SOUTH AMERICA

[kmaherali]

Mexico will elect its first woman as president next year after the governing party chose Claudia Sheinbaum to square off against the opposition’s candidate, Xóchitl Gálvez.



Claudia Sheinbaum in her office in 2020, when she served as the mayor of Mexico City.Credit...Meghan Dhaliwal for The New York Times

Mexico’s governing party chose Claudia Sheinbaum, a former mayor of Mexico City, as its candidate in next year’s presidential election on Wednesday, creating a watershed moment in the world’s largest Spanish-speaking country, with voters expected to choose for the first time between two leading candidates who are women.

“Today democracy won. Today the people of Mexico decided,” Ms. Sheinbaum said during the announcement, adding that her party, Morena, would win the 2024 election. “Tomorrow begins the electoral process,” she said. “And there is no minute to lose.”

Ms. Sheinbaum, 61, a physicist with a doctorate in environmental engineering and a protégé of Mexico’s current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, will face off against the opposition’s top contender, Xóchitl Gálvez, 60, an outspoken engineer with Indigenous roots who rose from poverty to become a tech entrepreneur.

“We can already say today: Mexico, by the end of next year, will be governed by a woman,” said Jesús Silva-Herzog Márquez, a political scientist at Mexico’s Monterrey Institute of Technology, adding that it was an “extraordinary change” for the country.

Ms. Sheinbaum has built her political career mostly in the shadow of Mr. López Obrador, and had emerged early on as the party’s favored pick to succeed the current president. That connection is thought to give her a crucial edge heading into next year’s election thanks to the high approval ratings enjoyed by Mr. López Obrador, who is limited by Mexico’s Constitution to one six-year term.

In recent months, Mr. López Obrador has insisted that he will hold no influence once he finishes his term. “I am going to retire completely,” he said in March. “I am not a chieftain, much less do I feel irreplaceable. I am not a strongman; I am not a messiah.”

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The president of Mexico, in a suit and tie, stands in front of a lectern, raising one hand. A flag of Mexico is behind him.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is constitutionally limited to one six-year term.Credit...Alejandro Cegarra for The New York Times

But some analysts say his influence will endure regardless of which candidate wins in 2024. Should Ms. Sheinbaum win, “there may be changes to certain policies, though the broad strokes of his agenda will remain intact,” according to a recent report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research institute in Washington

If she is defeated, Mr. López Obrador “will not fade quietly into the background,” the report said, citing a large base of loyal supporters allowing him to command substantial influence. Some legacies of his administration — including austerity measures or the immersion of the military into social, security and infrastructure roles — could also be obstacles for Ms. Gálvez if she seeks to roll back his policies.

As the two female candidates target weaknesses in each other’s campaigns, they share some similarities. While neither are explicitly feminist, both are socially progressive, have engineering degrees and say they will maintain broadly popular antipoverty programs.

Ms. Sheinbaum, who was born to Jewish parents in Mexico City, would become Mexico’s first Jewish president if she wins the race. She has faced a misinformation campaign on social media claiming falsely that she was born in Bulgaria, the country from which her mother emigrated; supporters of Ms. Sheinbaum have called this effort antisemitic.


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Ms. Sheinbaum standing by a balcony in a building with roman columns.

Ms. Sheinbaum would become Mexico’s first Jewish president if she wins the race.Credit...Meghan Dhaliwal for The New York Times

She studied physics and energy engineering in Mexico before carrying out her doctoral research at California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. After entering politics, she became Mr. López Obrador’s top environmental official when he was mayor of Mexico City.

When Ms. Sheinbaum herself was elected mayor of the capital in 2018, she took on public transit and environmental issues as top priorities, but was also the target of criticism over fatal mishaps in the city’s transportation systems, including the collapse of a metro overpass in which 26 people were killed.

With polls positioning Ms. Sheinbaum as the front-runner, her ties to Mr. López Obrador required discipline to maintain his support even when she may not have agreed with his decisions. For instance, when Mr. López Obrador minimized the coronavirus pandemic and federal government officials tweaked data to avoid a lockdown in Mexico City, she remained silent.

“What has stood out is her loyalty, I think a blind loyalty, to the president,” said Mr. Silva-Herzog Márquez, the political scientist.

Still, while hewing to Mr. López Obrador’s policies, Ms. Sheinbaum has also signaled some potential changes, notably expressing support for renewable energy sources.

Drawing a contrast with her rival, Ms. Gálvez, a senator who often gets around Mexico City on an electric bicycle, has focused on her origins as the daughter of an Indigenous Otomí father and a mestiza mother.

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Xóchitl Gálvez sits in a room with a shelf holding plants behind her.

Xóchitl Gálvez, the top opposition candidate, has Indigenous roots and rose from poverty to become a tech entrepreneur.Credit...Claudio Cruz/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Ms. Gálvez grew up in a small town about two hours from Mexico City without running water and speaking her father’s Hñähñu language. After receiving a scholarship to the National Autonomous University of Mexico, she became an engineer and founded a company that designs communications and energy networks for office buildings.

After Vicente Fox won the presidency in 2000, she was appointed as head of the presidential office for Indigenous peoples. In 2018, Ms. Gálvez was elected senator representing the conservative National Action Party.

Mr. López Obrador has repeatedly made her the focus of verbal attacks, which has had the effect of raising her profile around the country while highlighting the sway that the president and his party exert across Mexico.

A combative leader who has embraced austerity measures while doubling down on Mexico’s reliance on fossil fuels, Mr. López Obrador looms over the campaigning. He pledged to do away with a long-held political tradition whereby Mexican presidents handpicked their successors with their “big finger,” replacing the practice with nationwide voter surveys.

Historically, political parties in Mexico mostly selected their candidates in ways that were opaque and lacked much inclusion. Handpicking was more common than a “free and fair competition for a candidacy,” said Flavia Freidenberg, a political scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

The new selection process has changed that tradition, but concerns persist over a lack of clarity and other irregularities that have been denounced by some analysts and other presidential hopefuls. Both the governing party, Morena, and the broad opposition coalition, called the Broad Front for Mexico, used public opinion polls “that have not been fully transparent,” Ms. Freidenberg added, “and are not necessarily considered democratic procedures.”

The new procedures also ignored federal campaign regulations, with those at the helm of the process in both the governing party and the opposition moving the selection forward by a few months and cryptically calling Ms. Sheinbaum and Ms. Gálvez “coordinators” of each coalition instead of “candidates.”

“These irregular activities have occurred under the gaze of public opinion, the political class and the electoral authorities,” Ms. Freidenberg said. “This is not a minor issue.”

Next year’s general election, in which voters will elect not only a president but members of Congress, might also determine whether Mexico may return to a dominant-party system — similar to what the country experienced under the once-hegemonic Institutional Revolutionary Party, which held uninterrupted power for 71 years until 2000.

Despite some setbacks, there are signs this is already happening. In June, Morena’s candidate won the governor’s race in the State of Mexico, the country’s most populous state, defeating the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s candidate.

That victory brought the number of states under Morena’s control to 23 out of 32 states, up from just seven at the start of the president’s term in 2018.

