We Need Walter Mercado’s Optimism
The Puerto Rican astrologer’s affirmations brought the Latinx community together and made me, an awkward teenager, feel less alone.
I was transported back to my childhood in Florida when news of the death of Walter Mercado, a beloved Puerto Rican astrologer, swept across the internet on Sunday. Suddenly I could hear my father’s radio alarm clock cutting into the morning silence and the walls of our bedrooms at full volume, jolting the household awake at what felt like an ungodly hour.
I saw myself moving through my morning rituals — brushing my teeth, getting dressed for school, eating breakfast — to the soundtrack of a morning talk show that consisted mostly of two men arguing about Cuban politics, with Mr. Mercado’s horoscope predictions sprinkled between segments.
I’d wait for him to make his way through the zodiac to my sign, Cancer. “Your friends will multiply today, and Mars will ignite your house of passion,” he’d say. I’d pile into my mom’s car with gusto, ready to conquer the world. If you’re Latinx and grew up between the 1970s and ’90s, Mr. Mercado was most likely a fixture in your home, too.
Surely there have been other Latin American astrologers, but none as revered or fabulous. He defied categorization. “He was our Oprah, Mr. Rogers, Liberace and spiritual adviser all rolled into one,” said Cristina Costantini, a co-director of a forthcoming documentary about Mr. Mercado. His was a gentle, decidedly positive brand of astrology. In those days we had only ourselves or the universe to blame for our poor judgment and broken electronics — not Mercury retrograde.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/05/opin ... 3053091106
SOUTH AMERICA
Latin Americans Are Furious
People are no longer remaining silent in the region, and continued government attempts at repression will only make matters worse.
There is a rage brewing in Latin America.
Aware that they don’t live in real democracies, the people of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia are taking to the streets. In Chile, Ecuador and Haiti, citizens are angry about social inequality and the lack of economic opportunity.
Meanwhile, Argentina’s government is turning back to the Peronist-Kirchnerian left, and Mexico’s drug-related violence continues to spiral out of control. Other countries in the region aren’t faring much better.
Within this chaotic atmosphere in Latin America, there are three major aspects at play: Inequality, protests and social media, and authoritarian leanings.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/08/opin ... ogin-email
People are no longer remaining silent in the region, and continued government attempts at repression will only make matters worse.
There is a rage brewing in Latin America.
Aware that they don’t live in real democracies, the people of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia are taking to the streets. In Chile, Ecuador and Haiti, citizens are angry about social inequality and the lack of economic opportunity.
Meanwhile, Argentina’s government is turning back to the Peronist-Kirchnerian left, and Mexico’s drug-related violence continues to spiral out of control. Other countries in the region aren’t faring much better.
Within this chaotic atmosphere in Latin America, there are three major aspects at play: Inequality, protests and social media, and authoritarian leanings.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/08/opin ... ogin-email
The Coup Temptation in Latin America
Overlooking the tragic lessons of the region’s dictatorial past, politicians are turning again to the armed forces to resolve crises.
Excerpt:
Establishing a civilian rule is a long and difficult process. Each time military officials step in to resolve a crisis, no matter how benign or even democratic their motives may appear to be, the process of institutionalizing civilian control is undermined. Only recently has Latin America began to break out of this vicious cycle. After 1980, the number of coups declined significantly. At least partly as a result, the last three decades have been the most democratic in Latin American history. The renewed willingness to accept and even seek out military intervention is deeply troubling.
The political scientist Alfred Stepan, an expert on Latin American militaries, wrote during the 1980s that the key to preserving the region’s new democracies lay in ensuring that no civilian group knocked on the barracks door. In other words, politicians from across the political spectrum must agree that under no circumstance will they seek out or support a coup. Without civilian allies, militaries rarely intervene. These lessons are especially important today as Latin America enters a period of heightened polarization and unrest.
The lessons extend to the international community. If foreign governments choose sides in the region’s conflicts, tolerating coups that favor their ideological allies rather than consistently defending democracy, it will encourage a return to the violence and instability that Latin Americans struggled so hard to end.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/opin ... 0920191126
Overlooking the tragic lessons of the region’s dictatorial past, politicians are turning again to the armed forces to resolve crises.
Excerpt:
Establishing a civilian rule is a long and difficult process. Each time military officials step in to resolve a crisis, no matter how benign or even democratic their motives may appear to be, the process of institutionalizing civilian control is undermined. Only recently has Latin America began to break out of this vicious cycle. After 1980, the number of coups declined significantly. At least partly as a result, the last three decades have been the most democratic in Latin American history. The renewed willingness to accept and even seek out military intervention is deeply troubling.
The political scientist Alfred Stepan, an expert on Latin American militaries, wrote during the 1980s that the key to preserving the region’s new democracies lay in ensuring that no civilian group knocked on the barracks door. In other words, politicians from across the political spectrum must agree that under no circumstance will they seek out or support a coup. Without civilian allies, militaries rarely intervene. These lessons are especially important today as Latin America enters a period of heightened polarization and unrest.
The lessons extend to the international community. If foreign governments choose sides in the region’s conflicts, tolerating coups that favor their ideological allies rather than consistently defending democracy, it will encourage a return to the violence and instability that Latin Americans struggled so hard to end.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/opin ... 0920191126
Conflicts Over Indigenous Land Grow More Violent in Central America
Faced with government inaction, some activists try to reclaim ancestral lands on their own. Often, they pay a high price.
TÉRRABA, Costa Rica — For decades, members of the Brörán tribe in southern Costa Rica longed to take back what they considered ancestral land from the farmers who also claimed it. One weekend last month, they acted, entering several farms, hanging up signs and vowing to stay put.
It was not long, they said, before group of agitated farmers came out on horseback, motorbikes and in pickups. Armed with machetes, sticks and firearms, the farmers huddled at the top of the mountain for hours, hurling threats, as Indigenous leaders implored the police to come help.
Elides Rivera, a local Indigenous land rights leader, still has the voice recording of the call for help she made to a local police commander: “I beg you with all, all my heart.”
But soon after, a brawl broke out, and it ended in the death of her nephew, Jerhy Rivera, 45, who was an Indigenous activist in the community.
Mr. Rivera’s death came just a few weeks after another Indigenous man in a nearby town was shot in a dispute over land, and a year after a land rights leader in that town was gunned down in his home.
Over the past five years, conflicts over land and natural resources in the region have led to about 200 confrontations and the deaths of 60 Indigenous people, according to the Business & Human Rights Resource Center, a London organization.
Four Indigenous people were killed in an attack in Nicaragua in January, and at least a dozen more died in Colombia in just the first two weeks of this year, according to the United Nations.
The deaths in Latin America are the result of increasingly violent clashes between people who have lived on the land for thousands of years and settlers who have arrived much more recently.
From Mexico to Brazil, Indigenous tribes moving against stop ranchers, loggers, miners and other business interests — sometimes aggressively — are hoping to reclaim their community land.
Sometimes, they are dying for it.
And when they do, the newcomers to Indigenous lands rarely seem to pay a legal price.
“I told you these criminals would keep coming,” Ms. Rivera said in a follow-up message to the police commander. “Thank you. Today, you let them kill Jerhy.”
Mr. Rivera, a father of four, sold chickens and worked to promote awareness about his tribe. In 2013, he was beaten in a dispute with loggers.
Mr. Rivera was a member of one of the nearly 800 Indigenous tribes in Latin America. Many of them were never colonized after the arrival of the Spanish and the Portuguese to the continent, and maintained their languages and traditions.
Although some groups enjoy protections similar to that afforded Native American reservations in the United States, enforcement can be lax.
That can be particularly true in areas that are remote, or are rich in natural resources.
In Nicaragua, home of the Miskitu, the government has spoken against illegal land grabs by settlers, but has done nothing to stop it, said Laura Hobson Herlihy, a lecturer at the University of Kansas.
Four Indigenous people were killed in the country in January.
“This is a humanitarian crisis,” said Lottie Cunningham, a Miskitu human rights lawyer on Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast.
With no legal avenue to turn to, Indigenous communities sometimes team up to clear land of newcomers, a process they call “sanamiento.” In Costa Rica, it’s called “recovery.”
“They had shirts that said, ‘sanamiento’ across the back,” Ms. Herlihy said. “I used to tell them, ‘Dude, that’s a target on your back. That is just so dangerous. It gets so many people killed.”
In many cases, settlers occupying Indigenous land did not know that their land purchases were against the law. Many invested their life savings into the land deals and are unwilling to go without a fight.
Víctor Hugo Zúñiga, a 38-year-old father of three, is one of the thousands of non-Indigenous farmers living on disputed land in Costa Rica. He says the government gave his father land in the town of Olán back in 1972, five years before Indigenous reservations were established.
“We didn’t take it away from any Indigenous person,” he said. “Now after 45 years of living here, how are we usurpers?”
Most of the farmers in the disputes have nowhere else to go, he said.
Costa Rica, like Nicaragua, began offering special protections to Indigenous people and their lands in the 1970s.
Marcos Guevara, a professor of anthropology at the University of Costa Rica who studied Indigenous issues for more than 30 years, says the eruption of violence has been simmering for decades because of poorly enforced government policy.
When the government gave Indigenous groups swaths of land in 1977, farmers were supposed to be compensated, but few were.
“These are problems that the state itself created,” Mr. Guevara said.
Minor Mora, 61, a local farmer and member of the Buenos Aires Farmers Commission, said there are around thousands of non-Indigenous people living on Indigenous land in Costa Rica. The government, should help compensate or relocate them, he said.
“They all just kick the ball forward,” Mr. Mora said.
The Brazilian government’s role in the disputes has been even more contentious. Land invasions are on the rise across Brazil, where President Jair Bolsonaro favors ending protections for Indigenous lands. He says they impede economic growth.
In Mexico, the vast majority of the 14 environmental defenders killed in 2018 were members of Indigenous groups.
Worldwide, Central and South American Indigenous groups are the most under attack, according to the Business & Human Rights Resource Center, which maintains a database of attacks and killings of human rights activists.
With 54 violent incidents against Indigenous groups fighting businesses last year, Central America led the world last year in the number of such confrontations, according to Adam Barnett, the group’s spokesman. Honduras, he said, had the most.
The issue exploded internationally in 2016, when a Lenca woman fighting a dam in Honduras, Berta Caceres, was murdered. Seven men were convicted in that case.
The killings have been all the more alarming in Costa Rica, which has escaped the rampant violence elsewhere in Central America.
Cindy Vargas, 35, a member of a group of Brörán women called Ruta de las Aves, said that Costa Rica was sold as a multiethnic and multicultural country, but that it did not extend much beyond folklore.
“They see Indigenous people as the ones who dress up, make traditional food and dance,” Ms. Vargas said. “Costa Rica is a country with a double standard. They only care about the folklore, but not about applying rights in Indigenous territories.”
One of the plots of land seized by the Indigenous the weekend Mr. Rivera died had belonged to her grandfather, she said.
After his death, one man turned himself in to the police and claimed he had shot the Indigenous leader in self-defense. After a brief detention, he was released.
In January, just after the New Year, Mark Rivas, a 33-year-old Miskitu youth leader, was found dead in his home in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua. Even before the police investigated the case, the local government-affiliated radio station had declared it a suicide, his father, Carlos Hendy Thomas, said.
“We speak for the land, for the forests, and to silence us, they kill us,” Mr. Hendy said. “That is the only way to shut us up.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/worl ... 3053090309
Faced with government inaction, some activists try to reclaim ancestral lands on their own. Often, they pay a high price.
TÉRRABA, Costa Rica — For decades, members of the Brörán tribe in southern Costa Rica longed to take back what they considered ancestral land from the farmers who also claimed it. One weekend last month, they acted, entering several farms, hanging up signs and vowing to stay put.
It was not long, they said, before group of agitated farmers came out on horseback, motorbikes and in pickups. Armed with machetes, sticks and firearms, the farmers huddled at the top of the mountain for hours, hurling threats, as Indigenous leaders implored the police to come help.
Elides Rivera, a local Indigenous land rights leader, still has the voice recording of the call for help she made to a local police commander: “I beg you with all, all my heart.”
But soon after, a brawl broke out, and it ended in the death of her nephew, Jerhy Rivera, 45, who was an Indigenous activist in the community.
Mr. Rivera’s death came just a few weeks after another Indigenous man in a nearby town was shot in a dispute over land, and a year after a land rights leader in that town was gunned down in his home.
Over the past five years, conflicts over land and natural resources in the region have led to about 200 confrontations and the deaths of 60 Indigenous people, according to the Business & Human Rights Resource Center, a London organization.
Four Indigenous people were killed in an attack in Nicaragua in January, and at least a dozen more died in Colombia in just the first two weeks of this year, according to the United Nations.
The deaths in Latin America are the result of increasingly violent clashes between people who have lived on the land for thousands of years and settlers who have arrived much more recently.
From Mexico to Brazil, Indigenous tribes moving against stop ranchers, loggers, miners and other business interests — sometimes aggressively — are hoping to reclaim their community land.
Sometimes, they are dying for it.
And when they do, the newcomers to Indigenous lands rarely seem to pay a legal price.
“I told you these criminals would keep coming,” Ms. Rivera said in a follow-up message to the police commander. “Thank you. Today, you let them kill Jerhy.”
Mr. Rivera, a father of four, sold chickens and worked to promote awareness about his tribe. In 2013, he was beaten in a dispute with loggers.
Mr. Rivera was a member of one of the nearly 800 Indigenous tribes in Latin America. Many of them were never colonized after the arrival of the Spanish and the Portuguese to the continent, and maintained their languages and traditions.
Although some groups enjoy protections similar to that afforded Native American reservations in the United States, enforcement can be lax.
That can be particularly true in areas that are remote, or are rich in natural resources.
In Nicaragua, home of the Miskitu, the government has spoken against illegal land grabs by settlers, but has done nothing to stop it, said Laura Hobson Herlihy, a lecturer at the University of Kansas.
Four Indigenous people were killed in the country in January.
“This is a humanitarian crisis,” said Lottie Cunningham, a Miskitu human rights lawyer on Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast.
With no legal avenue to turn to, Indigenous communities sometimes team up to clear land of newcomers, a process they call “sanamiento.” In Costa Rica, it’s called “recovery.”
“They had shirts that said, ‘sanamiento’ across the back,” Ms. Herlihy said. “I used to tell them, ‘Dude, that’s a target on your back. That is just so dangerous. It gets so many people killed.”
In many cases, settlers occupying Indigenous land did not know that their land purchases were against the law. Many invested their life savings into the land deals and are unwilling to go without a fight.
Víctor Hugo Zúñiga, a 38-year-old father of three, is one of the thousands of non-Indigenous farmers living on disputed land in Costa Rica. He says the government gave his father land in the town of Olán back in 1972, five years before Indigenous reservations were established.
“We didn’t take it away from any Indigenous person,” he said. “Now after 45 years of living here, how are we usurpers?”
Most of the farmers in the disputes have nowhere else to go, he said.
Costa Rica, like Nicaragua, began offering special protections to Indigenous people and their lands in the 1970s.
Marcos Guevara, a professor of anthropology at the University of Costa Rica who studied Indigenous issues for more than 30 years, says the eruption of violence has been simmering for decades because of poorly enforced government policy.
When the government gave Indigenous groups swaths of land in 1977, farmers were supposed to be compensated, but few were.
“These are problems that the state itself created,” Mr. Guevara said.
Minor Mora, 61, a local farmer and member of the Buenos Aires Farmers Commission, said there are around thousands of non-Indigenous people living on Indigenous land in Costa Rica. The government, should help compensate or relocate them, he said.
“They all just kick the ball forward,” Mr. Mora said.
The Brazilian government’s role in the disputes has been even more contentious. Land invasions are on the rise across Brazil, where President Jair Bolsonaro favors ending protections for Indigenous lands. He says they impede economic growth.
In Mexico, the vast majority of the 14 environmental defenders killed in 2018 were members of Indigenous groups.
Worldwide, Central and South American Indigenous groups are the most under attack, according to the Business & Human Rights Resource Center, which maintains a database of attacks and killings of human rights activists.
With 54 violent incidents against Indigenous groups fighting businesses last year, Central America led the world last year in the number of such confrontations, according to Adam Barnett, the group’s spokesman. Honduras, he said, had the most.
The issue exploded internationally in 2016, when a Lenca woman fighting a dam in Honduras, Berta Caceres, was murdered. Seven men were convicted in that case.
The killings have been all the more alarming in Costa Rica, which has escaped the rampant violence elsewhere in Central America.
Cindy Vargas, 35, a member of a group of Brörán women called Ruta de las Aves, said that Costa Rica was sold as a multiethnic and multicultural country, but that it did not extend much beyond folklore.
“They see Indigenous people as the ones who dress up, make traditional food and dance,” Ms. Vargas said. “Costa Rica is a country with a double standard. They only care about the folklore, but not about applying rights in Indigenous territories.”
One of the plots of land seized by the Indigenous the weekend Mr. Rivera died had belonged to her grandfather, she said.
After his death, one man turned himself in to the police and claimed he had shot the Indigenous leader in self-defense. After a brief detention, he was released.
In January, just after the New Year, Mark Rivas, a 33-year-old Miskitu youth leader, was found dead in his home in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua. Even before the police investigated the case, the local government-affiliated radio station had declared it a suicide, his father, Carlos Hendy Thomas, said.
“We speak for the land, for the forests, and to silence us, they kill us,” Mr. Hendy said. “That is the only way to shut us up.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/worl ... 3053090309
As Bolsonaro Keeps Amazon Vows, Brazil’s Indigenous Fear ‘Ethnocide’
President Jair Bolsonaro is moving aggressively to open up the Amazon rainforest to commercial development, posing an existential threat to the tribes living there.
URU EU WAU WAU TERRITORY, Brazil — The billboard at the entrance of a tiny Indigenous village in the Amazon has become a relic in less than a decade, boasting of something no longer true.
“Here, there is investment by the federal government,” proclaims the sign, erected in 2012, which is now shrouded by fallen palm tree fronds.
In fact, this tiny hamlet in Rondônia state, called Alto Jamari, home to some 10 families of the Uru Eu Wau Wau tribe, is barely surviving, just like scores of other struggling villages in the region that for decades have served as havens for Indigenous culture and bulwarks against deforestation in Brazil.
Federal aid is drying up at the same time that more outsiders are trespassing on their lands, eager to illegally exploit the forest’s resources, and as the coronavirus poses a deadly threat, having already reached a few remote villages.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/19/worl ... 778d3e6de3
President Jair Bolsonaro is moving aggressively to open up the Amazon rainforest to commercial development, posing an existential threat to the tribes living there.
URU EU WAU WAU TERRITORY, Brazil — The billboard at the entrance of a tiny Indigenous village in the Amazon has become a relic in less than a decade, boasting of something no longer true.
“Here, there is investment by the federal government,” proclaims the sign, erected in 2012, which is now shrouded by fallen palm tree fronds.
In fact, this tiny hamlet in Rondônia state, called Alto Jamari, home to some 10 families of the Uru Eu Wau Wau tribe, is barely surviving, just like scores of other struggling villages in the region that for decades have served as havens for Indigenous culture and bulwarks against deforestation in Brazil.
Federal aid is drying up at the same time that more outsiders are trespassing on their lands, eager to illegally exploit the forest’s resources, and as the coronavirus poses a deadly threat, having already reached a few remote villages.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/19/worl ... 778d3e6de3
‘Gracias China!!!’
While the U.S. leadership in Latin America is being called into question, Beijing is positioning itself to carry the mantle.
“Gracias China!!!,” Marcelo Ebrard, the foreign minister of Mexico, posted on Twitter on April 1, along with a photo of the plane that carried 100,000 masks, 50,000 test kits and five ventilators donated from China. Mexico may see as many as 700,000 cases of Covid-19, while the country has a mere 5,500 ventilators. Even though this will without a doubt have an impact on the United States, which shares a 2,000-mile border and robust trade with Mexico, it’s Beijing, not Washington, that is fast-tracking hundreds of ventilators to help the country meet its vulnerability.
In another era, Mr. Ebrard would have expressed gratitude to his neighbor to the north and highlighted the enduring partnership with the United States. But now China is stepping in to fill a void left by President Trump, who has alienated longtime partners and undermined the country’s standing in Latin America and the Caribbean.
This is not the first time that China has lent a helping hand to the region. Following the Great Recession of 2008, China, which financed a global stimulus representing 7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, buoyed Latin American economies by devouring commodities like oil, timber and metallic minerals.
China is now the second-largest trading partner in the region, and it has surpassed the United States to become the top trading partner of major economies, including Brazil, Chile, Peru and Uruguay. Since 2017, 19 nations in the region have signed on to the Chinese government’s Belt and Road Initiative, a multibillion-dollar network of investment and infrastructure projects. The influx of financing and development assistance has afforded access to critical financing for cash-strapped and heavily indebted governments, which have faced growing public demand for paved roads, modern public transport and improved services.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/21/opin ... 778d3e6de3
While the U.S. leadership in Latin America is being called into question, Beijing is positioning itself to carry the mantle.
