Category Archives: Americas

‘Narcos are looking for me’: deadly threats to Peru’s indigenous leaders

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Communities call for protection after string of killings linked to rush for land to grow coca, under cover of the pandemic

“We’re looking for you, dead or alive,” is one of the daily threats that Herlín Odicio receives on his mobile phone.

The leader of the indigenous Cacataibo people in Peru’s central Amazon has been forced into hiding for standing up to drug traffickers trying to steal his land. “We’ve reported coca plantations on our land so many times and nothing has been done,” Odicio said.

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Water spirit is no monster – he’s sacred and ours, Indigenous Canadians say

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Ownership of the Ogopogo legend has renewed discussions over the appropriation of traditions and the challenges Indigenous nations face to reclaim their culture

People living on the shores of Okanagan Lake have long said that dark, curling waves signal the presence of Ogopogo, a monstrous serpent lurking beneath the surface.

A handful claim to have seen the long green body and horse-like head of Canada’s own Loch Ness monster. They tell stories of a creature that once nearly killed a settler when it dragged his horse into the depths. And every few years, new video footage renews excitement that Ogopogo has been found.

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Haiti has no Covid vaccine doses as violence looms larger than pandemic

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  • Caribbean republic’s 11m people have yet to receive a single jab
  • Doses due to arrive in May but delays expected

Haiti does not have a single vaccine to offer its more than 11 million people over a year after the pandemic began, raising concerns among health experts that the wellbeing of Haitians is being pushed aside as violence and political instability across the country deepen.

So far, Haiti is slated to receive only 756,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine through a United Nations program aimed at ensuring the neediest countries get Covid-19 shots. The free doses were scheduled to arrive in May at the latest, but delays are expected because Haiti missed a deadline and the key Indian manufacturer is now prioritizing an increase in domestic demand.

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Nicaraguan ruler Ortega rolls out vaccination campaign amid secrecy and doubt

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Doctors say details on strategy are lacking – a lack of clarity that has characterized the authoritarian leader’s pandemic response

The first person in Nicaragua to receive a coronavirus vaccine was Marco Antonio Aráuz, 62, who was given a dose of the Russian Sputnik V treatment at Managua’s Blue Cross hospital.

Related: Nicaragua leaders face backlash after forming space agency amid human rights crisis

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‘I miss school’: 800m children still not fully back in classes

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Rights groups warn that children across the world are being pushed into abusive situations, from early marriage to child labour

Across the world 800 million children are still not fully back in school, Unicef is warning, with many at risk of never returning to the classroom the longer closures go on. There are at least 90 countries where schools are either closed or offering a mix of remote and in-person learning.

The UN agency’s chief of education, Robert Jenkins, told the Guardian that the closures are part of “unimaginable” disruption to children’s education.

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Ontario hastily reverses reopening as new variants usher in a third wave of Covid cases

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Canada’s most populous province has been warning of rapidly spreading coronavirus variants, as cases and ICU admissions surged

Lisa Salamon-Switzman, an emergency room doctor in Toronto, had already worked through two deadly surges of the coronavirus pandemic when a new batch of patients recently began arriving that left her unsettled because of their low oxygen levels – and their age.

“They’re younger than what we saw earlier and they don’t really understand how sick they are,” she said of patients who are in their 40s and 50s. “And now it’s become this huge, huge wave.”

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Canada’s herring facing ‘biological decimation’, say First Nations and activists

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Herring off western coast will ‘teeter on edge of complete collapse’ if commercial fishing continues at current level, says report

First Nations and conservationists are warning that Pacific herring populations are “collapsing” off Canada’s western coast, and are appealing for a moratorium on commercial fishing until the critical species can rebuild.

Emmie Page, a marine campaigner with the organization Pacific Wild, said in the past, five large commercial herring fisheries opened each year on the coast.

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A Mexican tragedy: country’s crippling Covid crisis comes into sharp focus

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Adriana Mejía lost half her family in just 83 days – now a huge death toll of 294,000 is being quietly acknowledged

It took just 83 days for Adriana Mejía to lose half her family, as Covid unleashed a Mexican tragedy whose full impact is only now becoming clear.