The question is “whether Morena reconfigures itself into a hegemonic party like the old PRI,” said Ana Laura Magaloni, a law professor who advised Ms. Sheinbaum’s mayoral campaign. “And that depends on how much of a fight the opposition can put up.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/06/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Unable to build safe or stable lives in other parts of South America, many people are making the perilous journey to the United States.


Venezuelans crossing from Mexico into the United States in May. Credit...Alejandro Cegarra for The New York Times

Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have arrived at the United States border in the last two years, part of a historic wave of migrants headed north amid growing global crises.

But Venezuela has been in the midst of an economic and humanitarian crisis for roughly a decade.

Why are so many people going to the United States now?

Over the last year, we’ve interviewed hundreds of Venezuelans headed to the United States. The short answer is that people are exhausted by so many years of economic struggle, and global policies meant to change the situation have failed to keep them at home.

At the same time, social media has popularized the route to the United States, while a thriving people-moving business near the start of the journey has accelerated the pace of migration — even as a United Nations tally shows a record number of people dying on their way north.

Venezuela was once among the wealthiest countries in Latin America, its economy buoyed by profits from vast oil reserves — the largest proven reserves in the world — that supported celebrated universities, a respected public health system and a flourishing middle class.

But the economy crashed in the mid-2010s amid mismanagement of the oil sector by an authoritarian government claiming socialist ideals, now led by President Nicolás Maduro. Tough sanctions imposed by the United States in 2019 have exacerbated the situation.

For years Venezuelans have been scraping by, trying to feed their children on meager salaries, watching family members die of preventable diseases, waiting for hours in line for gasoline so they can take a trip to the hospital or the market.

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William Añez, right, and his family in Necoclí, Colombia, in July. They are among many Venezuelans who have left their country for economic reasons.

William Añez, right, and his family in Necoclí, Colombia, in July. They are among many Venezuelans who have left their country for economic reasons.Credit...Federico Rios for The New York Times

An influx of dollars in recent years has landed mostly in the pockets of the wealthy and well-connected.

The average salary for a public-school teacher or nurse is roughly $3 a month, the average salary for a private sector employee is $160 — and the monthly cost to simply feed a family of four is $372, according to the Venezuelan Finance Observatory, a nonprofit organization.

Many parents are now raising children who have only known crisis, and making herculean efforts to simply put food on the table.

“Every day I get older and I have still not secured anything for them,” said Williams Añez, 42, speaking of his five children. Mr. Añez, a former supporter of Mr. Maduro’s party, spoke from a northern Colombian town that has become a gathering point for Venezuelans headed to the United States.

Why are Venezuelans going to the United States? Why not go elsewhere?

In the early days of the crisis, millions of Venezuelans migrated to other countries in South America. Colombia, Venezuela’s neighbor, received the largest part of the exodus — more than two million people.

Colombia, with the support of the United States, offered a generous visa program meant to keep Venezuelans in South America. But wages in Colombia are very low. Mr. Añez, for example, migrated to Colombia, where he made just $5 a day cutting sugar cane.

Peru and Ecuador were other popular countries for Venezuelans seeking new homes. But both suffer similar wage issues. Ecuador is now struggling with rising drug trafficking violence and with common criminals who extort small business owners.

Unable to build safe or stable lives in South America, many Venezuelans are moving on to the United States.

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Migrants including children guarded by a soldier.

Venezuelans waiting to cross into the United States in July.Credit...Alejandro Cegarra for The New York Times

Isn’t life improving in Venezuela?

Not really.

In the early days of the economic crisis, widespread scarcity made everyday goods difficult to find for nearly all Venezuelans. Today, food and medicine are more available, they are just too expensive for most citizens to afford.

Life in Venezuela has gotten better — for an extremely select number of people.

For everyone else, public schools have been gutted as investment has dried up, while a teacher strike over low wages has put educators in the streets and students out of the classroom.

The health care situation is dire. Public hospitals lack basic supplies and are overwhelmed. To enter a private clinic, patients are sometimes asked to pay as much as $1,000 in advance, and then a similar price for every day of care. Formerly middle class families now resort to websites like GoFundMe, forced to beg for money to treat life-threatening cancers and other conditions.

At the same time, the electricity and gasoline shortages that characterized the early days of the crisis continue because of the country’s deteriorating infrastructure.

Caracas, the capital, has suffered almost daily electricity cuts in the last year, while lines for subsidized gasoline last up to six hours. The situation beyond the capital is worse.

Alicia Anderson, 44, a nurse in a Caracas suburb, said that she makes about $5 a month at a public hospital, along with two monthly bonuses — $40 for food and $30 explained by Mr. Maduro as an effort to combat the country’s “economic war.”

She makes ends meet by caring for patients in their homes, selling food out of her house and participating in a community loan system.

Running water arrives about once a week, Ms. Anderson said, and on those days the family fills every bucket they have, to save for the future.

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A car drives past a gas flare.

Venezuela’s economy collapsed in the mid-2010s amid mismanagement of the oil sector.Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times

What is the journey like to the United States?

Visa requirements mean that many Venezuelans cannot simply fly.

Instead, they are taking a grueling land route from Caracas or other points of origin, moving on foot, and via bus, train and car all the way to the southern U.S. border.

One of the most dangerous legs is a jungle called the Darién Gap, which connects South and North America.

In the past, the jungle acted as a natural barrier, making northward migration difficult. But in 2021, Haitians fleeing chaos at home began to cross the forest in large numbers. Last year they were surpassed by Venezuelans.

Today, Venezuelans are the largest group crossing the Darién, according to the authorities in Panama, followed by Ecuadoreans and people from many other countries, including China, India and Afghanistan.

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Four migrants sitting in a jungle clearing, drinking water.

Twin sisters María Valentina and María Alejandra, 14, traveled with their family through the Darién Gap last month.Credit...Federico Rios for The New York Times

How does Venezuela’s government treat people still at home?

For nearly a decade, human rights activists have documented detailed allegations of torture, forced disappearances, arbitrary detentions and sexual violence orchestrated by the state authorities.

Since 2014, the year after Mr. Maduro took power, more than 15,700 people have been detained for political reasons, according to Foro Penal, a nonprofit organization based in Caracas. At least 283 political prisoners are still in custody, the organization estimated in a March report.

For years, those held in custody say they have been treated in cruel and degrading ways, had limited access to a legal defense and often been detained with little or fabricated evidence. Rather than await justice, victims who are freed often choose to flee, increasing the U.S.-bound migration.

What role does the U.S. play in Venezuela’s demise?

The United States intensified economic sanctions on Venezuela in 2019, including a ban on oil imports, after having accused Mr. Maduro of fraud in the most recent presidential election. The goal was to force him from power.

Experts agree that sanctions hobbled the country’s oil industry. But they are split over how much the economic collapse was also caused by the corruption and mismanagement of the Venezuelan government.

“That these sanctions are still in place is a major impediment for the Venezuelan economy to be able to recover,” said Mariano de Alba, a senior adviser for International Crisis Group. “It is not the only factor.”

