Politicians are hiding behind complacent language instead of facing the challenges that their constituents are fired up about.
Source: EL ESPECTADOR
The oldest newspaper in Colombia, El Espectador was founded in 1887. The national daily newspaper has historically taken a firm stance against drug trafficking and in defense of freedom of the press. In 1986, the director of El Espectador was assassinated by gunmen hired by Pablo Escobar. The majority share-holder of the paper is Julio Mario Santo Domingo, a Colombian businessman named by Forbes magazine as one of the wealthiest men in the world in 2011.
A meeting with shamans in Colombia allows El Espectador’s Pablo Correa to experience an “indescribable” ritual.
From a republic struggling to rid itself from overbearing U.S. influence, then its own political shenanigans, Panama has come of age as a sovereign state.
LIMA — The Peruvian capital has no shortage of vultures flying overhead. For the past year they have also been enlisted to help find, and perhaps eventually clear, some of Lima’s worst illegal trash heaps. How is it done? The city and scientists have been using 10 vultures strapped with GPS and GoPro cameras to […]
-Essay- BOGOTÁ — Colombia’s Caribbean coastal cities have people with less depression, bipolar mood swings, schizophrenia and other mental health conditions than elsewhere in the country, according to a recent national mental health poll. Is that surprising? A few days after I arrived in the Caribbean, I was invited to a barbecue in one of […]
Chased from their homes and communities, many transgender women in Colombia seek refuge in a four-block area in Santa Fe, in downtown Bogotá.
Tests in a region in Colombia with widespread, recurring and inherited Alzheimer’s may help researchers understand why the disease occurs and has thwarted treatments for so long.
BOGOTÁ — For Latin America, the U.S. presidential elections have become a big-screen spectacle that affects the tone and register of local politics, in a region that combines democratic aspirations with an enduring admiration for its northern neighbor. The televised debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy generations ago began a process that has […]
Some 6,000 people gathered in Bogota for artist Spencer Tunik’s latest outdoor photo shoot. The clothes-free event was a stunning splash of hope for a country torn for so long.
A recent drug raid in a south-central Bogotá neighborhood that shares its name with the New York borough uncovers a veritable den of vice, violence and unfettered gang rule.
A handful of producers are trying to boost the quality of coffee in Colombia, and improve rural lives in the process. They’d also like local consumers to be a bit more discerning.
The legacy of our time will not be our literary or architectural monuments, but all the plastic trash we leave to poison the seas and choke our future. Fortunately, change is in the air.
Bogotá’s Central Military Hospital has seen the worst of decades of civil war in Colombia — from severed limbs to longstanding traumas, Amid prospects of peace with the FARC guerrillas, its work begins a slight, and welcome decline.
BOGOTA — During the difficult months of the rainy season, when daily downpours put a damper on hunting and fishing, the Tatuyo indigenous people of Vaupés, in Colombia’s Amazonian region, spend entire days in the jungle collecting fruit. The purpose of the forest harvest? To make yapurá. A black paste with a pungent odor that […]
Are there clues to Donald Trump’s rise in the celluloid figure of Citizen Kane? It may be that the Orson Welles classic also points to the limits of the billionaire candidate.
Maxima Acuna, an illiterate farmer in the northern Peruvian region of Cajamarca, faced years of litigation — and police beatings — to protect her property from the bulldozing and toxic dumping of a US-based mining firm.
Saving rainwater and increasing green spaces are two small steps shown to help fight the ravages of climate change in cities.
CARACAS — It might be funny if it weren’t true — which Venezuelan reporter Nitu Pérez Osuna didn’t think it was before witnessing it with her own eyes: people lining up along a Caracas street to get a “shot” or “lick” of deodorant. “I’d seen something similar two years ago on Twitter and thought it […]
Bolivia’s president lost a referendum earlier this year that could have kept him in power beyond 2019. The long-serving leader may try to seek reelection regardless.
