El Salvador’s Advice on Zika: Don’t Have Babies
SAN SALVADOR — When in human history has an epidemic become so alarming that a nation feels compelled to urge its people not to have children for two years?
Grappling with a mosquito-borne virus linked to brain damage in infants, El Salvador is doing just that, advising all women in the country not to get pregnant until 2018 — the equivalent of a Hail Mary pass that, to many here, only illustrates their government’s desperation.
“It’s not up to the government; it’s up to God,” said Vanessa Iraheta, 30, who is seven months pregnant with her second child. “I don’t think the youth will stop having children.”
The virus, known as Zika, has rattled Latin America and the Caribbean, particularly Brazil, where more than a million people have been infected and nearly 4,000 children have been born with microcephaly, a rare condition in which babies have unusually small heads.
Other nations around the region have issued warnings similar to El Salvador’s, with officials in Colombia and Ecuador urging women to put off becoming pregnant for months, or until the dangers of the virus are better understood.
More...
nytimes.com/2016/01/26/world/americas/el-salvadors-advice-on-zika-dont-have-babies.html?emc=edit_th_20160126&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=71987722
SOUTH AMERICA
Uruguay’s Quiet Democratic Miracle
Montevideo, Uruguay — “Because here nobody is better than anybody else.” The phrase, one of this small South American country’s most cherished sayings, dates back to the 19th century and is often repeated by its thinkers, presidents and everyday citizens. As a simple expression of the democratic spirit, it sums up how Uruguayans feel about their homeland.
With only 3.3 million inhabitants, Uruguay is the smallest nation by population in Latin America. Its giant neighbor Brazil, by contrast, has a population of more than 200 million. But what it lacks in numbers, Uruguay makes up for by ranking as the least corrupt and most democratic country in Latin America — as well as only one of two, along with Chile, rated as a “high income” country by the United Nations.
Uruguay used to be known as the “Switzerland of South America,” in part because of its banking secrecy regulations. But the phrase also speaks to a deep respect for the rule of law.
In a region where democracy is increasingly tested by economic mismanagement, political corruption, drug cartels and environmental crises, Uruguay is the only Latin American country ranked among the world’s 20 “full democracies,” according to The Economist’s 2015 democracy index — ahead even, by one place, of the United States.
The passionate nationalism prevalent elsewhere, often whipped up by populist leaders intent on clinging to power beyond their allotted presidential terms, is refreshingly absent in Uruguay. It is a preference some of Uruguay’s neighbors would do well to emulate.
“ ‘Nation’ is not a word we often use,” says the Uruguayan historian Gerardo Caetano. “We prefer republic.”
Perhaps because of this, Uruguay scores perfect 10s on the indexes of civil liberties and electoral process, a feat equaled only by Norway and New Zealand. Argentina and Brazil, on the other hand, are far below, at 50th and 51st — among the world’s “flawed democracies,” a sorry indictment for the two proud but unruly economic powerhouses.
There is a flaw in Uruguay’s record, one that has left a historic mark. During the colonial period, the port of the capital, Montevideo, was a hub for the slave trade in South America. Today, the country has a large Afro-Uruguayan community — about 10 percent of the population is descended from slaves.
Fernando Nuñez, a percussionist, lives in the same house that his forebears, freed African slaves, moved into way back in 1837. He loves to talk about playing with the Berlin Philharmonic or with his drum orchestra come carnival time. But his passion is also aroused by the racism he still sees here. Even though he is a well-known artist in Montevideo, Mr. Nuñez says he notices white Uruguayans crossing to the other side sometimes when he walks down the street.
That blemish aside, “we are an extremely liberal society,” says Fernando Cabrera, one of Uruguay’s leading artists. “It’s our inheritance. During the first half of the 20th century, Uruguay was a unique marvel, even more progressive than it is today.”
He refers to the liberal reform program led by President José Batlle y Ordóñez, who helped create a uniquely egalitarian society on a continent where a steep contrast between the haves and have-nots is the norm. His Uruguay powered through social advances unthinkable elsewhere at the time, including, in 1913, a divorce law that granted a couple a divorce at the sole request of the woman.
To say other countries in the region lagged behind would be an understatement. Chile legalized divorce only 12 years ago.
This legacy shaped modern-day Uruguay. In 2012, in a landmark move, it became only the second country in Latin America (besides Cuba) to legalize abortion. Three years ago, Uruguay became the first country in the world to legalize the sale of marijuana.
This utopia is possible only because of what Professor Caetano calls the “social contract” that sets Uruguay apart. Uruguayans seem to have a tacit agreement to resolve differences at the voting booth, instead of by packing masses of people into city squares to test the weight of opposing factions, as happens in Argentina.
“In Uruguay, the political parties are more important than the social movements,” he says. Uruguayans have a healthy mistrust of charismatic, messianic leaders, which preserves them from the bane of presidents dubiously extending their term limits, as we have seen in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia in recent years.
“We don’t have that sense of epic politics, we just have a boring democracy,” says the professor.
The same temperance is evident also in Uruguay’s relationship with religion. Ask anyone here what distinguishes their country from the rest of South America, and their answer is almost invariably “our laicism.”
Despite forming part of the world’s most populous Catholic continent, Uruguay takes a different view of religious holidays: Christmas is known officially as “Family Day,” Easter Week is referred to by almost everyone as “Tourism Week,” and the holiday of Dec. 8, celebrated elsewhere as the feast day of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, is “Beach Day,” by virtue of the 1919 Constitution and a law passed that year to sever colonial-era ties between state and religion. Even the wave of enthusiasm that greeted the election of a South American pope, when Argentina’s former cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis three years ago, did not alter Uruguay’s secular instincts.
“I didn’t go to Pope Francis’ inauguration,” José Mujica, Uruguay’s former president, told me in an interview in 2014, when he was still in office. “Why should I? Uruguay is a lay country. I respect Francis as a person and religious leader, I visited him privately afterward. But I had no official business there.”
As I drove by the port at Montevideo, endless stacks of wind turbines awaiting assembly caught my eye. In less than a decade, Uruguay has become a continental leader in renewable energy — last year producing 95 percent of its electricity from renewable sources and sharply reducing its reliance on foreign oil, which once made up 27 percent of imports.
It is a concrete illustration of how tiny Uruguay, pulling itself up by its bootstraps, has morphed into one of the most progressive nations on earth. Its neighbor, Argentina, whose windswept Patagonia region cries out for wind farms, is plowing ahead instead with hydraulic fracturing and new nuclear power plants.
Latin America has a lot to learn from little Uruguay.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/10/opini ... 87722&_r=0
Montevideo, Uruguay — “Because here nobody is better than anybody else.” The phrase, one of this small South American country’s most cherished sayings, dates back to the 19th century and is often repeated by its thinkers, presidents and everyday citizens. As a simple expression of the democratic spirit, it sums up how Uruguayans feel about their homeland.
With only 3.3 million inhabitants, Uruguay is the smallest nation by population in Latin America. Its giant neighbor Brazil, by contrast, has a population of more than 200 million. But what it lacks in numbers, Uruguay makes up for by ranking as the least corrupt and most democratic country in Latin America — as well as only one of two, along with Chile, rated as a “high income” country by the United Nations.
Uruguay used to be known as the “Switzerland of South America,” in part because of its banking secrecy regulations. But the phrase also speaks to a deep respect for the rule of law.
In a region where democracy is increasingly tested by economic mismanagement, political corruption, drug cartels and environmental crises, Uruguay is the only Latin American country ranked among the world’s 20 “full democracies,” according to The Economist’s 2015 democracy index — ahead even, by one place, of the United States.
The passionate nationalism prevalent elsewhere, often whipped up by populist leaders intent on clinging to power beyond their allotted presidential terms, is refreshingly absent in Uruguay. It is a preference some of Uruguay’s neighbors would do well to emulate.
“ ‘Nation’ is not a word we often use,” says the Uruguayan historian Gerardo Caetano. “We prefer republic.”
Perhaps because of this, Uruguay scores perfect 10s on the indexes of civil liberties and electoral process, a feat equaled only by Norway and New Zealand. Argentina and Brazil, on the other hand, are far below, at 50th and 51st — among the world’s “flawed democracies,” a sorry indictment for the two proud but unruly economic powerhouses.
There is a flaw in Uruguay’s record, one that has left a historic mark. During the colonial period, the port of the capital, Montevideo, was a hub for the slave trade in South America. Today, the country has a large Afro-Uruguayan community — about 10 percent of the population is descended from slaves.
Fernando Nuñez, a percussionist, lives in the same house that his forebears, freed African slaves, moved into way back in 1837. He loves to talk about playing with the Berlin Philharmonic or with his drum orchestra come carnival time. But his passion is also aroused by the racism he still sees here. Even though he is a well-known artist in Montevideo, Mr. Nuñez says he notices white Uruguayans crossing to the other side sometimes when he walks down the street.
That blemish aside, “we are an extremely liberal society,” says Fernando Cabrera, one of Uruguay’s leading artists. “It’s our inheritance. During the first half of the 20th century, Uruguay was a unique marvel, even more progressive than it is today.”
He refers to the liberal reform program led by President José Batlle y Ordóñez, who helped create a uniquely egalitarian society on a continent where a steep contrast between the haves and have-nots is the norm. His Uruguay powered through social advances unthinkable elsewhere at the time, including, in 1913, a divorce law that granted a couple a divorce at the sole request of the woman.
To say other countries in the region lagged behind would be an understatement. Chile legalized divorce only 12 years ago.
This legacy shaped modern-day Uruguay. In 2012, in a landmark move, it became only the second country in Latin America (besides Cuba) to legalize abortion. Three years ago, Uruguay became the first country in the world to legalize the sale of marijuana.
This utopia is possible only because of what Professor Caetano calls the “social contract” that sets Uruguay apart. Uruguayans seem to have a tacit agreement to resolve differences at the voting booth, instead of by packing masses of people into city squares to test the weight of opposing factions, as happens in Argentina.
“In Uruguay, the political parties are more important than the social movements,” he says. Uruguayans have a healthy mistrust of charismatic, messianic leaders, which preserves them from the bane of presidents dubiously extending their term limits, as we have seen in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia in recent years.
“We don’t have that sense of epic politics, we just have a boring democracy,” says the professor.
The same temperance is evident also in Uruguay’s relationship with religion. Ask anyone here what distinguishes their country from the rest of South America, and their answer is almost invariably “our laicism.”
Despite forming part of the world’s most populous Catholic continent, Uruguay takes a different view of religious holidays: Christmas is known officially as “Family Day,” Easter Week is referred to by almost everyone as “Tourism Week,” and the holiday of Dec. 8, celebrated elsewhere as the feast day of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, is “Beach Day,” by virtue of the 1919 Constitution and a law passed that year to sever colonial-era ties between state and religion. Even the wave of enthusiasm that greeted the election of a South American pope, when Argentina’s former cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis three years ago, did not alter Uruguay’s secular instincts.
“I didn’t go to Pope Francis’ inauguration,” José Mujica, Uruguay’s former president, told me in an interview in 2014, when he was still in office. “Why should I? Uruguay is a lay country. I respect Francis as a person and religious leader, I visited him privately afterward. But I had no official business there.”
As I drove by the port at Montevideo, endless stacks of wind turbines awaiting assembly caught my eye. In less than a decade, Uruguay has become a continental leader in renewable energy — last year producing 95 percent of its electricity from renewable sources and sharply reducing its reliance on foreign oil, which once made up 27 percent of imports.
