500-year old structure, found in working-class area of Lima, thought to contain remains of society elites
Scientists have unearthed an Inca-era tomb under a home in the heart of Peru’s capital, Lima, a burial believed to hold remains wrapped in cloth alongside ceramics and fine ornaments.
The lead archeologist, Julio Abanto, told Reuters the 500-year-old tomb contained “multiple funerary bundles” tightly wrapped in cloth.
Continue reading...A key police outpost lies in ruins after a daring raid – a sign of the growing danger on an increasingly lucrative smuggling route
In the crime-infested tri-border region where Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira disappeared, rumours abound over what happened at Puerto Amelia in January this year.
Were Brazilian drug traffickers responsible for burning the Peruvian police outpost on the River Yavarí to the ground?
Continue reading...Graphic Turn: Like the Ivy on a Wall at Reina Sofía looks at calls for social justice and responses to repression
Forty-three kites bearing 43 black-and-white faces hang from the ceiling of the Reina Sofía, each one a mute appeal for answers, remembrance and justice.
Close by, T-shirts and posters clamour for equality, a forest of placards commemorates the detained, disappeared and dead of Uruguay’s military dictatorship, and an icon of the struggle for Peruvian independence undergoes a queer, pop art makeover.
Continue reading...TV station finds 54% of document was apparently copied but Pedro Castillo calls accusations ‘malicious’
Peruvian prosecutors are investigating President Pedro Castillo and his wife for alleged plagiarism after a local television station said an investigation showed the couple may have copied more than half the master’s thesis they co-authored.
Panamericana television’s Panorama program used a transparency request to obtain the text of the 121-page thesis and submitted it to the plagiarism detection service Turnitin. Panorama said the couple appeared to have plagiarized 54% of it from other authors.
Continue reading...Aníbal Torres said his words were misunderstood but offered to apologize in person to Israeli ambassador Asaf Ichilevich
The Israeli embassy in Lima has led a wave of protest after Peru’s prime minister Aníbal Torres praised Adolf Hitler, on the grounds that the fascist dictator turned Germany into the “first economic power in the world”.
In a week in which the government of Pedro Castillo has been engulfed in a political crisis caused by rising fuel and fertiliser prices triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – and the president’s own blundering efforts to calm the unrest – Torres’ inopportune remark on Thursday drew opprobrium from all quarters.
Continue reading...Pedro Castillo lifted a curfew in Lima but is still facing calls to resign after a rash of bad decisions and allegations of corruption
Peru’s beleaguered president, Pedro Castillo, is at the centre of a spiralling political crisis caused by rising fuel and fertiliser prices triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – and his own heavy-handed efforts to quell the unrest.
On Tuesday Castillo lifted a curfew in Lima that he had decreed less than a day earlier in an attempt to quell sometimes violent protests over rising fuel and food prices. But the move came too late to defuse public anger.
Continue reading...Peru’s embattled president takes drastic step as fertiliser and fuel prices soar and Brazil seeks to open Indigenous territory to mining
Peru’s embattled president Pedro Castillo has banned residents of the capital, Lima, from leaving their homes in an attempt to quell nationwide protests over soaring fuel and fertiliser prices caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In a televised address just before midnight on Monday, Castillo announced a curfew from 2am until 11.59pm on Tuesday, claiming the measure would “protect the fundamental rights of all people”.
Continue reading...Peruvian historian and US archaeologist say the pre-Columbian town was called Huayna Picchu by the Inca people
Machu Picchu is one of the world’s best-known archaeological sites, a wonder of pre-Columbian architecture that has been closely studied for decades and a tourist attraction that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors every year.
But a new academic paper argues that since its rediscovery more than a century ago, the site has been known by the wrong name.
Continue reading...Decision restores humanitarian pardon granted to Fujimori, who is serving a 25-year sentence for murder and corruption charges
Peru’s constitutional court has approved the release from prison of former president Alberto Fujimori, who is serving a 25-year sentence for murder and corruption charges.
Judge Eloy Espinosa-Saldana confirmed the 4-3 ruling in remarks broadcast on local channel Canal N. It was unclear when Fujimori could leave prison or if new legal challenges could halt the decision.
Continue reading...Scheme being trialled in Chile, Costa Rica and Peru seen as way to make more money from existing subscribers as growth slows
The days of sharing Netflix passwords could soon be over. The streaming company has begun testing a new feature that would charge people to add multiple profiles to an account.
The scheme is being trialled in Chile, Costa Rica and Peru. It is unclear if and when the feature will be rolled out in other countries.
Continue reading...Héctor Valer confirms resignation just four days after being named for the post
The Peruvian prime minister Héctor Valer confirmed on Saturday that he will step down just four days after being named for the post, after allegations that he beat his daughter and late wife.
