Human rights groups warn that El Salvador’s prisons are marked by overcrowding, lack of access to basic services and repeated rights violations — but that the situation is even worse for women, who are already vulnerable sector of the population.
Author: Alidad Vassigh
Born in Tehran, educated in Britain and France, I have been a freelance translator since the late 1990s.
In one of his final major interviews, the Peruvian Nobel laureate reflected on literature, Trump, feminism, and mortality. His passing in Lima marks the end of an era for Latin American letters.
Political turbulence today may be sourced in a flawed consideration put centuries ago at the heart of modern democracy’s institutional mechanics: self-interest as the chief motivator of citizens and their representatives.
Donald Trump has raised a hue and cry with his tariffs and is no doubt wallowing in the repercussions. Yet we may have forgotten he is a businessman, not an arsonist, and doing what he has always done, playing hardball for a fast buck.
Whether it’s to narrow the digital divide or to attract tourists, foreign businesses, remote workers and digital nomad influencers, it might be time to offer free internet access across society. Here are some of the places leading the push.
Colombian writer Mauricio Restrepo Posada says U.S. President Donald Trump is not only hostile to Latin America and the Third World, but also to the entire planet, including his fellow citizens. Faced with this monster who wants to own the planet, there is little ordinary global citizens can do — except for the firm decision not to buy U.S.-exported products.
Some call it “Grandparent Slave” syndrome, where grandma (and sometimes grandpa) are increasingly forced into caregiving duties that leave them exhausted and can even affect their health.
After waiting more than two years for a visa appointment at the U.S. embassy in Bogotá, Héctor Abad Faciolince’s meeting was cancelled following the Jan. 26 spat over migrants between Gustavo Petro and Donald Trump. Nevermind, the Colombian novelist and essayist writes; in a world clearly run by idiots, we’re better off staying at home.
In another sign of changing power relations in the ‘post-Western’ world, the BRICS group of emerging economies could frustrate the United States’ bid to sink communism in Cuba by strangling its economy.
Banning flour and carbs from our diet is unfair considering our history with the grains that helped our ancestors survive. The key is to reduce refined flours — and our guilt.
The series based on One Hundred Years Of Solitude, the iconic book by the late Colombian novelist and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, has surprised Gonzalo Mallarino Flórez, who reviews the Netflix adaptation for Bogotá-based daily El Espectador.
Observers thought the libertarian maverick could never transform the Argentine state’s entrenched welfare system without unleashing social chaos, but one-year later and disaster has yet to strike amidst a modest uptick in economic indices.
Putting authors and artists in categories may help pinpoint their work in socio-cultural and stylistic terms, but is inevitably restrictive of literature’s essential universality. In South America, there is one, tiresome if profitable label literature seemingly cannot shake off, namely Magic Realism.
Multilateral diplomacy may seem to be exhausted today as wars and violence proliferate unchecked, but nobody should think its time is past and expect to see peace in the world.
As Nicaragua’s weakened opponents expend themselves in jail or exile or in rivalries, communist strongman Daniel Ortega has amended the constitution yet again, to lock himself and his family into perpetual power. Could Donald Trump’s reelection become a miraculous glitch in his plans?
Cuba’s current energy crisis is a dramatic illustration, symbolic and otherwise, of the overall downfall of a country that could have followed the successful models of its Asian cousins. Faced with a socioeconomic dead-end, record numbers of Cubans are fleeing the country.
Former One Direction member Liam Payne, who died last after falling from a hotel balcony in Buenos Aires, reportedly had “pink cocaine” in his system. Also known as “Tuci,” this “designer drug” has been spreading in Latin America and globally over the past decade.
As Donald Trump makes his third bid for the White House, Catalina Uribe Rincón considers, in the Colombian daily El Espectador, why so many Hispanic-Americans back a racist and anti-immigrant candidate.
Bezos, Branson, Musk, Isaacman. Will the billionaires throwing untold resources into private space travel prove to be visionaries or just thrill seekers? The latest, Isaacman’s Polaris dawn mission, launched Tuesday with the objective to feature the first ever private spacewalk.
