Graffiti, cooking and breakdancing are some of the attractions bringing visitors to Medellin’s once-feared district
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‘Bring our people home’: the bold new plan for an Indigenous-led district in Canada
The Senakw development aims to ease the city’s chronic housing crisis – and to challenge the mindset that indigeneity and urbanity are incompatible
The scrubby, vacant patch beneath the Burrard Street Bridge in Vancouver looks at first glance like a typical example of the type of derelict nook common to all cities: 11.7 acres of former railway lands, over which tens of thousands of people drive every day.
This is not any old swath of underused space, however. It’s one of Canada’s smallest First Nations reserves, where dozens of Squamish families once lived. The village was destroyed by provincial authorities more than a century ago.
Continue reading...US sends asylum seekers to Mexico to await hearings held 350 miles away
Authorities are expanding the Remain in Mexico program, which critics say puts migrants into dangerous border towns
The US government has started sending asylum seekers back to Nogales, Mexico, to await court hearings that will be scheduled roughly 350 miles (563 kilometers) away in Ciudad Juárez.
Authorities are expanding a program known as Remain in Mexico that requires tens of thousands of asylum seekers to wait out their immigration court hearings in Mexico. Until this week, the government was driving some asylum seekers from Nogales, Arizona, to El Paso, Texas, so they could be returned to Juárez.
Continue reading...‘Unqualified, dangerous’: the oddball officials running Bolsonaro’s Brazil
While the far-right president has trashed norms the lower ranks of his administration have shown jaw-dropping offensiveness
Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, and his gun-loving sons have hogged the headlines during his first year in power with their incendiary declarations, social media meltdowns and scandal-hit lives.
Endless column inches have also been devoted to the eccentricities and extremist ideas of his top lieutenants, including the foreign minister who insists climate change is a Marxist plot and the education minister who enjoys tweeting about his dog’s habit of defecating on Brazil’s top newspapers.
Continue reading...‘The salt they pump back in kills everything’: is the cost of Chile’s fresh water too high?
Antofagasta, situated on the edge of the Atacama Desert, relies on a vast desalination plant which provides the city with drinking water – but the waste brine is killing wildlife, say fishermen
As Eduardo Muñoz drifts his ageing skiff into Antofagasta’s harbour, flecks of paint peeling from its prow, he looks disconsolate.
“I used to get twice as many clams from every dive,” he mutters bitterly, hauling two large sacks of shellfish on to the dock and ruffling the salt from his hair.
Continue reading...Mexico’s Amlo says El Chapo ‘had the same power’ as past presidents
López Obrador took a blow at his predecessors while claiming Mexico’s era of corruption is ‘gone to the garbage dump of history’
Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, closed out 2019 with a parting shot at his predecessors, saying the imprisoned drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera had once wielded the same power as the country’s president.
In a video message from the southern city of Palenque on Wednesday, López Obrador recounted his administration’s successes in its first year and highlighted its challenges foremost surging violence.
Continue reading...Brazilians on Bolsonaro’s first year: ‘If you disagree, you’re seen as a traitor’
Six prominent voices from the arts, media, diplomacy and the Amazon give their views on the far-right president’s opening 12 months
It has been a year since a pro-gun, anti-indigenous far-right former army captain took power in Brazil and began sending shockwaves through the country’s government and society.
In those 12 months, Jair Bolsonaro – who is openly homophobic and allied to Brazil’s hardline religious right – has declared war on film-makers, journalists and the environment; put a conspiracy theorist in charge of the foreign service; and greenlit a new era of police repression and rainforest destruction.
Continue reading...2019: year of unrest in the Americas – in pictures
Wave of protests and violence against austerity measures and political corruption swept Bolivia, Venezuela, Chile and other Latin American countries
Continue reading...Spain orders Bolivian trio to leave as diplomatic row deepens
Government in tit-for-tat retort after Jeanine Añez said she would expel diplomats over alleged plan to extract former Morales aide
The Spanish government has declared three Bolivian diplomats “personae non gratae” in a tit-for-tat move as a diplomatic spat deepened with Madrid’s former colony.
Related: Latin America's tumultuous year turns expectations on their head
Continue reading...Are Mexican avocados the world’s new conflict commodity?
The fruit’s global surge in popularity has fuelled exports and attracted violent cartels to the trade in ‘green gold’
The 19 mutilated bodies, nine hanging semi-naked from a bridge in the Mexican city of Uruapan, were initially thought to be the result of a clash between rival drug gangs. But the Jalisco New Generation cartel, which claimed the murders in August, is believed to be fighting for more than drugs. It wants dominance over the local avocado trade.
Mexico is the world’s biggest producer of avocados. Exports of the “green gold” from the state of Michoacán, which produces most of Mexico’s avocados, were worth $2.4bn last year.