It is a concrete illustration of how tiny Uruguay, pulling itself up by its bootstraps, has morphed into one of the most progressive nations on earth. Its neighbor, Argentina, whose windswept Patagonia region cries out for wind farms, is plowing ahead instead with hydraulic fracturing and new nuclear power plants.
Latin America has a lot to learn from little Uruguay.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/10/opini ... 87722&_r=0
Francis’s Visit to Mexico Comes as Country Struggles With Many Ills
Excerpts:
MEXICO CITY — For more than a century, the Mexican government has treated the Catholic Church with a deep suspicion, if not outright hostility. Battles have literally been fought between church and state, while anticlerical laws stayed on the books until just a couple of decades ago.
But gauging by the Mexican government’s enthusiasm ahead of Pope Francis’ visit, the popular leader’s arrival may do more than offer salvation for the masses. It might also provide a much-needed boost to the government’s flagging credibility — or so it hopes.
To welcome the pope when he arrives on Friday night, the first lady produced a song in his honor. For the first time, the president will welcome a pope in the National Palace. Francis will receive a key to Mexico City, which placed a giant billboard along the airport highway that perhaps most accurately sums up the sentiment: “Pope Francis, Mexico
While Pope John Paul II remains a revered figure in Mexico, having visited the nation five times during his papacy, the new pontiff offers a profile that few Latin American governments can resist: a Spanish speaker beloved by many.
....
But historians say that only recently has the Mexican church sought to more overtly engage with the problems of society — and to do so with the blessing of the government.
“The expectation of persecution has inhibited lots of outward efforts by the church over the years,” said Jorge Eugenio Traslosheros Hernández, a history professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, who has studied Mexican Catholicism. “That is changing, and now the pope comes and hopefully he can help catalyze change. Without the participation of every citizen in Mexico, we will never fix this crisis.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/world ... pe=article
Excerpts:
MEXICO CITY — For more than a century, the Mexican government has treated the Catholic Church with a deep suspicion, if not outright hostility. Battles have literally been fought between church and state, while anticlerical laws stayed on the books until just a couple of decades ago.
But gauging by the Mexican government’s enthusiasm ahead of Pope Francis’ visit, the popular leader’s arrival may do more than offer salvation for the masses. It might also provide a much-needed boost to the government’s flagging credibility — or so it hopes.
To welcome the pope when he arrives on Friday night, the first lady produced a song in his honor. For the first time, the president will welcome a pope in the National Palace. Francis will receive a key to Mexico City, which placed a giant billboard along the airport highway that perhaps most accurately sums up the sentiment: “Pope Francis, Mexico
While Pope John Paul II remains a revered figure in Mexico, having visited the nation five times during his papacy, the new pontiff offers a profile that few Latin American governments can resist: a Spanish speaker beloved by many.
....
But historians say that only recently has the Mexican church sought to more overtly engage with the problems of society — and to do so with the blessing of the government.
“The expectation of persecution has inhibited lots of outward efforts by the church over the years,” said Jorge Eugenio Traslosheros Hernández, a history professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, who has studied Mexican Catholicism. “That is changing, and now the pope comes and hopefully he can help catalyze change. Without the participation of every citizen in Mexico, we will never fix this crisis.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/world ... pe=article
In Mexican Slum, Pope Francis Laments Economic Gap
ECATEPEC, Mexico — Pope Francis stepped into the heartland of Mexican inequality on Sunday, presiding over an enormous outdoor Mass in the impoverished outskirts of the capital and urging the joyous crowd not to fall prey to the wealth, vanity and pride that can create “a society of the few, and for the few.”
By coming to Ecatepec, one of the country’s largest, poorest and most violent cities, the Latin American pope placed himself at the center of Mexico’s identity crisis. Nagging economic disparity has left nearly half of the country living in poverty while a mere sliver of society controls the rest — even as drug traffickers terrorize large parts of the nation.
Standing on a gigantic stage before several hundred thousand people, Francis told his listeners that the Lenten season, which began last week, is one of conversion, and that Mexico needed conversion. He asked Mexicans to turn their nation into “a land of opportunities, where there will be no need to emigrate in order to dream, no need to be exploited in order to work, no need to make the despair and poverty of many the opportunism of a few, a land that will not have to mourn men and women, young people and children who are destroyed at the hands of the dealers of death.”
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/15/world ... d=45305309
ECATEPEC, Mexico — Pope Francis stepped into the heartland of Mexican inequality on Sunday, presiding over an enormous outdoor Mass in the impoverished outskirts of the capital and urging the joyous crowd not to fall prey to the wealth, vanity and pride that can create “a society of the few, and for the few.”
By coming to Ecatepec, one of the country’s largest, poorest and most violent cities, the Latin American pope placed himself at the center of Mexico’s identity crisis. Nagging economic disparity has left nearly half of the country living in poverty while a mere sliver of society controls the rest — even as drug traffickers terrorize large parts of the nation.
Standing on a gigantic stage before several hundred thousand people, Francis told his listeners that the Lenten season, which began last week, is one of conversion, and that Mexico needed conversion. He asked Mexicans to turn their nation into “a land of opportunities, where there will be no need to emigrate in order to dream, no need to be exploited in order to work, no need to make the despair and poverty of many the opportunism of a few, a land that will not have to mourn men and women, young people and children who are destroyed at the hands of the dealers of death.”
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/15/world ... d=45305309
The Left on the Run in Latin America
In 2004, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, launched the Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our Americas, a regional alliance of leftist leaders designed to subvert a hemispheric free trade agreement that the United States had been pushing for a decade.
In the years that followed, Washington’s hope of a trade pact of 34 nations faded, and its clout in the region diminished as voters across much of Latin America put their faith in firebrand politicians who promised to spread the wealth of a commodities boom and topple old elites. The region’s exports to China increased 25-fold between 2000 and 2013, allowing Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and Bolivia to bankroll generous welfare and social programs that lifted millions from poverty.
But today, Latin America’s leftist ramparts appear to be crumbling because of widespread corruption, a slowdown in China’s economy and poor economic choices. For the most part, leaders failed to create diversified economies capable of withstanding slumps. The welfare and pension programs that kept voters loyal proved unsustainable. Leaders in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia flouted democratic traditions by expanding or eliminating term limits and co-opted independent institutions with networks of patronage.
The region is in its second year of economic contraction. As national treasuries have emptied, voters in Argentina, Bolivia and Venezuela have repudiated populist statesmen at the ballot box. Lawmakers in Brazil recently ousted President Dilma Rousseff to put her on trial for alleged financial trickery. In Venezuela, Mr. Chávez’s successor, President Nicolás Maduro, is fighting for political survival. In Ecuador, President Rafael Correa, a leftist, decided last year not to seek a fourth term as the country’s economic crisis worsened. Cuba, meanwhile, is attempting to build a constructive relationship with the United States.
The shifting political landscape has opened the door for a new generation of leaders to chart a different course for Latin America. That offers the United States an opportunity to jump-start its relationship with several neighbors that have historically regarded Washington as neglectful, imperial — or both.
New governments in Argentina and Brazil, for instance, are more open to expanding cooperation with the United States than they’ve been since the turn of the century. Although Washington is no longer eager to sign new trade deals — a lightning rod in the 2016 presidential race — it would be foolish not to seize on these possibilities.
The United States can help its neighbors become more competitive and stable by promoting investment in technology, innovation and high-quality education. It can point to the security turnaround of Colombia, which has one of the growing economies in the region, as evidence of the potential of sustained security partnerships. Washington can do more to help Central American and Caribbean nations find sustainable sources of energy, now that they can no longer count on subsidized oil from Venezuela. It also can support anticorruption initiatives that citizens around the hemisphere are clamoring for.
Yet, a brighter future for struggling Latin Americans cannot depend on the United States. Ultimately, that will require leaders who are accountable to their citizens, are willing to invest in long-term prosperity rather than their political brands and stand ready to acknowledge the colossal mistakes of their predecessors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/23/opini ... d=71987722
In 2004, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, launched the Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our Americas, a regional alliance of leftist leaders designed to subvert a hemispheric free trade agreement that the United States had been pushing for a decade.
In the years that followed, Washington’s hope of a trade pact of 34 nations faded, and its clout in the region diminished as voters across much of Latin America put their faith in firebrand politicians who promised to spread the wealth of a commodities boom and topple old elites. The region’s exports to China increased 25-fold between 2000 and 2013, allowing Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and Bolivia to bankroll generous welfare and social programs that lifted millions from poverty.
But today, Latin America’s leftist ramparts appear to be crumbling because of widespread corruption, a slowdown in China’s economy and poor economic choices. For the most part, leaders failed to create diversified economies capable of withstanding slumps. The welfare and pension programs that kept voters loyal proved unsustainable. Leaders in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia flouted democratic traditions by expanding or eliminating term limits and co-opted independent institutions with networks of patronage.
The region is in its second year of economic contraction. As national treasuries have emptied, voters in Argentina, Bolivia and Venezuela have repudiated populist statesmen at the ballot box. Lawmakers in Brazil recently ousted President Dilma Rousseff to put her on trial for alleged financial trickery. In Venezuela, Mr. Chávez’s successor, President Nicolás Maduro, is fighting for political survival. In Ecuador, President Rafael Correa, a leftist, decided last year not to seek a fourth term as the country’s economic crisis worsened. Cuba, meanwhile, is attempting to build a constructive relationship with the United States.
The shifting political landscape has opened the door for a new generation of leaders to chart a different course for Latin America. That offers the United States an opportunity to jump-start its relationship with several neighbors that have historically regarded Washington as neglectful, imperial — or both.
New governments in Argentina and Brazil, for instance, are more open to expanding cooperation with the United States than they’ve been since the turn of the century. Although Washington is no longer eager to sign new trade deals — a lightning rod in the 2016 presidential race — it would be foolish not to seize on these possibilities.
The United States can help its neighbors become more competitive and stable by promoting investment in technology, innovation and high-quality education. It can point to the security turnaround of Colombia, which has one of the growing economies in the region, as evidence of the potential of sustained security partnerships. Washington can do more to help Central American and Caribbean nations find sustainable sources of energy, now that they can no longer count on subsidized oil from Venezuela. It also can support anticorruption initiatives that citizens around the hemisphere are clamoring for.
Yet, a brighter future for struggling Latin Americans cannot depend on the United States. Ultimately, that will require leaders who are accountable to their citizens, are willing to invest in long-term prosperity rather than their political brands and stand ready to acknowledge the colossal mistakes of their predecessors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/23/opini ... d=71987722
Delay Pregnancy in Areas With Zika, W.H.O. Suggests
People living in areas where the Zika virus is circulating should consider delaying pregnancy to avoid having babies with birth defects, the World Health Organization has concluded.
The advice affects millions of couples in 46 countries across Latin America and the Caribbean where Zika transmission is occurring or expected. According to a recent study, more than five million babies are born each year in parts of the Western Hemisphere where the mosquitoes known to spread the virus are found.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/10/healt ... d=45305309
People living in areas where the Zika virus is circulating should consider delaying pregnancy to avoid having babies with birth defects, the World Health Organization has concluded.
The advice affects millions of couples in 46 countries across Latin America and the Caribbean where Zika transmission is occurring or expected. According to a recent study, more than five million babies are born each year in parts of the Western Hemisphere where the mosquitoes known to spread the virus are found.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/10/healt ... d=45305309
Brazilian Jihadist group becomes first in South America to pledge allegiance to Isis
A Brazilian Jihadist group has pledged allegiance to Isis just weeks before the Olympic Games are due to take place in Rio de Janeiro.