“Gracias China!!!,” Marcelo Ebrard, the foreign minister of Mexico, posted on Twitter on April 1, along with a photo of the plane that carried 100,000 masks, 50,000 test kits and five ventilators donated from China. Mexico may see as many as 700,000 cases of Covid-19, while the country has a mere 5,500 ventilators. Even though this will without a doubt have an impact on the United States, which shares a 2,000-mile border and robust trade with Mexico, it’s Beijing, not Washington, that is fast-tracking hundreds of ventilators to help the country meet its vulnerability.
In another era, Mr. Ebrard would have expressed gratitude to his neighbor to the north and highlighted the enduring partnership with the United States. But now China is stepping in to fill a void left by President Trump, who has alienated longtime partners and undermined the country’s standing in Latin America and the Caribbean.
This is not the first time that China has lent a helping hand to the region. Following the Great Recession of 2008, China, which financed a global stimulus representing 7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, buoyed Latin American economies by devouring commodities like oil, timber and metallic minerals.
China is now the second-largest trading partner in the region, and it has surpassed the United States to become the top trading partner of major economies, including Brazil, Chile, Peru and Uruguay. Since 2017, 19 nations in the region have signed on to the Chinese government’s Belt and Road Initiative, a multibillion-dollar network of investment and infrastructure projects. The influx of financing and development assistance has afforded access to critical financing for cash-strapped and heavily indebted governments, which have faced growing public demand for paved roads, modern public transport and improved services.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/21/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Virus Gains Steam Across Latin America
Inequality, densely packed cities, legions of informal workers and weak health care systems have undermined efforts to fight the pandemic, as some governments have fumbled the response.
MEXICO CITY — By late March, the Mexican government calmly predicted that its coronavirus outbreak would peak in April.
A few weeks later, it changed its prediction to mid-May.
And then to late May. And then to June.
Now, with new infections surging and the government facing growing anger, even ridicule, over its constant guesswork, many Mexicans have drawn their own conclusion: No one really knows.
“Obviously, prediction is not a guarantee of precision,” Hugo Lopez Gatell, the federal health official in charge of the nation’s virus response, has acknowledged.
Mexico, like the rest of Latin America, has quickly become a focal point of the pandemic, a worrisome frontier for a virus that has claimed the lives of more than 460,000 people and infected more than nine million worldwide.
The coronavirus was always going to hit Latin America hard. Even before it arrived, experts warned that the region’s combustible blend of inequality, densely packed cities, legions of informal workers living day-to-day and health care systems starved of resources could undermine even the best attempts to curb the pandemic.
But by brushing off the dangers, fumbling the response, dismissing scientific or expert guidance, withholding data and simply denying the extent of the outbreak altogether, some governments have made matters even worse.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Inequality, densely packed cities, legions of informal workers and weak health care systems have undermined efforts to fight the pandemic, as some governments have fumbled the response.
MEXICO CITY — By late March, the Mexican government calmly predicted that its coronavirus outbreak would peak in April.
A few weeks later, it changed its prediction to mid-May.
And then to late May. And then to June.
Now, with new infections surging and the government facing growing anger, even ridicule, over its constant guesswork, many Mexicans have drawn their own conclusion: No one really knows.
“Obviously, prediction is not a guarantee of precision,” Hugo Lopez Gatell, the federal health official in charge of the nation’s virus response, has acknowledged.
Mexico, like the rest of Latin America, has quickly become a focal point of the pandemic, a worrisome frontier for a virus that has claimed the lives of more than 460,000 people and infected more than nine million worldwide.
The coronavirus was always going to hit Latin America hard. Even before it arrived, experts warned that the region’s combustible blend of inequality, densely packed cities, legions of informal workers living day-to-day and health care systems starved of resources could undermine even the best attempts to curb the pandemic.
But by brushing off the dangers, fumbling the response, dismissing scientific or expert guidance, withholding data and simply denying the extent of the outbreak altogether, some governments have made matters even worse.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/worl ... 778d3e6de3
The Coronavirus Unleashed Along the Amazon River
As the pandemic assails Brazil, the virus is taking an exceptionally high toll on the Amazon region.
THE VIRUS SWEPT THROUGH THE REGION like past plagues that have traveled the river with colonizers and corporations.
It spread with the dugout canoes carrying families from town to town, the fishing dinghies with rattling engines, the ferries moving goods for hundreds of miles, packed with passengers sleeping in hammocks, side by side, for days at a time.
The Amazon River is South America’s essential life source, a glittering superhighway that cuts through the continent. It is the central artery in a vast network of tributaries that sustains some 30 million people across eight countries, moving supplies, people and industry deep into forested regions often untouched by road.
But once again, in a painful echo of history, it is also bringing disease.
As the pandemic assails Brazil, overwhelming it with more than two million infections and more than 84,000 deaths — second only to the United States — the virus is taking an exceptionally high toll on the Amazon region and the people who have depended on its abundance for generations.
In Brazil, the six cities with the highest coronavirus exposure are all on the Amazon River, according to an expansive new study from Brazilian researchers that measured antibodies in the population.
The epidemic has spread so quickly and thoroughly along the river that in remote fishing and farming communities like Tefé, people have been as likely to get the virus as in New York City, home to one of the world’s worst outbreaks.
“It was all very fast,” said Isabel Delgado, 34, whose father, Felicindo, died of the virus shortly after falling ill in the small city of Coari. He had been born on the river, raised his family by it and built his life crafting furniture from the timber on its banks.
In the past four months, as the epidemic traveled from the biggest city in the Brazilian Amazon, Manaus, with its high-rises and factories, to tiny, seemingly isolated villages deep in the interior, the fragile health care system has buckled under the onslaught.
Cities and towns along the river have some of the highest deaths per capita in the country — often several times the national average. In Manaus, there were periods when every Covid ward was full and 100 people were dying a day, pushing the city to cut new burial grounds out of thick forest. Grave diggers lay rows of coffins in long trenches carved in the freshly turned earth.
Down the river, hammocks have become stretchers, carrying the sick from communities with no doctors to boat ambulances that careen through the water. In remote reaches of the river basin, medevac planes land in tiny airstrips sliced into the lush landscape only to find that their patients died while waiting for help.
The virus is exacting an especially high toll on Indigenous people, a parallel to the past. Since the 1500s, waves of explorers have traveled the river, seeking gold, land and converts — and later, rubber, a resource that helped fuel the Industrial Revolution, changing the world. But with them, these outsiders brought violence and diseases like smallpox and measles, killing millions and wiping out entire communities.
Multi media and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... 778d3e6de3
As the pandemic assails Brazil, the virus is taking an exceptionally high toll on the Amazon region.
THE VIRUS SWEPT THROUGH THE REGION like past plagues that have traveled the river with colonizers and corporations.
It spread with the dugout canoes carrying families from town to town, the fishing dinghies with rattling engines, the ferries moving goods for hundreds of miles, packed with passengers sleeping in hammocks, side by side, for days at a time.
The Amazon River is South America’s essential life source, a glittering superhighway that cuts through the continent. It is the central artery in a vast network of tributaries that sustains some 30 million people across eight countries, moving supplies, people and industry deep into forested regions often untouched by road.
But once again, in a painful echo of history, it is also bringing disease.
As the pandemic assails Brazil, overwhelming it with more than two million infections and more than 84,000 deaths — second only to the United States — the virus is taking an exceptionally high toll on the Amazon region and the people who have depended on its abundance for generations.
In Brazil, the six cities with the highest coronavirus exposure are all on the Amazon River, according to an expansive new study from Brazilian researchers that measured antibodies in the population.
The epidemic has spread so quickly and thoroughly along the river that in remote fishing and farming communities like Tefé, people have been as likely to get the virus as in New York City, home to one of the world’s worst outbreaks.
“It was all very fast,” said Isabel Delgado, 34, whose father, Felicindo, died of the virus shortly after falling ill in the small city of Coari. He had been born on the river, raised his family by it and built his life crafting furniture from the timber on its banks.
In the past four months, as the epidemic traveled from the biggest city in the Brazilian Amazon, Manaus, with its high-rises and factories, to tiny, seemingly isolated villages deep in the interior, the fragile health care system has buckled under the onslaught.
Cities and towns along the river have some of the highest deaths per capita in the country — often several times the national average. In Manaus, there were periods when every Covid ward was full and 100 people were dying a day, pushing the city to cut new burial grounds out of thick forest. Grave diggers lay rows of coffins in long trenches carved in the freshly turned earth.
Down the river, hammocks have become stretchers, carrying the sick from communities with no doctors to boat ambulances that careen through the water. In remote reaches of the river basin, medevac planes land in tiny airstrips sliced into the lush landscape only to find that their patients died while waiting for help.
The virus is exacting an especially high toll on Indigenous people, a parallel to the past. Since the 1500s, waves of explorers have traveled the river, seeking gold, land and converts — and later, rubber, a resource that helped fuel the Industrial Revolution, changing the world. But with them, these outsiders brought violence and diseases like smallpox and measles, killing millions and wiping out entire communities.
Multi media and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... 778d3e6de3
A Pre-Columbian Bestiary
Fantastic creatures of indigenous Latin America
When the news grows seemingly more tumultuous by the day, a temporary escape from this world can sound pretty tempting. Ilan Stavans did just that during a shamanic ceremony in Colombia a few years ago, when he ingested the hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca. He “felt unconfined, physically as well as spiritually,” and envisioned himself as a number of supernatural creatures. The experience led him to dive into magical realist literature, in which new worlds and creatures abound. Here he writes of six such beings, accompanied by Mexican artist Eko’s visual imaginings
A few years ago, during a shamanic ceremony in Colombia, I ingested ayahuasca, made of Banisteriopsis caapi, a South American vine employed for hallucinogenic purposes. Ayahuasca is a “plant teacher.” It pushes the mind into unforeseen realms. No wonder indigenous tribes in the Amazon make it an essential companion for religious quests.
Using words to describe what I went through defeats the experience. I wrestled with this challenge in my book The Oven: An Anti-Lecture (2018), which also became a one-man theater show staged across the United States. The extraordinary out-of-body education the drug afforded me left a deep mark. I felt unconfined, physically as well as spiritually—and at one point, I miraculously underwent a mutation that turned me into a jaguar roaming for prey in a vast landscape.
Once I got home, I immediately reread the Popol Vuh (1554–58), the sacred origin book of the Maya. I became fascinated by the multiple adventures of Hunahpu and Ixb’alanke, twins who at one point traverse the underworld, known as Xibalba—a habitat as intricate as Dante’s hell—where they face, among dozens of other creatures, bat monsters called camazotz. In the narrative, these creatures have the terrifying strength of the Cyclops in Homer’s The Odyssey.
I soon realized that in the shamanic ceremony, I had also visualized myself into an assortment of other creatures, a few of them impossible to describe: part human, part deity, with a few recognizable features but many more I had never encountered before. I delved into pre-Columbian sources in search of them—encyclopedias, testimonies of the Spanish conquest, historical chronicles of life in colonial times under European rule. What I found astonished me: the sources I looked at were themselves inconsistent and described these beasts in fanciful fashion.
It took me time to understand that this ethereal quality is precisely what makes these creatures distinct. I felt the inescapable urge to retell Popol Vuh for a contemporary readership; I also got the inspiration that led me to compile an anthology of pre-Hispanic imaginary beings, quoting from both real and fabricated sources.
In the land of Magical Realism, what better way to pay tribute to these creatures than to celebrate their insubstantial status? Julio Cortázar, in his 1967 book, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, writes: “I have always known that the big surprises await us where we have learned to be surprised by nothing, that is, where we are not shocked by ruptures in the order.”
I grew up in Mexico, so I know how elusive is the line between fact and fiction. Latin America is where what is known and what is hoped for intermingle. Needless to say, fantastic animals have always been companions to human civilization. The Bible is full of them, not only unicorns and cockatrices (in the King James Version, 1611), angels and cherubim, but also Behemoth and Leviathan, and, obviously, the Almighty, an omniscient being with anthropomorphic qualities whose only limitation appears to be—surprisingly—not to have been able to clone itself.
The Greeks had sirens, centaurs, satyrs, chimeras, basilisks, phoenixes, Pegasus, Medusa, Cerberus, and other entities. The Middle Ages were a fertile era for the creation of these creatures too: golems, dragons, and griffins, among others, would all be considered cryptids today.
Modernity added its own contributions, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1823), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and the massive black earthworm known as Mihocão. The production of fantastic creatures has only intensified over the past century, especially in the English-speaking world, with J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937), C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–56), and, more recently, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter saga (1997–2007).
Of course, what is fantastic to one culture is mundane to another. I ask myself, What did the indigenous people of Hispaniola, the first Caribbean island on which Columbus set foot, think of the Italian explorer and his companions? They probably believed the visitors were ether demons or gods. As the Talmud (Tractate Berakhot) argues, we don’t see the world as it is; instead, we see it as we are.
The Americas have long been a popular location to find monstrosities. Scientists like Charles Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt and writers like André Breton, D. H. Lawrence, and Allen Ginsberg all presented these continents as puzzling, deceptive places. This isn’t surprising; even today, the so-called New World remains a testing ground in which Europe envisions all sorts of enigmatic occurrences.
Jorge Luis Borges, along with Margarita Guerrero, edited the 1959 anthology Manual de zoología fantástica (Manual of Fantastic Zoology), expanded in 1967 and again in 1969 under a different title: The Book of Imaginary Beings. It includes creatures like the pygmies mentioned by Aristotle and Pliny; the chimera, a beast with the head of a goat sprouting from its back, a lion’s head at its front, and a snake’s head on its tail; and Emanuel Swedenborg’s angels, “the perfect souls of the blessed and wise, living in a Heaven of ideal things.”
Perhaps most vividly, in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in 1967, a series of bizarre creatures visit the town of Macondo, including the gypsy Melquíades, who dies dozens of times yet is always youthful, and the naïve and angelic Remedios la Bella, whose out-of-this-world beauty ultimately makes her fly into the sky—neither of which is portrayed as monstrous.
In truth, my interest in pre-Columbian creatures dates back further than my ayahuasca experience, to the late 20th century, when I first read Moacyr Scliar’s The Carnival of the Animals (1968), which is full of the most whimsical American fauna. In my personal library, I have an array of volumes that attempt to portray them, a few of them lavishly illustrated. I have acquired artesanías that are the equivalent of action figures.
The six selections described below are all American creatures, both existent and invented by me, grounded in oral tradition but also traced in texts, real and imagined as well as the quotes, dating back to the 16th century, although some came to be—and were certainly recorded in historical documents—after the Conquest and during the colonial period that stretched until 1810.
In my childhood and in travels during my adult years, I have personally seen a handful of these creatures with my own eyes. During a night of conversation, I described them in detail to the legendary Mexican artist Eko. His superb depictions, included here, are approximations based on indigenous codices.
Descriptions of each creature and their significance at:
https://theamericanscholar.org/a-pre-co ... y3OFChKgU4
Fantastic creatures of indigenous Latin America
When the news grows seemingly more tumultuous by the day, a temporary escape from this world can sound pretty tempting. Ilan Stavans did just that during a shamanic ceremony in Colombia a few years ago, when he ingested the hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca. He “felt unconfined, physically as well as spiritually,” and envisioned himself as a number of supernatural creatures. The experience led him to dive into magical realist literature, in which new worlds and creatures abound. Here he writes of six such beings, accompanied by Mexican artist Eko’s visual imaginings
A few years ago, during a shamanic ceremony in Colombia, I ingested ayahuasca, made of Banisteriopsis caapi, a South American vine employed for hallucinogenic purposes. Ayahuasca is a “plant teacher.” It pushes the mind into unforeseen realms. No wonder indigenous tribes in the Amazon make it an essential companion for religious quests.
Using words to describe what I went through defeats the experience. I wrestled with this challenge in my book The Oven: An Anti-Lecture (2018), which also became a one-man theater show staged across the United States. The extraordinary out-of-body education the drug afforded me left a deep mark. I felt unconfined, physically as well as spiritually—and at one point, I miraculously underwent a mutation that turned me into a jaguar roaming for prey in a vast landscape.
Once I got home, I immediately reread the Popol Vuh (1554–58), the sacred origin book of the Maya. I became fascinated by the multiple adventures of Hunahpu and Ixb’alanke, twins who at one point traverse the underworld, known as Xibalba—a habitat as intricate as Dante’s hell—where they face, among dozens of other creatures, bat monsters called camazotz. In the narrative, these creatures have the terrifying strength of the Cyclops in Homer’s The Odyssey.
I soon realized that in the shamanic ceremony, I had also visualized myself into an assortment of other creatures, a few of them impossible to describe: part human, part deity, with a few recognizable features but many more I had never encountered before. I delved into pre-Columbian sources in search of them—encyclopedias, testimonies of the Spanish conquest, historical chronicles of life in colonial times under European rule. What I found astonished me: the sources I looked at were themselves inconsistent and described these beasts in fanciful fashion.
It took me time to understand that this ethereal quality is precisely what makes these creatures distinct. I felt the inescapable urge to retell Popol Vuh for a contemporary readership; I also got the inspiration that led me to compile an anthology of pre-Hispanic imaginary beings, quoting from both real and fabricated sources.
In the land of Magical Realism, what better way to pay tribute to these creatures than to celebrate their insubstantial status? Julio Cortázar, in his 1967 book, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, writes: “I have always known that the big surprises await us where we have learned to be surprised by nothing, that is, where we are not shocked by ruptures in the order.”
I grew up in Mexico, so I know how elusive is the line between fact and fiction. Latin America is where what is known and what is hoped for intermingle. Needless to say, fantastic animals have always been companions to human civilization. The Bible is full of them, not only unicorns and cockatrices (in the King James Version, 1611), angels and cherubim, but also Behemoth and Leviathan, and, obviously, the Almighty, an omniscient being with anthropomorphic qualities whose only limitation appears to be—surprisingly—not to have been able to clone itself.
The Greeks had sirens, centaurs, satyrs, chimeras, basilisks, phoenixes, Pegasus, Medusa, Cerberus, and other entities. The Middle Ages were a fertile era for the creation of these creatures too: golems, dragons, and griffins, among others, would all be considered cryptids today.
Modernity added its own contributions, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1823), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and the massive black earthworm known as Mihocão. The production of fantastic creatures has only intensified over the past century, especially in the English-speaking world, with J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937), C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–56), and, more recently, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter saga (1997–2007).
Of course, what is fantastic to one culture is mundane to another. I ask myself, What did the indigenous people of Hispaniola, the first Caribbean island on which Columbus set foot, think of the Italian explorer and his companions? They probably believed the visitors were ether demons or gods. As the Talmud (Tractate Berakhot) argues, we don’t see the world as it is; instead, we see it as we are.
The Americas have long been a popular location to find monstrosities. Scientists like Charles Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt and writers like André Breton, D. H. Lawrence, and Allen Ginsberg all presented these continents as puzzling, deceptive places. This isn’t surprising; even today, the so-called New World remains a testing ground in which Europe envisions all sorts of enigmatic occurrences.
Jorge Luis Borges, along with Margarita Guerrero, edited the 1959 anthology Manual de zoología fantástica (Manual of Fantastic Zoology), expanded in 1967 and again in 1969 under a different title: The Book of Imaginary Beings. It includes creatures like the pygmies mentioned by Aristotle and Pliny; the chimera, a beast with the head of a goat sprouting from its back, a lion’s head at its front, and a snake’s head on its tail; and Emanuel Swedenborg’s angels, “the perfect souls of the blessed and wise, living in a Heaven of ideal things.”
Perhaps most vividly, in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in 1967, a series of bizarre creatures visit the town of Macondo, including the gypsy Melquíades, who dies dozens of times yet is always youthful, and the naïve and angelic Remedios la Bella, whose out-of-this-world beauty ultimately makes her fly into the sky—neither of which is portrayed as monstrous.
In truth, my interest in pre-Columbian creatures dates back further than my ayahuasca experience, to the late 20th century, when I first read Moacyr Scliar’s The Carnival of the Animals (1968), which is full of the most whimsical American fauna. In my personal library, I have an array of volumes that attempt to portray them, a few of them lavishly illustrated. I have acquired artesanías that are the equivalent of action figures.
The six selections described below are all American creatures, both existent and invented by me, grounded in oral tradition but also traced in texts, real and imagined as well as the quotes, dating back to the 16th century, although some came to be—and were certainly recorded in historical documents—after the Conquest and during the colonial period that stretched until 1810.
In my childhood and in travels during my adult years, I have personally seen a handful of these creatures with my own eyes. During a night of conversation, I described them in detail to the legendary Mexican artist Eko. His superb depictions, included here, are approximations based on indigenous codices.
Descriptions of each creature and their significance at:
https://theamericanscholar.org/a-pre-co ... y3OFChKgU4
Brazil Fires Burn World’s Largest Tropical Wetlands at ‘Unprecedented’ Scale
The blazes in Brazil, often intentionally set, have scorched a record-setting 10 percent of the Pantanal, one of the most biologically diverse habitats on the planet.