First to depart was her father, Juan, a 90-year-old carpenter who died at the family home in Mexico City last July after summoning his eight children to say goodbye. Two weeks later Mejía’s 55-year-old sister, Cecilia, who began feeling unwell as they buried their father, also lost her life. Two days later, on 3 August, Mejía lost her brother, Juan Carlos, then, 13 days after that, her brother-in-law, Germán.

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Amid Brazil’s tragedy, our hope is the prospect of Bolsonaro’s defeat next year | Celso Amorim

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As Covid deaths climb the president seems to be throwing the country into an abyss that will be difficult to escape from

It is no exaggeration to say that Brazil is going through the most serious crisis in its history. With nearly 4,000 deaths a day and moving quickly towards a figure of 500,000 people killed by Covid-19, Brazil is not just the epicentre of the pandemic. It has also become the breeding ground for new variants of the virus: a real threat to its own people and the whole of humankind.

In the midst of a public health war that is being lost, its president, Jair Bolsonaro, is throwing the country more deeply into an abyss, from where it will be hard to emerge. Apart from the suffering caused to hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of relatives and friends of the victims, the economy has been plunged into recession, with 14% of the workforce condemned to the dole. In contrast to what happened during the first wave of the pandemic, when Congress forced the government to distribute relatively significant financial aid to a large portion of the population, now fewer people will benefit with a smaller amount.

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‘An atmosphere of terror’: the bloody rise of Mexico’s top cartel

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The Jalisco cartel’s violence has taken a horrific toll on the state and experts say it poses a threat to Mexico’s government

It was mid-spring when residents of the wasteland behind Guadalajara’s international airport noticed a dog roaming their community with a strange object in its mouth: a human forearm.

Search teams in the ramshackle neighbourhood of La Piedrera entered a roofless red brick shack flanked by trees decked with bright orange mistletoe. Under several layers of dusky earth they made an even more grotesque discovery.

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Mexican press freedom dispute erupts as Amlo attacks US and domestic critics

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President hits back over critical US human rights report but also singles out Mexican press freedom group Article 19 for censure

A growing row over press freedom has engulfed Mexico after the country’s nationalist president maligned a routine US human rights report which highlighted his government’s failure to protect journalists – and the behaviour of some officials against media members.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, commonly called Amlo, condemned Mexico’s mention in the state department’s annual human rights report as an unwelcome intervention in Mexican matters.

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The death truck: how a solution to Mexico’s morgue crisis created a new horror

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How did a lorry carrying 273 dead bodies end up stranded on the outskirts of Guadalajara?

On the southern outskirts of Guadalajara, early in the morning of 15 September 2018, a large container, the type normally attached to a lorry, sank into the soupy ground beside a rutted country road. The refrigerated container could store up to 18 tonnes of material, cooled to -40C. Across its white exterior, a cartoon polar bear in a blue work shirt smiled and gave a thumbs up.

A container like this was a common enough sight in the neighbourhood of Tlajomulco de Zúñiga. What attracted attention was the smell. Sitting there, slumped between cornfields on one side and dilapidated concrete houses on the other, it gave off a thick, cloying odour. Some said it reeked of rotting cabbage and fish, others mentioned putrid meat. But they all agreed: the container exuded death.

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What’s next for Brazil as Jair Bolsonaro’s troubles deepen?

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The president has stacked his government with military men. Now that blurring of institutional lines may backfire

It is not surprising that the government of Jair Bolsonaro is in crisis. Setting aside his ruinous response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the radically reactionary leader of the largest country in Latin America has never displayed the ability or desire to use political means to benefit anyone but those closest to him. Still, the scale and rapidity of the upheaval this week has raised concerns that Brazilians may soon confront a full-blown political meltdown on top of the public health disaster that has been unfolding for several months.