According to extremist monitoring group SITE Intelligence, a channel on the Telegram app called Ansar al-Khilafah #Brazil has posted a message of support for Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Portuguese and Spanish versions of Isis's Nashir Telegram channel have also been released for the first time.
It is believed to be the first pledge of allegiance to the group, also known as Daesh and Islamic State, to come from South America.
More...
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/bra ... lsignoutmd
A Brazilian Jihadist group has pledged allegiance to Isis just weeks before the Olympic Games are due to take place in Rio de Janeiro.
According to extremist monitoring group SITE Intelligence, a channel on the Telegram app called Ansar al-Khilafah #Brazil has posted a message of support for Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Portuguese and Spanish versions of Isis's Nashir Telegram channel have also been released for the first time.
It is believed to be the first pledge of allegiance to the group, also known as Daesh and Islamic State, to come from South America.
More...
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/bra ... lsignoutmd
‘There’s No Law on the Amazon’: River Pirates Terrorize Ships by Night
MACAPÁ, Brazil — The pirates of the Amazon River relish striking after nightfall.
Wearing balaclavas, 15 of the marauders stormed Merinaldo Paiva’s riverboat as dozens of his passengers dozed in their hammocks. Suddenly, they woke to find rifles pointed at their heads.
The gunmen took cash, jewelry, smartphones, fuel and even food, forcing everyone to lie facedown on the deck. Then they disappeared on speedboats into the Amazon, a waterway so vast that some in Brazil’s frontier call it the river-sea.
“Every riverboat captain knows they’re at the mercy of these bastards,” said the captain, Mr. Paiva, 41, who has been plying the rivers of Brazil’s rain forests since he was a teenager. “We’re lucky it wasn’t worse,” he added of the robbery in April, listing other attacks in which passengers had been raped, tortured or killed.
Piracy has long been a fact of life on the rivers of Brazil’s anarchic wilderness. But as the population in the Amazon surges and drug gangs expand their sway over the region, hijacking opportunities have flourished. And police forces are struggling to keep up with the crime, culminating in a series of recent attacks that have terrorized riverboat crews and their passengers.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/19/world ... d=71987722
MACAPÁ, Brazil — The pirates of the Amazon River relish striking after nightfall.
Wearing balaclavas, 15 of the marauders stormed Merinaldo Paiva’s riverboat as dozens of his passengers dozed in their hammocks. Suddenly, they woke to find rifles pointed at their heads.
The gunmen took cash, jewelry, smartphones, fuel and even food, forcing everyone to lie facedown on the deck. Then they disappeared on speedboats into the Amazon, a waterway so vast that some in Brazil’s frontier call it the river-sea.
“Every riverboat captain knows they’re at the mercy of these bastards,” said the captain, Mr. Paiva, 41, who has been plying the rivers of Brazil’s rain forests since he was a teenager. “We’re lucky it wasn’t worse,” he added of the robbery in April, listing other attacks in which passengers had been raped, tortured or killed.
Piracy has long been a fact of life on the rivers of Brazil’s anarchic wilderness. But as the population in the Amazon surges and drug gangs expand their sway over the region, hijacking opportunities have flourished. And police forces are struggling to keep up with the crime, culminating in a series of recent attacks that have terrorized riverboat crews and their passengers.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/19/world ... d=71987722
Latin America is set to become a leader in alternative energy
The power of the Andean sun
BESIDE the Pan-American Highway, almost 600km (375 miles) north of Santiago, Chile’s capital, lies El Romero, the largest solar-energy plant in Latin America and among the dozen biggest in the world. Its 775,000 grey solar panels spread out across the undulating plateau of the Atacama desert as if they were sheets of water. Built at a cost of $343m by Acciona Energía, a Spanish company, last month El Romero started to be hooked up to the national grid. By April it should reach full strength, generating 196MW of electricity—enough to power a city of a million people. A third of its output will be bought directly by Google’s Chilean subsidiary, and the rest fed into the grid.
El Romero is evidence of an energy revolution that is spreading across Latin America. The region already leads the world in clean energy. For almost seven months this year, Costa Rica ran purely on renewable power. Uruguay has come close to that, too. In 2014, the latest year for which comparable data exist, Latin America as a whole produced 53% of its electricity from renewable sources, compared with a world average of 22%, according to the International Energy Agency.
The region’s impressive clean-energy production is boosted by an abundance of hydropower. Big dams are increasingly controversial: in recent years, Brazil and Chile have blocked hydro-electric projects in environmentally sensitive areas. Alternative energy sources, such as wind, solar and geothermal, still only account for around 2% of Latin America’s output, compared with a world average of 6%. Nonetheless, there are several reasons to think this share will grow quickly.
One is the region’s natural endowment. El Romero, for example, enjoys 320 days of sunshine a year. On the horizon, amid the Andean mountaintops, sit two astronomical observatories, testament to the clarity of the air. Much of Latin America is well suited to solar and wind power; volcanic Central America and the Caribbean have geothermal potential.
Worldwide, technological progress and economies of scale have slashed the cost of green energy. Once built, solar plants are much cheaper than thermal power stations to operate. “El Romero is a symbol that alternative energy is no longer alternative. It’s the most commercial now,” says José Ignacio Escobar, Acciona Energía’s boss in Chile.
Countries such as Chile, Brazil, Mexico and recently Argentina have tweaked their regulations to encourage alternative energy without having to offer subsidies. Some have held auctions for generation contracts purely for renewables, points out Lisa Viscidi, an energy specialist at the Inter-American Dialogue, a think-tank in Washington. Chile’s regulatory framework is trusted by investors; it has encouraged renewable generation by auctioning smaller contracts. It has set a target of producing 20% of its electricity from non-hydro renewable sources by 2025. Argentina and Mexico have similar goals.
There are two pitfalls. In Chile, the penalty for failing to fulfil contracts is low, which means the winners of auctions may pull out later if they do not raise financing. Moreover, both solar and wind power are intermittent. That means they need to be paired with baseload generation. In many Latin American countries this tends to come from natural gas, which emits less carbon than oil, though in Chile it is coal. Greater efforts to connect grids between countries might reduce the need for fossil fuels as a backup.
Renewable energy offers big benefits to the region. Chile is short of domestic fossil fuels. As a result of its latest auction of energy contracts, by 2025 prices should be a third lower than they are now, reckons Andrés Velasco, a former finance minister. By promoting renewables, Latin America is helping to curb carbon emissions globally—though it also needs to do more to stop deforestation and encourage public transport.
That matters for political as well as altruistic reasons. Latin Americans worry more than anybody else about climate change, according to polling by the Pew Research Centre, a think-tank. They have good reason. The region is prone to natural disasters and extreme weather. To take one current example, Bolivia last month imposed water rationing in La Paz, the capital. The three reservoirs that serve the city are almost dry. Lake Poopó, once a large freshwater body in the altiplano, has all but dried up, seemingly permanently.
Outside Chile and Colombia, coal deposits are scarce in Latin America. That is one reason why industrialisation came late to the region. In the 21st century, it may turn out to be an advantage in helping Latin America move swiftly to a post-carbon economy.
http://www.economist.com/news/americas/ ... lydispatch
The power of the Andean sun
BESIDE the Pan-American Highway, almost 600km (375 miles) north of Santiago, Chile’s capital, lies El Romero, the largest solar-energy plant in Latin America and among the dozen biggest in the world. Its 775,000 grey solar panels spread out across the undulating plateau of the Atacama desert as if they were sheets of water. Built at a cost of $343m by Acciona Energía, a Spanish company, last month El Romero started to be hooked up to the national grid. By April it should reach full strength, generating 196MW of electricity—enough to power a city of a million people. A third of its output will be bought directly by Google’s Chilean subsidiary, and the rest fed into the grid.
El Romero is evidence of an energy revolution that is spreading across Latin America. The region already leads the world in clean energy. For almost seven months this year, Costa Rica ran purely on renewable power. Uruguay has come close to that, too. In 2014, the latest year for which comparable data exist, Latin America as a whole produced 53% of its electricity from renewable sources, compared with a world average of 22%, according to the International Energy Agency.
The region’s impressive clean-energy production is boosted by an abundance of hydropower. Big dams are increasingly controversial: in recent years, Brazil and Chile have blocked hydro-electric projects in environmentally sensitive areas. Alternative energy sources, such as wind, solar and geothermal, still only account for around 2% of Latin America’s output, compared with a world average of 6%. Nonetheless, there are several reasons to think this share will grow quickly.
One is the region’s natural endowment. El Romero, for example, enjoys 320 days of sunshine a year. On the horizon, amid the Andean mountaintops, sit two astronomical observatories, testament to the clarity of the air. Much of Latin America is well suited to solar and wind power; volcanic Central America and the Caribbean have geothermal potential.
Worldwide, technological progress and economies of scale have slashed the cost of green energy. Once built, solar plants are much cheaper than thermal power stations to operate. “El Romero is a symbol that alternative energy is no longer alternative. It’s the most commercial now,” says José Ignacio Escobar, Acciona Energía’s boss in Chile.
Countries such as Chile, Brazil, Mexico and recently Argentina have tweaked their regulations to encourage alternative energy without having to offer subsidies. Some have held auctions for generation contracts purely for renewables, points out Lisa Viscidi, an energy specialist at the Inter-American Dialogue, a think-tank in Washington. Chile’s regulatory framework is trusted by investors; it has encouraged renewable generation by auctioning smaller contracts. It has set a target of producing 20% of its electricity from non-hydro renewable sources by 2025. Argentina and Mexico have similar goals.
There are two pitfalls. In Chile, the penalty for failing to fulfil contracts is low, which means the winners of auctions may pull out later if they do not raise financing. Moreover, both solar and wind power are intermittent. That means they need to be paired with baseload generation. In many Latin American countries this tends to come from natural gas, which emits less carbon than oil, though in Chile it is coal. Greater efforts to connect grids between countries might reduce the need for fossil fuels as a backup.
Renewable energy offers big benefits to the region. Chile is short of domestic fossil fuels. As a result of its latest auction of energy contracts, by 2025 prices should be a third lower than they are now, reckons Andrés Velasco, a former finance minister. By promoting renewables, Latin America is helping to curb carbon emissions globally—though it also needs to do more to stop deforestation and encourage public transport.
That matters for political as well as altruistic reasons. Latin Americans worry more than anybody else about climate change, according to polling by the Pew Research Centre, a think-tank. They have good reason. The region is prone to natural disasters and extreme weather. To take one current example, Bolivia last month imposed water rationing in La Paz, the capital. The three reservoirs that serve the city are almost dry. Lake Poopó, once a large freshwater body in the altiplano, has all but dried up, seemingly permanently.
Outside Chile and Colombia, coal deposits are scarce in Latin America. That is one reason why industrialisation came late to the region. In the 21st century, it may turn out to be an advantage in helping Latin America move swiftly to a post-carbon economy.
http://www.economist.com/news/americas/ ... lydispatch
A ‘Stonehenge,’ and a Mystery, in the Amazon
CALÇOENE, Brazil — As the foreman for a cattle ranch in the far reaches of the Brazilian Amazon, Lailson Camelo da Silva was razing trees to convert rain forest into pasture when he stumbled across a bizarre arrangement of towering granite blocks.