On Friday, President Pedro Castillo said he would reshuffle the cabinet again, after just three days, amid widespread condemnation of his appointment of Valer as prime minister.
Continue reading...Peru has demanded compensation from the Spanish oil firm Repsol after freak waves caused by a volcanic eruption near Tonga caused a disastrous oil spill. The spill happened in an area rich in marine life such as seabirds, sea lions and otters. Locals have only rudimentary equipment to try to clear the oil.
Peru’s prime minister, Mirtha Vásquez, has claimed the Pampilla refinery, run by Repsol, apparently did not have a contingency plan for an oil spill
Continue reading...A large underwater volcano in Tonga has sent huge swells around the world affecting countries bordering the Pacific Ocean. The tsunami waves caused damage to boats as far away as New Zealand and large swells were seen in California and Japan but did not appear to cause any widespread damage. Two people have drowned off a beach in northern Peru, local authorities say, after unusually high waves were recorded in several coastal areas
More than 20 Peruvian ports closed while TV images show seawater flooding homes and businesses in country’s centre and north
Two people have drowned off a beach in northern Peru, local authorities say, after unusually high waves were recorded in several coastal areas following Saturday’s eruption of an underwater volcano in Tonga.
The deaths occurred on Saturday on a beach located in the Lambayeque region, Peru’s National Institute of Civil Defence (Indeci) said in a statement.
Continue reading...Visitors stop for selfies with 9ft representation of fertility symbol from pre-Columbian Mochica culture but phallus already damaged
The newly erected statue of a grinning man with an enormous phallus has prompted delight and rage in an archaeological hotspot in northern Peru where it has been on show since the beginning of the year.
Although perhaps not anatomically correct, the crimson fibreglass structure is a faithful representation of a ceramic vessel from Peru’s pre-Columbian Mochica culture, whose people lived in the region between 150 and 700 AD.
Continue reading...In Peru’s remote villages, farmers have used diverse crops to survive unpredictable weather for millennia. Now they are using this knowledge to adapt to the climate crisis
In a pastoral scene that has changed little in centuries, farmers wearing red woollen ponchos gather on a December morning in a semicircle to drink chicha, made from fermented maize, and mutter an invocation to Pachamama – Mother Earth – before sprinkling the dregs on the Andean soil.
Singing in Quechua, the language spread along the vast length of the Andes by the Incas, they hill the soil around plants in the numerous small plots terraced into a patchwork up and down the Peruvian mountainside.
Continue reading...From a Somali love story to a deep dive into Congolese rumba, Guardian writers pick their favourite recent world cinema releases
The Great Indian Kitchen
Continue reading...A Peruvian author fears her adopted home is far from an apology for its Latin American abuses
The Plaza Mayor, where tourists gather to drink steep beers and feast on overpriced paella, may be better known. So may Puerta del Sol, where locals ring in the new year by eating a grape on each of the 12 chimes.
But Madrid’s Plaza de Colón, a 25-minute walk from these spaces, has come to play its own special part in the social, political and historical life of the capital – and the rest of Spain.
Continue reading...Remains found inside an underground structure were tied up by ropes and with the hands covering the face
A team of experts has found a mummy estimated to be at least 800 years old on Peru’s central coast, one of the archaeologists who participated in the excavation said.
The mummified remains were of a person from the culture that developed between the coast and mountains of the South American country. The mummy, whose gender was not identified, was discovered in the Lima region, said archaeologist Pieter Van Dalen Luna on Friday.
Continue reading...A British Museum show on ancient Andean civilisations is revealing new insights into their views of time, society and war
The British Museum’s landmark show Peru: A Journey in Time has been a decade in the making and enables the museum to foreground objects from its own collections and present them alongside treasures from Peru seen for the first time in the UK. Its opening coincides with the 200th anniversary of Peru declaring its independence from Spain, with the UK being one of the first countries to recognise the new nation’s sovereignty. But the neatness of this chronology is perhaps, to a western audience, almost the only familiar aspect of a show that consistently challenges the most basic notions of how the world works and how it can, and should, be lived in. Not the least of these challenges is to the concept of time itself.
The subtitle of the exhibition is both a prosaic description of a chronological examination of many different cultures over 3,500 years, but also an introduction to how Andean time was experienced. “We generally think that we’re in the present, the past is behind us and the future is ahead of us,” explains its co-curator Jago Cooper. “Whereas in Andean societies, the past, present and future are parallel lines happening contemporaneously. So the past isn’t dead, it’s happening at the same time as the present, which can therefore change it. And it is by accepting the interrelationship between the past and present that you can best plan for the future.”
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