On Monday, Ernesto Araújo, the foreign minister, resigned. His tenure had been marked by brash self-righteous rhetoric delivered without a glimmer of grace or confidence. Indeed, Araújo became known for masking his palpable insecurity with long, confusing references to Latin and Greek antiquity. Aráujo embraced conspiracy theories and far-right ideas that endeared him to the constellation of far-right governments that emerged around the world in recent years, particularly the Trump administration in Washington, but failed to deliver many tangible results for the Brazilian people (this is why two years ago I called Araújo “the worst diplomat in the world”).

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‘In the middle of a war zone’: thousands flee as Venezuela troops and Colombia rebels clash

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Nearly 5,000 refugees holed up in small Colombian town of Arauquita, having fled intense and continuing battles

Lizeth Iturrieta, a journalist in the small town of La Victoria on Venezuela’s western border with Colombia, was woken by the rumble of armoured vehicles rolling past her home. Hours later the sounds of gunfire and explosions shook the walls, and she and her husband dived for cover.

“Out of nowhere we were in the middle of a war zone,” Iturrieta said in a video call from a refugee camp on the Colombian side of the frontier. “After a day of hiding at home in absolute silence, we ran for our lives to the boat to Colombia. We almost fell into the river in the panic.”

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Mexican troops seized by villagers after Guatemalan man killed at a checkpoint

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Soldiers, three vehicles and 17 guns released after Mexican officials agreed to economic reparations and legal proceedings

Fifteen Mexican troops were held for hours by angry villagers in a remote border zone and held captive for hours after one of the soldiers shot and killed a Guatemalan citizen at a checkpoint.

The Mexican defense secretary, Luis Cresencio Sandoval, said on Tuesday that the events stemmed from “an erroneous reaction on the part of military personnel” who fired on a vehicle reversing away from a checkpoint on Monday.

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Brazil on edge as three military chiefs resign after Bolsonaro fires defense minister

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Political earthquake rattles country already grappling with one of the world’s worst coronavirus outbreaks

Jair Bolsonaro’s crisis-stricken administration has been rocked by the sudden sacking of Brazil’s defence minister and the subsequent resignation of the heads of all three branches of the armed forces.

The commanders of the Brazilian army, navy and air force – Gen Edson Leal Pujol, Adm Ilques Barbosa and Lt-Brig Antônio Carlos Bermudez – met with the president’s new minister on Tuesday morning and reportedly tendered their resignations during a dramatic and heated encounter. On Tuesday afternoon the defence ministry confirmed all three would be replaced, a political earthquake that rattled a country already grappling with one of the world’s worst coronavirus outbreaks.

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‘The heart of darkness’: neighbors shun Brazil over Covid response

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Latin American countries scramble to protect themselves from a country where nearly 60,000 people are expected to die in March alone

It has long been regarded as a soft power superpower, the sun-kissed, culturally blessed land of Bossa Nova, Capoeira and Pelé.

But Brazil’s shambolic response to coronavirus under far-right president Jair Bolsonaro has cast Latin America’s largest country in an unfamiliar and unpleasant role: that of a Covid-riddled, science-shunning, politically-unstable outcast on whom many regional neighbors are now shutting the door.

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Mystery brain disorder baffles Canadian doctors

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Spasms, memory loss and hallucinations among symptoms of 43 patients in Acadian region of New Brunswick province

Doctors in Canada are concerned they could be dealing with a previously unknown brain disease amid a string of cases involving memory loss, hallucinations and muscle atrophy.

Politicians in the province of New Brunswick have demanded answers, but with so few cases, experts say there are far more questions than answers and have urged the public not to panic.

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Canada suspends use of AstraZeneca Covid vaccine for those under 55

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Immunisation panel says there is ‘substantial uncertainty about the benefit’ of the vaccine given risk of rare type of blood clot

Canada on Monday suspended the use of the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine for people under 55 following concerns it might be linked to rare blood clots.

The pause was recommended by the National Advisory Committee on Immunization for safety reasons. The Canadian provinces, which administer health in the country, announced the suspension on Monday.

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