“I had no idea that I was discovering the Amazon’s own Stonehenge,” said Mr. da Silva, 65, on a scorching October day as he gazed at the archaeological site located just north of the Equator. “It makes me wonder: What other secrets about our past are still hidden in Brazil’s jungles?”
After conducting radiocarbon testing and carrying out measurements during the winter solstice, scholars in the field of archaeoastronomy determined that an indigenous culture arranged the megaliths into an astronomical observatory about 1,000 years ago, or five centuries before the European conquest of the Americas began.
Their findings, along with other archaeological discoveries in Brazil in recent years — including giant land carvings, remains of fortified settlements and even complex road networks — are upending earlier views of archaeologists who argued that the Amazon had been relatively untouched by humans except for small, nomadic tribes.
Instead, some scholars now assert that the world’s largest tropical rain forest was far less “Edenic” than previously imagined, and that the Amazon supported a population of as many as 10 million people before the epidemics and large-scale slaughter put into motion by European colonizers.
Photos and more...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/world ... d=45305309
CALÇOENE, Brazil — As the foreman for a cattle ranch in the far reaches of the Brazilian Amazon, Lailson Camelo da Silva was razing trees to convert rain forest into pasture when he stumbled across a bizarre arrangement of towering granite blocks.
“I had no idea that I was discovering the Amazon’s own Stonehenge,” said Mr. da Silva, 65, on a scorching October day as he gazed at the archaeological site located just north of the Equator. “It makes me wonder: What other secrets about our past are still hidden in Brazil’s jungles?”
After conducting radiocarbon testing and carrying out measurements during the winter solstice, scholars in the field of archaeoastronomy determined that an indigenous culture arranged the megaliths into an astronomical observatory about 1,000 years ago, or five centuries before the European conquest of the Americas began.
Their findings, along with other archaeological discoveries in Brazil in recent years — including giant land carvings, remains of fortified settlements and even complex road networks — are upending earlier views of archaeologists who argued that the Amazon had been relatively untouched by humans except for small, nomadic tribes.
Instead, some scholars now assert that the world’s largest tropical rain forest was far less “Edenic” than previously imagined, and that the Amazon supported a population of as many as 10 million people before the epidemics and large-scale slaughter put into motion by European colonizers.
Photos and more...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/world ... d=45305309
Argentina’s Trump-Like Immigration Order Rattles South America
BUENOS AIRES — Argentina is so used to celebrating immigration as a cornerstone of society that a 19th-century saying — to govern is to populate — remains in use to this day.
But in an abrupt shift coinciding with the immigration restrictions put in place by the Trump administration, President Mauricio Macri has issued a decree curbing immigration to Argentina, with his government declaring that newcomers from poorer countries in Latin America bring crime.
The measures announced by Mr. Macri in recent days made it much easier to deport immigrants and restrict their entry, prompting irate comparisons to President Trump and igniting a fierce debate over immigration.
“A decree like this scares people,” said Arfang Diedhiou, 33, a Senegalese immigrant who runs his own clothing store here in the capital, Buenos Aires. “It came out just after what Trump did, a coincidence that seems very strange to me.”
More...
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/arg ... ailsignout
BUENOS AIRES — Argentina is so used to celebrating immigration as a cornerstone of society that a 19th-century saying — to govern is to populate — remains in use to this day.
But in an abrupt shift coinciding with the immigration restrictions put in place by the Trump administration, President Mauricio Macri has issued a decree curbing immigration to Argentina, with his government declaring that newcomers from poorer countries in Latin America bring crime.
The measures announced by Mr. Macri in recent days made it much easier to deport immigrants and restrict their entry, prompting irate comparisons to President Trump and igniting a fierce debate over immigration.
“A decree like this scares people,” said Arfang Diedhiou, 33, a Senegalese immigrant who runs his own clothing store here in the capital, Buenos Aires. “It came out just after what Trump did, a coincidence that seems very strange to me.”
More...
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/arg ... ailsignout
Chile’s Energy Transformation Is Powered by Wind, Sun and Volcanoes
CERRO PABELLÓN, Chile — It looks and functions much like an oil drilling rig. As it happens, several of the men in thick blue overalls and white helmets who operate the hulking machine once made a living pumping crude.
But now they are surrounded by snowcapped volcanoes, laboring to breathe up here at 14,760 feet above sea level as they draw steam from the earth at South America’s first geothermal energy plant.
With the ability to power roughly 165,000 homes, the new plant is yet another step in Chile’s clean energy transformation. This nation’s rapidly expanding clean energy grid, which includes vast solar fields and wind farms, is one of the most ambitious in a region that is decisively moving beyond fossil fuels.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/12/worl ... d=45305309
CERRO PABELLÓN, Chile — It looks and functions much like an oil drilling rig. As it happens, several of the men in thick blue overalls and white helmets who operate the hulking machine once made a living pumping crude.
But now they are surrounded by snowcapped volcanoes, laboring to breathe up here at 14,760 feet above sea level as they draw steam from the earth at South America’s first geothermal energy plant.
With the ability to power roughly 165,000 homes, the new plant is yet another step in Chile’s clean energy transformation. This nation’s rapidly expanding clean energy grid, which includes vast solar fields and wind farms, is one of the most ambitious in a region that is decisively moving beyond fossil fuels.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/12/worl ... d=45305309
Chileans will be a tough crowd for Pope Francis
Can a papal visit bring them back to the fold?
Excerpt:
The Catholic church has been losing adherents across Latin America. But in other countries people are shifting mainly to evangelical churches. The same trend is visible among poorer and less educated Chileans. What marks Chile out is the behaviour of its richer and better-educated youngsters. Elsewhere in the region, they are staying with Catholicism; in Chile they are abandoning faith altogether. “There is an advanced and fairly rapid process of secularisation” in Chile, says Ignacio Irarrázaval of the Centre for Public Policy.
In part this is because Chile is the region’s richest country, and its most open economy. That has facilitated the spread of social trends from outside Latin America. It is also because of revelations about the sexual abuse of children by priests. The Latinobarómetro poll suggests that criminal cases filed against Fernando Karadima, the priest in charge of El Bosque, an upmarket parish in Santiago, triggered an exodus from the church. They came to public notice in 2010. Father Karadima had close connections to Chile’s elite, raising suspicions that powerful patrons had allowed him to act with impunity for many years. Francis’s appointment of Juan Barros, an associate of the disgraced priest, as bishop of the diocese of Osorno was seen by many Chileans as a disastrous mistake.
Trust in the Catholic church is now lower in Chile than in any other Latin American country, says Marta Lagos of Latinobarómetro. And the share of Chileans who say they have no religious belief is similar to that in Uruguay, which has a longer history of secularisation.
The church is also increasingly out of step with Chileans on matters of sexual morality. It campaigned against divorce, which became legal in 2004, and against last year’s relaxation of the strict abortion law. Church leaders seem more concerned by such matters than by injustice and inequality, says Fernando Montes, a Jesuit priest and former rector of Alberto Hurtado University in Santiago.
Some Catholics hope that young people will find Francis’s environmentalism, modest lifestyle and open manner attractive. His agenda emphasises matters of social justice. It includes a visit to a women’s prison, a meeting with a group of Mapuche, Chile’s most numerous indigenous people, and a celebration of immigrants.
More..
https://www.economist.com/news/americas ... lydispatch
Can a papal visit bring them back to the fold?
Excerpt:
The Catholic church has been losing adherents across Latin America. But in other countries people are shifting mainly to evangelical churches. The same trend is visible among poorer and less educated Chileans. What marks Chile out is the behaviour of its richer and better-educated youngsters. Elsewhere in the region, they are staying with Catholicism; in Chile they are abandoning faith altogether. “There is an advanced and fairly rapid process of secularisation” in Chile, says Ignacio Irarrázaval of the Centre for Public Policy.
In part this is because Chile is the region’s richest country, and its most open economy. That has facilitated the spread of social trends from outside Latin America. It is also because of revelations about the sexual abuse of children by priests. The Latinobarómetro poll suggests that criminal cases filed against Fernando Karadima, the priest in charge of El Bosque, an upmarket parish in Santiago, triggered an exodus from the church. They came to public notice in 2010. Father Karadima had close connections to Chile’s elite, raising suspicions that powerful patrons had allowed him to act with impunity for many years. Francis’s appointment of Juan Barros, an associate of the disgraced priest, as bishop of the diocese of Osorno was seen by many Chileans as a disastrous mistake.
Trust in the Catholic church is now lower in Chile than in any other Latin American country, says Marta Lagos of Latinobarómetro. And the share of Chileans who say they have no religious belief is similar to that in Uruguay, which has a longer history of secularisation.
The church is also increasingly out of step with Chileans on matters of sexual morality. It campaigned against divorce, which became legal in 2004, and against last year’s relaxation of the strict abortion law. Church leaders seem more concerned by such matters than by injustice and inequality, says Fernando Montes, a Jesuit priest and former rector of Alberto Hurtado University in Santiago.
Some Catholics hope that young people will find Francis’s environmentalism, modest lifestyle and open manner attractive. His agenda emphasises matters of social justice. It includes a visit to a women’s prison, a meeting with a group of Mapuche, Chile’s most numerous indigenous people, and a celebration of immigrants.
More..
https://www.economist.com/news/americas ... lydispatch
HIKING A 110-MILE JUNGLE TRAIL — ENTIRELY WITHIN RIO
Brazil’s longest hiking trail is 110 miles through Atlantic rainforest along the coast, stopping off at white sand beaches, waterfalls and panoramic viewpoints, where monkeys, toucans and parrots abound. Where is this tropical hiker’s paradise? It’s 100 percent within Rio de Janeiro city limits — a metropolis with more than 7 million people.
The newly inaugurated Transcarioca Trail (Rio locals are known as Cariocas) links seven Rio de Janeiro parks from the city’s eastern to western corners, forming one of the most extensive urban hiking experiences on the planet. The trail uses several of Rio’s famous pre-existing trails — like the trail up Corcovado Mountain to Rio’s iconic Christ the Redeemer statue — and connects with newly forged trails that spread far beyond the tourist zone and into the city’s outskirts.
There’s a lot to draw you to Rio, but for me, even after nearly five years here, I’ll never get over the awe of this urban center built within the kind of tropical paradise usually reserved for five-star resorts on remote islands — filled with jungle, gorgeous beaches and dramatic granite mountains that jut up from the sea. The Transcarioca allows you to explore so many corners of the world’s largest urban rainforest without leaving the city.
More...
http://www.ozy.com/good-sht/hiking-a-11 ... e63f4fd013
Brazil’s longest hiking trail is 110 miles through Atlantic rainforest along the coast, stopping off at white sand beaches, waterfalls and panoramic viewpoints, where monkeys, toucans and parrots abound. Where is this tropical hiker’s paradise? It’s 100 percent within Rio de Janeiro city limits — a metropolis with more than 7 million people.
The newly inaugurated Transcarioca Trail (Rio locals are known as Cariocas) links seven Rio de Janeiro parks from the city’s eastern to western corners, forming one of the most extensive urban hiking experiences on the planet. The trail uses several of Rio’s famous pre-existing trails — like the trail up Corcovado Mountain to Rio’s iconic Christ the Redeemer statue — and connects with newly forged trails that spread far beyond the tourist zone and into the city’s outskirts.
