‘My mission has been accomplished’: how Susana Baca resurrected Afro-Peruvian music

In her 50-year career, Baca has been a singer, ethnomusicologist and Peru’s minister of culture. As she releases her 16th album, she reveals why her work is as vital as it has ever been

Susana Baca has lived multiple lives in her 77 years. She is one of Peru’s most celebrated singers, and a champion of Afro-Peruvian music, amplified by a partnership with David Byrne’s Luaka Bop record label. She is trained as an ethnomusicologist and manages a cultural centre in Peru, and she was only the second Afro-Peruvian minister in the history of independent Peruvian government, serving as minister of culture in 2011.

“It was not an easy path to achieve all that I have,” Baca says, speaking over video call. She is draped in a black shawl, speaking via an interpreter, from her home in Cañete. “My parents used to play music all the time when I was a child – my earliest memories are of my father singing and my mother dancing – but when I decided that I wanted to be a singer, my mother was horrified. We were very poor and all the musicians she had heard of had died from tuberculosis. It was an extreme life.”

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Peru to cremate Shining Path leader’s remains ending weeks of controversy

The ashes of Abimael Guzmán will be spread in an undisclosed location to avoid creating a rallying point for supporters

Peruvian authorities will cremate the body of Abimael Guzmán – the founder of the Shining Path rebel group that killed tens of thousands of people in the 1980s and 1990s – and spread his ashes in an undisclosed location.

Related: Peruvians split on how to handle Shining Path leader’s remains

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Peruvians split on how to handle Shining Path leader’s remains

Absence of a firm decision by Peru’s new leftist government has sown doubts about the cabinet’s willingness to act

Nearly a week after the death of Abimael Guzmán, the messianic leader of Peru’s Shining Path insurgency which killed tens of thousands of people in the 1980s and 90s, the country remains gripped by the debate over what to do with his remains.

At least one local media outlet reported that the cabinet voted on Wednesday 13 to 5 to reject a proposal for a supreme decree that would lay the legal framework to cremate the remains of the former guerrilla leader, who died on Saturday in a maximum-security prison aged 86.

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Abimael Guzmán, leader of Peru’s Shining Path, dies aged 86

Founder of Maoist insurgents that terrorised Peru in 1980s and 1990s dies in military prison where he was serving life sentence

Abimael Guzmán, the founder and leader of the Shining Path, the Maoist insurgents which terrorised Peru in the 1980s and 1990s, has died in military hospital aged 86, the Peruvian government has said.

After nearly 30 years serving a life sentence in a maximum-security prison inside a naval base, Guzmán died at 6.40am on Saturday due to “health complications”, Peru’s prison service confirmed.

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World weatherwatch: Peru’s saint of storms brings salvation to cities and ski slopes

Seasonal storms that blow up on the Peruvian coast at this time of year are named after St Rosa

In August 1615, a Dutch pirate fleet under Joris Van Spilbergen threatened the city of Lima. According to legend, a nun called Sister Rosa, whose original name was Isabel Flores de Oliva, prayed for deliverance. A tremendous storm blew up just as the pirates were sailing in to sack the city and scattered their fleet.

The storm was hailed as a miracle, and Sister Rosa became the first person born in the Americas to be canonised. She is patron saint of embroidery, gardening, the Americas, and the city of Lima. The seasonal storms that blow up on the Peruvian coast at this time of year are known as the Tormentas de Santa Rosa or Saint Rosa’s storms. These traditionally occur 15 days either side of the saint’s day on 30 August.

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‘Hidden pandemic’: Peruvian children in crisis as carers die

With 93,000 children in Peru losing a parent to Covid, many face depression, anxiety and poverty

When Covid-19 began shutting down Nilda López’s vital organs, doctors decided that the best chance of saving her and her unborn baby was to put her into a coma.

Six months pregnant, López feared she would not wake up, or that if she did, her baby would not be there.

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Drone footage shows devastating aftermath of wildfires – video

Devastating wildfires have ravaged large areas in southern Europe as the region endures its most extreme heatwave in three decades. Several people have died in Greece, Turkey and Italy, with many more injured. Huge fires also have been burning across Peru as well as northern Russia, with smoke from forest fires in Siberia reaching the north pole

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‘New wave of volatility’: Covid stirs up grievances in Latin America

A new series on Covid’s global political impact starts by looking at how the pandemic has fuelled turbulence in Latin America and the Caribbean

For Filipe da Silva, hitting the streets was about staying alive.

“Unfortunately, Brazil elected a murderer,” the 28-year-old declared as he and thousands of fellow protesters streamed through the seaside city of Fortaleza last month to decry the president’s bungling of a Covid epidemic that has killed more than half a million people.

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Pedro Francke: relief in Peru as moderate is made finance minister

President Pedro Castillo completes his cabinet after causing shockwaves with appointment of controversial Guido Bellido as prime minister

After 24 hours of uncertainty and the worst Friday in years on the stock exchange, Peru’s new president, Pedro Castillo, has completed his cabinet, swearing in the moderate leftist economist Pedro Francke as finance minister, and in the process calming jittery investors and anxious Peruvians alike.

Aníbal Torres was also sworn in, as justice minister, on Friday, filling the remaining empty cabinet posts. The rest were sworn in late on Thursday, amid deep unease over Castillo’s choice of prime minister, Guido Bellido, who is under investigation for allegedly defending the Shining Path, a Maoist rebel group that killed tens of thousands of Peruvians in the 1980s and 1990s, and is also accused of making homophobic remarks.