We live in a political, social, economic and fundamentally cultural environment that viscerally rejects all pain and suffering as irrelevant. For the modern individual, it is not so much a case of being free to do this or that, as to be free from whatever limits us.
Maria Branyas Morera, the world’s oldest person who has just passed away at age 117, once talked about the importance of socializing in old age. Even if the aging and elderly tend to wind up confined to family circles, studies have shown the often untapped benefits of friendship in our later years.
The crushing weight of Chinese loans to socialist Venezuela may yet become the biggest, if less publicized, obstacle to the restoration of liberal democracy there, if its power-drunk president were ever to abandon power as he once again appears unwilling to do after a highly contested election.
The former U.S. president and Republican nominee Donald Trump is threatening to revive his choice policies of curbing immigration and trade, and nobody would suffer as a result quite as much as the hundreds of millions of Latin Americans who may be forced to turn toward China and the Global South.
Argentina’s rabidly neo-liberal president, Javier Milei, is downsizing the state at home and curbing diplomacy to the bare minimum of promoting the free market, lambasting communism, and nurturing ties with just two, cherished states, Israel and the United States.
Since U.S. immigration laws were tightened in the 1990s, at least 8,000 people have died trying to cross from Mexico to the United States. Of those, more than 4,000 died in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. While authorities call for migration through legal channels, NGOs argue that regulatory barriers are pushing people to make this dangerous journey.
Argentina’s Antarctic bases are staffed by isolated and often young scientists confined in close quarters.
The Venezuelan opposition and its leader Corina Machado may yet end 25 years of socialist rule with an against-the-odds election win in July, which would bring to mind that of Corazon Aquino in 1986 that toppled the Marcos regime in the Philippines.
The modern world conspires to make us fear reflection and solitude, but these might be the rocky paths to a happier life, if we could first stop hating them.
Venezuela and its neighbors are nervously waiting to see if President Maduro and his clique will soon hold a fair election, or cling onto power, fueling more despair and unleashing yet another migratory wave over the region.
An ad for one of Colombia’s biggest banks sparked controversy for including a gay couple. Some viewed it as a step in the right direction, while detractors said the ad was not suited for a bank.
Certain contemporary writers may be deluded and even deceived in claiming there is nothing subjective in their fictional writings, forgetting that their literary “realities” are, inevitably, the fruit of a personal vision.
We all know good communication is the bedrock of a healthy relationship. Here’s why keeping some of your thoughts to yourself, and a practiced lack of utter sincerity, is a bedrock of a healthy couple.
The UN and the international criminal justice system are failing to prevent and punish brazen aggressions and killings around the world. When this period of turmoil ends, states must find new rules and tools to prevent the return of totalitarian violence.
Recent Cuban protests over fuel and food swiftly turned against the communist system but unlike the past, the state, which is asking the UN for food aid, refrained from giving a crushing response. Venezuela is no better off, and the age of symbiosis for Latin America’s leftist regimes is long gone.
Although the last Salvadorian woman imprisoned on charges linked to abortion was released in December, 11 similar cases are currently pending in the country. Human rights activists acknowledge the progress made, and the work that remains to be done to overturn strict anti-abortion laws.
The release of “En agosto nos vemos” as a posthumous novel by Gabriel García Márquez would have horrified Colombia’s Nobel laureate, who had described it as useless and wanted it to be “destroyed.”
An Argentine writer in Sweden was shocked to see pets as quiet and orderly as people there, quite in contrast with pet owners at home. Did that say all there is to say about the contrasting states of two countries?
The crisis of gang violence in Ecuador is being driven by international drug trafficking, a major illicit economy that exists because of the ban on drugs. It and other Latin American countries are paying a high price for this unjust ban, and must unite to call for its end.
Streaming video channels that allows interactive home shopping has been booming in China, and is beginning to win over customers abroad as a cheap and cheerful way of selling products to millions of consumers glued to the screen.
Rationalism and technology are no longer tools in our hands but govern our lives, in a depressing world of our own making.