PORTO JOFRE, Brazil — A record amount of the world’s largest tropical wetland has been lost to the fires sweeping Brazil this year, scientists said, devastating a delicate ecosystem that is one of the most biologically diverse habitats on the planet.
The enormous fires — often set by ranchers and farmers to clear land, but exacerbated by unusually dry conditions in recent weeks — have engulfed more than 10 percent of the Brazilian wetlands, known as the Pantanal, exacting a toll scientists call “unprecedented.”
The fires in the Pantanal, in southwest Brazil, raged across an estimated 7,861 square miles between January and August, according to an analysis conducted by NASA for The New York Times, based on a new system to track fires in real time using satellite data. That’s an area slightly larger than New Jersey.
The previous record was in 2005, when approximately 4,608 square miles burned in the biome during the same period.
And to the north, the fires in the Brazilian Amazon — many of them also deliberately set for commercial clearing — have been ruinous as well. The amount of Brazilian rainforest lost to fires in 2020 has been similar to the scale of the destruction last year, when the problem drew global condemnation and added to the strains between Brazil and its trading partners, particularly in Europe.
The enormous scale of the fires in the Amazon and the Pantanal, several of which were visible to astronauts in space, has drawn less attention in a year overwhelmed by the coronavirus pandemic, the protests over police brutality and the coming American election.
But experts called this year’s blazes in the Pantanal a particularly jarring loss and the latest ecological crisis that has unfolded on the watch of President Jair Bolsonaro, whose policies have prioritized economic development over environmental protections.
Photos and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/worl ... 778d3e6de3
The blazes in Brazil, often intentionally set, have scorched a record-setting 10 percent of the Pantanal, one of the most biologically diverse habitats on the planet.
PORTO JOFRE, Brazil — A record amount of the world’s largest tropical wetland has been lost to the fires sweeping Brazil this year, scientists said, devastating a delicate ecosystem that is one of the most biologically diverse habitats on the planet.
The enormous fires — often set by ranchers and farmers to clear land, but exacerbated by unusually dry conditions in recent weeks — have engulfed more than 10 percent of the Brazilian wetlands, known as the Pantanal, exacting a toll scientists call “unprecedented.”
The fires in the Pantanal, in southwest Brazil, raged across an estimated 7,861 square miles between January and August, according to an analysis conducted by NASA for The New York Times, based on a new system to track fires in real time using satellite data. That’s an area slightly larger than New Jersey.
The previous record was in 2005, when approximately 4,608 square miles burned in the biome during the same period.
And to the north, the fires in the Brazilian Amazon — many of them also deliberately set for commercial clearing — have been ruinous as well. The amount of Brazilian rainforest lost to fires in 2020 has been similar to the scale of the destruction last year, when the problem drew global condemnation and added to the strains between Brazil and its trading partners, particularly in Europe.
The enormous scale of the fires in the Amazon and the Pantanal, several of which were visible to astronauts in space, has drawn less attention in a year overwhelmed by the coronavirus pandemic, the protests over police brutality and the coming American election.
But experts called this year’s blazes in the Pantanal a particularly jarring loss and the latest ecological crisis that has unfolded on the watch of President Jair Bolsonaro, whose policies have prioritized economic development over environmental protections.
Photos and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Legal Abortion, Once a Long Shot in Catholic Argentina, Now Within Reach
A bill before the Senate would make abortion legal in the predominantly Catholic nation, the homeland of Pope Francis. Its approval likely would have significant effect across Latin America.
BUENOS AIRES — A vote to legalize abortion in Argentina was balanced on a knife’s edge Tuesday as the Senate debated a bill that would make this largely Catholic nation, homeland of Pope Francis, the largest in Latin America to take that step.
Legalization in Argentina would reverberate across a region where powerful forces oppose abortion, notably the long-dominant Roman Catholic Church and the fast-growing evangelical Protestant churches.
With the bill having cleared the lower house of Argentina’s Congress and the president vowing to sign it, all eyes were on the Senate, where its fate appears to rest in the hands of a handful of lawmakers who remain undecided or are keeping their positions under wraps.
As crowds on both sides of the issue gathered on the plaza and streets outside Congress, senators began debating the measure Tuesday afternoon, and the too-close-to-call vote was expected early Wednesday. The bill would allow abortion on request up to 14 weeks into pregnancy, with exceptions to the limit in cases of rape or health risk.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/worl ... 778d3e6de3
******
Ancient DNA Is Changing How We Think About the Caribbean
New research delivers surprising findings about Indigenous people in the region before contact with Europeans.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus touched land for the first time in the Americas, reaching the Bahamas, Hispaniola (present-day Dominican Republic and Haiti) and eastern Cuba. After he returned to Spain he reported that he had encountered islands rich in gold. A few years later his brother Bartholomew, who also traveled to the Americas, reported that Hispaniola had a large population whose labor and land could be put to the advantage of the Spanish crown. He estimated the population at 1.1 million people.
Was this figure accurate? It soon was a matter of dispute. Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish monk and colonist who became the first chronicler of the human disaster that unfolded in the Americas after the arrival of Europeans, estimated a far larger number: three million to four million.
The population size of “pre-contact” Hispaniola would continue to be a contested issue until the present day, not least because of its profound emotional and moral resonance in light of the destruction of that world. Modern scholars have generally estimated the population at 250,000 to a million people.
Some of the arguments for large population numbers in the pre-contact Americas have been motivated by an attempt to counter a myth, perpetuated by apologists for colonialism like the philosopher John Locke, that the Americas were a vast “vacuum domicilium,” or empty dwelling, populated by a handful of Indigenous groups whose displacement could be readily justified. In a similar vein, some of the arguments for large population sizes have been motivated by a desire to underscore how disastrous the arrival of Europeans was for Indigenous people.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23/opin ... 778d3e6de3
A bill before the Senate would make abortion legal in the predominantly Catholic nation, the homeland of Pope Francis. Its approval likely would have significant effect across Latin America.
BUENOS AIRES — A vote to legalize abortion in Argentina was balanced on a knife’s edge Tuesday as the Senate debated a bill that would make this largely Catholic nation, homeland of Pope Francis, the largest in Latin America to take that step.
Legalization in Argentina would reverberate across a region where powerful forces oppose abortion, notably the long-dominant Roman Catholic Church and the fast-growing evangelical Protestant churches.
With the bill having cleared the lower house of Argentina’s Congress and the president vowing to sign it, all eyes were on the Senate, where its fate appears to rest in the hands of a handful of lawmakers who remain undecided or are keeping their positions under wraps.
As crowds on both sides of the issue gathered on the plaza and streets outside Congress, senators began debating the measure Tuesday afternoon, and the too-close-to-call vote was expected early Wednesday. The bill would allow abortion on request up to 14 weeks into pregnancy, with exceptions to the limit in cases of rape or health risk.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/worl ... 778d3e6de3
******
Ancient DNA Is Changing How We Think About the Caribbean
New research delivers surprising findings about Indigenous people in the region before contact with Europeans.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus touched land for the first time in the Americas, reaching the Bahamas, Hispaniola (present-day Dominican Republic and Haiti) and eastern Cuba. After he returned to Spain he reported that he had encountered islands rich in gold. A few years later his brother Bartholomew, who also traveled to the Americas, reported that Hispaniola had a large population whose labor and land could be put to the advantage of the Spanish crown. He estimated the population at 1.1 million people.
Was this figure accurate? It soon was a matter of dispute. Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish monk and colonist who became the first chronicler of the human disaster that unfolded in the Americas after the arrival of Europeans, estimated a far larger number: three million to four million.
The population size of “pre-contact” Hispaniola would continue to be a contested issue until the present day, not least because of its profound emotional and moral resonance in light of the destruction of that world. Modern scholars have generally estimated the population at 250,000 to a million people.
Some of the arguments for large population numbers in the pre-contact Americas have been motivated by an attempt to counter a myth, perpetuated by apologists for colonialism like the philosopher John Locke, that the Americas were a vast “vacuum domicilium,” or empty dwelling, populated by a handful of Indigenous groups whose displacement could be readily justified. In a similar vein, some of the arguments for large population sizes have been motivated by a desire to underscore how disastrous the arrival of Europeans was for Indigenous people.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Argentina Legalizes Abortion, a Milestone in a Conservative Region
The Senate vote on Wednesday was a major victory for Latin America’s growing feminist movement, and its ripple effects are likely to be widespread.
BUENOS AIRES — Argentina on Wednesday became the largest nation in Latin America to legalize abortion, a landmark vote in a conservative region and a victory for a grass-roots movement that turned years of rallies into political power.
The high-stakes vote, during 12 hours of often dramatic debate in the Senate, gripped the nation and exposed the tensions between a conservative society long influenced by the Roman Catholic Church, and a more secular generation that is fired up by a growing feminist movement.
“When I was born, women did not vote, we did not inherit, we could not manage our assets, we could not have bank accounts, we didn’t have credit cards, we couldn’t go to university,” Senator Silvia Sapag said in an emotional speech after the vote. “When I was born, women were nobody.”
Now, she added, for all the women who fought for those legal rights and more, “let it be law.”
The effects of the legalization vote are likely to ripple across Latin America, galvanizing abortion-rights advocates elsewhere in the region. The symbol of that effort in Argentina — green handkerchiefs — has begun showing up in other countries where women have poured into the streets demanding greater support for their rights.
Argentine groups that had worked against the abortion legislation, with the active support of Pope Francis, vowed not to give up.
“This doesn’t end here,” said Ana Belén Marmora, an activist in the anti-abortion group Youth Front. “We will not allow our voices to be ignored like this.”
As she spoke, a sonogram was carried out on a pregnant woman on a stage as people cheered: “Long live life!”
But the mood outside the neo-Classical Palace of Congress, where tens of thousands gathered while the bill was being debated into the early hours, was one of elation. Many in the crowd were part of a grass-roots effort that had made a concerted push for women’s rights, and focused on abortion access as its main goal.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/30/worl ... ogin-email
The Senate vote on Wednesday was a major victory for Latin America’s growing feminist movement, and its ripple effects are likely to be widespread.
BUENOS AIRES — Argentina on Wednesday became the largest nation in Latin America to legalize abortion, a landmark vote in a conservative region and a victory for a grass-roots movement that turned years of rallies into political power.
The high-stakes vote, during 12 hours of often dramatic debate in the Senate, gripped the nation and exposed the tensions between a conservative society long influenced by the Roman Catholic Church, and a more secular generation that is fired up by a growing feminist movement.
“When I was born, women did not vote, we did not inherit, we could not manage our assets, we could not have bank accounts, we didn’t have credit cards, we couldn’t go to university,” Senator Silvia Sapag said in an emotional speech after the vote. “When I was born, women were nobody.”
Now, she added, for all the women who fought for those legal rights and more, “let it be law.”
The effects of the legalization vote are likely to ripple across Latin America, galvanizing abortion-rights advocates elsewhere in the region. The symbol of that effort in Argentina — green handkerchiefs — has begun showing up in other countries where women have poured into the streets demanding greater support for their rights.
Argentine groups that had worked against the abortion legislation, with the active support of Pope Francis, vowed not to give up.
“This doesn’t end here,” said Ana Belén Marmora, an activist in the anti-abortion group Youth Front. “We will not allow our voices to be ignored like this.”
As she spoke, a sonogram was carried out on a pregnant woman on a stage as people cheered: “Long live life!”
But the mood outside the neo-Classical Palace of Congress, where tens of thousands gathered while the bill was being debated into the early hours, was one of elation. Many in the crowd were part of a grass-roots effort that had made a concerted push for women’s rights, and focused on abortion access as its main goal.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/30/worl ... ogin-email
'Rivers of gold' rush through the Peruvian Amazon in stunning NASA photo
By Brandon Specktor - Senior Writer 3 days ago
They look like pools of pure gold; they're actually pits of toxic mud.
The Peruvian Amazon glitters like gold in a gorgeous new photo taken aboard the International Space Station.
While that glow is just sunlight reflecting off hundreds of pits of muddy water, there is plenty of gold in them thar hills. Each glistening pool is a gold-prospecting pit, according to NASA's Earth Observatory website, likely dug by independent miners looking to unearth some of the Amazon's ancient treasures.
"Each pit is surrounded by de-vegetated areas of muddy soil," Justin Wilkinson, a grant specialist at Texas State University, wrote for Earth Observatory. "These deforested tracts follow the courses of ancient rivers that deposited sediments, including gold."
Peru's Madre de Dios state, shown in this picture, is home to one of the largest independent gold mining industries on Earth, Wilkinson wrote. As many as 30,000 small-scale miners (working outside of government regulations) prospect illegally in the area, tearing up the rainforest with excavators and dump trucks in order to unearth the gold underneath.
Illegal mining can be a boon to impoverished workers in Madre de Dios, but a detriment to the Amazon; according to a 2011 study in the journal PLOS One, gold mining is the single greatest cause of deforestation in the region.
https://www.livescience.com/nasa-peru-a ... rm=5382448
By Brandon Specktor - Senior Writer 3 days ago
They look like pools of pure gold; they're actually pits of toxic mud.
The Peruvian Amazon glitters like gold in a gorgeous new photo taken aboard the International Space Station.
While that glow is just sunlight reflecting off hundreds of pits of muddy water, there is plenty of gold in them thar hills. Each glistening pool is a gold-prospecting pit, according to NASA's Earth Observatory website, likely dug by independent miners looking to unearth some of the Amazon's ancient treasures.
"Each pit is surrounded by de-vegetated areas of muddy soil," Justin Wilkinson, a grant specialist at Texas State University, wrote for Earth Observatory. "These deforested tracts follow the courses of ancient rivers that deposited sediments, including gold."
Peru's Madre de Dios state, shown in this picture, is home to one of the largest independent gold mining industries on Earth, Wilkinson wrote. As many as 30,000 small-scale miners (working outside of government regulations) prospect illegally in the area, tearing up the rainforest with excavators and dump trucks in order to unearth the gold underneath.
Illegal mining can be a boon to impoverished workers in Madre de Dios, but a detriment to the Amazon; according to a 2011 study in the journal PLOS One, gold mining is the single greatest cause of deforestation in the region.
https://www.livescience.com/nasa-peru-a ... rm=5382448
Venezuelan Women Lose Access to Contraception, and Control of Their Lives
Affordable birth control has disappeared, pushing many women into unplanned pregnancies at a time when they can barely feed the children they already have.
SAN DIEGO DE LOS ALTOS, Venezuela — The moment Johanna Guzmán, 25, discovered she was going to have her sixth child she began to sob, crushed by the idea of bringing another life into a nation in such decay.
For years, as Venezuela spiraled deeper into an economic crisis, she and her husband had scoured clinics and pharmacies for any kind of birth control, usually in vain. They had a third child. A fourth. A fifth.
Already, Ms. Guzmán was cooking meager dinners over a wood fire, washing clothing without soap, teaching lessons without paper. Already, she was stalked by a fear that she could not feed them all.
And now, another child?
“I felt like I was drowning,” she said.
As Venezuela enters its eighth year of economic crisis, a deeply personal drama is playing out inside the home: Millions of women are no longer able to find or afford birth control, pushing many into unplanned pregnancies at a time when they can barely feed the children they already have.
Around Caracas, the capital, a pack of three condoms costs $4.40 — three times Venezuela’s monthly minimum wage of $1.50.
Birth control pills cost more than twice as much, roughly $11 a month, while an IUD, or intrauterine device, can cost more than $40 — more than 25 times the minimum wage. And that does not include a doctor’s fee to have the device put in.
With the cost of contraception so far out of reach, women are increasingly resorting to abortions, which are illegal and, in the worst cases, can cost them their lives.
Photos and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Affordable birth control has disappeared, pushing many women into unplanned pregnancies at a time when they can barely feed the children they already have.
SAN DIEGO DE LOS ALTOS, Venezuela — The moment Johanna Guzmán, 25, discovered she was going to have her sixth child she began to sob, crushed by the idea of bringing another life into a nation in such decay.
For years, as Venezuela spiraled deeper into an economic crisis, she and her husband had scoured clinics and pharmacies for any kind of birth control, usually in vain. They had a third child. A fourth. A fifth.
Already, Ms. Guzmán was cooking meager dinners over a wood fire, washing clothing without soap, teaching lessons without paper. Already, she was stalked by a fear that she could not feed them all.
And now, another child?
“I felt like I was drowning,” she said.
As Venezuela enters its eighth year of economic crisis, a deeply personal drama is playing out inside the home: Millions of women are no longer able to find or afford birth control, pushing many into unplanned pregnancies at a time when they can barely feed the children they already have.
Around Caracas, the capital, a pack of three condoms costs $4.40 — three times Venezuela’s monthly minimum wage of $1.50.
Birth control pills cost more than twice as much, roughly $11 a month, while an IUD, or intrauterine device, can cost more than $40 — more than 25 times the minimum wage. And that does not include a doctor’s fee to have the device put in.
With the cost of contraception so far out of reach, women are increasingly resorting to abortions, which are illegal and, in the worst cases, can cost them their lives.
Photos and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Abortion Is Now Legal in Argentina, but Opponents Are Making It Hard to Get
Anti-abortion activists are suing to block a new law allowing the procedure, and many doctors in conservative areas have declared themselves conscientious objectors.
BUENOS AIRES — For the first time in more than a century, women in Argentina can legally get an abortion, but that landmark shift in law may do them little good at hospitals like the one in northern Jujuy Province where all but one obstetrician have a simple response: No.
Abortion opponents are reeling after a measure legalizing the procedure was signed into law in December, but they have hardly given up. They have filed lawsuits arguing that the new law is unconstitutional. And they have made sure doctors know that they can refuse to terminate pregnancies, a message that is being embraced by many in rural areas.
“The law is already a reality, but that doesn’t mean we have to stay still,” said Dr. Gloria Abán, a general practitioner and abortion opponent who travels the remote Calchaquí Valleys of Salta Province to see patients. “We must be proactive.”
In neighboring Jujuy, 29 of the 30 obstetricians at the Hector Quintana Maternity and Children’s hospital have declared themselves conscientious objectors, as the law allows. So have all but a handful of the 120 gynecologists in the province, said Dr. Rubén Véliz, head of the obstetrics department at Hector Quintana.
“We’re really standing in the eye of the hurricane,” he said.
Argentina’s abortion law represented a big shift for reproductive rights in Latin America, which has among the strictest such laws in the world, galvanizing movements to expand access to safe abortion in Colombia, Mexico and Chile.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/07/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Anti-abortion activists are suing to block a new law allowing the procedure, and many doctors in conservative areas have declared themselves conscientious objectors.
BUENOS AIRES — For the first time in more than a century, women in Argentina can legally get an abortion, but that landmark shift in law may do them little good at hospitals like the one in northern Jujuy Province where all but one obstetrician have a simple response: No.
Abortion opponents are reeling after a measure legalizing the procedure was signed into law in December, but they have hardly given up. They have filed lawsuits arguing that the new law is unconstitutional. And they have made sure doctors know that they can refuse to terminate pregnancies, a message that is being embraced by many in rural areas.
“The law is already a reality, but that doesn’t mean we have to stay still,” said Dr. Gloria Abán, a general practitioner and abortion opponent who travels the remote Calchaquí Valleys of Salta Province to see patients. “We must be proactive.”
In neighboring Jujuy, 29 of the 30 obstetricians at the Hector Quintana Maternity and Children’s hospital have declared themselves conscientious objectors, as the law allows. So have all but a handful of the 120 gynecologists in the province, said Dr. Rubén Véliz, head of the obstetrics department at Hector Quintana.
“We’re really standing in the eye of the hurricane,” he said.
Argentina’s abortion law represented a big shift for reproductive rights in Latin America, which has among the strictest such laws in the world, galvanizing movements to expand access to safe abortion in Colombia, Mexico and Chile.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/07/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Ravaged by Covid, Brazil Faces a Hunger Epidemic
Tens of millions of Brazilians are facing hunger or food insecurity as the country’s Covid-19 crisis drags on, killing thousands of people every day.
RIO DE JANEIRO — Rail-thin teenagers hold placards at traffic stops with the word for hunger — fome — in large print. Children, many of whom have been out of school for over a year, beg for food outside supermarkets and restaurants. Entire families huddle in flimsy encampments on sidewalks, asking for baby formula, crackers, anything.
A year into the pandemic, millions of Brazilians are going hungry.
The scenes, which have proliferated in the last months on Brazil’s streets, are stark evidence that President Jair Bolsonaro’s bet that he could protect the country’s economy by resisting public health policies intended to curb the virus has failed.
From the start of the outbreak, Brazil’s president has been skeptical of the disease’s impact, and scorned the guidance of health experts, arguing that the economic damage wrought by the lockdowns, business closures and mobility restrictions they recommended would be a bigger threat than the pandemic to the country’s weak economy.