There’s a lot to draw you to Rio, but for me, even after nearly five years here, I’ll never get over the awe of this urban center built within the kind of tropical paradise usually reserved for five-star resorts on remote islands — filled with jungle, gorgeous beaches and dramatic granite mountains that jut up from the sea. The Transcarioca allows you to explore so many corners of the world’s largest urban rainforest without leaving the city.
More...
http://www.ozy.com/good-sht/hiking-a-11 ... e63f4fd013
A Perfect Marriage: Evangelicals and Conservatives in Latin America
AMHERST, Mass. — Evangelical churches today can be found in almost every neighborhood in Latin America — and they are transforming politics like no other force. They are giving conservative causes, and especially political parties, new strength and new constituencies.
In Latin America, Christianity used to be associated with Roman Catholicism. The church held a near monopoly on religion until the 1980s. The only challenge to Catholicism was anticlericalism and atheism. There has never been another religion. Until now.
Evangelicals today account for almost 20 percent of the population in Latin America, up from 3 percent three decades ago. In a few Central American countries, evangelicals are near majorities.
Evangelical pastors embrace varied ideologies, but when it comes to gender and sexuality, their values are typically conservative, patriarchal and homophobic. They expect women to be completely submissive to their evangelical husbands. And in every country in the region, they have taken the strongest stands against gay rights.
The rise of evangelicalism is politically worrisome. Evangelicals are fueling a new form of populism. They are supplying conservative parties with nonelite voters, which is good for democracy, but these voters tend to be intransigent on issues of sexuality, which feeds cultural polarization. Intolerant inclusion, which is the classic Latin American populist formula, is being reinvented by evangelical pastors.
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/17/opin ... dline&te=1
AMHERST, Mass. — Evangelical churches today can be found in almost every neighborhood in Latin America — and they are transforming politics like no other force. They are giving conservative causes, and especially political parties, new strength and new constituencies.
In Latin America, Christianity used to be associated with Roman Catholicism. The church held a near monopoly on religion until the 1980s. The only challenge to Catholicism was anticlericalism and atheism. There has never been another religion. Until now.
Evangelicals today account for almost 20 percent of the population in Latin America, up from 3 percent three decades ago. In a few Central American countries, evangelicals are near majorities.
Evangelical pastors embrace varied ideologies, but when it comes to gender and sexuality, their values are typically conservative, patriarchal and homophobic. They expect women to be completely submissive to their evangelical husbands. And in every country in the region, they have taken the strongest stands against gay rights.
The rise of evangelicalism is politically worrisome. Evangelicals are fueling a new form of populism. They are supplying conservative parties with nonelite voters, which is good for democracy, but these voters tend to be intransigent on issues of sexuality, which feeds cultural polarization. Intolerant inclusion, which is the classic Latin American populist formula, is being reinvented by evangelical pastors.
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/17/opin ... dline&te=1
Lasers Reveal a Maya Civilization So Dense It Blew Experts’ Minds
They were hidden there, all this time, under the cover of tree canopies in the jungles of northern Guatemala: tens of thousands of structures built by the Maya over a millennium ago.
Not far from the sites tourists already know, like the towering temples of the ancient city of Tikal, laser technology has uncovered about 60,000 homes, palaces, tombs and even highways in the humid lowlands.
The findings suggested an ancient society of such density and interconnectedness that even the most experienced archaeologists were surprised.
“Everywhere that we looked, there was more settlement than we expected,” said Thomas Garrison, a National Geographic explorer and an archaeologist at Ithaca College. “We knew there was going to be more, but the scale of it really blew our minds.”
Researchers found the structures by shooting lasers down from planes to pierce the thick foliage and paint a 3-D picture of the ground below. The technology is called Light Detection and Ranging, or lidar.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/03/worl ... d=45305309
They were hidden there, all this time, under the cover of tree canopies in the jungles of northern Guatemala: tens of thousands of structures built by the Maya over a millennium ago.
Not far from the sites tourists already know, like the towering temples of the ancient city of Tikal, laser technology has uncovered about 60,000 homes, palaces, tombs and even highways in the humid lowlands.
The findings suggested an ancient society of such density and interconnectedness that even the most experienced archaeologists were surprised.
“Everywhere that we looked, there was more settlement than we expected,” said Thomas Garrison, a National Geographic explorer and an archaeologist at Ithaca College. “We knew there was going to be more, but the scale of it really blew our minds.”
Researchers found the structures by shooting lasers down from planes to pierce the thick foliage and paint a 3-D picture of the ground below. The technology is called Light Detection and Ranging, or lidar.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/03/worl ... d=45305309
The City at the Center of the Cosmos
Robots and lasers are uncovering an ancient, sacred geography.
Some 48 kilometers north of Mexico City, in the Basin of Mexico, towers the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán. This massive 71-meter high structure makes you feel like a speck of dust in the presence of the gods. And that is exactly what the builders intended. Those who dwelt at Teotihuacán lived at the heart of a vast sacred landscape. The city itself covered more than 21 square kilometers, and it dominated the basin and the surrounding highlands. By 100 A.D., at least 80,000 people lived there. And between 200 and 750 A.D., Teotihuacán’s population swelled to more than 150,000. At the time, it was as big as all but the largest cities of China and the Middle East.
Archaeologists have worked there for nearly a century. They’ve learned that Teotihuacán was a vast symbolic landscape of artificial mountains, foothills, caves, and open spaces that replicated the spiritual world. Over a period of more than eight centuries, the Teotihuacános built 600 pyramids, 500 workshop areas, a huge marketplace, 2,000 apartment complexes, and several squares or plazas.
At some point, the city’s rulers decided to rebuild much of the city. They constructed standardized, walled residential compounds, probably to replace crowded urban areas. Some of these housed artisans and their workshops. Others were military quarters. Foreigners from the Valley of Oaxaca and lowland Veracruz on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico lived in their own neighborhoods, which are identified by distinctive pottery styles.
Everything followed a grid plan, with the streets all running at right angles to one another. Bisecting the city in a north–south direction was a wide avenue, known ever since the Spanish Conquest as the Avenue of the Dead.
The great Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon dominate the avenue’s north end. Between 150 and 325 A.D., the city’s rulers remodeled the Pyramid of the Sun into its present form, enlarged the Pyramid of the Moon and extended the Avenue of the Dead more than a mile southward to include the Ciudadela—the city’s new political and religious center. Until recently, not much was known about this impressive structure. Then in 2003, the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City embarked on an ambitious, long-term program to investigate and preserve the Ciudadela temples. The project continues to this day, and in recent years there have been some spectacular discoveries.
More...
http://nautil.us/issue/57/communities/t ... 0-60760513
Robots and lasers are uncovering an ancient, sacred geography.
Some 48 kilometers north of Mexico City, in the Basin of Mexico, towers the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán. This massive 71-meter high structure makes you feel like a speck of dust in the presence of the gods. And that is exactly what the builders intended. Those who dwelt at Teotihuacán lived at the heart of a vast sacred landscape. The city itself covered more than 21 square kilometers, and it dominated the basin and the surrounding highlands. By 100 A.D., at least 80,000 people lived there. And between 200 and 750 A.D., Teotihuacán’s population swelled to more than 150,000. At the time, it was as big as all but the largest cities of China and the Middle East.
Archaeologists have worked there for nearly a century. They’ve learned that Teotihuacán was a vast symbolic landscape of artificial mountains, foothills, caves, and open spaces that replicated the spiritual world. Over a period of more than eight centuries, the Teotihuacános built 600 pyramids, 500 workshop areas, a huge marketplace, 2,000 apartment complexes, and several squares or plazas.
At some point, the city’s rulers decided to rebuild much of the city. They constructed standardized, walled residential compounds, probably to replace crowded urban areas. Some of these housed artisans and their workshops. Others were military quarters. Foreigners from the Valley of Oaxaca and lowland Veracruz on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico lived in their own neighborhoods, which are identified by distinctive pottery styles.
Everything followed a grid plan, with the streets all running at right angles to one another. Bisecting the city in a north–south direction was a wide avenue, known ever since the Spanish Conquest as the Avenue of the Dead.
The great Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon dominate the avenue’s north end. Between 150 and 325 A.D., the city’s rulers remodeled the Pyramid of the Sun into its present form, enlarged the Pyramid of the Moon and extended the Avenue of the Dead more than a mile southward to include the Ciudadela—the city’s new political and religious center. Until recently, not much was known about this impressive structure. Then in 2003, the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City embarked on an ambitious, long-term program to investigate and preserve the Ciudadela temples. The project continues to this day, and in recent years there have been some spectacular discoveries.
More...
http://nautil.us/issue/57/communities/t ... 0-60760513
Massive Ancient Drawings Found in Peruvian Desert
Etched into the high desert of southern Peru more than a millennium ago, the enigmatic Nasca lines continue to capture our imagination. More than a thousand of these geoglyphs (literally, 'ground drawings') sprawl across the sandy soil of Nasca province, the remains of little-understood ritual practices that may have been connected to life-giving rain.
Now, Peruvian archaeologists armed with drones have discovered more than 50 new examples of these mysterious desert monuments in adjacent Palpa province, traced onto the earth's surface in lines almost too fine to see with the human eye. In addition, archaeologists surveyed locally known geoglyphs with drones for the first time—mapping them in never-before-seen detail.
Some of the newfound lines belong to the Nasca culture, which held sway in the area from 200 to 700 A.D. However, archaeologists suspect that the earlier Paracas and Topará cultures carved many of the newfound images between 500 B.C. and 200 A.D.
Unlike the iconic Nasca lines—most of which are only visible from overhead—the older Paracas glyphs were laid down on hillsides, making them visible to villages below. The two cultures also pursued different artistic subjects: Nasca lines most often consist of lines or polygons, but many of the newfound Paracas figures depict humans.
More...
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/ma ... ailsignout
Etched into the high desert of southern Peru more than a millennium ago, the enigmatic Nasca lines continue to capture our imagination. More than a thousand of these geoglyphs (literally, 'ground drawings') sprawl across the sandy soil of Nasca province, the remains of little-understood ritual practices that may have been connected to life-giving rain.
Now, Peruvian archaeologists armed with drones have discovered more than 50 new examples of these mysterious desert monuments in adjacent Palpa province, traced onto the earth's surface in lines almost too fine to see with the human eye. In addition, archaeologists surveyed locally known geoglyphs with drones for the first time—mapping them in never-before-seen detail.
Some of the newfound lines belong to the Nasca culture, which held sway in the area from 200 to 700 A.D. However, archaeologists suspect that the earlier Paracas and Topará cultures carved many of the newfound images between 500 B.C. and 200 A.D.
Unlike the iconic Nasca lines—most of which are only visible from overhead—the older Paracas glyphs were laid down on hillsides, making them visible to villages below. The two cultures also pursued different artistic subjects: Nasca lines most often consist of lines or polygons, but many of the newfound Paracas figures depict humans.
More...
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/ma ... ailsignout
China Fills Trump’s Empty Seat at Latin America Summit
Excerpt:
The Santa Cruz project is just one of the $141 billion in loan commitments China made to Latin America from 2005 to 2016. China’s lending now surpasses lending from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank.
But China, unlike those agencies, isn’t putting short-term conditions on those loans or pushing for austerity measures. Instead, its interest in Latin America is part of a long strategic game, an effort to assert its influence around the world, quench its need for raw materials and control the flow of global trade through Chinese-funded transportation hubs.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/13/opin ... 3053090414
Excerpt:
The Santa Cruz project is just one of the $141 billion in loan commitments China made to Latin America from 2005 to 2016. China’s lending now surpasses lending from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank.