Francisco Rodríguez, a senior researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said he had found that sanctions and other foreign policy actions have played a central role in the country’s economic contraction since 2012 and are a major factor driving the exodus.

“If there had been no sanctions, Venezuela would still have suffered a major economic crisis,” said Mr. Rodríguez. “But by no means of the dimension of what we’ve seen.”

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Venezuela’s president on a podium giving a speech.

President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela at the presidential palace in Caracas, the capital, in November.Credit...Federico Rios for The New York Times

Will the situation change in Venezuela?

A presidential election is planned for next year. But many international observers are skeptical that the election will be free and fair, especially since the Maduro government has disqualified leading opposition candidates.

María Corina Machado, a former lawmaker, is currently the most popular candidate hoping to challenge Mr. Maduro in 2024. It is unclear how she will participate, though, as she is among the disqualified.

At a recent Machado campaign event in the state of Guárico, south of Caracas, a teacher named Josefina Romance stood in the audience.

With a new president, Ms. Romance said, “We are going to begin to rebuild.”

“And we will have the hope that private companies that left the country will come back,” she continued, “and that there will be sources of work — so that my children can return.”

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An outdoor market with umbrellas shielding fruits and vegetables.

A street market in downtown Caracas in January. Many people struggle even to feed their families.Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times

Genevieve Glatsky contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia, and Bianca Padró Ocasio from Lima, Peru.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/24/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Followers of Afro-Brazilian religions have been displaced by New Year’s revelers. But they still find ways to make their offerings to the ocean.


Carrying offerings to the sea on Friday in Rio de Janeiro as part of an annual rite by devotees of Afro-Brazilian religions.

Each New Year’s Eve, more than two million revelers — twice as many as typically fill Times Square — dress in white and pack Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro to watch a 15-minute midnight fireworks extravaganza.

The one-night hedonistic release is one of the world’s largest New Year’s celebrations and leaves Copacabana’s famed 2.4 miles of sand strewed with trash.

But it began as something far more spiritual.

In the 1950s, followers of an Afro-Brazilian religion, Umbanda, began congregating on Copacabana on New Year’s Eve to make offerings to their goddess of the sea, Iemanjá, and ask for good fortune in the year ahead.

It quickly became one of the holiest moments of the year for followers of a cluster of Afro-Brazilian religions that have roots in slavery, worship an array of deities and have long faced prejudice in Brazil.

Then, in 1987, a hotel along the Copacabana strip started a Dec. 31 fireworks show. It was a huge hit that began attracting large numbers.

ImageOn a beach crowded with people in T-shirts and shorts, a man carries a statue of a goddess in a flowing blue gown.

Followers make offerings to their goddess of the sea, Iemanjá, and ask for good fortune in the new year.

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A woman in white stands in shallow water nudging a small blue boat carrying flowers into the waves.

Sending a small wooden ship loaded with flowers into the sea. Devotees had to shift their ritual to Dec. 29 because of New Year’s Eve revelry on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro.

“Obviously, this was great for the hotel industry, for tourism,” said Ivanir Dos Santos, a professor of comparative history at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

A new New Year’s tradition was born, and the revelers adopted some old Umbanda traditions, including throwing flowers into the sea, jumping seven waves and, especially, wearing white, a symbol of peace in the religion.

But the huge party, Mr. Dos Santos said, “also then pushed the worshipers off the beach.”

Not entirely.

Mr. Dos Santos was standing on Copacabana Beach, dressed in white, with the chants of Umbanda worshipers behind him. Yet this was Dec. 29, the date when devotees of the Afro-Brazilian religions now descend on Copacabana Beach to make their annual offerings to Iemanjá (pronounced ee-mahn-JA).

Alongside beachgoers in bikinis and vendors selling beer and barbecued cheese, hundreds of worshipers were trying to make contact with one of their most important gods. Devotees believe that Iemenjá, who is often depicted with flowing hair and a billowing blue-and-white dress, is the queen of the sea and a goddess of motherhood and fertility.

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A procession of people dressed mostly in white carry decorated boats and images of Iemanjá on a beach, with high-rises in the background.

A procession on Friday, part of festivities that help some Brazilians reconnect with their African roots.

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A woman with long dark hair and a satiny white dress dances with others on the sand under a canopy.

People gathered under a tent for traditional dances and songs.

With temperatures exceeding 90 degrees, many gathered under a tent for traditional dances and songs around an altar of small wooden ships, loaded with flowers and fruit, that would soon be sent into the sea. Outside, they dug shallow altars in the sand, leaving candles, flowers, fruit and liquor.

“This is a tradition passed from generation to generation. From grandmother to mother to son,” said Bruna Ribeiro de Souza, 39, a schoolteacher, sitting in the sand with her mother and her toddler son. They had lit three candles and poured a glass of sparkling wine for Iemenjá. Nearby was their foot-long wooden boat, ready for its voyage.

Ms. Souza’s mother, Marilda, 69, said her own mother brought her to Copacabana to make offerings to Iemanjá in the 1950s. It was a way, she said, to reconnect with her family’s African roots.

Afro-Brazilian religions were largely created by slaves and their descendants. From about 1540 to 1850, Brazil imported more slaves than any other nation, or nearly half of the estimated 10.7 million slaves brought to the Americas, according to historians.

One of the most popular religions, Candomblé, is a direct extension of Yoruba beliefs from Africa, which also inspired Santería in Cuba. Residents of Rio created Umbanda in the 20th century, mixing the Yoruba worship of various deities with Catholicism and aspects of occultism.


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Carrying a large blue wooden boat to the beach for celebrations in Rio de Janeiro.

Preparing to mark the year’s end by carrying a large wooden boat to the beach in Rio.

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Copacabana Beach at night, with people standing and sitting next to small fires in the sand.

People lit shallow altars in the sand, leaving candles, flowers, fruit and liquor.

Roughly 2 percent of Brazilians, or more than four million people, identify as followers of Afro-Brazilian religions, according to a survey conducted in 2019. (About half identified as Catholic and 31 percent Evangelical.) That was an increase from the 0.3 percent who said they followed Afro-Brazilian religions in Brazil’s 2010 census, the last official figures.

The religions have given many Black Brazilians a cultural identity and connections with their ancestors. But followers have also faced persecution. Extremists in the Evangelical church have called the religions evil, attacked their followers and destroyed their places of worship.

Still, as the sun set over Copacabana Beach on Friday, groups of beachgoers cheered on the worshipers as they marched into the surf with bouquets of white flowers, bottles of sparking wine and their wooden boats. (Environmental concerns led devotees to abandon Styrofoam boats, and they no longer load on things like bottles of perfume.)

Alexander Pereira Vitoriano, a cook and Umbanda worshiper, carried one of the largest boats and waded into the waves first. As he let the boat go, a wave capsized it, a sign to the followers that Iemenjá had taken the offering.

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Waves bubble up in the foreground as a blue and white boat adorned with fruit and flowers is carried to sea by a man whose face is obscured.

Alexander Pereira Vitoriano preparing to release his boat. Afro-Brazilian religions were largely created by slaves and their descendants. From about 1540 to 1850, Brazil imported more slaves than any other nation.