Continue reading...Protests, climate crisis and Ebola: a tumultuous 2019 – in pictures
Around the world people took to the streets in pro-democracy protests, while extreme weather, disease and violence wreaked havoc in some of the most vulnerable communities. But amid disaster, new grassroots leaders came to the fore, women fought to claim their rights and radical treatments for diseases were trialled
Continue reading...The power behind the thrones: 10 political movers and shakers who will shape 2020
Some are trusted aides, others are fixers who work in the shadows. Often unelected and unaccountable, they all have the ear of national leaders
The role of Dominic Cummings in plotting and facilitating Boris Johnson’s drive for power has focused attention on the influence exerted by behind-the-scenes advisers and confidants who have the ear of prominent politicians.
Powerful men and women around the world all have personal counsellors, trusted aides and backroom mentors. Then there are the “insiders” – string-pullers, fixers and manipulators with ambitions of their own. Few become well-known, although Cummings’s notoriety is by no means exceptional.
Continue reading...Brazil’s artists lead a chorus of resistance to Jair Bolsonaro
As the president completes his first year in power, his opponents are finding their voice and fighting back
Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency was still a week away when Edu Krieger penned his first critique – a ballad lamenting the rise of Brazil’s incoming leader and lampooning him over the corruption allegations that continue to haunt his family.
“It’s important for us to counterattack with our art,” said the 45-year-old singer-songwriter who has since become a specialist in musical parodies of the populist provocateur.
Continue reading...Mexican president Amlo calls on Bolivia to stop harassing diplomats
Comments further stoked diplomatic row between Mexico and Bolivia, which has descended into personal insults
Mexico’s president has called on police in Bolivia to stop harrassing diplomats at his country’s embassy in La Paz and allow nine former officials holed up there – all allies of former leader Evo Morales – to seek asylum.
“The right to asylum has to be guaranteed,” Andrés Manuel López Obrador said at his daily press conference on Friday. “We hope they act sensibly and they don’t invade our diplomatic representation in Bolivia. Not even Pinochet did that.”
Continue reading...Mexican police chief arrested in connection to Mormon family killings
Nine women and children of US-Mexican origin were shot dead by suspected drug cartel hitmen last month
Mexican authorities have arrested a municipal police chief for his suspected links to the killing of three women and six children of US-Mexican origin in northern Mexico last month, local media and an official said on Friday.
Suspected drug cartel hitmen shot dead the nine women and children from families of Mormon origin in Sonora state on 4 November, sparking outrage in Mexico and the United States.
Continue reading...Archaeologists discover remains of vast Mayan palace in Mexico
Ancient building found 100 miles west of Cancùn estimated to be more than 1,000 years old
Archaeologists in Mexico have uncovered the remains of a vast Mayan palace over 1,000 years old in an ancient city about 100 miles west of the tourist hotspot of Cancún.
The building in Kulubá is 55 metres long, 15 metres wide and six metres high, and appears to have been made up of six rooms, said Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History.
Continue reading...Home Alone 2: Trump scene cut in Canada, angering supporters
CBC removed president’s cameo in 2014 to save time, but Trump’s son says move is ‘pathetic’
Canada’s national broadcaster has riled Donald Trump’s conservative base by airing Christmas movie favourite Home Alone 2 without a scene involving the president.
The Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) says it removed Trump’s brief cameo – and eight minutes of the film in total – in 2014 to make room for commercials.
Continue reading...Reasons to be fearful – the international news review of 2019
This year world leaders struggled to manage the fallout from the erratic tenant in the White House – as China flexed its imperial muscles. We look back at the events that created the most turbulence
Click here for 2019’s reasons to be cheerful
A year of high anxiety was rendered more alarming by intensifying clashes of interest between world powers. As international cooperation declined, and nationalist agendas gathered strength, China, the US, Russia and Europe, and their respective allies, emulators and proxies, engaged in often dangerous competition.
The Chinese communist regime’s increasingly assertive behaviour at home and abroad, reflecting the authoritarian outlook of its paramount leader-for-life, Xi Jinping, produced head-on collisions with western countries, notably over Hong Kong, trade, technology and the repression of the Uighur Muslim minority in Xinjiang.
Continue reading...Mexico releases Texas woman who tried to deliver Christmas gifts to migrants
Authorities had arrested Anamichelle Castellano, who runs a not-for-profit, after finding ammunition in her car on Monday
A Texas woman has been allowed to leave Mexico after being detained while trying to deliver Christmas gifts to a sprawling refugee camp housing people waiting in limbo at the border for US court dates to deal with their asylum claims.
Relatives of Anamichelle Castellano say she was arrested by Mexican authorities Monday at a bridge crossing from Brownsville, Texas, to Matamoros, Mexico.
Continue reading...Jair Bolsonaro: Brazilian president says he briefly lost memory after fall
President’s office said Bolsonaro spent the night in the hospital and was discharged on Tuesday
The Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, said on Tuesday night that he briefly lost his memory after falling at his presidential residence in Brasilia, the capital, earlier this week.
The president’s office disclosed on Monday that Bolsonaro, 64, had suffered a fall and was taken to a hospital Monday night for a brain scan, which detected no abnormalities. Bolsonaro spent the night in the hospital and was discharged on Tuesday.
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