But China, unlike those agencies, isn’t putting short-term conditions on those loans or pushing for austerity measures. Instead, its interest in Latin America is part of a long strategic game, an effort to assert its influence around the world, quench its need for raw materials and control the flow of global trade through Chinese-funded transportation hubs.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/13/opin ... 3053090414
El Salvador’s violent gang members are finding God in prison
Gangs terrorise El Salvador, making it one of the deadliest places on earth. Leaving is not easy—former members face rejection from society and the threat of violence from gangs and the police. Can religion provide a way out?
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7deancj ... m=20180524
Gangs terrorise El Salvador, making it one of the deadliest places on earth. Leaving is not easy—former members face rejection from society and the threat of violence from gangs and the police. Can religion provide a way out?
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7deancj ... m=20180524
Of Demagogues and Pedagogues
Colombia demonstrates the value of the political center.
Last week I interviewed Colombian President Iván Duque, who took office in August and calls himself a man of the “extreme center.” In an era of rising populism, I asked, how should politicians make the case for reviving or strengthening centrist-style politics?
“When you see a populist,” Duque answered, “you always see a demagogue. Societies no longer need demagogues; they need pedagogues — people that can tell a country, ‘Where is it that we want to go, how is it that we want to make it happen, and what is it that everybody has to put in the basket to achieve those goals?’ ”
Colombians have something to teach the rest of us about the need to preserve a vital political center. Long before cocaine wars and guerrilla insurgencies nearly destroyed Colombia in the 1980s and ’90s, some 200,000 people perished in a civil war in the 1940s through the ’60s because the country’s liberals and conservatives couldn’t settle their ideological differences peacefully.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/05/opin ... 3053091006
Colombia demonstrates the value of the political center.
Last week I interviewed Colombian President Iván Duque, who took office in August and calls himself a man of the “extreme center.” In an era of rising populism, I asked, how should politicians make the case for reviving or strengthening centrist-style politics?
“When you see a populist,” Duque answered, “you always see a demagogue. Societies no longer need demagogues; they need pedagogues — people that can tell a country, ‘Where is it that we want to go, how is it that we want to make it happen, and what is it that everybody has to put in the basket to achieve those goals?’ ”
Colombians have something to teach the rest of us about the need to preserve a vital political center. Long before cocaine wars and guerrilla insurgencies nearly destroyed Colombia in the 1980s and ’90s, some 200,000 people perished in a civil war in the 1940s through the ’60s because the country’s liberals and conservatives couldn’t settle their ideological differences peacefully.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/05/opin ... 3053091006
‘It’s an Exodus’
What the people making their way to the United States tell us about the crises in Latin America.
CIUDAD HIDALGO, Mexico — The long line of men and women waded into the muddy waters of the Suchiate River. Holding onto a rope, they pulled themselves over the invisible line dividing Guatemala and Mexico. Others crossed with their babies and young children on crowded rafts built with tires.
I watched this flood of humanity on Oct. 20, and by the time the sun set, thousands had made it over the border to continue the march northward. Even more crossed in the following days, reinforcing the caravan of the desperate and determined that is shaking governments from Honduras to Washington.
Donald Trump has used the caravan — a group of thousands of Central Americans who’ve joined together to make their way toward Mexico and the United States and escape violence and desperate poverty — as a political tool. “I think the Democrats had something to do with it,” he said Monday, calling it “an assault on our country” that includes “some very bad people.”
He’s claimed “Middle Easterners” are in the group, while admitting there is no proof of this. Jim Mattis, the defense secretary, announced Thursday that he would send at least 800 troops to the southern border to block the migrants, which would prevent them from seeking asylum.
The migrant caravan is more than fodder for misleading claims and overreactions, and more than a tool to stoke voters’ fears just before midterm elections. It’s a blaring reminder that Latin America is suffering a prolonged refugee crisis that demands solutions.
The vast majority are from Honduras, although some Salvadorans, Nicaraguans and Guatemalans have joined them. Since the caravan first formed in the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula on Oct. 13, it has grown from hundreds to thousands. Its scale reflects how much Hondurans are suffering from incessant violence, political turmoil and brutal poverty.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/opin ... 3053091027
What the people making their way to the United States tell us about the crises in Latin America.
CIUDAD HIDALGO, Mexico — The long line of men and women waded into the muddy waters of the Suchiate River. Holding onto a rope, they pulled themselves over the invisible line dividing Guatemala and Mexico. Others crossed with their babies and young children on crowded rafts built with tires.
I watched this flood of humanity on Oct. 20, and by the time the sun set, thousands had made it over the border to continue the march northward. Even more crossed in the following days, reinforcing the caravan of the desperate and determined that is shaking governments from Honduras to Washington.
Donald Trump has used the caravan — a group of thousands of Central Americans who’ve joined together to make their way toward Mexico and the United States and escape violence and desperate poverty — as a political tool. “I think the Democrats had something to do with it,” he said Monday, calling it “an assault on our country” that includes “some very bad people.”
He’s claimed “Middle Easterners” are in the group, while admitting there is no proof of this. Jim Mattis, the defense secretary, announced Thursday that he would send at least 800 troops to the southern border to block the migrants, which would prevent them from seeking asylum.
The migrant caravan is more than fodder for misleading claims and overreactions, and more than a tool to stoke voters’ fears just before midterm elections. It’s a blaring reminder that Latin America is suffering a prolonged refugee crisis that demands solutions.
The vast majority are from Honduras, although some Salvadorans, Nicaraguans and Guatemalans have joined them. Since the caravan first formed in the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula on Oct. 13, it has grown from hundreds to thousands. Its scale reflects how much Hondurans are suffering from incessant violence, political turmoil and brutal poverty.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/opin ... 3053091027
Virgin of Guadalupe Is ‘No. 1 Mother’ in Mexico, a Binding Force Across Divides
It is hard to overstate the singular importance of the Virgin of Guadalupe to the Mexican identity. Nowhere is the country’s devotion more apparent than at a yearly pilgrimage.
Excerpt:
Over the course of several days this month, an estimated nine million people visited the basilica, with some seven million of them filing through the building between Tuesday and Wednesday, to celebrate what believers say was the appearance of the Virgin Mary before an indigenous Mexican peasant named Juan Diego in 1531.
It is hard to overstate the singular importance of the Virgin of Guadalupe to the Mexican identity.
She serves as a binding force that transcends the country’s varied and dramatic sociodemographic divisions, and her image is ubiquitous — in portraits hanging on the walls of homes; in small shrines found in shops, gas stations and parking lots; and on objects as varied as kitchenware, jewelry, lamps, satchels, refrigerator magnets and bottle openers.
“She’s everywhere,” said Davíd Carrasco, a professor of Latin American studies at Harvard Divinity School. “She’s everybody’s mother in Mexico. My daughter calls her ‘the No. 1 Mother.’ ”
And even as Latin Americans have defected in enormous numbers from Catholicism to evangelical congregations, the deep devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe, also known as Our Lady of Guadalupe, has helped to slow this tendency in Mexico and throughout the Mexican migrant diaspora.
More and photos:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/worl ... 3053091216
It is hard to overstate the singular importance of the Virgin of Guadalupe to the Mexican identity. Nowhere is the country’s devotion more apparent than at a yearly pilgrimage.
Excerpt:
Over the course of several days this month, an estimated nine million people visited the basilica, with some seven million of them filing through the building between Tuesday and Wednesday, to celebrate what believers say was the appearance of the Virgin Mary before an indigenous Mexican peasant named Juan Diego in 1531.
It is hard to overstate the singular importance of the Virgin of Guadalupe to the Mexican identity.
She serves as a binding force that transcends the country’s varied and dramatic sociodemographic divisions, and her image is ubiquitous — in portraits hanging on the walls of homes; in small shrines found in shops, gas stations and parking lots; and on objects as varied as kitchenware, jewelry, lamps, satchels, refrigerator magnets and bottle openers.
“She’s everywhere,” said Davíd Carrasco, a professor of Latin American studies at Harvard Divinity School. “She’s everybody’s mother in Mexico. My daughter calls her ‘the No. 1 Mother.’ ”
And even as Latin Americans have defected in enormous numbers from Catholicism to evangelical congregations, the deep devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe, also known as Our Lady of Guadalupe, has helped to slow this tendency in Mexico and throughout the Mexican migrant diaspora.
More and photos:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/worl ... 3053091216
Latin America is losing its battle against teen pregnancy
Why rates of early motherhood are so high
Excerpt:
Almost a third of Latin American women can expect to have a baby before reaching the age of 20. That is a higher rate of teen motherhood than in any region except sub-Saharan Africa, which is much poorer. Latin America has an unusually high birth rate among teens, defined as births per 1,000 women aged 15-19, for its overall level of fertility (see chart). East Asia, which has fertility rates and incomes per person similar to Latin America’s, has much lower rates of teen childbearing. Latin America is the only region where births among girls younger than 15 have been rising. In Ecuador, the birth rate among under-15s tripled between 1990 and 2012.
The region’s governments have started to realise that this is a problem. Most have adopted national plans over the past decade or so to reduce teen pregnancy. Progress, so far, has been slow. Last year three un agencies, including the Pan American Health Organisation, observed that “adolescent fertility rates have dropped minimally” over the past 30 years.
Premature motherhood is bad for mothers, babies and countries. Maternal mortality for girls under 16 is four times that of women in their 20s. Young mothers are less likely than older ones to seek prenatal care. That omission increases the chance that a child will have a low birth weight and learning problems later on. Latin American women marry later than do women in Africa and South Asia; thus, teen mothers are disproportionately likely to be single mothers. In Mexico, where the median age of marriage for women is 27, nearly a quarter of mothers aged 15-19 are single.
Teen childbearing derails mothers’ careers. A study from Brazil showed that it reduces women’s participation in the labour force. Often, it is the grandmother who stops paid work to take care of her daughters’ kids. In the Dominican Republic, adolescent girls who have had babies have two years’ less schooling on average than those who have not. They are less than half as likely to attend university.
More....
https://www.economist.com/the-americas/ ... m=20190219
Why rates of early motherhood are so high
Excerpt:
Almost a third of Latin American women can expect to have a baby before reaching the age of 20. That is a higher rate of teen motherhood than in any region except sub-Saharan Africa, which is much poorer. Latin America has an unusually high birth rate among teens, defined as births per 1,000 women aged 15-19, for its overall level of fertility (see chart). East Asia, which has fertility rates and incomes per person similar to Latin America’s, has much lower rates of teen childbearing. Latin America is the only region where births among girls younger than 15 have been rising. In Ecuador, the birth rate among under-15s tripled between 1990 and 2012.
The region’s governments have started to realise that this is a problem. Most have adopted national plans over the past decade or so to reduce teen pregnancy. Progress, so far, has been slow. Last year three un agencies, including the Pan American Health Organisation, observed that “adolescent fertility rates have dropped minimally” over the past 30 years.
Premature motherhood is bad for mothers, babies and countries. Maternal mortality for girls under 16 is four times that of women in their 20s. Young mothers are less likely than older ones to seek prenatal care. That omission increases the chance that a child will have a low birth weight and learning problems later on. Latin American women marry later than do women in Africa and South Asia; thus, teen mothers are disproportionately likely to be single mothers. In Mexico, where the median age of marriage for women is 27, nearly a quarter of mothers aged 15-19 are single.
