Time to Clean Up: A Case For Greater Transparency in the Americas
This article is adapted from our 1st print issue of 2016. For a look at our Top 5 Corruption Busters special feature, click here. Leer en español Corruption – a longstanding obstacle to development in Latin America — was often overlooked during the commodities boom of the 2000s, as the region experienced a boost in … Read more
Easter Island’s Tapati Rapa Nui
Most visitors to Easter Island are lured by the Moai — the mysterious stone heads scattered around this remote speck in the southeastern Pacific. But for two weeks every February, the monoliths take second billing to a festival honoring the culture of those who erected them. Easter Islanders, many of whom can trace their ancestry … Read more
AQ Top 5 Corruption Busters: Viridiana Rios
This article is adapted from our 1st print issue of 2016. For an overview of our Top 5 Corruption Busters, click here. Last April, Mexico’s Congress passed a sweeping anticorruption law that would, among other things, increase oversight on public officials and establish a special prosecutor to take on corruption cases. The Sistema Nacional Anticorrupción … Read more
AQ Top 5 Corruption Busters: Sérgio Moro
This article is adapted from our 1st print issue of 2016. For an overview of our Top 5 Corruption Busters, click here. “Brazilian of the Year.” “Personality of the Year.” One of Brazil’s “Most Influential People.” Sérgio Moro is a star, and it’s no mystery why. The young Brazilian judge pried the lid off a … Read more
AQ Top 5 Corruption Busters: Iván Velásquez
This article is adapted from our 1st print issue of 2016. For an overview of our Top 5 Corruption Busters, click here. Visiting Iván Velásquez’s office is like entering an armed fortress. And no wonder. Even before leading the investigation that caused the resignation and imprisonment of a sitting Guatemalan president, Velásquez was a man … Read more
AQ Top 5 Corruption Busters: José Ugaz
This article is adapted from our 1st print issue of 2016. For an overview of our Top 5 Corruption Busters, click here. José Ugaz was just a few years out of law school in his native Peru when a client came to him with an unusual request: A judge was demanding $1,000 to settle a … Read more
A Batalha Pela Amazônia
Nosso barco deslizava calmamente sobre o rio Tapajós, quando, de forma inesperada, a monotonia hipnótica da Amazônia foi quebrada por pequenos corpos saltando na água. Um punhado de crianças da tribo local Munduruku havia se pendurado em árvores ao longo da margem do rio. Ao nos ver chegando, elas pularam na água escura, subiram a … Read more
Rethinking Poverty in the Amazon
María Teresa Quispe is keenly aware of her status as an outsider in the Amazon. Born in London to Peruvian parents, Quispe grew up in Lima, Caracas and Buenos Aires, and initially focused her career on addressing poverty among urban populations. But a chance trip to the Venezuelan Amazon as part of an Inter-American Development … Read more
Health Education in the Amazon? Go to the Movies
In a scene from Parente, a documentary short about sexually transmitted diseases in the Amazon, indigenous Yanomami woman giggle during a sex education class as they pass around and examine an unwrapped condom. For all the sensitivities and complexity behind the foreignness with which they approach the idea of safe sex, the portrait of the … Read more
Garbage Is Choking the Amazon’s Biggest City
Maria da Conceição Peixote has lived in a floating house on the Igarapé do Quarenta, one of the two longest waterways in Manaus, for most of her life. “I can’t afford to move,” says the 63-yearold housekeeper. “But it’s hard.” Da Conceição and her husband, Natanel Baima de Oliveira, 60, a produce vendor, are among … Read more
Indigenous Residents of Lima’s Cantagallo Shantytown Confront an Uncertain Future
The pueblo joven, or shantytown, of Cantagallo sits atop a former landfill in Lima, wedged between a freeway and the Rímac River. Founded in 2000 by roughly 15 indigenous Shipibo families who were part of a mass exodus of Amazonian immigrants pushed out of their communities by logging, illegal mining and infrastructure development in the … Read more
Why Consulta Previa Is Among the Most Divisive Issues in Peru
In 2011, shortly after he took office, Peru’s President Ollanta Humala signed a law guaranteeing the right to prior consultation for indigenous communities that could be affected by development projects on or near their land. The legislation, known as consulta previa in Spanish and based on the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169, was enacted in … Read more
Alberta’s Left Turn
Until this year, Alberta was known as Canada’s most conservative province. But in May, Albertans elected for the first time the left -of-center New Democratic Party (NDP) to run their government. The huge change at the top for Canada’s fourth-largest province in terms of population — and the country’s leading petroleum producer — will have … Read more
Rediscovering the Chile – California Connection
Paperback, 336 pages Californians are breezily indifferent to their own history. The narrative of the future, not the past, fuels the state’s fixation with the ephemeral — with youth, beauty, fortune, fame. California is thus a place where origins are lost or discarded, and often reinvented. It’s no coincidence that we know screen actors by … Read more