-Analysis- BOGOTÁ — Lynching, as it is practiced in Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America, represents a kind of fast-track “people’s justice” fueled by anger over persistent crime and contempt for the pace and integrity of the police and judiciary. It’s not a new phenomenon, and a wave of lynchings was registered in Argentina a […]
BOGOTÁ — Colombians can add pollution caused by millions of cigarette butts to an already varied list of environmental calamities that include deforestation, forest fires and the pesticides and mercury dumped into their rivers. It’s the huge number of discarded cigarette butts that add gravity to what might seem an insignificant problem. In Bogotá alone, […]
Keiko Fujimori has overcome, at least paritally, her imprisoned father’s past to become the frontrunner to be Peru’s next president. But the runoff will measure fears of a return to the authoritarian right?
Barack Obama’s recent trip to Cuba and Argentina are the crowning achievement on his administration’s efforts to consolidate peaceful ties with and among Latin American countries.
-OpEd- BOGOTÁ — Years ago, toward the end of Lula da Silva“s first term (2003-2007) as president of Brazil, I remember reading a perplexing article. It was about Lula’s son, Lulinha, who had apparently become a multi-millionaire in the span of just a few years. It is always possible, if highly improbable, that someone could […]
With help from agencies and the government, locals from Monte de María in northern Colombia are breathing new life into the land stripped by abuse and violence.
Reactions from both officials and the media to the murders of two Argentine women in Ecuador suggest that old-fashioned misogyny still commands in modern Latin America.
BOGOTA — The U.S. presidential elections have left the two main parties stunned. Amid acrid debates filled with harsh words and the insolence of one billionaire candidate, raw emotions have turned out to be more potent than any substantial solutions proposed by the candidates for their country. Faced with the populism of the tycoon Donald […]
Plan Colombia was never the aid program touted by leaders in Washington and Bogota. But it proved to be excellent business for arms dealers and other shady characters.
A new surge in deforestation can be traced to an unauthorized road connecting La Macarena to San Jose del Guaviare. What is the origin? What will be done?
Complaining out loud (and on social media) about the high prices at exclusive restaurants is the epitome of upper class lack of self-awareness. A VIP case study in Bogota.
Health authorities in Cúcuta, northeastern Colombia, are struggling to stop the spread of mosquito-borne infections like zika. And the blame game has begun.
Donald Trump’s brand of xenophobic patriotism belies basic values on which America was founded. Given the U.S.’s cultural sway, his election would weign on other countries facing similar issues.
BOGOTA — Bogotá”s new mayor, the technocratic Enrique Peñalosa, wants to remove some of the Colombian capital’s abundant graffiti — those deemed to be “non-artistic.” But the move is being perceived by some as a reversal of the socially oriented policies of his predecessor, leftist Gustavo Petro, who essentially considered all such street art socially […]
Deforestation is one of the primary causes of global warming, and much of it has happened across vast areas of the Amazon rain forest. Will pledges at the climate change conference in Paris really count?
No doubt the rebels cherish their history of armed struggle against the Colombian state, but if they’re serious about entering politics, an image makeover is very much in order.
It took a dozen years for Juan Camilo Niño Vargas to document and create a glossary for a little-known, and unwritten, tongue being threatened with extinction. Now it has a chance to live on.
Medellín officials tout the city’s transformation, diversions and high-tech investments. They’re less keen to talk about criminal gangs that operate with impunity reminiscent of the drug cartel days in the 1980s.
Falling revenues, dire financial conditions and voter exasperation have curbed populist-socialist power in Venezuela and Argentina. The opponents have their work cut out for them.
As Venezuela’s government becomes nervous about possible defeat in parliamentary elections Sunday, its threatening rhetoric shows signs it might refuse to acknowledge a loss at the polls. Then, all bets are off.
BOGOTÁ — Recent election defeats for the social-democratic Peronist candidate in Argentina, and for Bogotá”s unapologetic socialist mayor, may be part of a wider trend for leftist leaders across Latin America. Both those elections — not to mention several mass protests against Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s Workers Party — suggest voters are tired of business-as-usual […]