Category Archives: Americas

Mexico elections: President Amlo fails to win super-majority in midterms

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But president’s Morena party keeps its majority in the lower house of congress

Mexican voters have denied President Andrés Manuel López Obrador a mega-majority in midterm elections, though his Morena party kept its majority in the lower house of congress with the support of a controversial ally.

Voters also showed little enthusiasm for Mexico’s rightwing opposition, which remains reviled after its decisive 2018 defeat by López Obrador, who swept to power promising to curb corruption and put the poor first.

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Leftist teacher holds razor-thin lead in Peru presidential election

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Pedro Castillo is about 0.2% ahead of his far-right opponent, Keiko Fujimori, with more than 94% of the vote counted

The scion of a jailed autocrat and the son of illiterate peasant farmers are fighting vote by vote for the presidency of Peru, in an election which has thrown into sharp relief the Andean country’s deep fault lines of class and geography.

Related: Peru faces poll dilemma: a leftist firebrand or the dictator’s daughter?

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Spat at, abused, attacked: healthcare staff face rising violence during Covid

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Data shows increased danger for those on the frontline in the pandemic, with misinformation, scarce vaccines and fragile health systems blamed

Hundreds of healthcare workers treating Covid patients around the world have experienced verbal, physical, and sometimes life-threatening attacks during the pandemic, prompting calls for immediate action from human rights campaigners.

Covid-related attacks on healthcare workers are expected to rise as new variants cause havoc in countries such as India and rollouts of vaccination programmes belatedly get under way in some countries, according to the UN special rapporteur on the right to health.

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‘They stormed the ICU and beat the doctor’: health workers under attack

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From Brazil to Myanmar, five doctors and nurses treating coronavirus patients share their experiences

Since the pandemic began, healthcare workers have been venerated for treating patients with Covid-19, but they have also been attacked for doing their job.

Five doctors and nurses treating coronavirus patients, some of whom asked to be kept anonymous, recount their experiences.

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Pope Francis stops short of apology over deaths in ex-Catholic school in Canada

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Pontiff fails to issue direct apology for church’s role in residential schools where children were abused

Pope Francis has said he was pained by the discovery of the remains of 215 children at a former Catholic school for indigenous students in Canada and called for respect of the rights and cultures of native peoples, but stopped short of the direct apology some Canadians had demanded.

Speaking to pilgrims and tourists in St Peter’s Square in the Vatican during his weekly blessing, Francis urged Canadian political and Catholic religious leaders to “cooperate with determination” to shed light on the finding and to seek reconciliation and healing.

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Peru faces poll dilemma: a leftist firebrand or the dictator’s daughter?

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Novelist Carlos Dávalos says his homeland has an unenviable choice in bitterly divisive presidential election

“Peru has always been a gloomy country; it’s not the Caribbean,” says the writer and journalist Carlos Dávalos as the traffic rolls down the Gran Vía in Madrid on a sunny June morning. “There’s that sense of a kind of Andean melancholy.”

Although Dávalos’s debut novel, La Furia del Silencio (The Fury of Silence), has drawn comparisons with both The Catcher in the Rye and Alfonso Cuarón’s Oscar-winning Roma, the coming-of-age tale is profoundly, and inescapably, Peruvian.

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‘He was just a child’: dead of Indigenous residential schools haunt Canada

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Generations of First Nations children were abducted to institutions to solve the country’s ‘Indian problem’. Thousands never returned

When they came to take Jonnish Saganash away, he was only five years old.

It was 1954, and the Canadian government had decided he was to be sent to a residential school in Ontario – hundreds of kilometers from his Indigenous community in Quebec.

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Myanmar school strikes and a plane diverted to Minsk: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

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A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Colombia to China

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UN experts urge Canada and Vatican to hold swift mass graves investigation

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Nine experts call for ‘full-fledged investigations’ after discovery of remains of 215 Indigenous children at former residential school

UN human rights experts have urged the Canadian government and the Vatican to hold swift and thorough investigations into the discovery of unmarked graves at a former residential school in British Columbia.

The unmarked graves of up to 215 Indigenous children were discovered at the Kamloops Indian Residential Schools last week, using ground-penetrating radar.

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Belize gripped by arrest of Ashcroft son’s partner over officer’s death

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Discontent simmers over police handling of investigation as Canadian Jasmine Hartin awaits bail hearing

A late-night stroll in the moonlight, then a sudden and fatal gunshot. What exactly happened between the socialite partner of the son of a billionaire Tory donor and a senior police officer in the early hours of last Friday in the resort of Mata Rocks has gripped the small Caribbean nation of Belize and turned into an international drama. It is now a major test for the country’s legal and criminal system.

This week a 32-year-old Canadian woman, Jasmine Hartin, was accused of the negligent manslaughter of a local police superintendent, Henry Jemmott. The case has attracted attention because Hartin is the partner of Andrew Ashcroft, son of Michael Ashcroft, the Conservative party donor and Belize’s most influential resident. Lord Ashcroft is a former Tory party deputy chairman, a one-time member of the House of Lords, and a billionaire.

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What do you think of it so far? Voters rate Amlo’s Mexico ‘transformation’

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President Andrés Manuel López Obrador remains popular but midterm elections may reflect judgments of his handling of the pandemic and endemic violence

Nearly three years have passed since Andrés Manuel López Obrador was elected president of Mexico and, before a sea of euphoric supporters, promised: “I will not fail you. You will not be disappointed.”