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Peru: new president appoints Marxist as prime minister

Appointment of Guido Bellido ends hopes of a moderate government and is likely to spook jittery investors

A day after being sworn in as Peru’s president, Pedro Castillo has appointed a far-left lawmaker and member of his Marxist party, Guido Bellido, as prime minister, ending expectations of a moderate government.

Beginning nearly three hours late, Castillo swore in an incomplete cabinet on Thursday night that included several figures from the far left and only two women. He did not appoint a finance minister, and Pedro Francke, the favourite for the post, was seen leaving the venue minutes before the ceremony began.

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Leftwing rural teacher Pedro Castillo sworn in as president of Peru

Castillo vows to govern ‘for the people and with the people’ but will face deeply divided Congress

A rural school teacher who has never held public office has been sworn in as Peru’s new president pledging to govern “with the people and for the people” in a ceremony steeped in historic symbolism on Peru’s bicentenary of independence from Spain.

Wearing his typical wide-brimmed straw hat, Pedro Castillo promised to make sweeping changes to the country in his inaugural speech, he paid homage to Peru’s indigenous people and teachers and vowed to combat corruption, rein in monopolies and boost public spending on education and health.

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‘No parallels’: 2,300-year-old solar observatory awarded Unesco world heritage status

Chankillo in Peru features 13 stone towers built in 250 to 200 BC that functioned as a calendar by marking the rising and setting arcs of the sun

The oldest solar observatory in the Americas has been awarded Unesco world heritage status and dubbed “a masterpiece of human creative genius”.

The 2,300-year-old archaeological ruin Chankillo which lies in a desert valley in northern Peru was one of 13 new global sites added to the list of cultural monuments.

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Peru’s new president to take charge of divided country ravaged by Covid

Pedro Castillo saw off an ugly, Trump-style revolt against his victory and must now try to unite the country

After nearly two months of waiting, amid baseless claims of fraud and even rumblings of a military coup, Pedro Castillo will on Wednesday become Peru’s president. The son of illiterate peasant farmers, Castillo’s rise to the top on Peru’s 200th anniversary of independence is hugely symbolic, but he will face huge challenges to unite the country.

Castillo’s razor-thin win has split the country between those who back his pledge to overhaul politics and the economic system to tackle poverty and inequality, and others who fear his presidency will upturn Peru’s market-friendly economy and even threaten its democracy.

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Pedro Castillo makes unity plea after finally being named Peru’s next president

One-time teacher asks for ‘effort and sacrifice’ in first remarks after being confirmed as president-elect

Pedro Castillo, a rural teacher turned political novice, has become the winner of Peru’s presidential election after the country’s longest electoral count in 40 years.

In his first comments as president-elect, he called for national unity. “I ask for effort and sacrifice in the struggle to make this a just and sovereign country,” he said.

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Former Peru dictator’s spymaster reappears in alleged plot to swing recount

Vladimiro Montesinos secretly recorded apparently suggesting bribes be paid to secure election for Keiko Fujimori

He was known as the Peruvian Rasputin, the spymaster of one of the country’s most corrupt and brutal regimes.

Vladimiro Montesinos masterminded a network of political espionage, mining state coffers to control the military top brass, the courts, and the media, until he was brought down by one of his own videotapes, which showed him bribing politicians.

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Peru: Fujimori cries electoral fraud – and unleashes torrent of racism

Claims of rightwing candidate, trailing Pedro Castillo in the polls, emboldens far right, who have vowed not to accept result

The prospect of the son of illiterate Andean peasants becoming president as his rival cries fraud has shaken Peru’s entrenched class system and its fragile democracy, letting loose a torrent of racism in the bicentennial year of the country’s independence.

With 100% of the official vote counted, leftist Pedro Castillo had 50.12% – and advantage of about 44,000 votes over his far-right rival Keiko Fujimori. But Fujimori has claimed fraud, challenging about 500,000 votes, calling for half to be annulled, and obliging officials at Peru’s electoral board to reexamine ballots – despite the lack of evidence of wrongdoing.

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A silent decimation: South America’s losing battle against Covid

Strained and underfunded health systems, economics and misinformation have all led to a surge in deaths

The cold, tired and desperate relatives camped outside the Barrio Obrero general hospital in Asunción don’t need charts or datasets to confirm what they can see with their own eyes.

As Paraguay records the world’s highest daily proportion of Covid deaths, the huddled families wait for news of their loved ones – and for the sudden requests for medicine and supplies that the country’s chronically underfunded health system cannot provide.

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‘Gamechanging’ £10m environmental DNA project to map life in world’s rivers

eBioAtlas programme aims to identify fish, birds, amphibians and land animals in freshwater systems from the Ganges to the Mekong

Concealed by the turbid, swirling waters of the Amazon, the Mekong and the Congo, the biodiversity of the world’s great rivers has largely remained a mystery to scientists. But now a multimillion-pound project aims to describe and identify the web of life in major freshwater ecosystems around the world with “gamechanging” DNA technology.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and UK-based environmental DNA (eDNA) specialists NatureMetrics have launched a partnership to take thousands of water samples from freshwater river systems like the Ganges and the Niger delta to identify the fish, birds, amphibians and land animals that live in and around them.

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Peruvians re-weave Incan hanging bridge spanning river – video

Peruvians from the Huinchiri community in Cusco region are rebuilding a 500-year-old Incan hanging bridge using traditional weaving techniques. The Q’eswachaka bridge crosses the Apurimac river, connecting communities, but fell into disrepair during the Covid pandemic and collapsed in March. Now, the bridge is being rebuilt by teams of workers across both sides of the ravine who carefully balance on main ropes while weaving

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Leftist teacher holds razor-thin lead in Peru presidential election

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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