That trade-off led to one of the world’s highest death tolls, but also foundered in its goal — to keep the country afloat.
The virus is ripping through the social fabric, setting wrenching records, while the worsening health crisis pushes businesses into bankruptcy, killing jobs and further hampering an economy that has grown little or not at all for more than six years.
Last year, emergency government cash payments helped put food on the table for millions of Brazilians — but when the money was scaled back sharply this year, with a debt crisis looming, many pantries were left bare.
About 19 million people have gone hungry over the past year — nearly twice the 10 million who did so in 2018, the most recent year for which data were available, according to the Brazilian government and a study of privation during the pandemic by a network of Brazilian researchers focused on the issue.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Tens of millions of Brazilians are facing hunger or food insecurity as the country’s Covid-19 crisis drags on, killing thousands of people every day.
RIO DE JANEIRO — Rail-thin teenagers hold placards at traffic stops with the word for hunger — fome — in large print. Children, many of whom have been out of school for over a year, beg for food outside supermarkets and restaurants. Entire families huddle in flimsy encampments on sidewalks, asking for baby formula, crackers, anything.
A year into the pandemic, millions of Brazilians are going hungry.
The scenes, which have proliferated in the last months on Brazil’s streets, are stark evidence that President Jair Bolsonaro’s bet that he could protect the country’s economy by resisting public health policies intended to curb the virus has failed.
From the start of the outbreak, Brazil’s president has been skeptical of the disease’s impact, and scorned the guidance of health experts, arguing that the economic damage wrought by the lockdowns, business closures and mobility restrictions they recommended would be a bigger threat than the pandemic to the country’s weak economy.
That trade-off led to one of the world’s highest death tolls, but also foundered in its goal — to keep the country afloat.
The virus is ripping through the social fabric, setting wrenching records, while the worsening health crisis pushes businesses into bankruptcy, killing jobs and further hampering an economy that has grown little or not at all for more than six years.
Last year, emergency government cash payments helped put food on the table for millions of Brazilians — but when the money was scaled back sharply this year, with a debt crisis looming, many pantries were left bare.
About 19 million people have gone hungry over the past year — nearly twice the 10 million who did so in 2018, the most recent year for which data were available, according to the Brazilian government and a study of privation during the pandemic by a network of Brazilian researchers focused on the issue.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/worl ... 778d3e6de3
After a Year of Loss, South America Suffers Worst Death Tolls Yet
If the world doesn’t stop the region’s surging caseload, it could cost us all that we’ve done to fight the pandemic, one health official said.
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — In the capital of Colombia, Bogotá, the mayor is warning residents to brace for “the worst two weeks of our lives.”
Uruguay, once lauded as a model for keeping the coronavirus under control, now has one of the highest death rates in the world, while the grim daily tallies of the dead have hit records in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Peru in recent days.
Even Venezuela, where the authoritarian government is notorious for hiding health statistics and any suggestion of disarray, says that coronavirus deaths are up 86 percent since January.
As vaccinations mount in some of the world’s wealthiest countries and people cautiously envision life after the pandemic, the crisis in Latin America — and in South America in particular — is taking an alarming turn for the worse, potentially threatening the progress made well beyond its borders.
Last week, Latin America accounted for 35 percent of all coronavirus deaths in the world, despite having just 8 percent of the global population, according to data compiled by The New York Times.
Latin America was already one of the world’s hardest hit regions in 2020, with bodies sometimes abandoned on sidewalks and new burial grounds cut into thick forest. Yet even after a year of incalculable loss, it is still one of the most troubling global hot spots, with a recent surge in many countries that is even more deadly than before.
The crisis stems in part from predictable forces — limited vaccine supplies and slow rollouts, weak health systems and fragile economies that make stay-at-home orders difficult to impose or maintain.
But the region has another thorny challenge, health officials say: living side-by-side with Brazil, a country of more than 200 million whose president has consistently dismissed the threat of the virus and denounced measures to control it, helping fuel a dangerous variant that is now stalking the continent.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/worl ... 778d3e6de3
If the world doesn’t stop the region’s surging caseload, it could cost us all that we’ve done to fight the pandemic, one health official said.
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — In the capital of Colombia, Bogotá, the mayor is warning residents to brace for “the worst two weeks of our lives.”
Uruguay, once lauded as a model for keeping the coronavirus under control, now has one of the highest death rates in the world, while the grim daily tallies of the dead have hit records in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Peru in recent days.
Even Venezuela, where the authoritarian government is notorious for hiding health statistics and any suggestion of disarray, says that coronavirus deaths are up 86 percent since January.
As vaccinations mount in some of the world’s wealthiest countries and people cautiously envision life after the pandemic, the crisis in Latin America — and in South America in particular — is taking an alarming turn for the worse, potentially threatening the progress made well beyond its borders.
Last week, Latin America accounted for 35 percent of all coronavirus deaths in the world, despite having just 8 percent of the global population, according to data compiled by The New York Times.
Latin America was already one of the world’s hardest hit regions in 2020, with bodies sometimes abandoned on sidewalks and new burial grounds cut into thick forest. Yet even after a year of incalculable loss, it is still one of the most troubling global hot spots, with a recent surge in many countries that is even more deadly than before.
The crisis stems in part from predictable forces — limited vaccine supplies and slow rollouts, weak health systems and fragile economies that make stay-at-home orders difficult to impose or maintain.
But the region has another thorny challenge, health officials say: living side-by-side with Brazil, a country of more than 200 million whose president has consistently dismissed the threat of the virus and denounced measures to control it, helping fuel a dangerous variant that is now stalking the continent.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Even the Pope Has Prayed to Venezuela’s Beloved ‘Doctor of the Poor’
In a deeply polarized country, suffering an extreme health crisis, one of the few uniting beliefs is the admiration across the political spectrum for a doctor recently beatified by the Vatican.
ISNOTÚ, Venezuela — The faithful began arriving before dawn, silhouettes emerging from a thick fog, serenaded by birdsong and clamoring church bells.
They had navigated winding mountain roads, clogged with mudslide debris and checkpoints guarded by soldiers, to pay homage at the statue of a doctor with an outstretched hand. Many had traveled by foot because of widespread gasoline shortages.
Deivis Vásquez arrived, presented his only son to the doctor’s statue and wept, overcome with emotion that his boy was well enough to show his gratitude in person.
Months earlier, Mr. Vásquez had come to this very spot, deep in the foothills of the Andes, when his 14-year-old son, Deivi Rafael, lay in a coma on life-support in the pediatric intensive care unit of a government hospital.
A motorcycle crash had caused severe head trauma, and the boy’s medical team did not expect him to survive. If he defied the odds and lived, he faced a 95 percent probability of permanent brain damage.
“There was practically nothing I could do,” said his neurosurgeon, Dr. Edgar Altuve. “If I would have operated, it would have killed him.”
Terrified that his son would die, Mr. Vásquez drove his pickup truck to the tiny town of Isnotú to pray before the large white marble statue of Dr. José Gregorio Hernández, known nationwide as Venezuela’s “Doctor of the Poor.”
For decades, Venezuelans like him have flocked to Isnotú to beseech Dr. Hernández to heal them or their loved ones.
When devotees believe a cure is attributed to the doctor’s intervention, they present his statue with metal plaques to show their thanks. A few thousand such plaques — inscribed with messages describing successful operations and miracles — have been presented to the sanctuary since it was founded in 1960. There is now little room for more.
Photos and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/01/worl ... 778d3e6de3
In a deeply polarized country, suffering an extreme health crisis, one of the few uniting beliefs is the admiration across the political spectrum for a doctor recently beatified by the Vatican.
ISNOTÚ, Venezuela — The faithful began arriving before dawn, silhouettes emerging from a thick fog, serenaded by birdsong and clamoring church bells.
They had navigated winding mountain roads, clogged with mudslide debris and checkpoints guarded by soldiers, to pay homage at the statue of a doctor with an outstretched hand. Many had traveled by foot because of widespread gasoline shortages.
Deivis Vásquez arrived, presented his only son to the doctor’s statue and wept, overcome with emotion that his boy was well enough to show his gratitude in person.
Months earlier, Mr. Vásquez had come to this very spot, deep in the foothills of the Andes, when his 14-year-old son, Deivi Rafael, lay in a coma on life-support in the pediatric intensive care unit of a government hospital.
A motorcycle crash had caused severe head trauma, and the boy’s medical team did not expect him to survive. If he defied the odds and lived, he faced a 95 percent probability of permanent brain damage.
“There was practically nothing I could do,” said his neurosurgeon, Dr. Edgar Altuve. “If I would have operated, it would have killed him.”
Terrified that his son would die, Mr. Vásquez drove his pickup truck to the tiny town of Isnotú to pray before the large white marble statue of Dr. José Gregorio Hernández, known nationwide as Venezuela’s “Doctor of the Poor.”
For decades, Venezuelans like him have flocked to Isnotú to beseech Dr. Hernández to heal them or their loved ones.
When devotees believe a cure is attributed to the doctor’s intervention, they present his statue with metal plaques to show their thanks. A few thousand such plaques — inscribed with messages describing successful operations and miracles — have been presented to the sanctuary since it was founded in 1960. There is now little room for more.
Photos and more...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/01/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Abortion Is No Longer a Crime in Mexico. But Most Women Still Can’t Get One.
The Supreme Court’s decision set a legal precedent for the nation. But applying it to all of Mexico’s states will be a long path, and women are still facing prosecution.
MEXICO CITY — When the Supreme Court in Mexico issued a historic decision on Tuesday declaring that having an abortion was not a crime, activists across the country celebrated. On Wednesday, they got back to work, taking on the long and arduous process of ensuring that the legal shift applies across Mexico.
Among their top priorities are helping the women who need it most: those facing criminal penalties, often after having been reported to the authorities for trying to induce an abortion themselves under dangerous conditions.
“A woman who decides to get an abortion is already vulnerable, and then we also have to confront the dire situation of believing we will face punishment,” said Yetlanezi Pech, who was rushed to a hospital, bleeding, after an attempted abortion, only to have an emergency room doctor deny her help and turn her in to authorities.
“I felt so much fear, I felt so unsafe, I felt really, really bad,” she said. “And I also felt alone.”
Ms. Pech is among the thousands of women who have been investigated for illegally obtaining abortion in recent years. In the first seven months of this year alone, 432 investigations were opened across Mexico into cases of illegal abortion, according to the Mexican government.
The ruling on Tuesday set a legal precedent for the nation — and stands in stark contrast to the trend in the United States, where Texas and other states have recently moved to restrict abortion. The court’s decision also raised the prospect of Mexico eventually becoming a destination for American women seeking to end their pregnancies, advocates said, though that would require removing the many obstacles that make abortion difficult to obtain in much of the country.
Tuesday’s decision applies only to the border state of Coahuila, and putting it into practice nationwide requires either legal challenges in each of the 28 states in Mexico that still criminalize the procedure, or a change in law by state legislatures. The justices did not specify how far into a pregnancy a woman can legally obtain an abortion, meaning those terms will likely be determined at the state level.
A leading abortion rights group in Mexico, GIRE, said that it would push for abortion to be legal in Coahuila for 12 weeks after conception at a minimum — a time limit established in the law that made abortion legal in Mexico City and which was previously validated by the Supreme Court.
If that were the case, Coahuila would have more permissive abortions rules than neighboring Texas, where the state legislature recently implemented a law that prohibits most abortions after about six weeks. In time, women from Texas could potentially cross the border to have an abortion — but for now, there wouldn’t be enough infrastructure in place to meet the need, activists said.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/08/worl ... 778d3e6de3
The Supreme Court’s decision set a legal precedent for the nation. But applying it to all of Mexico’s states will be a long path, and women are still facing prosecution.
MEXICO CITY — When the Supreme Court in Mexico issued a historic decision on Tuesday declaring that having an abortion was not a crime, activists across the country celebrated. On Wednesday, they got back to work, taking on the long and arduous process of ensuring that the legal shift applies across Mexico.
Among their top priorities are helping the women who need it most: those facing criminal penalties, often after having been reported to the authorities for trying to induce an abortion themselves under dangerous conditions.
“A woman who decides to get an abortion is already vulnerable, and then we also have to confront the dire situation of believing we will face punishment,” said Yetlanezi Pech, who was rushed to a hospital, bleeding, after an attempted abortion, only to have an emergency room doctor deny her help and turn her in to authorities.
“I felt so much fear, I felt so unsafe, I felt really, really bad,” she said. “And I also felt alone.”
Ms. Pech is among the thousands of women who have been investigated for illegally obtaining abortion in recent years. In the first seven months of this year alone, 432 investigations were opened across Mexico into cases of illegal abortion, according to the Mexican government.
The ruling on Tuesday set a legal precedent for the nation — and stands in stark contrast to the trend in the United States, where Texas and other states have recently moved to restrict abortion. The court’s decision also raised the prospect of Mexico eventually becoming a destination for American women seeking to end their pregnancies, advocates said, though that would require removing the many obstacles that make abortion difficult to obtain in much of the country.
Tuesday’s decision applies only to the border state of Coahuila, and putting it into practice nationwide requires either legal challenges in each of the 28 states in Mexico that still criminalize the procedure, or a change in law by state legislatures. The justices did not specify how far into a pregnancy a woman can legally obtain an abortion, meaning those terms will likely be determined at the state level.
A leading abortion rights group in Mexico, GIRE, said that it would push for abortion to be legal in Coahuila for 12 weeks after conception at a minimum — a time limit established in the law that made abortion legal in Mexico City and which was previously validated by the Supreme Court.
If that were the case, Coahuila would have more permissive abortions rules than neighboring Texas, where the state legislature recently implemented a law that prohibits most abortions after about six weeks. In time, women from Texas could potentially cross the border to have an abortion — but for now, there wouldn’t be enough infrastructure in place to meet the need, activists said.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/08/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Abortion Is No Longer a Crime in Mexico. But Will Doctors Object?
Another battle looms over whether public hospitals will be required to offer the procedure.
MEXICO CITY — As soon as the nurse found out that she had an abortion at home, Fernanda García knew she was in danger. The nurse began yelling that she was a criminal, that what she had done was wrong, that she would be sent to jail.
“She told me that they were going to report me, that I was going to face charges,” said Ms. García, who went to the hospital last month after experiencing pain and bleeding. “I’ve never felt so scared in my life.”
When Ms. García tried to leave, she said the medical staff refused to return her belongings. She said that she snatched her things and ran out, but that she still shakes every time the doorbell rings, convinced the police are coming to arrest her. She says she has thought about killing herself many times since then.
Now, Mexico’s Supreme Court has ruled that abortion is not a crime, setting a national precedent that puts the country on the path to becoming the most populous nation in Latin America to allow the procedure. Thousands of people have faced criminal investigations in recent years for ending their pregnancies, and the court’s unanimous decision last week should enable them to get any charges dropped, legal experts said.
But cases like Ms. García’s show how out of sync the nation’s top judges are with the views of the conservative majority in Mexico, where polls indicate that most people don’t believe abortion should be legal.
As an emboldened women’s rights movement increasingly took to the streets in Mexico, the nation edged toward broader access to abortion, with several states decriminalizing the procedure before the Supreme Court ruling. But as in Argentina, which legalized abortion last year only to have many doctors refuse to provide the procedure on moral grounds, those changes have created sharp divisions in a country with one of the world’s largest numbers of Catholics.
In fact, lawmakers in Mexico enshrined a doctor’s right to refuse to perform any procedure that goes against his or her personal beliefs in 2018 — a contentious issue that the Supreme Court is expected to take on this week that could ultimately determine how widely available abortion is in practice.
The court is considering whether to require that public hospitals have medical professionals on staff who are willing to perform abortions, or that patients must be transferred to facilities that do. The justices are also deciding whether to prohibit medical professionals from harassing or preaching to women who want abortions, a move that could fundamentally change the way doctors and nurses are allowed to treat people who seek to end their pregnancies.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/13/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Another battle looms over whether public hospitals will be required to offer the procedure.
MEXICO CITY — As soon as the nurse found out that she had an abortion at home, Fernanda García knew she was in danger. The nurse began yelling that she was a criminal, that what she had done was wrong, that she would be sent to jail.
“She told me that they were going to report me, that I was going to face charges,” said Ms. García, who went to the hospital last month after experiencing pain and bleeding. “I’ve never felt so scared in my life.”
When Ms. García tried to leave, she said the medical staff refused to return her belongings. She said that she snatched her things and ran out, but that she still shakes every time the doorbell rings, convinced the police are coming to arrest her. She says she has thought about killing herself many times since then.
Now, Mexico’s Supreme Court has ruled that abortion is not a crime, setting a national precedent that puts the country on the path to becoming the most populous nation in Latin America to allow the procedure. Thousands of people have faced criminal investigations in recent years for ending their pregnancies, and the court’s unanimous decision last week should enable them to get any charges dropped, legal experts said.
But cases like Ms. García’s show how out of sync the nation’s top judges are with the views of the conservative majority in Mexico, where polls indicate that most people don’t believe abortion should be legal.
As an emboldened women’s rights movement increasingly took to the streets in Mexico, the nation edged toward broader access to abortion, with several states decriminalizing the procedure before the Supreme Court ruling. But as in Argentina, which legalized abortion last year only to have many doctors refuse to provide the procedure on moral grounds, those changes have created sharp divisions in a country with one of the world’s largest numbers of Catholics.
In fact, lawmakers in Mexico enshrined a doctor’s right to refuse to perform any procedure that goes against his or her personal beliefs in 2018 — a contentious issue that the Supreme Court is expected to take on this week that could ultimately determine how widely available abortion is in practice.
The court is considering whether to require that public hospitals have medical professionals on staff who are willing to perform abortions, or that patients must be transferred to facilities that do. The justices are also deciding whether to prohibit medical professionals from harassing or preaching to women who want abortions, a move that could fundamentally change the way doctors and nurses are allowed to treat people who seek to end their pregnancies.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/13/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Chile has a growing Muslim community – but few know about it
Michael Vicente Perez, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Memphis and Matthew Ingalls, Chair of the Department of International and Middle Eastern Studies and Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies, American University in Dubai
Tue, September 14, 2021, 7:12 AM
Chilean Muslims reflect significant diversity. The Naqshbandi Haqqani Sufis, a global Sufi order that originated in Central Asia, are among them. John Albert, CC BY
Nora is a rare sight at the Universidad de Chile. Dressed in a long abaya, or Islamic robe, that covers all but her hands and face, her outfit distinguishes her from other students on campus. In between classes, she’ll often seek a quiet, sheltered space to lay out a small carpet and pray.
If one were to ask Nora, as we did, about her distinct appearance on campus, she would say she doesn’t mind. She’s content with her dress, her prayers and the way of life it reflects. Nora is a Chilean Muslim, and proudly so.
Chile is not a country where most people would expect to find a Muslim population. It is, however, not unique. Some of the earliest Muslims in Latin America, for example, arrived in the 16th and 17th centuries. Known as “Moriscos,” these Muslims traveled to the colonies hoping to evade persecution under the Christian crown in Spain.
Muslims also came to the Americas during the 18th century as enslaved Africans under the Portuguese and Spanish empires. These Muslims came mostly from West Africa and, in Brazil, led one of the continent’s largest revolts against slavery. Muslims in Latin America are also the result of Middle Eastern migrations from the Ottoman Empire during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
This history of Islam in Latin America is visible today in the 1.7 million Muslims living across Central and South America.
Why we did this research
As scholars of religion and anthropology, our interest in Latin American Muslims began in 2018. At the time, few studies on Muslim minorities in the Americas considered the experience of Muslims in Latin America. Moreover, much of the research in the Americas focused on questions of assimilation or terrorism and neglected the more basic issues of belief, practice and community.
Islam, in other words, was framed as a problem, not a way of life. And we found that, because of such research, large Muslim communities and their experiences had been excluded from the picture of Islam in the Americas.
As both scholars and converts to Islam ourselves, we understand the depth of meaning Islam can have for its believers. We therefore decided to focus our research on a growing community of Muslims in a region not typically associated with Islam.
Diverse community
In Chile, Islam is primarily the result of Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian migrations from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Fleeing conditions in the Ottoman Empire, these Levantine immigrants and their descendants permanently settled in Chile and established the first Islamic institutions in the 1920s.
Despite their national and religious differences, members of this early community combined their efforts as Muslims to lay the foundation for Islam in Chile. Now, almost a century after the first Islamic center was built, Chile boasts over 13 mosques and Islamic centers.
Home to approximately 5,000 Muslims, including Sunnis and Shiites who have their own distinct mosques and centers, these sites are the communal epicenters for the Muslim minority in Chile. Together, they provide the spaces for Muslim education and practice and serve as an important source of their visibility.
Chile has one of the smaller Muslim populations in the region. Its size notwithstanding, Chilean Muslims reflect significant diversity. In many ways, they are a microcosm of the Muslim world. In the capital city of Santiago, where the majority of Muslims live, the largest community is tied to the Mezquita as-Salaam.
The Mezquita as-Salaam mosque in Santiago, Chile.