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Three female devotees in blue and white stand in the ocean holding a small statue of Iemanjá.

Female devotees with a small Iemanjá statue. Afro-Brazilian religions have strengthened many people’s connections with their ancestors.

“She comes to take everything bad to the depths of the sacred sea, all the evil, the sickness, the envy,” he said on the shore, panting and soaked. “It’s a clean start to the new year.”

Nearby, Amanda Santos emptied a bottle of sparkling wine into the waves and wept. “It’s just gratitude,” she said. “Last year I was here and asked for a home, and this year I got my first house.”

After a few minutes, the surf became a line of flowers that had been thrown into the sea and were then spit back out. As the skies darkened and the crowd cleared, Adriana Carvalho, 53, stood with a white dove in her hands. She had bought the bird the day before to release it as an offering. She was asking Iemanjá for peace, health and clear paths for her family.

She let go of the dove, and it flittered into the sky. Then it quickly came down again, landing on the back of a woman bent over an altar in the sand. The woman, Sara Henriques, 19, was making her first offering.

The dove landed “at the moment we were asking for a good 2024, with health, prosperity and peace,” she said. “So, to me, it was a confirmation that my wish had been fulfilled.”

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A dove sits on the back of a woman in a bathing suit facing the sea.

A dove that had been released as an offering landed Friday on Sara Henriques’s back as she was making her first offering. She took it as a good sign.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/01/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Where Anteaters and Anacondas Roam, and Ranchers Are Now Rangers

Colombia created its latest, and perhaps last, national park by befriending the traditional ranching culture that surrounds it.

The llanos region spans more than 200,000 square miles through Colombia and Venezuela. Hot winds blow over its grassy hills, and scattered forests of Mauritius palms shelter hidden streams and lagoons. For centuries this landscape, shaped by ancient rivers, has been shared by ranchers and cattle, which learned to coexist with jaguars, panthers, anacondas, electric eels and crocodiles.

In December, Colombia declared a new national park in a corner of the llanos that borders the Manacacías River. The Manacacías joins the larger Meta River; then the Orinoco River, which forms part of the border with Venezuela; and there feeds into a tributary of the Amazon. At 263 square miles, the new park, Parque Nacional Natural Serranía de Manacacías, is not Colombia’s biggest. But from a conservation perspective it is strategic, protecting a crucial link between this vast tropical savanna and the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest.


CARIBBEAN

SEA

VENEZUELA

Medellín

Bogotá

Serranía de Manacacías

National Natural Park

COLOMBIA

BRAZIL

ECUADOR

PERU

By The New York Times

The Manacacías park is six hours from the nearest town, San Martín. To reach it, one must navigate unmarked roads across an undulating sea of green prairie grass, seldom seeing another vehicle. Cellphone signals die as the sky widens and the ubiquitous zebu cattle grow sparse.

On a ride into the nascent park in late November, just days before it was legally declared, Thomas Walschburger, the chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy in Colombia, explained why it was needed so urgently. Cattle rearing, the traditional livelihood of the region and one that was easier on its rivers and soils, was giving way to a new agricultural frontier. Fields of African oil palms, and white-trunked eucalyptus trees, were encroaching ever closer to the park’s boundaries.

The sandy, acidic, nutrient-poor soils of the llanos can support these commercial crops only when doused with fertilizers and calcium carbonate. But intensive agriculture compromises the water, and the ability to sustain life, in a key transition zone between the llanos and the Amazon. The hope is that by protecting this small puzzle piece of savanna, a whole lot more can be saved.

The park has been in the works since 2010, when the Colombian government recognized the llanos — long viewed by the public as grassy wastelands — to be a conservation priority. A rare and fortuitous alignment of science, philanthropy and a new carbon tax allowed Manacacías to take shape, slowly and carefully, over more than a decade. During that time, a whole community had to be persuaded that it was worthwhile.


a caiman; ;


egrets


a giant anteater;


the Manacacías River.

Farewell to a family ranch

Hato Palmeras, the Rey family ranch, sits close to the Manacacías River, in the southern part of the park, surrounded by a panoramic view of prairie. Founded in the early 1950s, the ranch and its 25,000 acres of natural grasslands, palm forests and wetlands have never been touched by a tractor.

On a November afternoon, Ernesto Rey, 68, prepared to drive hundreds of his cows out of the park’s limits, never to return. The ranch would soon be turned over to the Colombian government, and the farmhouse converted to a ranger station.

Colombia put up about $20 million for the park, using funds from a fossil fuel tax and environmental impact compensation payments from industry. A consortium of nonprofit groups, including the Nature Conservancy, Re:wild, the Wyss Foundation and others joined forces to help, raising more than $5 million toward the purchase of lands. Much of the seed money came from the sale of a single artwork donated by Carol Bove, an American sculptor, through a nonprofit called Art into Acres.

The World Wildlife Fund, which also supported the park’s creation, hired lawyers and topographers to manage sales of ranches like Hato Palmeras. One lawyer, Lorena Torres, had traveled to the ranch from Colombia’s capital, and was spending the night. Final payment on the Rey ranch was tied to the exodus of most of its livestock, which Ms. Torres would document.

ImageErnesto Rey dresses for a festival and someone adjusts his collar in a house near the parade start. Photos of past parades line a wall next to him.

Ernesto Rey prepares to ride in the cuadrillas of San Martín, an equestrian spectacle evoking the Crusades and performed here annually since 1735. All his life Mr. Rey, a cattle rancher, has portrayed a Galán, or Spaniard, at the festival.

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Oscar Rey and another ranger, both wearing blue shirts with insignia of the park, stand wearing tall rubber boots on a grassy hill, pointing at something in the distance.

Oscar Rey, nephew of Mr. Rey and a ranger with the new park, left, and Oscar Gaitán, who conducts social outreach on the park’s behalf.

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A person works over several cooking pots on a large stove in a wood hut.

A ranch cook at Hato Palmeras prepares food on a wood-burning stove.

William Zorro, the new park’s director, had also come to see the Rey cows leave. The lawyers, park people and conservationists were not there to monitor the ranchers, Mr. Zorro insisted, but to accompany them. The atmosphere was convivial, as everyone knew one another well.

Mr. Zorro, 51, had spent more than 20 years directing different national parks in Colombia, some of them in conflict zones. As a result, his diplomatic skills were well honed. Not everyone living within the boundaries of the park was as cooperative as the Rey family; some ranchers would not vacate until they absolutely had to. Mr. Zorro tried to be as flexible as he could with them. He would give them time before he and his team began dismantling the corrals that allowed people to rear cattle here.

Another challenge Mr. Zorro faced was that people came to these lands from the surrounding community to hunt and fish, activities soon to be prohibited. “Llaneros love to hunt,” he said. “It’s something we have to work on.” He hoped to welcome tourists to the park one day, but the more immediate concern was getting the community to accept it, and its rules. For two years Mr. Zorro’s team, including a sociologist and several newly minted rangers, had promoted the park and its mission to residents of San Martín.

Of caracaras and oncillas

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Cattle being driven by cowboys in a grassy area with bright orange dawn light wafting in, carried by a mist.