Teen childbearing derails mothers’ careers. A study from Brazil showed that it reduces women’s participation in the labour force. Often, it is the grandmother who stops paid work to take care of her daughters’ kids. In the Dominican Republic, adolescent girls who have had babies have two years’ less schooling on average than those who have not. They are less than half as likely to attend university.
More....
https://www.economist.com/the-americas/ ... m=20190219
Latin America Claims to Love Its Mothers. Why Does It Abuse Them?
How the region became home to an epidemic of obstetric violence.
Excerpt:
But if Ms. de Goes’s case was especially notorious, it was also far from exceptional. According to a 2010 survey, one in every four Brazilian women has suffered mistreatment during labor. Many of them were denied pain relief or weren’t informed about a procedure that was being done to them. Twenty-three percent were verbally abused by a health professional; one of the most common insults was “Na hora de fazer não chorou” (“You didn’t cry like that when making the baby”).
Another survey found that, in 2011, 75 percent of women in labor in hospitals were not provided water and food (last year, I became one of them), although this practice is not supported by scientific evidence. The World Health Organization recommends that low-risk women in labor eat or drink as they wish.
But some doctors are unaware of the concept of “wish” as it relates to women. Faced with a patient who refuses a procedure, they do it to her anyway. “I am the boss here,” they insist.
Outraged by this enduring abuse, Latin American women in the last few decades have helped to identify and to legally define a different type of gender-based violence: “obstetric violence.” It refers to disrespectful, abusive or neglectful treatment during pregnancy, childbirth, abortion and the postpartum period.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/opin ... ogin-email
How the region became home to an epidemic of obstetric violence.
Excerpt:
But if Ms. de Goes’s case was especially notorious, it was also far from exceptional. According to a 2010 survey, one in every four Brazilian women has suffered mistreatment during labor. Many of them were denied pain relief or weren’t informed about a procedure that was being done to them. Twenty-three percent were verbally abused by a health professional; one of the most common insults was “Na hora de fazer não chorou” (“You didn’t cry like that when making the baby”).
Another survey found that, in 2011, 75 percent of women in labor in hospitals were not provided water and food (last year, I became one of them), although this practice is not supported by scientific evidence. The World Health Organization recommends that low-risk women in labor eat or drink as they wish.
But some doctors are unaware of the concept of “wish” as it relates to women. Faced with a patient who refuses a procedure, they do it to her anyway. “I am the boss here,” they insist.
Outraged by this enduring abuse, Latin American women in the last few decades have helped to identify and to legally define a different type of gender-based violence: “obstetric violence.” It refers to disrespectful, abusive or neglectful treatment during pregnancy, childbirth, abortion and the postpartum period.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/opin ... ogin-email
Central American Farmers Head to the U.S., Fleeing Climate Change
CORQUÍN, Honduras — The farmer stood in his patch of forlorn coffee plants, their leaves sick and wilted, the next harvest in doubt.
Last year, two of his brothers and a sister, desperate to find a better way to survive, abandoned their small coffee farms in this mountainous part of Honduras and migrated north, eventually sneaking into the United States.
Then in February, the farmer’s 16-year-old son also headed north, ignoring the family’s pleas to stay.
The challenges of agricultural life in Honduras have always been mighty, from poverty and a neglectful government to the swings of international commodity prices.
But farmers, agricultural scientists and industry officials say a new threat has been ruining harvests, upending lives and adding to the surge of families migrating to the United States: climate change.
And their worries are increasingly shared by climate scientists as well.
Gradually rising temperatures, more extreme weather events and increasingly unpredictable patterns — like rain not falling when it should, or pouring when it shouldn’t — have disrupted growing cycles and promoted the relentless spread of pests.
The obstacles have cut crop production or wiped out entire harvests, leaving already poor families destitute.
Central America is among the regions most vulnerable to climate change, scientists say. And because agriculture employs much of the labor force — about 28 percent in Honduras alone, according to the World Bank — the livelihoods of millions of people are at stake.
Last year, the bank reported that climate change could lead at least 1.4 million people to flee their homes in Mexico and Central America and migrate during the next three decades.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/13/worl ... 3053090414
CORQUÍN, Honduras — The farmer stood in his patch of forlorn coffee plants, their leaves sick and wilted, the next harvest in doubt.
Last year, two of his brothers and a sister, desperate to find a better way to survive, abandoned their small coffee farms in this mountainous part of Honduras and migrated north, eventually sneaking into the United States.
Then in February, the farmer’s 16-year-old son also headed north, ignoring the family’s pleas to stay.
The challenges of agricultural life in Honduras have always been mighty, from poverty and a neglectful government to the swings of international commodity prices.
But farmers, agricultural scientists and industry officials say a new threat has been ruining harvests, upending lives and adding to the surge of families migrating to the United States: climate change.
And their worries are increasingly shared by climate scientists as well.
Gradually rising temperatures, more extreme weather events and increasingly unpredictable patterns — like rain not falling when it should, or pouring when it shouldn’t — have disrupted growing cycles and promoted the relentless spread of pests.
The obstacles have cut crop production or wiped out entire harvests, leaving already poor families destitute.
Central America is among the regions most vulnerable to climate change, scientists say. And because agriculture employs much of the labor force — about 28 percent in Honduras alone, according to the World Bank — the livelihoods of millions of people are at stake.
Last year, the bank reported that climate change could lead at least 1.4 million people to flee their homes in Mexico and Central America and migrate during the next three decades.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/13/worl ... 3053090414
Deathwatch for the Amazon
Brazil has the power to save Earth’s greatest forest—or destroy it
Although its cradle is the sparsely wooded savannah, humankind has long looked to forests for food, fuel, timber and sublime inspiration. Still a livelihood for 1.5bn people, forests maintain local and regional ecosystems and, for the other 6.2bn, provide a—fragile and creaking—buffer against climate change. Now droughts, wildfires and other human-induced changes are compounding the damage from chainsaws. In the tropics, which contain half of the world’s forest biomass, tree-cover loss has accelerated by two-thirds since 2015; if it were a country, the shrinkage would make the tropical rainforest the world’s third-biggest carbon-dioxide emitter, after China and America.
Nowhere are the stakes higher than in the Amazon basin—and not just because it contains 40% of Earth’s rainforests and harbours 10-15% of the world’s terrestrial species. South America’s natural wonder may be perilously close to the tipping-point beyond which its gradual transformation into something closer to steppe cannot be stopped or reversed, even if people lay down their axes. Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, is hastening the process—in the name, he claims, of development. The ecological collapse his policies may precipitate would be felt most acutely within his country’s borders, which encircle 80% of the basin—but would go far beyond them, too. It must be averted.
Humans have been chipping away at the Amazon rainforest since they settled there well over ten millennia ago. Since the 1970s they have done so on an industrial scale. In the past 50 years Brazil has relinquished 17% of the forest’s original extent, more than the area of France, to road- and dam-building, logging, mining, soyabean farming and cattle ranching. After a seven-year government effort to slow the destruction, it picked up in 2013 because of weakened enforcement and an amnesty for past deforestation. Recession and political crisis further pared back the government’s ability to enforce the rules. Now Mr Bolsonaro has gleefully taken a buzz saw to them. Although congress and the courts have blocked some of his efforts to strip parts of the Amazon of their protected status, he has made it clear that rule-breakers have nothing to fear, despite the fact that he was elected to restore law and order. Because 70-80% of logging in the Amazon is illegal, the destruction has soared to record levels. Since he took office in January, trees have been disappearing at a rate of over two Manhattans a week.
The Amazon is unusual in that it recycles much of its own water. As the forest shrivels, less recycling takes place. At a certain threshold, that causes more of the forest to wither so that, over a matter of decades, the process feeds on itself. Climate change is bringing the threshold closer every year as the forest heats up. Mr Bolsonaro is pushing it towards the edge. Pessimists fear that the cycle of runaway degradation may kick in when another 3-8% of the forest vanishes—which, under Mr Bolsonaro, could happen soon. There are hints the pessimists may be correct (see Briefing). In the past 15 years the Amazon has suffered three severe droughts. Fires are on the rise.
Brazil’s president dismisses such findings, as he does science more broadly. He accuses outsiders of hypocrisy—did rich countries not fell their own forests?—and, sometimes, of using environmental dogma as a pretext to keep Brazil poor. “The Amazon is ours,” the president thundered recently. What happens in the Brazilian Amazon, he thinks, is Brazil’s business.
Except it isn’t. A “dieback” would directly hurt the seven other countries with which Brazil shares the river basin. It would reduce the moisture channelled along the Andes as far south as Buenos Aires. If Brazil were damming a real river, not choking off an aerial one, downstream nations could consider it an act of war. As the vast Amazonian store of carbon burned and rotted, the world could heat up by as much as 0.1°C by 2100—not a lot, you may think, but the preferred target of the Paris climate agreement allows further warming of only 0.5°C or so.
Mr Bolsonaro’s other arguments are also flawed. Yes, the rich world has razed its forests. Brazil should not copy its mistakes, but learn from them instead as, say, France has, by reforesting while it still can. Paranoia about Western scheming is just that. The knowledge economy values the genetic information sequestered in the forest more highly than land or dead trees. Even if it did not, deforestation is not a necessary price of development. Brazil’s output of soyabeans and beef rose between 2004 and 2012, when forest-clearing slowed by 80%. In fact, aside from the Amazon itself, Brazilian agriculture may be deforestation’s biggest victim. The drought of 2015 caused maize farmers in the central Brazilian state of Mato Grosso to lose a third of their harvest.
For all these reasons, the world ought to make clear to Mr Bolsonaro that it will not tolerate his vandalism. Food companies, pressed by consumers, should spurn soyabeans and beef produced on illegally logged Amazonian land, as they did in the mid-2000s. Brazil’s trading partners should make deals contingent on its good behaviour. The agreement reached in June by the eu and Mercosur, a South American trading bloc of which Brazil is the biggest member, already includes provisions to protect the rainforest. It is overwhelmingly in the parties’ interest to enforce them. So too for China, which is anxious about global warming and needs Brazilian agriculture to feed its livestock. Rich signatories of the Paris agreement, who pledged to pay developing ones to plant carbon-consuming trees, ought to do so. Deforestation accounts for 8% of global greenhouse-gas emissions but attracts only 3% of the aid earmarked for combating climate change.
The wood and the trees
If there is a green shoot in Mr Bolsonaro’s scorched-earth tactics towards the rainforest, it is that they have made the Amazon’s plight harder to ignore—and not just for outsiders. Brazil’s agriculture minister urged Mr Bolsonaro to stay in the Paris agreement. Unchecked deforestation could end up hurting Brazilian farmers if it leads to foreign boycotts of Brazilian farm goods. Ordinary Brazilians should press their president to reverse course. They have been blessed with a unique planetary patrimony, whose value is intrinsic and life-sustaining as much as it is commercial. Letting it perish would be a needless catastrophe. ■
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/ ... the-amazon
Brazil has the power to save Earth’s greatest forest—or destroy it
Although its cradle is the sparsely wooded savannah, humankind has long looked to forests for food, fuel, timber and sublime inspiration. Still a livelihood for 1.5bn people, forests maintain local and regional ecosystems and, for the other 6.2bn, provide a—fragile and creaking—buffer against climate change. Now droughts, wildfires and other human-induced changes are compounding the damage from chainsaws. In the tropics, which contain half of the world’s forest biomass, tree-cover loss has accelerated by two-thirds since 2015; if it were a country, the shrinkage would make the tropical rainforest the world’s third-biggest carbon-dioxide emitter, after China and America.