Established in 1989, Mezquita as-Salaam today is open daily for ritual prayers and hosts all Islamic events including nightly feasts during Ramadan and communal meals for the festival of Eid. The mosque is currently managed by the Tablighi Jamaat, a global Muslim missionary movement, which provides most Islamic instruction and delivers the main lectures in Spanish and Arabic for Friday prayer.
The Tablighi Jamaat also sends Chile’s Muslim converts abroad for Islamic learning and takes them on religious excursions throughout Latin America as part of their mission to remind Muslims to adhere to Islamic traditions.
Converts to Islam
Mezquita as-Salaam is a diverse communal space. Despite its official affiliation with the Tablighi Jamaat, Chilean Muslims come from a range of backgrounds and experiences.
Many are native Chilean converts, like Khadija, who embraced Islam about a decade ago. We met Khadija in the Mezquita as-Salaam during Ramadan. She discovered Islam through her own online search and came to the mosque only after deciding she wanted to join the faith. Khadija does not identify with the approach of the Tablighi Jamaat and instead participates in study circles with Chilean converts and some of the Arab Muslim women who attend the mosque.
Together, they practice Quranic recitation; study the Quran and hadith, the recorded sayings of the Prophet Muhammad; discuss the ethics of Islam; and share ideas for halal recipes. For Khadija, the mosque is an important space to connect with other Chilean Muslims and escape her experience as a minority.
In a working-class area about 6 miles west of the Mezquita as-Salaam is the center, or dargah, for the Naqshbandi Haqqani Sufis, a global Sufi order that originated in Central Asia. We were introduced to the Naqshbandis through a Tablighi imam who was providing Islamic education to the community. Led by a local Chilean sheikh who established the first branch in Chile, this small group of Muslims is connected to Naqshbandi Orders throughout the Americas, including Argentina and the United States.
From our visits with the Naqshbandis, we learned that they are almost exclusively converts. Many of them told us during interviews that they discovered Islam through what they said they experienced as personal encounters with the order’s sheikh, Muhammad Nazim al-Qabbani, during a dream. The community visits the dargah regularly for informal gatherings, vegetarian meals, and dhikr (devotional acts of prayer that remind Muslims of their connection to God), as well as prayers on Fridays.
They also meet to prepare and distribute meals in impoverished areas of Santiago. For the Naqshbandi, this is a critical dimension of their ethical labor. It is one of the most important ways to practice the Islamic principles of compassion and faith.
Iman, for example, is one of the founders of the food drive they call Olla Rabbani. Every week, she and other Naqshbandis travel to local markets to collect unspoiled food scraps and use them to prepare large pots of lentil soup for local distribution. Iman was a deeply spiritual woman who established her connection to God in the practice of dhikr. But Iman also found a connection to God through her work with the poor. For her, as with many of the Naqshbandi, feeding the hungry is as much a part of Islam as any other form of devotion.
The communities of Mezquita as-Salaam and the Naqshbandi dargah are only a fraction of Chile’s Muslim community. In Santiago and the throughout the country, there are other Sunni, Shiite and Sufi mosques and centers with their own communities. Some are mixtures of Chilean converts and Muslim migrants from abroad. Others are exclusively Muslim converts.
Together, however, they represent the Muslim minority population of Chile. More significantly, they are a part of the ever-expanding Muslim world.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ch ... 48240.html
Michael Vicente Perez, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Memphis and Matthew Ingalls, Chair of the Department of International and Middle Eastern Studies and Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies, American University in Dubai
Tue, September 14, 2021, 7:12 AM
Chilean Muslims reflect significant diversity. The Naqshbandi Haqqani Sufis, a global Sufi order that originated in Central Asia, are among them. John Albert, CC BY
Nora is a rare sight at the Universidad de Chile. Dressed in a long abaya, or Islamic robe, that covers all but her hands and face, her outfit distinguishes her from other students on campus. In between classes, she’ll often seek a quiet, sheltered space to lay out a small carpet and pray.
If one were to ask Nora, as we did, about her distinct appearance on campus, she would say she doesn’t mind. She’s content with her dress, her prayers and the way of life it reflects. Nora is a Chilean Muslim, and proudly so.
Chile is not a country where most people would expect to find a Muslim population. It is, however, not unique. Some of the earliest Muslims in Latin America, for example, arrived in the 16th and 17th centuries. Known as “Moriscos,” these Muslims traveled to the colonies hoping to evade persecution under the Christian crown in Spain.
Muslims also came to the Americas during the 18th century as enslaved Africans under the Portuguese and Spanish empires. These Muslims came mostly from West Africa and, in Brazil, led one of the continent’s largest revolts against slavery. Muslims in Latin America are also the result of Middle Eastern migrations from the Ottoman Empire during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
This history of Islam in Latin America is visible today in the 1.7 million Muslims living across Central and South America.
Why we did this research
As scholars of religion and anthropology, our interest in Latin American Muslims began in 2018. At the time, few studies on Muslim minorities in the Americas considered the experience of Muslims in Latin America. Moreover, much of the research in the Americas focused on questions of assimilation or terrorism and neglected the more basic issues of belief, practice and community.
Islam, in other words, was framed as a problem, not a way of life. And we found that, because of such research, large Muslim communities and their experiences had been excluded from the picture of Islam in the Americas.
As both scholars and converts to Islam ourselves, we understand the depth of meaning Islam can have for its believers. We therefore decided to focus our research on a growing community of Muslims in a region not typically associated with Islam.
Diverse community
In Chile, Islam is primarily the result of Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian migrations from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Fleeing conditions in the Ottoman Empire, these Levantine immigrants and their descendants permanently settled in Chile and established the first Islamic institutions in the 1920s.
Despite their national and religious differences, members of this early community combined their efforts as Muslims to lay the foundation for Islam in Chile. Now, almost a century after the first Islamic center was built, Chile boasts over 13 mosques and Islamic centers.
Home to approximately 5,000 Muslims, including Sunnis and Shiites who have their own distinct mosques and centers, these sites are the communal epicenters for the Muslim minority in Chile. Together, they provide the spaces for Muslim education and practice and serve as an important source of their visibility.
Chile has one of the smaller Muslim populations in the region. Its size notwithstanding, Chilean Muslims reflect significant diversity. In many ways, they are a microcosm of the Muslim world. In the capital city of Santiago, where the majority of Muslims live, the largest community is tied to the Mezquita as-Salaam.
The Mezquita as-Salaam mosque in Santiago, Chile.
Established in 1989, Mezquita as-Salaam today is open daily for ritual prayers and hosts all Islamic events including nightly feasts during Ramadan and communal meals for the festival of Eid. The mosque is currently managed by the Tablighi Jamaat, a global Muslim missionary movement, which provides most Islamic instruction and delivers the main lectures in Spanish and Arabic for Friday prayer.
The Tablighi Jamaat also sends Chile’s Muslim converts abroad for Islamic learning and takes them on religious excursions throughout Latin America as part of their mission to remind Muslims to adhere to Islamic traditions.
Converts to Islam
Mezquita as-Salaam is a diverse communal space. Despite its official affiliation with the Tablighi Jamaat, Chilean Muslims come from a range of backgrounds and experiences.
Many are native Chilean converts, like Khadija, who embraced Islam about a decade ago. We met Khadija in the Mezquita as-Salaam during Ramadan. She discovered Islam through her own online search and came to the mosque only after deciding she wanted to join the faith. Khadija does not identify with the approach of the Tablighi Jamaat and instead participates in study circles with Chilean converts and some of the Arab Muslim women who attend the mosque.
Together, they practice Quranic recitation; study the Quran and hadith, the recorded sayings of the Prophet Muhammad; discuss the ethics of Islam; and share ideas for halal recipes. For Khadija, the mosque is an important space to connect with other Chilean Muslims and escape her experience as a minority.
In a working-class area about 6 miles west of the Mezquita as-Salaam is the center, or dargah, for the Naqshbandi Haqqani Sufis, a global Sufi order that originated in Central Asia. We were introduced to the Naqshbandis through a Tablighi imam who was providing Islamic education to the community. Led by a local Chilean sheikh who established the first branch in Chile, this small group of Muslims is connected to Naqshbandi Orders throughout the Americas, including Argentina and the United States.
From our visits with the Naqshbandis, we learned that they are almost exclusively converts. Many of them told us during interviews that they discovered Islam through what they said they experienced as personal encounters with the order’s sheikh, Muhammad Nazim al-Qabbani, during a dream. The community visits the dargah regularly for informal gatherings, vegetarian meals, and dhikr (devotional acts of prayer that remind Muslims of their connection to God), as well as prayers on Fridays.
They also meet to prepare and distribute meals in impoverished areas of Santiago. For the Naqshbandi, this is a critical dimension of their ethical labor. It is one of the most important ways to practice the Islamic principles of compassion and faith.
Iman, for example, is one of the founders of the food drive they call Olla Rabbani. Every week, she and other Naqshbandis travel to local markets to collect unspoiled food scraps and use them to prepare large pots of lentil soup for local distribution. Iman was a deeply spiritual woman who established her connection to God in the practice of dhikr. But Iman also found a connection to God through her work with the poor. For her, as with many of the Naqshbandi, feeding the hungry is as much a part of Islam as any other form of devotion.
The communities of Mezquita as-Salaam and the Naqshbandi dargah are only a fraction of Chile’s Muslim community. In Santiago and the throughout the country, there are other Sunni, Shiite and Sufi mosques and centers with their own communities. Some are mixtures of Chilean converts and Muslim migrants from abroad. Others are exclusively Muslim converts.
Together, however, they represent the Muslim minority population of Chile. More significantly, they are a part of the ever-expanding Muslim world.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ch ... 48240.html
Chile Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage at Fraught Political Moment
The legalization of same-sex marriage in Chile comes as the country grapples with sweeping demands for social change.
SANTIAGO, Chile — Lawmakers in Chile on Tuesday legalized same-sex marriage, a landmark victory for gay rights activists that underscores how profoundly the country’s politics and society have shifted in the past decade.
By overwhelming majorities in both chambers, lawmakers put the unions of same-sex couples on par with others, making Chile the 31st nation to allow gay marriage and taking a significant step toward consolidating it as the norm in Latin America.
The vote comes as Chile, long seen as a stable and conservative country in the region, grapples with an urgent demand for sweeping social change from various sectors of society. Millions of Chileans took to the streets in 2019 in protests that culminated in a vote to scrap the Constitution, a document inherited from Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, and rewrite the laws that frame the nation.
The moment of reckoning showed how out of touch the political class had been on a broad range of issues, including gay rights, said Rolando Jiménez, one of the leaders of Movilh, a leading gay rights organization in Chile.
“The political class had been deaf, blind and mute regarding a series of matters on which civil society and ordinary Chileans had advanced,” he said.
President Sebastián Piñera, a longtime opponent of same-sex marriage, startled the political establishment in June by coming out in favor of such unions. He urged Congress to prioritize passing a bill that had languished for years, ensuring the legislation will be among the last achievements of a turbulent presidency.
The measure will be signed into law at the final stretch of Chile’s polarized presidential race. The vote is on Dec. 19, and the leading candidates — Gabriel Boric, a leftist former student activist, and José Antonio Kast, a far-right former congressman — are bitterly at odds on a vast array of issues, including same-sex marriage.
On Tuesday afternoon, during a meeting with evangelical leaders, Mr. Kast said he disagreed with the new law.
“We respect democracy, but that doesn’t mean we change our convictions,” he said. “For us, marriage is between a man and a woman.”
While the movement for same-sex marriage has advanced slowly in much of the world in recent years, the vast majority of Latin Americans now live in countries where those unions are legal. In some large nations, including Brazil and Mexico, the right has been conferred by the courts.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/07/worl ... 778d3e6de3
The legalization of same-sex marriage in Chile comes as the country grapples with sweeping demands for social change.
SANTIAGO, Chile — Lawmakers in Chile on Tuesday legalized same-sex marriage, a landmark victory for gay rights activists that underscores how profoundly the country’s politics and society have shifted in the past decade.
By overwhelming majorities in both chambers, lawmakers put the unions of same-sex couples on par with others, making Chile the 31st nation to allow gay marriage and taking a significant step toward consolidating it as the norm in Latin America.
The vote comes as Chile, long seen as a stable and conservative country in the region, grapples with an urgent demand for sweeping social change from various sectors of society. Millions of Chileans took to the streets in 2019 in protests that culminated in a vote to scrap the Constitution, a document inherited from Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, and rewrite the laws that frame the nation.
The moment of reckoning showed how out of touch the political class had been on a broad range of issues, including gay rights, said Rolando Jiménez, one of the leaders of Movilh, a leading gay rights organization in Chile.
“The political class had been deaf, blind and mute regarding a series of matters on which civil society and ordinary Chileans had advanced,” he said.
President Sebastián Piñera, a longtime opponent of same-sex marriage, startled the political establishment in June by coming out in favor of such unions. He urged Congress to prioritize passing a bill that had languished for years, ensuring the legislation will be among the last achievements of a turbulent presidency.
The measure will be signed into law at the final stretch of Chile’s polarized presidential race. The vote is on Dec. 19, and the leading candidates — Gabriel Boric, a leftist former student activist, and José Antonio Kast, a far-right former congressman — are bitterly at odds on a vast array of issues, including same-sex marriage.
On Tuesday afternoon, during a meeting with evangelical leaders, Mr. Kast said he disagreed with the new law.
“We respect democracy, but that doesn’t mean we change our convictions,” he said. “For us, marriage is between a man and a woman.”
While the movement for same-sex marriage has advanced slowly in much of the world in recent years, the vast majority of Latin Americans now live in countries where those unions are legal. In some large nations, including Brazil and Mexico, the right has been conferred by the courts.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/07/worl ... 778d3e6de3
‘Time We Can’t Get Back’: Stolen at Birth, Chilean Adoptees Uncover Their Past
Growing up in Minnesota, Tyler Graf knew almost nothing about his birth mother. And what little he knew, he said, stung.
His adoption papers listed her name, Hilda del Carmen Quezada; her age, 26; the date, March 2, 1983; and the hospital where she gave birth to him in central Chile. The documents also included a judge’s note saying Ms. Quezada gave him up because she had little money and “other children to support.”
“I never thought that any excuse would be good enough,” said Mr. Graf, who is now a firefighter in Houston. “I carried that animosity, that chip on my shoulder, my whole life.”
The claim that his mother willingly gave him up hurt, Mr. Graf said, until he learned this year that he is one of hundreds — possibly thousands — of Chilean adoptees taken from their parents without their consent during the country’s military dictatorship.
Ms. Quezada, it turned out, had not surrendered her son; she was told the baby, born three months premature, had died.
“Two weeks after the birth, they told me he had died,” Ms. Quezada said. “I asked for the body and they refused, saying it was too small.”
Investigators looking into coercive adoptions in Chile since the first cases came to light in 2014 have come to a stunning conclusion: The practice was widespread during the rule of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who actively encouraged overseas adoptions to reduce poverty in the 1970s and 1980s. The process was abetted by a vast network of officials — including judges, social workers, health professionals and adoption brokers — who forged documents and are widely assumed to have taken bribes.
More than 550 adoptees have reconnected with their birth families in recent years. But investigators say the scheme, which is still being uncovered, most likely involved many more children.
More and photos:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/17/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Growing up in Minnesota, Tyler Graf knew almost nothing about his birth mother. And what little he knew, he said, stung.
His adoption papers listed her name, Hilda del Carmen Quezada; her age, 26; the date, March 2, 1983; and the hospital where she gave birth to him in central Chile. The documents also included a judge’s note saying Ms. Quezada gave him up because she had little money and “other children to support.”
“I never thought that any excuse would be good enough,” said Mr. Graf, who is now a firefighter in Houston. “I carried that animosity, that chip on my shoulder, my whole life.”
The claim that his mother willingly gave him up hurt, Mr. Graf said, until he learned this year that he is one of hundreds — possibly thousands — of Chilean adoptees taken from their parents without their consent during the country’s military dictatorship.
Ms. Quezada, it turned out, had not surrendered her son; she was told the baby, born three months premature, had died.
“Two weeks after the birth, they told me he had died,” Ms. Quezada said. “I asked for the body and they refused, saying it was too small.”
Investigators looking into coercive adoptions in Chile since the first cases came to light in 2014 have come to a stunning conclusion: The practice was widespread during the rule of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who actively encouraged overseas adoptions to reduce poverty in the 1970s and 1980s. The process was abetted by a vast network of officials — including judges, social workers, health professionals and adoption brokers — who forged documents and are widely assumed to have taken bribes.
More than 550 adoptees have reconnected with their birth families in recent years. But investigators say the scheme, which is still being uncovered, most likely involved many more children.
More and photos:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/17/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Chile Writes Its Constitution, Confronting Climate Change Head On
Chile has lots of lithium, which is essential to the world’s transition to green energy. But anger over powerful mining interests, a water crisis and inequality has driven Chile to rethink how it defines itself.
SALAR DE ATACAMA, Chile — Rarely does a country get a chance to lay out its ideals as a nation and write a new constitution for itself. Almost never does the climate and ecological crisis play a central role.
That is, until now, in Chile, where a national reinvention is underway. After months of protests over social and environmental grievances, 155 Chileans have been elected to write a new constitution amid what they have declared a “climate and ecological emergency.”
Their work will not only shape how this country of 19 million is governed. It will also determine the future of a soft, lustrous metal, lithium, lurking in the salt waters beneath this vast ethereal desert beside the Andes Mountains.
Lithium is an essential component of batteries. And as the global economy seeks alternatives to fossil fuels to slow down climate change, lithium demand — and prices — are soaring.
Mining companies in Chile, the world’s second-largest lithium producer after Australia, are keen to increase production, as are politicians who see mining as crucial to national prosperity. They face mounting opposition, though, from Chileans who argue that the country’s very economic model, based on extraction of natural resources, has exacted too high an environmental cost and failed to spread the benefits to all citizens, including its Indigenous people.
And so, it falls to the Constitutional Convention to decide what kind of country Chile wants to be. Convention members will decide many things, including: How should mining be regulated, and what voice should local communities have over mining? Should Chile retain a presidential system? Should nature have rights? How about future generations?
Around the world, nations face similar dilemmas — in the forests of central Africa, in Native American territories in the United States — as they try to tackle the climate crisis without repeating past mistakes. For Chile, the issue now stands to shape the national charter. “We have to assume that human activity causes damage, so how much damage do we want to cause?” said Cristina Dorador Ortiz, a microbiologist who studies the salt flats and is in the Constitutional Convention. “What is enough damage to live well?”
Then there’s water. Amid a crippling drought supercharged by climate change, the Convention will decide who owns Chile’s water. It will also weigh something more basic: What exactly is water?
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/28/clim ... 778d3e6de3
Chile has lots of lithium, which is essential to the world’s transition to green energy. But anger over powerful mining interests, a water crisis and inequality has driven Chile to rethink how it defines itself.
SALAR DE ATACAMA, Chile — Rarely does a country get a chance to lay out its ideals as a nation and write a new constitution for itself. Almost never does the climate and ecological crisis play a central role.
That is, until now, in Chile, where a national reinvention is underway. After months of protests over social and environmental grievances, 155 Chileans have been elected to write a new constitution amid what they have declared a “climate and ecological emergency.”
Their work will not only shape how this country of 19 million is governed. It will also determine the future of a soft, lustrous metal, lithium, lurking in the salt waters beneath this vast ethereal desert beside the Andes Mountains.
Lithium is an essential component of batteries. And as the global economy seeks alternatives to fossil fuels to slow down climate change, lithium demand — and prices — are soaring.
Mining companies in Chile, the world’s second-largest lithium producer after Australia, are keen to increase production, as are politicians who see mining as crucial to national prosperity. They face mounting opposition, though, from Chileans who argue that the country’s very economic model, based on extraction of natural resources, has exacted too high an environmental cost and failed to spread the benefits to all citizens, including its Indigenous people.
And so, it falls to the Constitutional Convention to decide what kind of country Chile wants to be. Convention members will decide many things, including: How should mining be regulated, and what voice should local communities have over mining? Should Chile retain a presidential system? Should nature have rights? How about future generations?
Around the world, nations face similar dilemmas — in the forests of central Africa, in Native American territories in the United States — as they try to tackle the climate crisis without repeating past mistakes. For Chile, the issue now stands to shape the national charter. “We have to assume that human activity causes damage, so how much damage do we want to cause?” said Cristina Dorador Ortiz, a microbiologist who studies the salt flats and is in the Constitutional Convention. “What is enough damage to live well?”
Then there’s water. Amid a crippling drought supercharged by climate change, the Convention will decide who owns Chile’s water. It will also weigh something more basic: What exactly is water?
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/28/clim ... 778d3e6de3
Leftists Are Ascendant in Latin America as Key Elections Loom
Growing inequality and sputtering economies have helped fuel a wave of leftist victories that may soon extend to Brazil and Colombia.