Early morning on the day of the cattle drive.

It was early afternoon; the big cattle drive would start the next day. At his long farmhouse table, Ernesto Rey ate a lunch of beef liver with his cowboys, deploying a rich vocabulary of curses at them in a gravelly voice while cutting his meat with the knife from his belt. The cowboys were laughing. “He has a noble heart,” his nephew Oscar Rey said.

Unlike his brothers, who were eager to get out of ranching, Ernesto Rey was reluctant to sell at first. His parents built this rustic farmhouse, with its long wood-burning stove, antlers used as hat hooks and mango tree where the cowboys sat playing a ukulele-like instrument called a cuatro. Save for a period in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when right-wing paramilitaries invaded the llanos and extorted landowners like him, Mr. Rey’s memories here were good ones. “How can I not still love the farm where I’ve spent my whole life?” he said.

Instead of opting for a quiet retirement in town, as his family hoped, Mr. Rey would remain a cattleman: He had rented another ranch a four-day journey away. All morning he and the cowboys had been working furiously to separate out any pregnant and nursing cows that were unlikely to make it safely to the new property. The cowboys would come back for them later.

As they drank their coffee, the smell of smoke drifted in. Not far away, prairie grass was burning. The new park hadn’t yet been signed into law, and a neighboring family had decided to burn a few acres, hoping for some fresh shoots to feed their cows before they, too, had to leave.

Dr. Walschburger, the Nature Conservancy scientist, went out to get a closer look. At the fire’s frontier, flames crackled loudly as grass turned to spaghetti strings of ash. Dr. Walschburger stepped right through them as savanna hawks and caracaras, two common birds of prey on the llanos, swooped excitedly over the smoldering pasture, hunting escaping rodents and reptiles. Maneuvering around termite mounds as tall as he was, Dr. Walschburger made his way toward a stand of Mauritius palms that had been deliberately spared the burning; whoever lit this fire knew exactly what they were doing, he said.

Image
A worker stands in a large metal container containing tons and tons of palm oil fruits in a palm grove.

Harvesting oil palm fruits in San Martín. Colombia is Latin America’s largest producer of palm oil, but the expansion of commercial agriculture threatens the hydrology of the llanos.

Image
Thomas Walschburger runs across a burned area toward some flames in a cleared area of forest.

Thomas Walschburger, the chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy in Colombia, surveys burning prairie near Hato Palmeras.

Image
The remains of a woodpecker, its bright red head and black-and-white feathers, in a patch of tall grass.

The remains of a lineated woodpecker, a possible victim of a wild feline. Scientists wonder which plants and animals will benefit in the new park and which will suffer in an environment no longer actively cultivated.

Burning and grazing had shaped the ecosystem of the llanos for centuries. Both would soon be illegal here. The scientists and park officials weren’t sure how to think about this.

Tapirs, deer and other wild mammals liked fresh green prairie grass as much as cows did. Without burning, would the landscape grow so brushy that it would not be able to feed as many of them? Would the same large populations of migratory birds, like the flycatchers that sailed gracefully all over these open hills, continue to thrive if the tree cover increased? Which plants and animals would profit here, and which would suffer, without constant human intervention?

Dr. Walschburger pointed to a startling sight on the ground: the severed head of a woodpecker. Just a few feet away, in the mud where grasslands gave way to palm forest and shallow lakes, was the paw print of an oncilla, a cat that is smaller than a puma or jaguar. The trails of anacondas could be seen everywhere, the wet grass flattened by the snakes’ heavy bodies as they moved from lagoon to lagoon.

Domesticated pigs had also been part of this landscape since anyone could remember; they ate the fruits that the Mauritius palms dropped, while the anacondas ate their babies. Within weeks the pigs, like the rest of the farm animals within the bounds of the park, would be gone, and the whole trophic system would change.

Dr. Walschburger estimated that the park could support up to 20 pairs of jaguars. Scientists in Bogotá were hoping that captive-bred Orinoco crocodiles, a native species hunted to near-extinction in the 1940s and ’50s, could soon be reintroduced into its waterways.

“It will be interesting to see what all this looks like in five, then 10, then 20 years,” Dr. Walschburger said. For now he was just glad that Manacacías existed. Colombia had experienced an ambitious spate of national park-building in the 1970s and ’80s, but mining, big agriculture and armed groups made new ones ever harder to establish. Dr. Walschburger, along with many of his colleagues, felt that Manacacías, Colombia’s 61st national park, would most likely be its last.

Old times, new times

Image
Several elaborately costumed people stand in the back of a moving Jeep during a parade.

A group of cachaceros, whose costumes are meant to evoke those of African warriors, gets ready for the cuadrillas in San Martín.

The 16th-century town of San Martín, where the park has its offices, is home to a singular cattle-centric culture, and to a staunch traditionalism.

Even the local music reflects this. Llanera songs are cowboy songs, the star instrument of which is the harp, played fast and hard. Ana Veydó, a singer and the leader of the group Cimarrón, based in San Martín, is the rare female artist testing the limits of the genre, with piercing ballads that evoke the region’s nature and history. Although Cimarrón has been nominated for a Grammy Award and performs regularly abroad, it receives few invitations at home. “We want to showcase the great diversity” of llanos culture, Ms. Veydó said. “I don’t think the institutions like that.”

Every 11th of November, on the feast day of its patron saint, San Martín erupts in a wild spectacle that has occurred almost uninterrupted since 1735. Teams of horsemen dressed as Spanish, Moorish, African and Indigenous warriors engage in mock battles with spears and lances. The costumes of the cachaceros, representing Africans, are phantasmagoric confections of old jaguar pelts, caiman skulls and peccary teeth. Each horseman inherits his role from an older male relative, making the cuadrillas, as the battles are called, the domain of just a few families.

Ernesto Rey, the cattleman, has ridden in the cuadrillas since 1970 as a Galán, or Spaniard. Since his early teens, his nephew Oscar Rey has done the same.

Ana Veydó, leader of the musical group Cimarrón;


a Moro, or Moor, and a Galán battle on horseback;


Sergio Rey, one of the cachaceros, in preparation for the parade;


and Ernesto Rey riding as a Galán.

The younger Mr. Rey, now 44, worked on the family ranch for much of his life. He was there a decade ago, when teams of biologists and geologists from Colombia’s Universidad Nacional came to conduct the meticulous surveys that would form the scientific evidence for the Manacacías park. In 2022 he greeted the country’s then-environment minister when he arrived by helicopter to see it for himself. By then the Reys had committed to selling Hato Palmeras to the government. And Oscar Rey, rather than inherit his share of it, had become a park ranger.

In many ways, he said of the llanos, “it’s like old times here.” His family ranch has always been owned and run by men; his grandfather left nothing to his daughters. But a younger generation no longer wanted to work on huge, isolated cattle ranches, he explained. They wanted to study, find jobs with oil companies or agricultural firms, or move. They sought relationships that were more like partnerships, without the strict gender roles typical of the ranches. With fair offers for their properties, and few interested heirs, most landowning families were willing to sell.