Nowhere are the stakes higher than in the Amazon basin—and not just because it contains 40% of Earth’s rainforests and harbours 10-15% of the world’s terrestrial species. South America’s natural wonder may be perilously close to the tipping-point beyond which its gradual transformation into something closer to steppe cannot be stopped or reversed, even if people lay down their axes. Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, is hastening the process—in the name, he claims, of development. The ecological collapse his policies may precipitate would be felt most acutely within his country’s borders, which encircle 80% of the basin—but would go far beyond them, too. It must be averted.
Humans have been chipping away at the Amazon rainforest since they settled there well over ten millennia ago. Since the 1970s they have done so on an industrial scale. In the past 50 years Brazil has relinquished 17% of the forest’s original extent, more than the area of France, to road- and dam-building, logging, mining, soyabean farming and cattle ranching. After a seven-year government effort to slow the destruction, it picked up in 2013 because of weakened enforcement and an amnesty for past deforestation. Recession and political crisis further pared back the government’s ability to enforce the rules. Now Mr Bolsonaro has gleefully taken a buzz saw to them. Although congress and the courts have blocked some of his efforts to strip parts of the Amazon of their protected status, he has made it clear that rule-breakers have nothing to fear, despite the fact that he was elected to restore law and order. Because 70-80% of logging in the Amazon is illegal, the destruction has soared to record levels. Since he took office in January, trees have been disappearing at a rate of over two Manhattans a week.
The Amazon is unusual in that it recycles much of its own water. As the forest shrivels, less recycling takes place. At a certain threshold, that causes more of the forest to wither so that, over a matter of decades, the process feeds on itself. Climate change is bringing the threshold closer every year as the forest heats up. Mr Bolsonaro is pushing it towards the edge. Pessimists fear that the cycle of runaway degradation may kick in when another 3-8% of the forest vanishes—which, under Mr Bolsonaro, could happen soon. There are hints the pessimists may be correct (see Briefing). In the past 15 years the Amazon has suffered three severe droughts. Fires are on the rise.
Brazil’s president dismisses such findings, as he does science more broadly. He accuses outsiders of hypocrisy—did rich countries not fell their own forests?—and, sometimes, of using environmental dogma as a pretext to keep Brazil poor. “The Amazon is ours,” the president thundered recently. What happens in the Brazilian Amazon, he thinks, is Brazil’s business.
Except it isn’t. A “dieback” would directly hurt the seven other countries with which Brazil shares the river basin. It would reduce the moisture channelled along the Andes as far south as Buenos Aires. If Brazil were damming a real river, not choking off an aerial one, downstream nations could consider it an act of war. As the vast Amazonian store of carbon burned and rotted, the world could heat up by as much as 0.1°C by 2100—not a lot, you may think, but the preferred target of the Paris climate agreement allows further warming of only 0.5°C or so.
Mr Bolsonaro’s other arguments are also flawed. Yes, the rich world has razed its forests. Brazil should not copy its mistakes, but learn from them instead as, say, France has, by reforesting while it still can. Paranoia about Western scheming is just that. The knowledge economy values the genetic information sequestered in the forest more highly than land or dead trees. Even if it did not, deforestation is not a necessary price of development. Brazil’s output of soyabeans and beef rose between 2004 and 2012, when forest-clearing slowed by 80%. In fact, aside from the Amazon itself, Brazilian agriculture may be deforestation’s biggest victim. The drought of 2015 caused maize farmers in the central Brazilian state of Mato Grosso to lose a third of their harvest.
For all these reasons, the world ought to make clear to Mr Bolsonaro that it will not tolerate his vandalism. Food companies, pressed by consumers, should spurn soyabeans and beef produced on illegally logged Amazonian land, as they did in the mid-2000s. Brazil’s trading partners should make deals contingent on its good behaviour. The agreement reached in June by the eu and Mercosur, a South American trading bloc of which Brazil is the biggest member, already includes provisions to protect the rainforest. It is overwhelmingly in the parties’ interest to enforce them. So too for China, which is anxious about global warming and needs Brazilian agriculture to feed its livestock. Rich signatories of the Paris agreement, who pledged to pay developing ones to plant carbon-consuming trees, ought to do so. Deforestation accounts for 8% of global greenhouse-gas emissions but attracts only 3% of the aid earmarked for combating climate change.
The wood and the trees
If there is a green shoot in Mr Bolsonaro’s scorched-earth tactics towards the rainforest, it is that they have made the Amazon’s plight harder to ignore—and not just for outsiders. Brazil’s agriculture minister urged Mr Bolsonaro to stay in the Paris agreement. Unchecked deforestation could end up hurting Brazilian farmers if it leads to foreign boycotts of Brazilian farm goods. Ordinary Brazilians should press their president to reverse course. They have been blessed with a unique planetary patrimony, whose value is intrinsic and life-sustaining as much as it is commercial. Letting it perish would be a needless catastrophe. ■
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/ ... the-amazon
8 Things That Could Happen if the Amazon Rainforest Disappeared
The truth about the Amazon
The Amazon, a vast swath of tropical rainforest that straddles parts of Bolivia, Columbia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Surinam, Venezuela—but most of all, at 60 per cent, Brazil—has been losing the battle against deforestation for decades. Prior to the 1970s, in Brazil alone, it comprised 3.8 million square kilometres. It’s been declining steadily ever since, destroyed bit by bit by illegal logging, soy plantations, and cattle ranching, according to Greenpeace. In 2018, Brazil’s portion of the rainforest stood at 3.1 million square, but with a new, anti-environment government in power in the country, that figure is predicted by eco-watchers to plummet, quickly.
The Amazon holds a whopping 10 per cent of all the plant and animals species known to exist on our planet. About 30 million people call it home, 2.7 million of whom are indigenous. This rainforest also stores 100 billion metric tons of carbon and, according to the World Wildlife Federation, filters carbon dioxide out of the air we breathe and controls our climate through evapotranspiration. Below, we look at what would happen if this important and powerful entity were to disappear entirely.
Slide show at:
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/8- ... ut#image=1
The truth about the Amazon
The Amazon, a vast swath of tropical rainforest that straddles parts of Bolivia, Columbia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Surinam, Venezuela—but most of all, at 60 per cent, Brazil—has been losing the battle against deforestation for decades. Prior to the 1970s, in Brazil alone, it comprised 3.8 million square kilometres. It’s been declining steadily ever since, destroyed bit by bit by illegal logging, soy plantations, and cattle ranching, according to Greenpeace. In 2018, Brazil’s portion of the rainforest stood at 3.1 million square, but with a new, anti-environment government in power in the country, that figure is predicted by eco-watchers to plummet, quickly.
The Amazon holds a whopping 10 per cent of all the plant and animals species known to exist on our planet. About 30 million people call it home, 2.7 million of whom are indigenous. This rainforest also stores 100 billion metric tons of carbon and, according to the World Wildlife Federation, filters carbon dioxide out of the air we breathe and controls our climate through evapotranspiration. Below, we look at what would happen if this important and powerful entity were to disappear entirely.
Slide show at:
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/8- ... ut#image=1
As Amazon Fires Become Global Crisis, Brazil’s President Reverses Course
RIO DE JANEIRO — As an ecological disaster in the Amazon escalated into a global political crisis, Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, took the rare step on Friday of mobilizing the armed forces to help contain blazes of a scale not seen in nearly a decade.
The sudden reversal, after days of dismissing growing concern over hundreds of fires raging across the Amazon, came as international outrage grew over the rising deforestation in the world’s largest tropical rain forest. European leaders threatened to cancel a major trade deal, protesters staged demonstrations outside Brazilian embassies and calls for a boycott of Brazilian products snowballed on social media.
As a chorus of condemnation intensified, Brazil braced for the prospect of punitive measures that could severely damage an economy that is already sputtering after a brutal recession and the country’s far-right populist president faced a withering reckoning.
On Friday, he said that he was planning to send the military to enforce environmental laws and to help contain the fires starting Saturday.
In a televised address Friday night, he said the government would take a “zero tolerance” approach to environmental crimes, and that Brazilians in the Amazon region must be provided with broader opportunities to make a decent living.
“I have a profound love and respect for the Amazon,” he said in a rare scripted message. “Protecting the rain forest is our duty.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/worl ... 3053090824
RIO DE JANEIRO — As an ecological disaster in the Amazon escalated into a global political crisis, Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, took the rare step on Friday of mobilizing the armed forces to help contain blazes of a scale not seen in nearly a decade.
The sudden reversal, after days of dismissing growing concern over hundreds of fires raging across the Amazon, came as international outrage grew over the rising deforestation in the world’s largest tropical rain forest. European leaders threatened to cancel a major trade deal, protesters staged demonstrations outside Brazilian embassies and calls for a boycott of Brazilian products snowballed on social media.
As a chorus of condemnation intensified, Brazil braced for the prospect of punitive measures that could severely damage an economy that is already sputtering after a brutal recession and the country’s far-right populist president faced a withering reckoning.
On Friday, he said that he was planning to send the military to enforce environmental laws and to help contain the fires starting Saturday.
In a televised address Friday night, he said the government would take a “zero tolerance” approach to environmental crimes, and that Brazilians in the Amazon region must be provided with broader opportunities to make a decent living.
“I have a profound love and respect for the Amazon,” he said in a rare scripted message. “Protecting the rain forest is our duty.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/worl ... 3053090824
Amid Outrage Over Rainforest Fires, Many in the Amazon Remain Defiant
RIO DE JANEIRO — Seeing the global panic over thousands of forest fires in the Amazon last week, and hearing the calls to boycott Brazilian products, Agamenon da Silva Menezes wondered if the world had gone mad.
Mr. da Silva is a farmers’ union leader in Novo Progresso, a community in a heavily deforested state in northern Brazil, and he considers the fires burning in the region a normal part of life. It’s how some farmers clear land to make a living, and a natural result of the dry season.
“We’re going to continue producing here in the Amazon and we’re going to continue feeding the world,” Mr. da Silva said in an interview. “There’s no need for all this outrage.”
In Novo Progresso, as in many parts of Brazil, there is strong support for President Jair Bolsonaro’s policy on the Amazon, which prioritizes economic development over environmental protections. These Brazilians argue that fire and deforestation are essential to keep small farmers and large ranches that export beef and soy to the world in business, and that the damage they do to the world’s largest rainforest is modest.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/26/worl ... 3053090827
RIO DE JANEIRO — Seeing the global panic over thousands of forest fires in the Amazon last week, and hearing the calls to boycott Brazilian products, Agamenon da Silva Menezes wondered if the world had gone mad.
Mr. da Silva is a farmers’ union leader in Novo Progresso, a community in a heavily deforested state in northern Brazil, and he considers the fires burning in the region a normal part of life. It’s how some farmers clear land to make a living, and a natural result of the dry season.
“We’re going to continue producing here in the Amazon and we’re going to continue feeding the world,” Mr. da Silva said in an interview. “There’s no need for all this outrage.”
In Novo Progresso, as in many parts of Brazil, there is strong support for President Jair Bolsonaro’s policy on the Amazon, which prioritizes economic development over environmental protections. These Brazilians argue that fire and deforestation are essential to keep small farmers and large ranches that export beef and soy to the world in business, and that the damage they do to the world’s largest rainforest is modest.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/26/worl ... 3053090827