RIO DE JANEIRO — In the final weeks of 2021, Chile and Honduras voted decisively for leftist presidents to replace leaders on the right, extending a significant, multiyear shift across Latin America.
This year, leftist politicians are the favorites to win presidential elections in Colombia and Brazil, taking over from right-wing incumbents, which would put the left and center-left in power in the six largest economies in the region, stretching from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego.
Economic suffering, widening inequality, fervent anti-incumbent sentiment and mismanagement of Covid-19 have all fueled a pendulum swing away from the center-right and right-wing leaders who were dominant a few years ago.
The left has promised more equitable distribution of wealth, better public services and vastly expanded social safety nets. But the region’s new leaders face serious economic constraints and legislative opposition that could restrict their ambitions, and restive voters who have been willing to punish whoever fails to deliver.
The left’s gains could buoy China and undermine the United States as they compete for regional influence, analysts say, with a new crop of Latin American leaders who are desperate for economic development and more open to Beijing’s global strategy of offering loans and infrastructure investment. The change could also make it harder for the United States to continue isolating authoritarian leftist regimes in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba.
With rising inflation and stagnant economies, Latin America’s new leaders will find it hard to deliver real change on profound problems, said Pedro Mendes Loureiro, a professor of Latin American studies at the University of Cambridge. To some extent, he said, voters are “electing the left simply because it is the opposition at the moment.”
Poverty is at a 20-year high in a region where a short-lived commodities boom had enabled millions to ascend into the middle class after the turn of the century. Several nations now face double-digit unemployment, and more than 50 percent of workers in the region are employed in the informal sector.
Corruption scandals, dilapidated infrastructure and chronically underfunded health and education systems have eroded faith in leaders and public institutions.
Unlike the early 2000s, when leftists won critical presidencies in Latin America, the new officeholders are saddled by debt, lean budgets, scant access to credit and in many cases, vociferous opposition.
Eric Hershberg, the director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University, said the left’s winning streak is born out of widespread indignation.
“This is really about lower-middle-class and working-class sectors saying, ‘Thirty years into democracy, and we still have to ride a decrepit bus for two hours to get to a bad health clinic,’” Mr. Hershberg said. He cited frustration, anger and “a generalized sense that elites have enriched themselves, been corrupt, have not been operating in the public interest.”
Covid has ravaged Latin America and devastated economies that were already precarious, but the region’s political tilt started before the pandemic.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/04/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Growing inequality and sputtering economies have helped fuel a wave of leftist victories that may soon extend to Brazil and Colombia.
RIO DE JANEIRO — In the final weeks of 2021, Chile and Honduras voted decisively for leftist presidents to replace leaders on the right, extending a significant, multiyear shift across Latin America.
This year, leftist politicians are the favorites to win presidential elections in Colombia and Brazil, taking over from right-wing incumbents, which would put the left and center-left in power in the six largest economies in the region, stretching from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego.
Economic suffering, widening inequality, fervent anti-incumbent sentiment and mismanagement of Covid-19 have all fueled a pendulum swing away from the center-right and right-wing leaders who were dominant a few years ago.
The left has promised more equitable distribution of wealth, better public services and vastly expanded social safety nets. But the region’s new leaders face serious economic constraints and legislative opposition that could restrict their ambitions, and restive voters who have been willing to punish whoever fails to deliver.
The left’s gains could buoy China and undermine the United States as they compete for regional influence, analysts say, with a new crop of Latin American leaders who are desperate for economic development and more open to Beijing’s global strategy of offering loans and infrastructure investment. The change could also make it harder for the United States to continue isolating authoritarian leftist regimes in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba.
With rising inflation and stagnant economies, Latin America’s new leaders will find it hard to deliver real change on profound problems, said Pedro Mendes Loureiro, a professor of Latin American studies at the University of Cambridge. To some extent, he said, voters are “electing the left simply because it is the opposition at the moment.”
Poverty is at a 20-year high in a region where a short-lived commodities boom had enabled millions to ascend into the middle class after the turn of the century. Several nations now face double-digit unemployment, and more than 50 percent of workers in the region are employed in the informal sector.
Corruption scandals, dilapidated infrastructure and chronically underfunded health and education systems have eroded faith in leaders and public institutions.
Unlike the early 2000s, when leftists won critical presidencies in Latin America, the new officeholders are saddled by debt, lean budgets, scant access to credit and in many cases, vociferous opposition.
Eric Hershberg, the director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University, said the left’s winning streak is born out of widespread indignation.
“This is really about lower-middle-class and working-class sectors saying, ‘Thirty years into democracy, and we still have to ride a decrepit bus for two hours to get to a bad health clinic,’” Mr. Hershberg said. He cited frustration, anger and “a generalized sense that elites have enriched themselves, been corrupt, have not been operating in the public interest.”
Covid has ravaged Latin America and devastated economies that were already precarious, but the region’s political tilt started before the pandemic.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/04/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: SOUTH AMERICA
How Colombian Feminists Decriminalized Abortion: With Help From Their Neighbors
As the United States faces growing restrictions on abortion, activists in Latin America are increasingly relying on one another to knock down barriers in the region.
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Decades of grass roots organizing, with meetings in living rooms and in the streets, online and across borders, have produced a tectonic shift on abortion in Latin America, a historically conservative region where access to the procedure has long been severely limited.
In just over a year, Colombia has joined Mexico and Argentina in knocking down barriers to abortion. It’s all the more striking in contrast to the shift taking place in the United States, the country whose Supreme Court decision guaranteeing the right to abortion — Roe v. Wade — had been a seminal spark for many activists in Latin America.
As the United States faces growing restrictions on abortion, feminist activists in Latin America are increasingly relying on one another for legal strategy, organizing tactics and inspiration, pointing out that their counterparts to the north might have something to learn from them.
“It’s now an inspiration going south to north,” said Catalina Martínez Coral, 37, a Colombian lawyer and member of Causa Justa, the coalition of abortion rights groups that brought the case recently considered by the Colombian court. “We are going to inspire people in the United States to defend the rights set out in Roe v. Wade.”
As abortion rights advocates in Colombia prepared to make their case before the country’s highest court this year, they drew their tactics from their neighbors: They learned from lawyers in Mexico, adopted a song-and-dance performance similar to one in Chile and waved the green handkerchiefs that first emerged as a symbol of the movement in Argentina.
And when the country’s high court ruled in their favor on Monday, largely striking down a measure that made abortion a crime, they gathered outside the courthouse to celebrate and to thank those who had helped them make the moment possible: their partners across Latin America.
Abortion still has plenty of opponents in the region, including the Colombian president, Iván Duque, a conservative who condemned the ruling on Tuesday.
“I am worried that abortion, which goes against life, will become a regular practice,” he told local media shortly after taking office. “And that in a machista country, people will resort to it, and for many it will become a contraceptive in place of the condom.”
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/worl ... 778d3e6de3
As the United States faces growing restrictions on abortion, activists in Latin America are increasingly relying on one another to knock down barriers in the region.
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Decades of grass roots organizing, with meetings in living rooms and in the streets, online and across borders, have produced a tectonic shift on abortion in Latin America, a historically conservative region where access to the procedure has long been severely limited.
In just over a year, Colombia has joined Mexico and Argentina in knocking down barriers to abortion. It’s all the more striking in contrast to the shift taking place in the United States, the country whose Supreme Court decision guaranteeing the right to abortion — Roe v. Wade — had been a seminal spark for many activists in Latin America.
As the United States faces growing restrictions on abortion, feminist activists in Latin America are increasingly relying on one another for legal strategy, organizing tactics and inspiration, pointing out that their counterparts to the north might have something to learn from them.
“It’s now an inspiration going south to north,” said Catalina Martínez Coral, 37, a Colombian lawyer and member of Causa Justa, the coalition of abortion rights groups that brought the case recently considered by the Colombian court. “We are going to inspire people in the United States to defend the rights set out in Roe v. Wade.”
As abortion rights advocates in Colombia prepared to make their case before the country’s highest court this year, they drew their tactics from their neighbors: They learned from lawyers in Mexico, adopted a song-and-dance performance similar to one in Chile and waved the green handkerchiefs that first emerged as a symbol of the movement in Argentina.
And when the country’s high court ruled in their favor on Monday, largely striking down a measure that made abortion a crime, they gathered outside the courthouse to celebrate and to thank those who had helped them make the moment possible: their partners across Latin America.
Abortion still has plenty of opponents in the region, including the Colombian president, Iván Duque, a conservative who condemned the ruling on Tuesday.
“I am worried that abortion, which goes against life, will become a regular practice,” he told local media shortly after taking office. “And that in a machista country, people will resort to it, and for many it will become a contraceptive in place of the condom.”
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: SOUTH AMERICA
In Brazil, Firms Sought Black Workers. Then LinkedIn Got Involved.
After Brazilian activists fought LinkedIn for removing job ads that sought Black and Indigenous candidates, the company changed its global policy.
RIO DE JANEIRO — In February, a think tank in São Paulo was looking for a financial coordinator. The job was remote, the work was part time and, the post on LinkedIn said, Black and Indigenous candidates were preferred.
For Brazil, the ad was innocuous. Many Brazilian companies have started to explicitly seek out Black and Indigenous workers to diversify their ranks, a step to reverse the deep inequality that has racked the country since the area was first settled centuries ago.
Then LinkedIn, which is dominant in Brazil, removed the listing, setting off a debate over why a company based in California should be controlling how a country in South America deals with its racist past and present. Over the next month, dozens of large companies protested, federal prosecutors opened inquiries and activists sued.
This past week, LinkedIn reversed its stance. The company, which is owned by Microsoft, said it had learned from the experience in Brazil and changed its global policy to allow job listings that explicitly pursue candidates who are “members of groups historically disadvantaged in hiring.”
The case was the latest illustration of how a handful of American tech companies exert enormous influence in foreign countries, enforcing global policies that often clash with those cultures or bring strife, abuse or other unintended consequences.
“There are a lot of pros to global connectivity that I would hate to give up,” said Eileen Donahoe, a former Obama administration official who now studies global digital policies at Stanford University. “But what’s coming to the surface in this instance is the underside of that global connectivity and global dominance.”
In this case, the backlash succeeded in changing LinkedIn’s rules, not only in Brazil, but also across the world. LinkedIn’s about-face shows how countries are increasingly pushing back against big tech companies and forcing changes in their policies, with global implications.
“Often the trend has been an actual law, or government regulation” forcing tech companies to rethink policies, Ms. Donahoe said. But with the LinkedIn case, she said, “This was more public outcry.”
Like many countries, Brazil has a brutal history of racism. From the arrival of the first European settlers, Indigenous people were slaughtered for hundreds of years. Brazil imported more slaves than any other country and was the last nation in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888. And today, in a country where more than half the population is Black, Black people hold fewer than 1 in 100 corporate management positions, according to one study.
The fight for equality has gained steam in recent years, in part fueled by a surge of affirmative action programs. In 2020, Magazine Luiza, a Brazilian retail giant with more than 1,400 stores, announced that its executive trainee program would be open only to Black candidates.
The announcement ignited a national debate. Many conservatives in Brazil criticized the company, calling its policy racist, while many on the left cheered it on. “We were ‘canceled’ on social media, even by congressmen,” said Frederico Trajano, Magazine Luiza’s chief executive. Yet since then, similar policies in Brazil “have taken off,” he said. “The number of new initiatives is impressive.”
In the United States, companies including Google, Twitter and J.P. Morgan have introduced internship programs in recent years that are limited to certain minorities, framed as a way to create a more diverse pipeline of talent. But while there have been broad efforts to diversify the white-collar workforces at many American companies, U.S. law generally prohibits job ads that show a preference for a specific race.
In Brazil, several recent court decisions have upheld affirmative action policies, making the law more clear that companies can give preference to Black and Indigenous employees, said Elisiane Santos, a prosecutor in the federal labor prosecutor’s office. “It certainly is legal,” she said.
As a result, companies have become bolder. So when Laut, a research institute in São Paulo, posted its ad for a financial coordinator that “gave preference” to Black and Indigenous candidates, the move was hardly groundbreaking. It was more surprising when, three days later, on Feb. 28, LinkedIn removed the ad and told Laut, the Center for the Analysis of Freedom and Authoritarianism, in an email that the listing violated its policies.
Natura & Co., a Brazilian personal beauty company with 35,000 employees, later said that LinkedIn had also taken down its ad seeking a person of color for a management job.
The move by LinkedIn revived the national debate on affirmative action policies. LinkedIn was targeted by the left and seen as a champion of the right.
“LinkedIn’s stance toward Brazil is a colonialist use of the law to protect racism,” Pedro Abramovay, the former No. 2 official in Brazil’s Justice Department, said on Twitter.
LinkedIn’s official account responded, saying its policy applied to all users globally and prohibited job listings that give preference to, or exclude, candidates based on “age, gender, religion, ethnicity, race or sexual orientation.”
Raphael Vicente, a São Paulo lawyer and professor who runs an initiative to promote affirmative action policies, began gathering signatures from corporations for a letter protesting the policy. More than 40 companies signed on, including Coca-Cola, Intel, Procter & Gamble, Bayer and Unilever. “Such a policy can be a huge setback for the country,” Mr. Vicente wrote, adding that it would reverse the effect of the affirmative action programs that activists like him had fought for.
LinkedIn is dominant in Brazil for job listings. Brazil is LinkedIn’s third-largest market, after the United States and India, with 55 million users, or one in every four people in Brazil.
After LinkedIn took down the ads, the federal prosecutor’s office in São Paulo, the federal labor prosecutor and a federal consumer-rights agency all sent notices to the company requesting more information. Educafro, a racial-justice group, then sued LinkedIn, saying its policy was racist and violated Brazilian law. The group asked for more than $2 million in damages, which it said it would use for education programs for Black people.
On Tuesday, after The New York Times sought comment on its removal of the job listings, LinkedIn said it was changing its policy to allow such ads, as long as they are legal in a given country. “Getting this right is important and we’re committed to continuing to learn and improve,” the company said in a statement. It declined to comment further.
In 2010, a federal law in Brazil required companies to create “equal opportunities in the labor market for the Black population,” though it did not specify how. In 2012, Brazil’s Supreme Court backed racial quotas in public universities. And in 2014, a new law required that 20 percent of people hired through public service exams be Black.
Mr. Vicente said that when he and other activists began pushing affirmative action in Brazil in 2015, Brazilian companies still balked. “Now a global company has had to retreat on the subject,” he said. “This message to companies here is very clear.”
A European data-privacy law that went into effect in 2018 largely led to the worldwide proliferation of alerts on websites that ask visitors to accept “cookies,” or the tracking software embedded behind most web pages. The European Union is now set to approve new rules that could force tech companies to make their messaging apps work with rivals’ products, probably affecting people far beyond the bloc. And late last year, an investigation in Japan caused Apple to revise important rules for many app makers, while guidelines in Britain prompted tech giants to alter how their products work to protect minors better across the world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/02/worl ... 778d3e6de3
After Brazilian activists fought LinkedIn for removing job ads that sought Black and Indigenous candidates, the company changed its global policy.
RIO DE JANEIRO — In February, a think tank in São Paulo was looking for a financial coordinator. The job was remote, the work was part time and, the post on LinkedIn said, Black and Indigenous candidates were preferred.
For Brazil, the ad was innocuous. Many Brazilian companies have started to explicitly seek out Black and Indigenous workers to diversify their ranks, a step to reverse the deep inequality that has racked the country since the area was first settled centuries ago.
Then LinkedIn, which is dominant in Brazil, removed the listing, setting off a debate over why a company based in California should be controlling how a country in South America deals with its racist past and present. Over the next month, dozens of large companies protested, federal prosecutors opened inquiries and activists sued.
This past week, LinkedIn reversed its stance. The company, which is owned by Microsoft, said it had learned from the experience in Brazil and changed its global policy to allow job listings that explicitly pursue candidates who are “members of groups historically disadvantaged in hiring.”
The case was the latest illustration of how a handful of American tech companies exert enormous influence in foreign countries, enforcing global policies that often clash with those cultures or bring strife, abuse or other unintended consequences.
“There are a lot of pros to global connectivity that I would hate to give up,” said Eileen Donahoe, a former Obama administration official who now studies global digital policies at Stanford University. “But what’s coming to the surface in this instance is the underside of that global connectivity and global dominance.”
In this case, the backlash succeeded in changing LinkedIn’s rules, not only in Brazil, but also across the world. LinkedIn’s about-face shows how countries are increasingly pushing back against big tech companies and forcing changes in their policies, with global implications.
“Often the trend has been an actual law, or government regulation” forcing tech companies to rethink policies, Ms. Donahoe said. But with the LinkedIn case, she said, “This was more public outcry.”
Like many countries, Brazil has a brutal history of racism. From the arrival of the first European settlers, Indigenous people were slaughtered for hundreds of years. Brazil imported more slaves than any other country and was the last nation in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888. And today, in a country where more than half the population is Black, Black people hold fewer than 1 in 100 corporate management positions, according to one study.
The fight for equality has gained steam in recent years, in part fueled by a surge of affirmative action programs. In 2020, Magazine Luiza, a Brazilian retail giant with more than 1,400 stores, announced that its executive trainee program would be open only to Black candidates.
The announcement ignited a national debate. Many conservatives in Brazil criticized the company, calling its policy racist, while many on the left cheered it on. “We were ‘canceled’ on social media, even by congressmen,” said Frederico Trajano, Magazine Luiza’s chief executive. Yet since then, similar policies in Brazil “have taken off,” he said. “The number of new initiatives is impressive.”
In the United States, companies including Google, Twitter and J.P. Morgan have introduced internship programs in recent years that are limited to certain minorities, framed as a way to create a more diverse pipeline of talent. But while there have been broad efforts to diversify the white-collar workforces at many American companies, U.S. law generally prohibits job ads that show a preference for a specific race.
In Brazil, several recent court decisions have upheld affirmative action policies, making the law more clear that companies can give preference to Black and Indigenous employees, said Elisiane Santos, a prosecutor in the federal labor prosecutor’s office. “It certainly is legal,” she said.
As a result, companies have become bolder. So when Laut, a research institute in São Paulo, posted its ad for a financial coordinator that “gave preference” to Black and Indigenous candidates, the move was hardly groundbreaking. It was more surprising when, three days later, on Feb. 28, LinkedIn removed the ad and told Laut, the Center for the Analysis of Freedom and Authoritarianism, in an email that the listing violated its policies.
Natura & Co., a Brazilian personal beauty company with 35,000 employees, later said that LinkedIn had also taken down its ad seeking a person of color for a management job.
The move by LinkedIn revived the national debate on affirmative action policies. LinkedIn was targeted by the left and seen as a champion of the right.
“LinkedIn’s stance toward Brazil is a colonialist use of the law to protect racism,” Pedro Abramovay, the former No. 2 official in Brazil’s Justice Department, said on Twitter.
LinkedIn’s official account responded, saying its policy applied to all users globally and prohibited job listings that give preference to, or exclude, candidates based on “age, gender, religion, ethnicity, race or sexual orientation.”
Raphael Vicente, a São Paulo lawyer and professor who runs an initiative to promote affirmative action policies, began gathering signatures from corporations for a letter protesting the policy. More than 40 companies signed on, including Coca-Cola, Intel, Procter & Gamble, Bayer and Unilever. “Such a policy can be a huge setback for the country,” Mr. Vicente wrote, adding that it would reverse the effect of the affirmative action programs that activists like him had fought for.
LinkedIn is dominant in Brazil for job listings. Brazil is LinkedIn’s third-largest market, after the United States and India, with 55 million users, or one in every four people in Brazil.
After LinkedIn took down the ads, the federal prosecutor’s office in São Paulo, the federal labor prosecutor and a federal consumer-rights agency all sent notices to the company requesting more information. Educafro, a racial-justice group, then sued LinkedIn, saying its policy was racist and violated Brazilian law. The group asked for more than $2 million in damages, which it said it would use for education programs for Black people.
On Tuesday, after The New York Times sought comment on its removal of the job listings, LinkedIn said it was changing its policy to allow such ads, as long as they are legal in a given country. “Getting this right is important and we’re committed to continuing to learn and improve,” the company said in a statement. It declined to comment further.
In 2010, a federal law in Brazil required companies to create “equal opportunities in the labor market for the Black population,” though it did not specify how. In 2012, Brazil’s Supreme Court backed racial quotas in public universities. And in 2014, a new law required that 20 percent of people hired through public service exams be Black.
Mr. Vicente said that when he and other activists began pushing affirmative action in Brazil in 2015, Brazilian companies still balked. “Now a global company has had to retreat on the subject,” he said. “This message to companies here is very clear.”