The Manacacías park, Mr. Rey said, would accelerate the cultural changes already underway. “You’re going from people coming here to hunt, to fish, to the idea of conservation,” he said. “My colleagues and I are doing environmental education workshops in schools, talking to kids. Some of our new rangers are women. What does all this mean? Right now this landscape is all about the men who own the ranches. But if you’re looking at it as a place of conservation, a place for the public, it’s not necessarily so male-dominated.”

‘We’re like pioneers here’

Image
Ernesto Rey on horseback leads a herd of cattle across a grassy steppe.

Ernesto Rey and his cattle leaving the park for a rented farm a four days’ journey away.

Ernesto Rey and his cowboys awoke in their hammocks before dawn, to the percussive harps of llanera music on their phones and Jupiter visible in the sky. After a breakfast of beef bones in broth — no one seems to eat anything but beef in the llanos — they grabbed their soft-brimmed topochero hats and took off on their horses in a chorus of high-pitched hollers and whips cracking. A pink sunrise turned to yellow as Mr. Rey rode behind the herd in shirt sleeves, chasing wayward cows.

Within two hours they and 300 cows would cross a river and leave the park’s limits, but their journey to the rented farm was just starting. For three nights they would rely on the hospitality of the owners of other far-flung ranches.

The park workers and conservationists left Hato Palmeras soon afterward, headed for a northeastern sector where the new rangers were stationed.

That morning, along the improvised roads that crisscrossed the plains, wild animals were out in force. Bushy-tailed giant anteaters galloped in the dewy grass. A tamandua, or collared anteater, with prizefighter arms and curved claws that break open termite mounds, tried to ignore a car full of onlookers.

The rangers occupied an emptied-out ranch with limited electricity, no internet and no refrigerator; their fresh food was stored in foam coolers. The way it worked, a group of three rangers stayed in the house for two weeks at a time, and then returned to their base in San Martín, replaced by different colleagues. Several times a week they made the rounds of the park together on motorcycles that their boss, Mr. Zorro, borrowed for them.

They were mostly young, poorly paid, and all alone. As not even dogs can be kept in Colombia’s national parks, their sole pet was a chicken left behind by its former owners. “We’re like pioneers here,” said Alexandra Rubio, 21, who, with her colleagues, had been working in these bare-bones conditions for months. They would have to put up with the conditions a while longer, Mr. Zorro said. Once the park was officially declared and had a definite budget, things would start to improve.

Image
A large bird of prey, illuminated orange from early morning light, alights from a tree branch with its wings spread.

A savanna hawk.

Image
A bright, orange, partly cloudy sunrise over the Serrania del Manacacias National Park.

Sunrise on the plains.

Image
A close-up view of a three-toed footprint in some orange-brown mud.

A tapir print on the shore of the Manacacías River.

Already, though, the rangers had made a difference. They had established the government’s presence in a formerly anything-goes region. Thanks to their outreach in San Martín, they had been invited in November to march in the annual parade celebrating the cuadrillas. Mr. Zorro thought that the invitation was a turning point for the park, a moment of acceptance. And on their motorcycle patrols through Manacacías, the rangers had logged some important wildlife sightings.

Gustavo Castro, one of the rangers staying on the ranch that week, had been standing at a lookout a few months earlier when he noticed something brown and furry ambling in the tall grass. “I got closer to him, maybe five or six meters, and he carried on normally,” Mr. Castro said. “I was able to get some good videos and photos.” The animal was a bush dog, a wild canine thought to be extinct in the area.

To Dr. Walschburger, the verified sighting of a bush dog was exciting. Bush dogs were more common in the Amazon, suggesting that the wilderness corridor between Manacacías and the Amazon basin was active. The bush dog’s documented use of the area could potentially result in stronger protection for that corridor, which looked, on a satellite map, like a curved finger of green extending southeast. The more data coming from the park, Dr. Walschburger said, the greater the conservation possibilities in and around it.

The llanos can be disorienting — the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt, who explored the Orinoco region in 1800, complained of their “infinite monotony” — but after months of patrols, the new rangers navigated the terrain with ease. Their phones were now full of oncillas, tapirs, great horned owls and the gleaming crowns of Mauritius palms at sunset.

Oscar Rey joined his colleagues as they stopped at a bend of the Manacacías River. The rangers frequently checked in on this sandy shoreline, as people routinely placed fishing nets across it. Mr. Rey had known it since he was a boy, when his grandfather taught him to shuffle as he walked barefoot in the water to avoid being stung by rays.

Everywhere around him were tracks made by tapirs, peccaries, capybaras and lizards. It was almost the time of year when freshwater turtles dug nests in the riverbanks, he said. Mr. Rey’s grandparents ate their eggs, of course, but future generations would not.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/16/scie ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Archaeologists, relying on laser technology and decades of research, mapped a cluster of ancient cities in eastern Ecuador. Their findings add to evidence of dense settlements in Amazonia.


An image generated with laser technology showing streets crisscrossing an urban area bordered by complexes of rectangular platforms in the Upano Valley in Ecuador.Credit...Antoine Dorison and Stéphen Rostain

The Amazon valley looked like so many others, with a muddy river snaking through dense forest, except that this one had earthen mounds rising at clear right angles and ditches carving long straight lines through the soil.

In this rainforest, archaeologists say, lay the bones of sprawling ancient cities: earthworks that were once roads, canals, plazas and platforms for homes where thousands of people had lived for centuries, long before Europeans ever tried to chart South America.

The cluster of interconnected cities was only recently mapped in the Upano Valley of eastern Ecuador, a research team reported this month in the journal Science, working off decades of research and laser-mapping technology that has helped to revolutionize archaeology.

With the technology, called lidar, researchers were able to pierce the forest cover and map the ground below it, documenting five major settlements and 10 secondary sites across more than 115 square miles.

Radiocarbon dating found that people lived there from around 500 B.C. to between A.D. 300 and A.D. 600, which would make the settlements some of the oldest found so far in the diverse landscapes of the Amazon.

“It’s a huge contribution to Amazonian archaeology,” said José Iriarte, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter who was not involved in the research.

This region, where the Amazon reaches the eastern slope of the Andes, had long been thought of as an area “with nothing really happening there,” he said.

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Now, he said, “we have this major, idiosyncratic cultural development.”

Stéphen Rostain, the lead researcher of the study, said he was impressed by the complexity of the cities and the amount of work needed to build them.


The “perfectly straight roads” that connected them were one sign of the cities’ sophistication, he said, adding that they would have required engineers and workers, farmers to provide food, and some sort of chairman, chief or king to lead “a specialized and stratified society.”

Image
Lush green scenery of the cliff edge of the Upano River in Ecuador.

A complex of rectangular earthen platforms at the Nijiamanch site along the cliff edge of the Upano River in Ecuador.Credit...Stéphen Rostain

The original construction was done by groups from the Kilamope, and later, Upano cultures, the researchers said, adding that people of the Huapula culture lived in the area between 800 and 1200.

The team excavated artifacts, including painted pottery and jugs with the remains of traditional chicha, the corn-based drink that remains a mainstay of the Andes region today.

