
What Role for Foreigners?
U.S. sporting-goods entrepreneur Douglas Tompkins first fell in love with Patagonia as a teenager on backpacking trips. Today, he is one of Latin America’s largest private landowners, controlling an estimated 2 million acres (800,000 hectares) straddling Argentina and Chile at the tip of the continent. However, the 66-year-old New York native, who founded the North … Read more
Arts Innovator: Tonolec, Argentina
Often associated with melancholy tangos and chart-topping rock en español, Argentina’s music scene is taking a techno/traditional turn with the band Tonolec (www.tonolec.com.ar). The Buenos Aires-based duo, Charo Bogarín and Diego Pérez, have introduced indigenous musical traditions from their native Resistencia (in Argentina’s northeastern Chaco province) to the mainstream.
SAME SEX: Rights to get married
“To marry or not to marry?” For Latin America’s gays and lesbians this is not the existential dilemma that it is for most heterosexual couples. It is the object of an intense political struggle waged country by country. With some notable exceptions, same-sex couples across the region cannot enjoy conjugal or parental rights.
Innovators/Innovations
Angel Medina
Ecuador
When he was 17, Angel Medina joined the Federación Interprovincial de Indígenas Saraguros, an indigenous advocacy organization in Ecuador. Four years later, he was the group’s president. Anyone who knows him wouldn’t be surprised. The indigenous leader, now 38, has a talent for bringing people together. Today, as founder and president of the indigenous rights organization Fundación Q’ellkaj (the Quichua word for “producer of knowledge”), he is putting that talent to use by bridging the racial divide in his country…