A European data-privacy law that went into effect in 2018 largely led to the worldwide proliferation of alerts on websites that ask visitors to accept “cookies,” or the tracking software embedded behind most web pages. The European Union is now set to approve new rules that could force tech companies to make their messaging apps work with rivals’ products, probably affecting people far beyond the bloc. And late last year, an investigation in Japan caused Apple to revise important rules for many app makers, while guidelines in Britain prompted tech giants to alter how their products work to protect minors better across the world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/02/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Mexico Sees Its Energy Future in Fossil Fuels, Not Renewables
The president’s push to bring the energy sector under state control has put up roadblocks to renewable energy and left Mexico’s climate goals behind.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico last month at the Olmeca Dos Bocas refinery in Paraiso, Mexico.Credit...Office of the Mexican President
MEXICO CITY — On a recent scorching afternoon in his home state of Tabasco, the president of Mexico celebrated his government’s latest triumph: a new oil refinery.
Though not yet operational, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador hailed the refinery as a centerpiece in his grand campaign to secure Mexico’s energy independence.
“We ignored the sirens’ song, the voices that predicted, in good faith, perhaps, the end of the oil age and the massive arrival of electric cars and renewable energies,” he told the cheering crowd.
At a moment when scientists are sounding alarms about the need to move away from fossil fuels that contribute to catastrophic climate change, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sparked a global shift in the opposite direction, with the United States and European countries moving to increase oil and gas production to counter bans on Russian energy.
But Mexico is going even further.
Driven by Mr. López Obrador’s long-held goal to wrest control of the energy sector from private companies and allow state firms to dominate the market, the government is undermining efforts to expand renewable power and staking the nation’s future on fossil fuels.
The policy is central to Mr. López Obrador’s ambition to reverse what he sees as corrupt privatization of the industry, guarantee Mexican energy sovereignty and return the country to the glory days when oil created thousands of jobs and helped bolster the economy.
To this end, Mexican authorities are using the might of their regulatory agencies to keep renewable firms out of the market, blocking their power plants from operating, and instead propping up fossil fuel-powered plants owned or run by the state, according to interviews with more than a dozen former government officials, analysts and energy executives.
The Olmeca Dos Bocas refinery is owned by Pemex, the state-run oil company.Credit...Office of the Mexican President
As a result, Mexico will almost certainly fail to meet its pledge to the world to reduce its carbon output, according to analysts. The country has also potentially jeopardized billions of dollars in renewable investment and created another source of tension with the Biden administration, which has made combating climate change a key pillar of its foreign policy agenda.
“People say: ‘how is he going to fulfill his commitments to climate change?’ And I always tell people, ‘well, he doesn’t care,’” Tony Payan, a Mexico expert at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, said of Mr. López Obrador. “He’s an oil man.”
To our readers,
Stories like this are possible because of our deep commitment to original reporting, produced by a global staff of over 1,700 journalists who have all dedicated themselves to helping you understand the world. That work is only possible because of the support of our subscribers. I hope you’ll consider becoming one today.
— Marc Lacey, Managing Editor
The president’s press office, Mexico’s Energy Ministry and the state electric company did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. López Obrador has argued that while the transition to renewable energy will happen eventually, Mexico is simply not ready.
“That technological advancement will become a reality,” he said during the refinery inauguration. “To get there, we need more time.”
The government has not completely abandoned renewable energy. It plans to spend about $1.6 billion to build a giant solar plant in northern Mexico as well as refurbish more than a dozen state-owned hydroelectric plants.
Mexico generates nearly 80 percent of its energy from fossil fuels, while renewables and nuclear power provide the remaining 20 percent, according to government figures.
Mr. López Obrador’s supporters also contend that the government’s strategy will allow the state more control over the energy sector and any shift to renewables. The policy is critical in a country where public oversight of the private sector has often been weak, according to Fluvio Ruíz Alarcón, an analyst and former adviser at Pemex, the state-owned oil firm.
“Once a sector as important in our country as energy is controlled by private hands, state regulation becomes very, very difficult,” Mr. Ruíz said. Keeping the sector under state control “gives you the ability to manage the energy transition at your own pace.”
For Mexico, sovereignty over energy production holds a special place. In the 1930s, President Lázaro Cárdenas seized the assets of foreign oil firms, including U.S. corporations, accused of exploiting Mexican workers and nationalized the industry, an iconic event celebrated as a national holiday.
Mr. López Obrador, who hails Mr. Cárdenas as an inspiration, has made regaining a near monopoly over energy for the state a top priority.
A tanker truck operated by Pemex, the state-owned oil company. For Mexico, sovereignty over energy production holds a special place.Credit...Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters
One of his first acts was installing loyalists on the board of an energy regulatory commission responsible for overseeing the power sector, turning what had been an independent agency, analysts say, into a tool to carry out the president’s agenda.
“You’ve lost any semblance of autonomy or independence there,” said Jeremy M. Martin, vice president for energy and sustainability at the Institute of the Americas, a public policy research institute.
As of June, more than 50 wind and solar projects proposed by private and foreign firms were awaiting permits from the commission, with some applications dating to 2019, the last time any new permits for private energy companies were approved, according to government records. In total, they represent a potential of almost 7,000 megawatts of renewable energy — enough electricity to power a city the size of Los Angeles.
There’s a “war that’s been waged against renewables,” said Francisco Salazar Diez de Sollano, a former chairman of the energy regulatory commission.
A windmill farm that has not yet begun operations in Huimilpan, Mexico.Credit...Cesar Rodriguez for The New York Times
Antonio Perea, who works in business development at Sungrow, a Chinese firm supplying solar hardware, said three projects his company was working on are on hold because the government has not granted permits.
In Mexico, “we had the cheapest solar energy in the world, and unfortunately with all these changes we’ve been left behind,” Mr. Perea said, referring to the government’s energy agenda. “It’s not an energy issue, it’s a political issue.”
Mr. López Obrador has also focused on reversing sweeping energy reforms approved by his predecessor, which opened Mexican energy markets to private companies, including foreign firms working on renewables, for the first time in decades. In 2019, he canceled a public auction for the rights to generate wind and solar power, even though earlier auctions had led to some of the world’s cheapest renewable prices.
Mr. López Obrador’s governing Morena party also approved a bill to rewrite rules governing how power plants inject electricity to the grid, reversing previous changes that required cheaper, often renewable energy to be dispatched first, and instead prioritizing state-owned plants.
The new law, which was widely criticized by the private sector and environmentalists, was narrowly upheld by the Supreme Court in April, but it remains tied up in several lawsuits.
Government authorities have also prevented at least 14 privately owned wind and solar plants that have already been built from operating commercially, according to two industry executives who requested anonymity out of fear of government reprisals.
A solar plant that has not yet opened in Jalisco, Mexico.Credit...Cesar Rodriguez for The New York Times
The government has also given preference to energy from coal, gas and fuel-oil burning plants owned by the state over privately owned renewables in the order that they feed power into the national grid, citing the reliability needs of the energy system.
The practice was carried out “without apparent justification,” according to a report released last year by a U.S.-based firm hired by Mexico to monitor the nation’s energy sector. And even though the Supreme Court ruled key parts of the government’s policy unconstitutional, it is still being applied, according to the industry executives.
And even as it blocks renewable energy, the state is planning to invest $6.2 billion to build 15 fossil fuel-powered plants by 2024, government documents show.
The authorities’ targeting of the renewable sector has had a major economic impact: Foreign direct investment in the energy sector plunged from $5 billion in 2018, when Mr. López Obrador took office, to less than $600 million last year, according to government figures.
“Mexico is not open for energy investment,” Mr. Payan said. “It’s simply shut down.”
With U.S. firms already having invested heavily in the Mexican energy sector, the policy changes have become an increasing source of tension with Washington.
The Biden administration said recently it was seeking high-level discussions with Mexico over its energy policies, raising the specter of new tariffs.
A Pemex oil platform in the Bay of Campeche, Mexico.Credit...Victor Ruiz Garcia/Reuters
“We have repeatedly expressed serious concerns about a series of changes in Mexico’s energy policies,” Katherine Tai, the U.S. trade representative, said in a statement. “But, unfortunately, U.S. companies continue to face unfair treatment.”
Mr. López Obrador, during a news conference, appeared to shrug off the United States’ warning, playing a video of a Mexican song called “Ooh, How Scary.”
The Mexican leader has said his country would be open to foreign investment in renewable projects only if the energy ministry was in charge of planning and the state-owned utility company had a majority share — a likely violation of Mexico’s trade agreement with the United States.
Mr. López Obrador has insisted that Mexico will meet its goal under the 2015 Paris Agreement to produce 35 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2024, but a government report released this year showed that the country is now years behind that target.
Many environmentalists and renewable energy experts said they were focused on Mexico’s next presidential elections in two years, hoping for an administration friendlier to renewable power.
“Whoever takes office in 2024 is going to have to deal with some serious deficiencies in the energy sector,” Mr. Martin said. But as far as the Paris Agreement, he added, “that ship has sailed.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/17/worl ... 778d3e6de3
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico last month at the Olmeca Dos Bocas refinery in Paraiso, Mexico.Credit...Office of the Mexican President
MEXICO CITY — On a recent scorching afternoon in his home state of Tabasco, the president of Mexico celebrated his government’s latest triumph: a new oil refinery.
Though not yet operational, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador hailed the refinery as a centerpiece in his grand campaign to secure Mexico’s energy independence.
“We ignored the sirens’ song, the voices that predicted, in good faith, perhaps, the end of the oil age and the massive arrival of electric cars and renewable energies,” he told the cheering crowd.
At a moment when scientists are sounding alarms about the need to move away from fossil fuels that contribute to catastrophic climate change, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sparked a global shift in the opposite direction, with the United States and European countries moving to increase oil and gas production to counter bans on Russian energy.
But Mexico is going even further.
Driven by Mr. López Obrador’s long-held goal to wrest control of the energy sector from private companies and allow state firms to dominate the market, the government is undermining efforts to expand renewable power and staking the nation’s future on fossil fuels.
The policy is central to Mr. López Obrador’s ambition to reverse what he sees as corrupt privatization of the industry, guarantee Mexican energy sovereignty and return the country to the glory days when oil created thousands of jobs and helped bolster the economy.
To this end, Mexican authorities are using the might of their regulatory agencies to keep renewable firms out of the market, blocking their power plants from operating, and instead propping up fossil fuel-powered plants owned or run by the state, according to interviews with more than a dozen former government officials, analysts and energy executives.
The Olmeca Dos Bocas refinery is owned by Pemex, the state-run oil company.Credit...Office of the Mexican President
As a result, Mexico will almost certainly fail to meet its pledge to the world to reduce its carbon output, according to analysts. The country has also potentially jeopardized billions of dollars in renewable investment and created another source of tension with the Biden administration, which has made combating climate change a key pillar of its foreign policy agenda.
“People say: ‘how is he going to fulfill his commitments to climate change?’ And I always tell people, ‘well, he doesn’t care,’” Tony Payan, a Mexico expert at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, said of Mr. López Obrador. “He’s an oil man.”
To our readers,
Stories like this are possible because of our deep commitment to original reporting, produced by a global staff of over 1,700 journalists who have all dedicated themselves to helping you understand the world. That work is only possible because of the support of our subscribers. I hope you’ll consider becoming one today.
— Marc Lacey, Managing Editor
The president’s press office, Mexico’s Energy Ministry and the state electric company did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. López Obrador has argued that while the transition to renewable energy will happen eventually, Mexico is simply not ready.
“That technological advancement will become a reality,” he said during the refinery inauguration. “To get there, we need more time.”
The government has not completely abandoned renewable energy. It plans to spend about $1.6 billion to build a giant solar plant in northern Mexico as well as refurbish more than a dozen state-owned hydroelectric plants.
Mexico generates nearly 80 percent of its energy from fossil fuels, while renewables and nuclear power provide the remaining 20 percent, according to government figures.
Mr. López Obrador’s supporters also contend that the government’s strategy will allow the state more control over the energy sector and any shift to renewables. The policy is critical in a country where public oversight of the private sector has often been weak, according to Fluvio Ruíz Alarcón, an analyst and former adviser at Pemex, the state-owned oil firm.
“Once a sector as important in our country as energy is controlled by private hands, state regulation becomes very, very difficult,” Mr. Ruíz said. Keeping the sector under state control “gives you the ability to manage the energy transition at your own pace.”
For Mexico, sovereignty over energy production holds a special place. In the 1930s, President Lázaro Cárdenas seized the assets of foreign oil firms, including U.S. corporations, accused of exploiting Mexican workers and nationalized the industry, an iconic event celebrated as a national holiday.
Mr. López Obrador, who hails Mr. Cárdenas as an inspiration, has made regaining a near monopoly over energy for the state a top priority.
A tanker truck operated by Pemex, the state-owned oil company. For Mexico, sovereignty over energy production holds a special place.Credit...Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters
One of his first acts was installing loyalists on the board of an energy regulatory commission responsible for overseeing the power sector, turning what had been an independent agency, analysts say, into a tool to carry out the president’s agenda.
“You’ve lost any semblance of autonomy or independence there,” said Jeremy M. Martin, vice president for energy and sustainability at the Institute of the Americas, a public policy research institute.
As of June, more than 50 wind and solar projects proposed by private and foreign firms were awaiting permits from the commission, with some applications dating to 2019, the last time any new permits for private energy companies were approved, according to government records. In total, they represent a potential of almost 7,000 megawatts of renewable energy — enough electricity to power a city the size of Los Angeles.
There’s a “war that’s been waged against renewables,” said Francisco Salazar Diez de Sollano, a former chairman of the energy regulatory commission.
A windmill farm that has not yet begun operations in Huimilpan, Mexico.Credit...Cesar Rodriguez for The New York Times
Antonio Perea, who works in business development at Sungrow, a Chinese firm supplying solar hardware, said three projects his company was working on are on hold because the government has not granted permits.
In Mexico, “we had the cheapest solar energy in the world, and unfortunately with all these changes we’ve been left behind,” Mr. Perea said, referring to the government’s energy agenda. “It’s not an energy issue, it’s a political issue.”
Mr. López Obrador has also focused on reversing sweeping energy reforms approved by his predecessor, which opened Mexican energy markets to private companies, including foreign firms working on renewables, for the first time in decades. In 2019, he canceled a public auction for the rights to generate wind and solar power, even though earlier auctions had led to some of the world’s cheapest renewable prices.
Mr. López Obrador’s governing Morena party also approved a bill to rewrite rules governing how power plants inject electricity to the grid, reversing previous changes that required cheaper, often renewable energy to be dispatched first, and instead prioritizing state-owned plants.
The new law, which was widely criticized by the private sector and environmentalists, was narrowly upheld by the Supreme Court in April, but it remains tied up in several lawsuits.
Government authorities have also prevented at least 14 privately owned wind and solar plants that have already been built from operating commercially, according to two industry executives who requested anonymity out of fear of government reprisals.
A solar plant that has not yet opened in Jalisco, Mexico.Credit...Cesar Rodriguez for The New York Times
The government has also given preference to energy from coal, gas and fuel-oil burning plants owned by the state over privately owned renewables in the order that they feed power into the national grid, citing the reliability needs of the energy system.
The practice was carried out “without apparent justification,” according to a report released last year by a U.S.-based firm hired by Mexico to monitor the nation’s energy sector. And even though the Supreme Court ruled key parts of the government’s policy unconstitutional, it is still being applied, according to the industry executives.
And even as it blocks renewable energy, the state is planning to invest $6.2 billion to build 15 fossil fuel-powered plants by 2024, government documents show.
The authorities’ targeting of the renewable sector has had a major economic impact: Foreign direct investment in the energy sector plunged from $5 billion in 2018, when Mr. López Obrador took office, to less than $600 million last year, according to government figures.
“Mexico is not open for energy investment,” Mr. Payan said. “It’s simply shut down.”
With U.S. firms already having invested heavily in the Mexican energy sector, the policy changes have become an increasing source of tension with Washington.
The Biden administration said recently it was seeking high-level discussions with Mexico over its energy policies, raising the specter of new tariffs.
A Pemex oil platform in the Bay of Campeche, Mexico.Credit...Victor Ruiz Garcia/Reuters
“We have repeatedly expressed serious concerns about a series of changes in Mexico’s energy policies,” Katherine Tai, the U.S. trade representative, said in a statement. “But, unfortunately, U.S. companies continue to face unfair treatment.”
Mr. López Obrador, during a news conference, appeared to shrug off the United States’ warning, playing a video of a Mexican song called “Ooh, How Scary.”
The Mexican leader has said his country would be open to foreign investment in renewable projects only if the energy ministry was in charge of planning and the state-owned utility company had a majority share — a likely violation of Mexico’s trade agreement with the United States.
Mr. López Obrador has insisted that Mexico will meet its goal under the 2015 Paris Agreement to produce 35 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2024, but a government report released this year showed that the country is now years behind that target.
Many environmentalists and renewable energy experts said they were focused on Mexico’s next presidential elections in two years, hoping for an administration friendlier to renewable power.
“Whoever takes office in 2024 is going to have to deal with some serious deficiencies in the energy sector,” Mr. Martin said. But as far as the Paris Agreement, he added, “that ship has sailed.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/17/worl ... 778d3e6de3
In Record Numbers, Venezuelans Risk a Deadly Trek to Reach the U.S. Border
Two crises are converging at the perilous land bridge known as the Darién Gap: the economic and humanitarian disaster underway in South America, and the bitter fight over immigration policy in Washington.
DARIÉN GAP, Panama — Olga Ramos trekked for days through the jungle, crossing rivers, scaling mountains and carrying a diapered child through mud so deep it threatened to swallow them whole.
Along the way, she fell several times, passed a disabled child having a panic attack and saw the body of a dead man, his hands bound and tied to his neck.
Yet, like tens of thousands of other Venezuelans traversing this wild, roadless route known as the Darién Gap, Ms. Ramos believed that she would make it to the United States — just as her friends and neighbors had done weeks before.
“If I have to make this journey a thousand times,” said Ms. Ramos, a nurse, speaking at a camp many days into the forest, “a thousand times I will make it.”
Ms. Ramos, 45, is part of an extraordinary movement of Venezuelans to the United States.
During the worst period of the crisis in Venezuela, 2015 through 2018, apprehensions of migrants at the southern border never passed 100 people a year, according to U.S. officials.
This year, more than 150,000 Venezuelans have arrived at the border.
Most have been inspired to make the harrowing and sometimes deadly journey as word has spread that the United States has no way to turn many of them back.
Beginning the trek through the Darién Gap. Most Venezuelans have been inspired to make the harrowing journey as word has spread that the United States has no way to turn many of them back.
Olga Ramos, left, crossing the Darién with her family.
But their journeys — often poorly informed by videos ricocheting across social media — are producing brutal scenes in the Darién Gap, a 66-mile stretch of jungle terrain that connects South and Central America, a result of grinding, parallel crises unfolding to the north and south.
To the south, Venezuela, under an authoritarian government, has become a broken country, fueling a massive exodus of people seeking to feed their families. More than 6.8 million Venezuelans have left since 2015, according to the United Nations, mostly for other South American nations.
Yet amid the pandemic and growing economic instability exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, many people have not found the financial footing they had sought in countries like Colombia and Ecuador. So many Venezuelans are on the move again, this time toward the United States.
To the north, the surge presents a growing political challenge for President Biden, who is trapped between calls to aid desperate people and growing pressure from Republicans to limit a wave of migrants from Venezuela and elsewhere ahead of the November midterm elections.
In recent months, apprehensions at the U.S. southern border have hit record levels, with Venezuelans among the fastest growing groups.
But Venezuelans cannot be easily sent back. The United States broke off diplomatic relations with the government of President Nicolás Maduro and closed its embassy in 2019, after accusing the authoritarian leader of electoral fraud. In most cases, U.S. officials allow Venezuelans who turn themselves in to enter the country, where they can begin the process of applying for asylum.
This has put them at the center of the political fight over migration: A large number of the people being flown or bused by Republican governors to Democratic-led enclaves are Venezuelan, including those who arrived recently on Martha’s Vineyard, the upscale island off the Massachusetts coast.
Many people began the journey laden with belongings, but were forced to drop them as the trek got harder.
Resting near the border between Colombia and Panama.
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in an interview that the Biden administration remained committed to building “lawful pathways” for people to migrate to the United States “without having to place their lives in the hands of smugglers and proceed through treacherous terrain like the Darién.”
But he laid out no specific plan for Venezuelans, who would likely have to wait years if they apply for visas from abroad.
He made it clear that the United States is not offering any special type of sanctuary for Venezuelans.
Still, that has not stopped rumors from flying that the Biden administration has opened its doors to Venezuelan migrants, and will offer help once they arrive.
Surrounded by her family in a Darién gateway town before beginning her trek, Ms. Ramos, the nurse, said that she had left behind her parents and her home of 20 years in Caracas.
She was traveling with 10 family members, among them several grandchildren and two daughters.
“In the past, you needed a visa to enter the United States,” said Ms. Ramos. “Now, thank God, they’re giving us refuge.”
For decades, the Darién Gap was considered so dangerous that few dared to cross it. From 2010 until 2020, average annual crossings hovered just below 11,000 people, according to Panamanian officials. At one time, Cubans made up the majority of migrants walking through the gap. More recently, it was Haitians.