Though archaeologists have long known about earthworks in the area, lidar — which pierces foliage with laser pulses from airplanes and has helped find hidden Mayan sites and ancient Cambodian cities — revealed the scope of the settlements.

They eventually mapped more than 6,000 earthen platforms, connected by roads and laid across a landscape molded to control water and cultivate crops.

The researchers determined that some of the earthen mounds were residential platforms, and said in the paper that other, larger complexes might have served a “civic-ceremonial function.”

Particularly striking, archaeologists said, were the systems of roads and farming — how ancient people drained away the heavy rains along the Andes’ eastern slopes to take advantage of fertile volcanic soil.

“It really shows us that there are many more ways of living in the Amazon in the past than we used to consider in archaeology,” said Eduardo Neves, an archaeologist at the University of São Paulo who was not on the team.

He said that the research added to the growing evidence that the Amazon was “settled densely by Indigenous people for millennia, in very large settlements.”

The new paper also builds on research showing the extent to which ancient people transformed their landscapes, archaeologists said.

“This idea of a kind of pristine, untouched Amazonian landscape was definitely not the case,” said Jason Nesbitt, an archaeologist at Tulane University.

That longstanding notion, the archaeologists said, was fueled in part by how the Indigenous population was decimated by the arrival of Europeans, and by the raw materials of Amazonia. Ancient people there did not have huge quantities of stone to work with, like the monument-builders of Mesoamerica or Peru, and instead used the soil at hand.

Agricultural modifications in parts of the Amazon, said Simon Martin, an anthropologist at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, have “long pointed to major populations there in the past.”

Amazonia remains “the one vast location where hidden archaeological wonders could yet lie,” he said.

Dr. Nesbitt added that, although it was difficult to estimate the population of an ancient settlement, the researchers’ suggestion that, at one point, as many as 30,000 people may have lived in the Upano Valley seemed reasonable.

“It’s a very exciting time to do archaeology in the Amazon because of the use of lidar,” Dr. Neves added. “Places which were already known are being restudied, and places that were not known are being mapped for the first time.”

The archaeologists expressed hope that more excavation would be done in the valley and that the work could help to answer many of the outstanding questions about the people who lived there, including their beliefs, their system of governance and what connections to other societies they may have had.

“We have a lot to learn from the human past,” Dr. Rostain said, adding the scale and complexity of the cities showed that its inhabitants were more than “hunter-gatherers lost in the rainforest looking for food.”

Dr. Neves added that continued research could help protect the Amazon from the threat of deforestation.

“Some of the destruction is based on the idea that the Amazon has never been really settled in the past, that there were never many people there, that it’s kind of up for grabs,” he said. “I think this kind of work, archaeology in general, and this kind of research, is really important because it adds to the evidence showing the Amazon wasn’t an empty place.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/23/scie ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Record numbers of cases of the mosquito-borne virus have been reported in the Southern Hemisphere summer, and the surge is likely to move north.


Brazil is experiencing a massive outbreak of dengue fever, a mosquito-borne disease that can be fatal. Experts say El Niño and climate change have amplified the problem this year.Credit...Sergio Lima/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Brazil is experiencing an enormous outbreak of dengue fever, the sometimes fatal mosquito-borne disease, and public health experts say it is a harbinger of a coming surge in cases in the Americas, including Puerto Rico.

Brazil’s Health Ministry warns that it expects more than 4.2 million cases this year, outstripping the 4.1 million cases the Pan-American Health Organization recorded for all 42 countries in the region last year.

Brazil was due for a bad dengue year — numbers of cases of the virus typically rise and fall on a roughly four-year cycle — but experts say a number of factors, including El Niño and climate change, have significantly amplified the problem this year.

“The record heat in the country and the above-average rainfall since last year, even before the summer, have increased the number of mosquito breeding sites in Brazil, even in regions that had few cases of the disease,” Brazil’s health minister, Nísia Trindade, said.

Dengue case numbers have already soared in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay in the last few months, during the Southern Hemisphere summer, and the virus will move up through the continents with the seasons.

“When we see waves in one country, we will generally see waves in other countries, that’s how interconnected we are,” said Dr. Albert Ko, an expert on dengue in Brazil and a professor of public health at Yale University.

ImageA mean wearing rubber gloves leans over to examine a plant in an area with numerous potted plant.

A city worker drains standing water from potted plants in a street in Rio, in an effort to eliminate breeding spots for mosquitoes.Credit...Pilar Olivares/Reuters

Image

A health worker sprays insecticide to kill the Aedes aegypti mosquito in Brasilia.Credit...Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters

The World Health Organization has warned that dengue is rapidly becoming an urgent global health problem, with a record number of cases last year and outbreaks in places, such as France, that have historically never reported the disease.

In the United States, Dr. Gabriela Paz-Bailey, chief of the dengue branch at the division of vector-borne diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said that she expected high rates of dengue infection in Puerto Rico this year and that there would be more cases in the continental United States as well, especially in Florida, as well as in Texas, Arizona and Southern California.

Dengue is spread by Aedes aegypti, a species of mosquito that is becoming established in new regions, including warmer, wetter parts of the United States, where it had never been seen until the past few years.

Cases in the United States are still expected to be relatively few this year — in the hundreds, not millions — because of the prevalence of air-conditioning and window screens. But Dr. Paz-Bailey warned: “When you’re looking at trends in numbers of cases in the Americas, it’s scary. It’s been increasing consistently.”

Florida reported its highest number of locally acquired cases last year, 168, and California reported its first such cases.

//What to Know About Dengue Fever as Cases Spread to New Places
//Oct. 24, 2023 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/24/heal ... pe=Article

Three-quarters of people who are infected with dengue don’t have any symptoms at all, and among those who do, most cases will resemble only a mild flu. But some dengue infections are serious, producing headaches, vomiting, high fever and the aching joint pain that gives the disease the nickname “breakbone fever.” A bad dengue case can leave a person debilitated for weeks.

And about 5 percent of people who become sick will progress to what’s called severe dengue, which causes plasma, the protein-rich fluid component of blood, to leak out of blood vessels. Some patients may go into shock, causing organ failure.

Image
Mosquitoes are trapped in a wide cylinder for later lab analysis.

Mosquitoes captured by public health agents are trapped in a container for lab analysis in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.Credit...Silvia Izquierdo/Associated Press

Severe dengue has a mortality rate of between 2 percent and 5 percent in people whose symptoms are treated with blood transfusions and intravenous fluids. When left untreated, however, the mortality rate is 15 percent.

In Brazil, state governments are setting up emergency centers to test people for dengue and treat them. The city of Rio de Janeiro declared a public health emergency over dengue on Monday, days before the start of the annual celebration of Carnaval, which brings tens of thousands of people to outdoor parties through the days and nights.

High numbers of cases are being reported in the southernmost states of Brazil, Ms. Trindade, the health minister, said, which are typically much cooler than Rio and the states in the center and the north. People in those areas will have little immunity to the disease from prior exposure.

Dengue comes in four different serotypes, which are like virus cousins. Previous infection with one offers only short-term protection against infection with another, and a person who has had one serotype of dengue in the past is at higher risk of developing severe dengue from infection with another serotype.