Related: ‘Huge incentives to kill’: Mexico crime groups target election candidates

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Amazônia: life and death in the Brazilian rainforest

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The 10th edition of the Carmignac photojournalism award was dedicated to the Amazon and the issues related to its deforestation. Photojournalist Tommaso Protti, accompanied by journalist Sam Cowie, travelled thousands of miles across the Brazilian Amazon. From the eastern region of Maranhão to the western region of Rondônia, through the states of Pará and Amazonas, they portrayed modern-day life in the Brazilian Amazon, where social and humanitarian crises overlap with destruction of the rainforest.

As I sat in my hotel room in Marabá, a city in the Amazon state of Pará, Jornal Nacional – Brazil’s flagship news programme – transmitted images of the country’s newly elected president, Jair Bolsonaro. “The Indigenous in their reservations are like animals in a zoo,” he said. It was November 2018.

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Leftist teacher takes on dictator’s daughter as Peru picks new president

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Pedro Castillo challenges Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of the disgraced 1990s autocrat, in Sunday’s runoff election

Peruvians must choose between the son of illiterate peasant farmers who pledges to upend the country’s free-market economy and the unpopular daughter of a 1990s autocrat, who faces jail on corruption allegations, when they vote on Sunday in the most polarised election in living memory.

Amid surging poverty, one of the world’s worst Covid outbreaks, months of political crisis and rampant anti-left scaremongering, Peruvians will choose the fifth president in as many years.

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Nicaragua police detain opposition leader and expected Ortega challenger

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Investigation of Cristiana Chamorro seen as an attempt to stop her from challenging country’s autocratic leader in November elections

Police in Nicaragua have stormed into the house of a prominent opposition leader, one day after formally filing money laundering charges against her in what was seen as an attempt to stop an electoral challenge to the autocratic leader Daniel Ortega.

Cristiana Chamorro, 67, was detained at her home south of the capital Managua on Wednesday, 15 minutes before she was scheduled to give a virtual news conference to reporters.

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Canada calls on pope to apologize after Indigenous children’s remains found

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Government urges apology for role Catholic church played in residential school system after remains of 215 children discovered

Canada’s government has called on Pope Francis to issue a formal apology for the role the Catholic church played in Canada’s residential school system, days after the remains of 215 children were located at what was once the country’s largest such school.

Justin Trudeau’s government also pledged again to support efforts to find more unmarked graves at the former residential schools which held Indigenous children taken from families across the nation.

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‘That was the day I knew I had died … ’ José Mauro, the reborn genius of bossa nova

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The melancholic singer was a gem in Brazil’s musical history, but many thought he had been killed in a motorcycle accident. At 72, he is releasing his lost recordings and finally reclaiming his legacy

It was the summer of 1995 when José Mauro discovered he was dead. The Brazilian musician, then 46 years old, was living on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, teaching guitar, when a friend called from London saying he’d spotted a CD of Mauro’s long-deleted 1970 LP, Obnoxius, on sale in a London record shop.

“He called and explained about this CD, and about how it said I’d been killed in a motorcycle accident,” says Mauro today, now 72. “That was the day I knew I had died.”

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Hundreds of fishing fleets that go ‘dark’ suspected of illegal hunting, study finds

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Vessels primarily from China switch off their tracking beacons to evade detection while they engage in possible illegal fishing

Giant distant-water fishing fleets, primarily from China, are switching off their tracking beacons to evade detection while they engage in a possibly illegal hunt for squid and other lucrative species on the very edge of Argentina’s extensive fishing grounds, according to a new study by Oceana, an international NGO dedicated to ocean conservation.

Every year, vessels crowd together along the limits of Argentina’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) to take advantage of the lucrative fishing grounds.

Related: Cat and mouse on the high seas: on the trail of China's vast squid fleet

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‘Shameful’: Bolsonaro denounced for hosting Copa América amid pandemic

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  • Brazil president accused of mishandling Covid outbreak
  • Football tournament moved from Colombia and Argentina

The Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, has sparked outrage after approving plans to hold South America’s answer to the European Championship in his Covid-stricken country despite warnings Brazil is steaming into a potentially calamitous third wave of infections.

The Copa América was originally due to be co-hosted by Colombia and Argentina, but their struggles with deadly street protests and coronavirus put paid to those plans.

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Mexico accuses Zara and Anthropologie of cultural appropriation

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Ministry of culture claims Zara used a pattern distinctive to the indigenous Mixteca community

Mexico has accused the international fashion brands Zara, Anthropologie and Patowl of cultural appropriation, claiming they used patterns from indigenous groups in their designs without any benefit to the communities.

The culture ministry said in a statement that it had sent letters signed by the culture minister, Alejandra Frausto, to the three companies, asking each for a “public explanation on what basis it could privatise collective property”.

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Peru has world’s worst per capita Covid toll after death data revised

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Updated figures give country a per capita death toll of 500 per 100,000 people – double that of Brazil

Peru has almost tripled its official Covid-19 death toll to 180,764, after a government review, making it the country with the highest death rate per capita, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

Peru has been among the hardest hit Latin American countries during the pandemic, with its hospitals overcrowded and demand for oxygen outstripping availability.

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