Last year, more than 130,000 people trekked through the Darién. Already this year, more than 156,000 people have crossed, most of them Venezuelan.
“From Venezuela, I went to Colombia, I worked and I worked,” said Felix Garvett, 40, waiting under a tent in a Colombian beach town to begin his journey last month. “But my dreams are big, and I need a future for my children.”
The United States has invested nearly $2.7 billion in response to the Venezuelan crisis since 2017, with a significant part of that money meant to support South American countries hosting Venezuelans. The goal has been to keep them from traveling north.
But this new surge suggests that this strategy is not working.
Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, said that the rush toward the border was not the result of a shift in policy between the Trump and Biden administrations, but rather a growing awareness among Venezuelans that U.S. authorities are letting them in.
The migration surge has corresponded with a proliferation of people documenting their trips through the Darién Gap on social media.
A moment of joy as people arrived at the border between Colombia and Panama. Most had another week of trekking ahead of them.
A camp next to the Armila River, a three-day hike into the jungle.
On TikTok, variations of the hashtag #selvadarien, meaning “Darién jungle” in Spanish, have now been viewed more than a half billion times, an enormous jump from just a few months ago.
The trend has yielded Darién selfies and videos that experts say are leading large numbers of people to chance a trek that is far more dangerous than it appears on social media.
Asked for comment, a TikTok spokesman referred to the company’s community guidelines, which prohibit content that promotes criminal activity. The company said that it did not plan to disable hashtags related to the crossing, though it removed some videos for violating guidelines after being contacted by The New York Times.
In dozens of interviews over several days hiking the route, it became clear that a combination of desperation, the enduring pull of the American dream and deceptive social media posts are creating a humanitarian crisis unlike any previously seen in the Darién.
A polluted river in the Darién where migrants stop to clean themselves. The region, until just a few years ago a mostly pristine jungle, is now a long trail of trash, clothing, shoes, tents and food that people could no longer carry.
Juan Emilio Jiménez lost a part of his leg in a motorcycle accident and made the trip on a prosthetic.
Diana Medina, who leads community engagement and accountability for the International Federation of the Red Cross in Panama, has been monitoring social media to try to understand what information migrants are receiving.
Venezuelans, she said, were both particularly attached to technology and more likely to trust what they saw online, something she attributed to the decline of traditional media under the current government.
As a result, greater numbers of people are embarking on the journey, led by emotional TikTok testimonies. “Blessed be God,” reads the text on a video of a man and his partner crying as they wade through a river toward what appears to be the United States. “The glory belongs to God.”
Many migrants set out with no understanding of the terrain, geography or social conflicts that lay ahead of them, Ms. Medina said.
A powerful criminal group controls the region. Many migrants have been extorted and sexually assaulted on the route. Others have died on the hike, carried away by rivers or killed after a steep fall.
Panama’s border police force said recently that it had found the remains of 18 migrants in the Darién during the first eight months of the year.
The mud makes everything about the trip more difficult.
Yhoana Sierra lost her grip on a guide rope and went tumbling down a muddy hill.
On a recent day, about 1,000 migrants left Capurganá, Colombia, the last town before entering the Darién.
For hours, they trudged up several hills. While many wheezed and winced in pain, at day’s end, the mood was celebratory. Someone commented that it wasn’t so bad — a bit like walking through farmland.
Over the next few days, though, the journey got much harder. As people traveled deeper into the jungle, it became more and more difficult to see the path. Many lost track of family members when they tripped and fell or stopped to empty a waterlogged boot.
Past the border between Colombia and Panama, Romina Rubio, 23, an Ecuadorean who had been living in Venezuela, collapsed, fainting in her husband’s arms, suffering from severe pain in her abdomen.
When she came to, they charged on. But at the top of a perilous descent, Ms. Rubio’s sister-in-law, Yhoana Sierra, 29, lost her grip on a guide rope and went tumbling down the mountain.
Ms. Sierra was pregnant, and the next morning she woke up bleeding, likely to have lost the baby.
No one was taking selfies anymore.
A group of migrants stops on a hill while crossing the Darién Gap, between Colombia and Panama.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/worl ... 778d3e6de3
DARIÉN GAP, Panama — Olga Ramos trekked for days through the jungle, crossing rivers, scaling mountains and carrying a diapered child through mud so deep it threatened to swallow them whole.
Along the way, she fell several times, passed a disabled child having a panic attack and saw the body of a dead man, his hands bound and tied to his neck.
Yet, like tens of thousands of other Venezuelans traversing this wild, roadless route known as the Darién Gap, Ms. Ramos believed that she would make it to the United States — just as her friends and neighbors had done weeks before.
“If I have to make this journey a thousand times,” said Ms. Ramos, a nurse, speaking at a camp many days into the forest, “a thousand times I will make it.”
Ms. Ramos, 45, is part of an extraordinary movement of Venezuelans to the United States.
During the worst period of the crisis in Venezuela, 2015 through 2018, apprehensions of migrants at the southern border never passed 100 people a year, according to U.S. officials.
This year, more than 150,000 Venezuelans have arrived at the border.
Most have been inspired to make the harrowing and sometimes deadly journey as word has spread that the United States has no way to turn many of them back.
Beginning the trek through the Darién Gap. Most Venezuelans have been inspired to make the harrowing journey as word has spread that the United States has no way to turn many of them back.
Olga Ramos, left, crossing the Darién with her family.
But their journeys — often poorly informed by videos ricocheting across social media — are producing brutal scenes in the Darién Gap, a 66-mile stretch of jungle terrain that connects South and Central America, a result of grinding, parallel crises unfolding to the north and south.
To the south, Venezuela, under an authoritarian government, has become a broken country, fueling a massive exodus of people seeking to feed their families. More than 6.8 million Venezuelans have left since 2015, according to the United Nations, mostly for other South American nations.
Yet amid the pandemic and growing economic instability exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, many people have not found the financial footing they had sought in countries like Colombia and Ecuador. So many Venezuelans are on the move again, this time toward the United States.
To the north, the surge presents a growing political challenge for President Biden, who is trapped between calls to aid desperate people and growing pressure from Republicans to limit a wave of migrants from Venezuela and elsewhere ahead of the November midterm elections.
In recent months, apprehensions at the U.S. southern border have hit record levels, with Venezuelans among the fastest growing groups.
But Venezuelans cannot be easily sent back. The United States broke off diplomatic relations with the government of President Nicolás Maduro and closed its embassy in 2019, after accusing the authoritarian leader of electoral fraud. In most cases, U.S. officials allow Venezuelans who turn themselves in to enter the country, where they can begin the process of applying for asylum.
This has put them at the center of the political fight over migration: A large number of the people being flown or bused by Republican governors to Democratic-led enclaves are Venezuelan, including those who arrived recently on Martha’s Vineyard, the upscale island off the Massachusetts coast.
Many people began the journey laden with belongings, but were forced to drop them as the trek got harder.
Resting near the border between Colombia and Panama.
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in an interview that the Biden administration remained committed to building “lawful pathways” for people to migrate to the United States “without having to place their lives in the hands of smugglers and proceed through treacherous terrain like the Darién.”
But he laid out no specific plan for Venezuelans, who would likely have to wait years if they apply for visas from abroad.
He made it clear that the United States is not offering any special type of sanctuary for Venezuelans.
Still, that has not stopped rumors from flying that the Biden administration has opened its doors to Venezuelan migrants, and will offer help once they arrive.
Surrounded by her family in a Darién gateway town before beginning her trek, Ms. Ramos, the nurse, said that she had left behind her parents and her home of 20 years in Caracas.
She was traveling with 10 family members, among them several grandchildren and two daughters.
“In the past, you needed a visa to enter the United States,” said Ms. Ramos. “Now, thank God, they’re giving us refuge.”
For decades, the Darién Gap was considered so dangerous that few dared to cross it. From 2010 until 2020, average annual crossings hovered just below 11,000 people, according to Panamanian officials. At one time, Cubans made up the majority of migrants walking through the gap. More recently, it was Haitians.
Last year, more than 130,000 people trekked through the Darién. Already this year, more than 156,000 people have crossed, most of them Venezuelan.
“From Venezuela, I went to Colombia, I worked and I worked,” said Felix Garvett, 40, waiting under a tent in a Colombian beach town to begin his journey last month. “But my dreams are big, and I need a future for my children.”
The United States has invested nearly $2.7 billion in response to the Venezuelan crisis since 2017, with a significant part of that money meant to support South American countries hosting Venezuelans. The goal has been to keep them from traveling north.
But this new surge suggests that this strategy is not working.
Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, said that the rush toward the border was not the result of a shift in policy between the Trump and Biden administrations, but rather a growing awareness among Venezuelans that U.S. authorities are letting them in.
The migration surge has corresponded with a proliferation of people documenting their trips through the Darién Gap on social media.
A moment of joy as people arrived at the border between Colombia and Panama. Most had another week of trekking ahead of them.
A camp next to the Armila River, a three-day hike into the jungle.
On TikTok, variations of the hashtag #selvadarien, meaning “Darién jungle” in Spanish, have now been viewed more than a half billion times, an enormous jump from just a few months ago.
The trend has yielded Darién selfies and videos that experts say are leading large numbers of people to chance a trek that is far more dangerous than it appears on social media.
Asked for comment, a TikTok spokesman referred to the company’s community guidelines, which prohibit content that promotes criminal activity. The company said that it did not plan to disable hashtags related to the crossing, though it removed some videos for violating guidelines after being contacted by The New York Times.
In dozens of interviews over several days hiking the route, it became clear that a combination of desperation, the enduring pull of the American dream and deceptive social media posts are creating a humanitarian crisis unlike any previously seen in the Darién.
A polluted river in the Darién where migrants stop to clean themselves. The region, until just a few years ago a mostly pristine jungle, is now a long trail of trash, clothing, shoes, tents and food that people could no longer carry.
Juan Emilio Jiménez lost a part of his leg in a motorcycle accident and made the trip on a prosthetic.
Diana Medina, who leads community engagement and accountability for the International Federation of the Red Cross in Panama, has been monitoring social media to try to understand what information migrants are receiving.
Venezuelans, she said, were both particularly attached to technology and more likely to trust what they saw online, something she attributed to the decline of traditional media under the current government.
As a result, greater numbers of people are embarking on the journey, led by emotional TikTok testimonies. “Blessed be God,” reads the text on a video of a man and his partner crying as they wade through a river toward what appears to be the United States. “The glory belongs to God.”
Many migrants set out with no understanding of the terrain, geography or social conflicts that lay ahead of them, Ms. Medina said.
A powerful criminal group controls the region. Many migrants have been extorted and sexually assaulted on the route. Others have died on the hike, carried away by rivers or killed after a steep fall.
Panama’s border police force said recently that it had found the remains of 18 migrants in the Darién during the first eight months of the year.
The mud makes everything about the trip more difficult.
Yhoana Sierra lost her grip on a guide rope and went tumbling down a muddy hill.
On a recent day, about 1,000 migrants left Capurganá, Colombia, the last town before entering the Darién.
For hours, they trudged up several hills. While many wheezed and winced in pain, at day’s end, the mood was celebratory. Someone commented that it wasn’t so bad — a bit like walking through farmland.
Over the next few days, though, the journey got much harder. As people traveled deeper into the jungle, it became more and more difficult to see the path. Many lost track of family members when they tripped and fell or stopped to empty a waterlogged boot.
Past the border between Colombia and Panama, Romina Rubio, 23, an Ecuadorean who had been living in Venezuela, collapsed, fainting in her husband’s arms, suffering from severe pain in her abdomen.
When she came to, they charged on. But at the top of a perilous descent, Ms. Rubio’s sister-in-law, Yhoana Sierra, 29, lost her grip on a guide rope and went tumbling down the mountain.
Ms. Sierra was pregnant, and the next morning she woke up bleeding, likely to have lost the baby.
No one was taking selfies anymore.
A group of migrants stops on a hill while crossing the Darién Gap, between Colombia and Panama.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Amazon Countries, Led by Brazil, Sign a Rainforest Pact
The eight countries that comprise the Amazon River basin agreed on several initiatives to curtail deforestation in the world’s largest and most important rainforest.
The Itaquai River in Brazil. The Amazon rainforest plays an important role in regulating Earth’s climate by pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.Credit...Victor Moriyama for The New York Times
On Tuesday, the leaders of eight countries that are home to the Amazon River basin agreed to work together to conserve the world’s largest rainforest at a groundbreaking meeting convened by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil.
The agreement, called the Belém Declaration, for the Brazilian city where the meeting was held, provides a road map to stave off the rampant deforestation, caused in large part by industrial agriculture and land-grabbing, that has severely damaged the rainforest and has major implications for Earth’s climate.
The meeting was also expected to yield a separate agreement on Wednesday among other nations with major rainforests — including the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo and Indonesia — to more closely coordinate protecting the ecosystems globally.
The Amazon rainforest is not only a haven of biodiversity but also plays an important role in the fight against climate change because it pulls huge amounts of planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and stores it away. Over the past half-century, around 17 percent of the forest has been razed and an even bigger share is severely degraded.
Numerous studies have indicated that further deforestation would be disastrous to tens of thousands of species and transform the Amazon into a net emitter, rather than absorber, of greenhouse gases. Parts of it have already reached that point.
The summit meeting was part of Mr. Lula’s efforts to galvanize a climate-conscious coalition of countries seven months after he unseated Jair Bolsonaro, whose four-year term as president was marked by strident support for Brazil’s right to clear vast tracts of land for its economic benefit.
Mr. Lula made Amazon protection a cornerstone of his election campaign. Deforestation rates have dropped by 42 percent during his tenure, according to preliminary satellite imaging data.
“The Amazon is our passport to a new relationship with the world, a more symmetrical relationship in which our resources will not be exploited for the benefit of a few, but valued and placed at the service of all,” Mr. Lula said in a speech at the meeting.
Image
Three men, prominent leaders in Latin America, pose side-by-side in front of greenery.
From left, President Gustavo Petro of Colombia, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and President Luis Arce of Bolivia at the Belém talks on Tuesday.Credit...Antonio Lacerda/EPA, via Shutterstock
The agreement sets the groundwork for coordination between the Amazon basin’s eight countries on law enforcement to combat widespread illegal mining and logging, as well as between banks assigned to pool development funds for conservation and sustainable employment for the region’s inhabitants. It also creates an Amazon-specific climate-focused scientific panel.
While the agreement projected symbolic unity, it fell short of the biggest ambitions Mr. Lula had hoped to realize.
For months before the summit, Mr. Lula pushed the leaders of Bolivia and Venezuela to commit to ending deforestation in their countries by 2030, a pledge the six other Amazon basin countries had already made at the global climate summit in Glasgow in 2021. Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, who has adopted the region’s most progressive policies on conservation, had in turn pushed Mr. Lula to match his commitment to ban all oil drilling the forest, but Brazil still has plans for a huge offshore project at the mouth of the Amazon River.
Neither push succeeded.
Eduardo Viola, who studies environmental international affairs at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas in Brazil, said there was no doubt the summit marked the most significant step Amazon countries have made to protect the forest, but it may not be enough. “The commitments vary a lot, and the implementation capacity outside Brazil is low, or very low,” he said.
The expected announcement on Wednesday of further cooperation among other countries that are home to the most of the rest of the world’s rainforests could include efforts to increase access to financing from wealthier nations that would promote sustainable forest use.
The foundation for that agreement was laid last year at COP27, the United Nations-sponsored global climate summit, which was held in Egypt. Belém, the city where this week’s Amazon negotiations have taken place, is set to host COP30 in 2025.
The meeting in Belém provided Mr. Lula and others a venue to harshly criticize wealthy countries, particularly Western ones, for not delivering on a promise made in at the U.N. climate summit in 2009 to provide $100 billion in climate finance annually to poorer nations.
Historically, leftists in the region have pushed for more environmental protections. Mr. Lula and Mr. Petro, whose countries are home to nearly three-quarters of the remaining Amazon rainforest, went beyond that and have made conservation a cornerstone of their presidencies.
Under Mr. Petro, Colombia has sought to position itself as a leader on climate issues, with a push to phase out oil drilling, which would be a first for any of the world’s oil-drilling nations.
Despite the projection of unity, analysts said political crises wracking numerous Amazon Basin countries contributed to the limited scope of the Belém Declaration. Under the authoritarian leadership of Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela is enduring a crushing economic meltdown. Peru has had five presidents in the past four years. And Ecuador is holding early elections this month after its president dissolved Congress.
Neither the Venezuelan nor the Ecuadorean president was present at the summit.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/08/clim ... 778d3e6de3
The Itaquai River in Brazil. The Amazon rainforest plays an important role in regulating Earth’s climate by pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.Credit...Victor Moriyama for The New York Times
On Tuesday, the leaders of eight countries that are home to the Amazon River basin agreed to work together to conserve the world’s largest rainforest at a groundbreaking meeting convened by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil.
The agreement, called the Belém Declaration, for the Brazilian city where the meeting was held, provides a road map to stave off the rampant deforestation, caused in large part by industrial agriculture and land-grabbing, that has severely damaged the rainforest and has major implications for Earth’s climate.
The meeting was also expected to yield a separate agreement on Wednesday among other nations with major rainforests — including the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo and Indonesia — to more closely coordinate protecting the ecosystems globally.
The Amazon rainforest is not only a haven of biodiversity but also plays an important role in the fight against climate change because it pulls huge amounts of planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and stores it away. Over the past half-century, around 17 percent of the forest has been razed and an even bigger share is severely degraded.
Numerous studies have indicated that further deforestation would be disastrous to tens of thousands of species and transform the Amazon into a net emitter, rather than absorber, of greenhouse gases. Parts of it have already reached that point.
The summit meeting was part of Mr. Lula’s efforts to galvanize a climate-conscious coalition of countries seven months after he unseated Jair Bolsonaro, whose four-year term as president was marked by strident support for Brazil’s right to clear vast tracts of land for its economic benefit.
Mr. Lula made Amazon protection a cornerstone of his election campaign. Deforestation rates have dropped by 42 percent during his tenure, according to preliminary satellite imaging data.
“The Amazon is our passport to a new relationship with the world, a more symmetrical relationship in which our resources will not be exploited for the benefit of a few, but valued and placed at the service of all,” Mr. Lula said in a speech at the meeting.
Image
Three men, prominent leaders in Latin America, pose side-by-side in front of greenery.
From left, President Gustavo Petro of Colombia, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and President Luis Arce of Bolivia at the Belém talks on Tuesday.Credit...Antonio Lacerda/EPA, via Shutterstock
The agreement sets the groundwork for coordination between the Amazon basin’s eight countries on law enforcement to combat widespread illegal mining and logging, as well as between banks assigned to pool development funds for conservation and sustainable employment for the region’s inhabitants. It also creates an Amazon-specific climate-focused scientific panel.
While the agreement projected symbolic unity, it fell short of the biggest ambitions Mr. Lula had hoped to realize.
For months before the summit, Mr. Lula pushed the leaders of Bolivia and Venezuela to commit to ending deforestation in their countries by 2030, a pledge the six other Amazon basin countries had already made at the global climate summit in Glasgow in 2021. Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, who has adopted the region’s most progressive policies on conservation, had in turn pushed Mr. Lula to match his commitment to ban all oil drilling the forest, but Brazil still has plans for a huge offshore project at the mouth of the Amazon River.
Neither push succeeded.
Eduardo Viola, who studies environmental international affairs at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas in Brazil, said there was no doubt the summit marked the most significant step Amazon countries have made to protect the forest, but it may not be enough. “The commitments vary a lot, and the implementation capacity outside Brazil is low, or very low,” he said.
The expected announcement on Wednesday of further cooperation among other countries that are home to the most of the rest of the world’s rainforests could include efforts to increase access to financing from wealthier nations that would promote sustainable forest use.
The foundation for that agreement was laid last year at COP27, the United Nations-sponsored global climate summit, which was held in Egypt. Belém, the city where this week’s Amazon negotiations have taken place, is set to host COP30 in 2025.
The meeting in Belém provided Mr. Lula and others a venue to harshly criticize wealthy countries, particularly Western ones, for not delivering on a promise made in at the U.N. climate summit in 2009 to provide $100 billion in climate finance annually to poorer nations.
Historically, leftists in the region have pushed for more environmental protections. Mr. Lula and Mr. Petro, whose countries are home to nearly three-quarters of the remaining Amazon rainforest, went beyond that and have made conservation a cornerstone of their presidencies.
Under Mr. Petro, Colombia has sought to position itself as a leader on climate issues, with a push to phase out oil drilling, which would be a first for any of the world’s oil-drilling nations.
Despite the projection of unity, analysts said political crises wracking numerous Amazon Basin countries contributed to the limited scope of the Belém Declaration. Under the authoritarian leadership of Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela is enduring a crushing economic meltdown. Peru has had five presidents in the past four years. And Ecuador is holding early elections this month after its president dissolved Congress.
Neither the Venezuelan nor the Ecuadorean president was present at the summit.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/08/clim ... 778d3e6de3