposited sediments, including gold."
Peru's Madre de Dios state, shown in this picture, is home to one of the largest independent gold mining industries on Earth, Wilkinson wrote. As many as 30,000 small-scale miners (working outside of government regulations) prospect illegally in the area, tearing up the rainforest with excavators and dump trucks in order to unearth the gold underneath.
Illegal mining can be a boon to impoverished workers in Madre de Dios, but a detriment to the Amazon; according to a 2011 study in the journal PLOS One, gold mining is the single greatest cause of deforestation in the region.
https://www.livescience.com/nasa-peru-a ... rm=5382448
Venezuelan Women Lose Access to Contraception, and Control of Their Lives
Affordable birth control has disappeared, pushing many women into unplanned pregnancies at a time when they can barely feed the children they already have.
SAN DIEGO DE LOS ALTOS, Venezuela — The moment Johanna Guzmán, 25, discovered she was going to have her sixth child she began to sob, crushed by the idea of bringing another life into a nation in such decay.
For years, as Venezuela spiraled deeper into an economic crisis, she and her husband had scoured clinics and pharmacies for any kind of birth control, usually in vain. They had a third child. A fourth. A fifth.
Already, Ms. Guzmán was cooking meager dinners over a wood fire, washing clothing without soap, teaching lessons without paper. Already, she was stalked by a fear that she could not feed them all.
And now, another child?
“I felt like I was drowning,” she said.
As Venezuela enters its eighth year of economic crisis, a deeply personal drama is playing out inside the home: Millions of women are no longer able to find or afford birth control, pushing many into unplanned pregnancies at a time when they can barely feed the children they already have.
Around Caracas, the capital, a pack of three condoms costs $4.40 — three times Venezuela’s monthly minimum wage of $1.50.
Birth control pills cost more than twice as much, roughly $11 a month, while an IUD, or intrauterine device, can cost more than $40 — more than 25 times the minimum wage. And that does not include a doctor’s fee to have the device put in.
With the cost of contraception so far out of reach, women are increasingly resorting to abortions, which are illegal and, in the worst cases, can cost them their lives.
Photos and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Affordable birth control has disappeared, pushing many women into unplanned pregnancies at a time when they can barely feed the children they already have.
SAN DIEGO DE LOS ALTOS, Venezuela — The moment Johanna Guzmán, 25, discovered she was going to have her sixth child she began to sob, crushed by the idea of bringing another life into a nation in such decay.
For years, as Venezuela spiraled deeper into an economic crisis, she and her husband had scoured clinics and pharmacies for any kind of birth control, usually in vain. They had a third child. A fourth. A fifth.
Already, Ms. Guzmán was cooking meager dinners over a wood fire, washing clothing without soap, teaching lessons without paper. Already, she was stalked by a fear that she could not feed them all.
And now, another child?
“I felt like I was drowning,” she said.
As Venezuela enters its eighth year of economic crisis, a deeply personal drama is playing out inside the home: Millions of women are no longer able to find or afford birth control, pushing many into unplanned pregnancies at a time when they can barely feed the children they already have.
Around Caracas, the capital, a pack of three condoms costs $4.40 — three times Venezuela’s monthly minimum wage of $1.50.
Birth control pills cost more than twice as much, roughly $11 a month, while an IUD, or intrauterine device, can cost more than $40 — more than 25 times the minimum wage. And that does not include a doctor’s fee to have the device put in.
With the cost of contraception so far out of reach, women are increasingly resorting to abortions, which are illegal and, in the worst cases, can cost them their lives.
Photos and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Abortion Is Now Legal in Argentina, but Opponents Are Making It Hard to Get
Anti-abortion activists are suing to block a new law allowing the procedure, and many doctors in conservative areas have declared themselves conscientious objectors.
BUENOS AIRES — For the first time in more than a century, women in Argentina can legally get an abortion, but that landmark shift in law may do them little good at hospitals like the one in northern Jujuy Province where all but one obstetrician have a simple response: No.
Abortion opponents are reeling after a measure legalizing the procedure was signed into law in December, but they have hardly given up. They have filed lawsuits arguing that the new law is unconstitutional. And they have made sure doctors know that they can refuse to terminate pregnancies, a message that is being embraced by many in rural areas.
“The law is already a reality, but that doesn’t mean we have to stay still,” said Dr. Gloria Abán, a general practitioner and abortion opponent who travels the remote Calchaquí Valleys of Salta Province to see patients. “We must be proactive.”
In neighboring Jujuy, 29 of the 30 obstetricians at the Hector Quintana Maternity and Children’s hospital have declared themselves conscientious objectors, as the law allows. So have all but a handful of the 120 gynecologists in the province, said Dr. Rubén Véliz, head of the obstetrics department at Hector Quintana.
“We’re really standing in the eye of the hurricane,” he said.
Argentina’s abortion law represented a big shift for reproductive rights in Latin America, which has among the strictest such laws in the world, galvanizing movements to expand access to safe abortion in Colombia, Mexico and Chile.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/07/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Anti-abortion activists are suing to block a new law allowing the procedure, and many doctors in conservative areas have declared themselves conscientious objectors.
BUENOS AIRES — For the first time in more than a century, women in Argentina can legally get an abortion, but that landmark shift in law may do them little good at hospitals like the one in northern Jujuy Province where all but one obstetrician have a simple response: No.
Abortion opponents are reeling after a measure legalizing the procedure was signed into law in December, but they have hardly given up. They have filed lawsuits arguing that the new law is unconstitutional. And they have made sure doctors know that they can refuse to terminate pregnancies, a message that is being embraced by many in rural areas.
“The law is already a reality, but that doesn’t mean we have to stay still,” said Dr. Gloria Abán, a general practitioner and abortion opponent who travels the remote Calchaquí Valleys of Salta Province to see patients. “We must be proactive.”
In neighboring Jujuy, 29 of the 30 obstetricians at the Hector Quintana Maternity and Children’s hospital have declared themselves conscientious objectors, as the law allows. So have all but a handful of the 120 gynecologists in the province, said Dr. Rubén Véliz, head of the obstetrics department at Hector Quintana.
“We’re really standing in the eye of the hurricane,” he said.
Argentina’s abortion law represented a big shift for reproductive rights in Latin America, which has among the strictest such laws in the world, galvanizing movements to expand access to safe abortion in Colombia, Mexico and Chile.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/07/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Ravaged by Covid, Brazil Faces a Hunger Epidemic
Tens of millions of Brazilians are facing hunger or food insecurity as the country’s Covid-19 crisis drags on, killing thousands of people every day.
RIO DE JANEIRO — Rail-thin teenagers hold placards at traffic stops with the word for hunger — fome — in large print. Children, many of whom have been out of school for over a year, beg for food outside supermarkets and restaurants. Entire families huddle in flimsy encampments on sidewalks, asking for baby formula, crackers, anything.
A year into the pandemic, millions of Brazilians are going hungry.
The scenes, which have proliferated in the last months on Brazil’s streets, are stark evidence that President Jair Bolsonaro’s bet that he could protect the country’s economy by resisting public health policies intended to curb the virus has failed.
From the start of the outbreak, Brazil’s president has been skeptical of the disease’s impact, and scorned the guidance of health experts, arguing that the economic damage wrought by the lockdowns, business closures and mobility restrictions they recommended would be a bigger threat than the pandemic to the country’s weak economy.
That trade-off led to one of the world’s highest death tolls, but also foundered in its goal — to keep the country afloat.
The virus is ripping through the social fabric, setting wrenching records, while the worsening health crisis pushes businesses into bankruptcy, killing jobs and further hampering an economy that has grown little or not at all for more than six years.
Last year, emergency government cash payments helped put food on the table for millions of Brazilians — but when the money was scaled back sharply this year, with a debt crisis looming, many pantries were left bare.
About 19 million people have gone hungry over the past year — nearly twice the 10 million who did so in 2018, the most recent year for which data were available, according to the Brazilian government and a study of privation during the pandemic by a network of Brazilian researchers focused on the issue.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Tens of millions of Brazilians are facing hunger or food insecurity as the country’s Covid-19 crisis drags on, killing thousands of people every day.
RIO DE JANEIRO — Rail-thin teenagers hold placards at traffic stops with the word for hunger — fome — in large print. Children, many of whom have been out of school for over a year, beg for food outside supermarkets and restaurants. Entire families huddle in flimsy encampments on sidewalks, asking for baby formula, crackers, anything.
A year into the pandemic, millions of Brazilians are going hungry.
The scenes, which have proliferated in the last months on Brazil’s streets, are stark evidence that President Jair Bolsonaro’s bet that he could protect the country’s economy by resisting public health policies intended to curb the virus has failed.
From the start of the outbreak, Brazil’s president has been skeptical of the disease’s impact, and scorned the guidance of health experts, arguing that the economic damage wrought by the lockdowns, business closures and mobility restrictions they recommended would be a bigger threat than the pandemic to the country’s weak economy.
That trade-off led to one of the world’s highest death tolls, but also foundered in its goal — to keep the country afloat.
The virus is ripping through the social fabric, setting wrenching records, while the worsening health crisis pushes businesses into bankruptcy, killing jobs and further hampering an economy that has grown little or not at all for more than six years.
Last year, emergency government cash payments helped put food on the table for millions of Brazilians — but when the money was scaled back sharply this year, with a debt crisis looming, many pantries were left bare.
About 19 million people have gone hungry over the past year — nearly twice the 10 million who did so in 2018, the most recent year for which data were available, according to the Brazilian government and a study of privation during the pandemic by a network of Brazilian researchers focused on the issue.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/worl ... 778d3e6de3
After a Year of Loss, South America Suffers Worst Death Tolls Yet
If the world doesn’t stop the region’s surging caseload, it could cost us all that we’ve done to fight the pandemic, one health official said.
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — In the capital of Colombia, Bogotá, the mayor is warning residents to brace for “the worst two weeks of our lives.”
Uruguay, once lauded as a model for keeping the coronavirus under control, now has one of the highest death rates in the world, while the grim daily tallies of the dead have hit records in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Peru in recent days.
Even Venezuela, where the authoritarian government is notorious for hiding health statistics and any suggestion of disarray, says that coronavirus deaths are up 86 percent since January.
As vaccinations mount in some of the world’s wealthiest countries and people cautiously envision life after the pandemic, the crisis in Latin America — and in South America in particular — is taking an alarming turn for the worse, potentially threatening the progress made well beyond its borders.
Last week, Latin America accounted for 35 percent of all coronavirus deaths in the world, despite having just 8 percent of the global population, according to data compiled by The New York Times.
Latin America was already one of the world’s hardest hit regions in 2020, with bodies sometimes abandoned on sidewalks and new burial grounds cut into thick forest. Yet even after a year of incalculable loss, it is still one of the most troubling global hot spots, with a recent surge in many countries that is even more deadly than before.
The crisis stems in part from predictable forces — limited vaccine supplies and slow rollouts, weak health systems and fragile economies that make stay-at-home orders difficult to impose or maintain.
But the region has another thorny challenge, health officials say: living side-by-side with Brazil, a country of more than 200 million whose president has consistently dismissed the threat of the virus and denounced measures to control it, helping fuel a dangerous variant that is now stalking the continent.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/worl ... 778d3e6de3
If the world doesn’t stop the region’s surging caseload, it could cost us all that we’ve done to fight the pandemic, one health official said.
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — In the capital of Colombia, Bogotá, the mayor is warning residents to brace for “the worst two weeks of our lives.”
Uruguay, once lauded as a model for keeping the coronavirus under control, now has one of the highest death rates in the world, while the grim daily tallies of the dead have hit records in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Peru in recent days.
Even Venezuela, where the authoritarian government is notorious for hiding health statistics and any suggestion of disarray, says that coronavirus deaths are up 86 percent since January.
As vaccinations mount in some of the world’s wealthiest countries and people cautiously envision life after the pandemic, the crisis in Latin America — and in South America in particular — is taking an alarming turn for the worse, potentially threatening the progress made well beyond its borders.
Last week, Latin America accounted for 35 percent of all coronavirus deaths in the world, despite having just 8 percent of the global population, according to data compiled by The New York Times.
Latin America was already one of the world’s hardest hit regions in 2020, with bodies sometimes abandoned on sidewalks and new burial grounds cut into thick forest. Yet even after a year of incalculable loss, it is still one of the most troubling global hot spots, with a recent surge in many countries that is even more deadly than before.
The crisis stems in part from predictable forces — limited vaccine supplies and slow rollouts, weak health systems and fragile economies that make stay-at-home orders difficult to impose or maintain.
But the region has another thorny challenge, health officials say: living side-by-side with Brazil, a country of more than 200 million whose president has consistently dismissed the threat of the virus and denounced measures to control it, helping fuel a dangerous variant that is now stalking the continent.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Even the Pope Has Prayed to Venezuela’s Beloved ‘Doctor of the Poor’
In a deeply polarized country, suffering an extreme health crisis, one of the few uniting beliefs is the admiration across the political spectrum for a doctor recently beatified by the Vatican.
ISNOTÚ, Venezuela — The faithful began arriving before dawn, silhouettes emerging from a thick fog, serenaded by birdsong and clamoring church bells.
They had navigated winding mountain roads, clogged with mudslide debris and checkpoints guarded by soldiers, to pay homage at the statue of a doctor with an outstretched hand. Many had traveled by foot because of widespread gasoline shortages.
Deivis Vásquez arrived, presented his only son to the doctor’s statue and wept, overcome with emotion that his boy was well enough to show his gratitude in person.
Months earlier, Mr. Vásquez had come to this very spot, deep in the foothills of the Andes, when his 14-year-old son, Deivi Rafael, lay in a coma on life-support in the pediatric intensive care unit of a government hospital.
A motorcycle crash had caused severe head trauma, and the boy’s medical team did not expect him to survive. If he defied the odds and lived, he faced a 95 percent probability of permanent brain damage.
“There was practically nothing I could do,” said his neurosurgeon, Dr. Edgar Altuve. “If I would have operated, it would have killed him.”
Terrified that his son would die, Mr. Vásquez drove his pickup truck to the tiny town of Isnotú to pray before the large white marble statue of Dr. José Gregorio Hernández, known nationwide as Venezuela’s “Doctor of the Poor.”
For decades, Venezuelans like him have flocked to Isnotú to beseech Dr. Hernández to heal them or their loved ones.
When devotees believe a cure is attributed to the doctor’s intervention, they present his statue with metal plaques to show their thanks. A few thousand such plaques — inscribed with messages describing successful operations and miracles — have been presented to the sanctuary since it was founded in 1960. There is now little room for more.
Photos and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/01/worl ... 778d3e6de3
In a deeply polarized country, suffering an extreme health crisis, one of the few uniting beliefs is the admiration across the political spectrum for a doctor recently beatified by the Vatican.
ISNOTÚ, Venezuela — The faithful began arriving before dawn, silhouettes emerging from a thick fog, serenaded by birdsong and clamoring church bells.
They had navigated winding mountain roads, clogged with mudslide debris and checkpoints guarded by soldiers, to pay homage at the statue of a doctor with an outstretched hand. Many had traveled by foot because of widespread gasoline shortages.
Deivis Vásquez arrived, presented his only son to the doctor’s statue and wept, overcome with emotion that his boy was well enough to show his gratitude in person.
Months earlier, Mr. Vásquez had come to this very spot, deep in the foothills of the Andes, when his 14-year-old son, Deivi Rafael, lay in a coma on life-support in the pediatric intensive care unit of a government hospital.
A motorcycle crash had caused severe head trauma, and the boy’s medical team did not expect him to survive. If he defied the odds and lived, he faced a 95 percent probability of permanent brain damage.
“There was practically nothing I could do,” said his neurosurgeon, Dr. Edgar Altuve. “If I would have operated, it would have killed him.”
Terrified that his son would die, Mr. Vásquez drove his pickup truck to the tiny town of Isnotú to pray before the large white marble statue of Dr. José Gregorio Hernández, known nationwide as Venezuela’s “Doctor of the Poor.”
For decades, Venezuelans like him have flocked to Isnotú to beseech Dr. Hernández to heal them or their loved ones.
When devotees believe a cure is attributed to the doctor’s intervention, they present his statue with metal plaques to show their thanks. A few thousand such plaques — inscribed with messages describing successful operations and miracles — have been presented to the sanctuary since it was founded in 1960. There is now little room for more.
Photos and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/01/worl ... 778d3e6de3