“Right now you have serotypes circulating in Brazil that have not circulated in 20 years,” said Dr. Ernesto Marques, an associate professor of infectious diseases and microbiology at the University of Pittsburgh.

Brazil has started an emergency campaign to immunize children in areas with the highest rates or risk of dengue transmission, using a two-dose vaccine called Qdenga that is made by the Takeda Pharmaceutical Company of Japan. Brazil bought 5.2 million doses for delivery this year, plus nine million more for delivery in 2025, and the company donated an additional 1.3 million, which effectively locks up most of the supply of Qdenga globally. A company spokeswoman said Takeda is working on a plan to increase supply, focusing on delivery to high-prevalence countries.

Image
A woman in a purple floral dress holds her head while a person wearing camouflage pushes her in a wheelchair near an army-green tent.

A soldier assisting a woman with a presumed case of dengue at a military health clinic outside Brasilia, Brazil.Credit...Luis Nova/Associated Press

Image
A child in a red t-shirt holds someone's hand while a medical professional administers a vaccine in his other arm.

A health worker injecting a child with a dose of dengue vaccine in Brasilia, Brazil.Credit...Andre Borges/EPA, via Shutterstock

But even so, that is enough to cover less than 10 percent of the Brazilian population over two years. The only good news about dengue in Brazil at the moment is the publication of clinical trial results for a new vaccine tested by the public health research center Instituto Butantan in São Paulo. That vaccine requires just one shot, and the trial found that it protected 80 percent of those vaccinated against developing dengue virus disease. The research center will ask the Brazilian government to approve the vaccine, and it has facilities to produce it, aiming to start delivering shots in 2025.

For this outbreak, it’s too late for vaccination to help much, and there are few other ways for the public health authorities to slow it down.

“Insecticide resistance really limits what you can do in terms of controlling the mosquito population, and insecticide resistance is widespread,” said Dr. Paz-Bailey at the C.D.C. “What you can do is ensure that people have access to clinical management and that clinicians know what to do.”

Medical centers in Brazil are setting up extra beds for people with severe dengue, hoping to prevent the kind of overwhelming of health systems that occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic and to prevent dengue deaths.

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“The old paradigm of dengue most affecting children is not the case in Brazil — you have to think about the elderly, who are very vulnerable,” Dr. Ko said. It will be important for both clinicians and the public to get the message to test for dengue at the first sign of symptoms in both children and older people, he said.

“Any educated guess was that this would be a bad year,” Dr. Marques said, “but now we know how bad. It’s going to be very, very bad.”

Lis Moriconi contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/10/heal ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Mysterious Pattern in a Cave Is Oldest Rock Art Found in Patagonia
About 8,200 years ago, in one of the last places settled by humans, prehistoric peoples began painting comblike designs as the climate shifted.


In a cave full of ancient markings in Patagonia, archaeologists found some motifs appeared far earlier than others.Credit...Guadalupe Romero Villanueva

In the stark inland desert of Patagonia in Argentina, there is a remote cave decorated with nearly 900 paintings of human figures, animals and abstract designs. Until recently, archaeologists had assumed that the rock art at this site, known as Cueva Huenul 1, was created within the past few thousand years.

But in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, archaeologists say that one of the cave’s most mysterious motifs, a comblike pattern, first appeared some 8,200 years ago, making it by far the earliest known example of rock art in one of the last places on Earth to be settled by our species. Cave artists continued to draw the same comb design in black pigment for thousands of years, an era when other human activity was virtually absent at the site. The cave art provides a rare glimpse of a culture that may have relied on this design to communicate valuable insights across generations during a period of climactic shifts.

“We got the results and we were very surprised,” said Guadalupe Romero Villanueva, an author of the study and an archaeologist at the Argentine government agency CONICET and the National Institute of Anthropology and Latin American Thought in Buenos Aires. “It was a shock, and we had to rethink some things.”

Patagonia, which spans the southern tip of South America, was not reached by humans until about 12,000 years ago. These early inhabitants thrived at Cueva Huenul 1 for generations, leaving signs of habitation.

Then, around 10,000 years ago, the area became more arid and hostile as a result of climatic shifts. The archaeological record in the cave likewise dried up for the next several thousand years, suggesting that the site was largely abandoned because of environmental pressures.

Image
A view of a cave in the distance along a rock wall.

The researchers say that the marking left in the cave may have helped ancient peoples communicate as they adapted to a shifting climate.Credit...Guadalupe Romero Villanueva

The comb motifs overlap with this long period of hardship, according to Dr. Romero Villanueva and her colleagues, who identified the age of the paintings with radiocarbon dating. The team also found that the black paint was probably made with charred wood, perhaps from burned shrubs or cactuses.

“As interesting as the ages are, for us it’s more significant that they span, more or less, 3,000 years of painting basically the same motif during all this time,” said Ramiro Barberena, an author of the study and an archaeologist also at CONICET in Argentina as well as the Temuco Catholic University in Chile.

He added that this was evidence “for continuity in the transmission of information in these very small and very mobile societies.”

Though the meaning of the comb motif has been lost to time, the researchers speculate that it might have helped preserve the collective memories and oral traditions of peoples who endured this unusually hot and dry period.

The relationships between groups of ancient humans that developed and shared such rock art may have enhanced the odds of survival in this challenging environment, Dr. Barberena said.

Andrés Troncoso, an archaeologist in the department of anthropology at the University of Chile who was not involved with the research, said he agreed with that interpretation. The paper “provides a contribution to the discussion about how humans have dealt with climatic change in the past,” he said.

Though the purpose of the comb motif is likely to remain a mystery, the motif’s persistent presence in the cave opens a new window into Patagonia’s prehistoric peoples.

“You cannot help but think about these people,” Dr. Romero Villanueva said, adding: “They were at the same place, admiring the same landscape; the people living here, maybe families, were gathering here for social aspects. It’s really emotional for us.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/14/scie ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

In Latin America, Guards Don’t Control Prisons, Gangs Do

Intended to fight crime, Latin American prisons have instead become safe havens and recruitment centers for gangs, fueling a surge in violence.


Gang members at a prison in El Salvador. Over the last two decades, prisons have become recruitment centers for Latin America’s cartels and gangs, experts say, strengthening their grip on society.Credit...Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

Ecuador’s military was sent in to seize control of the country’s prisons last month after two major gang leaders escaped and criminal groups quickly set off a nationwide revolt that paralyzed the country.

In Brazil last week, two inmates with connections to a major gang became the first to escape from one of the nation’s five maximum-security federal prisons, officials said.

Officials in Colombia have declared an emergency in its prisons after two guards were killed and several more targeted in what the government said was retaliation for its crackdown on major criminal groups.

Inside prisons across Latin America, criminal groups exercise unchallenged authority over prisoners, extracting money from them to buy protection or basic necessities, like food.

The prisons also act as a safe haven of sorts for incarcerated criminal leaders to remotely run their criminal enterprises on the outside, ordering killings, orchestrating the smuggling of drugs to the United States and Europe and directing kidnappings and extortion of local businesses.

When officials attempt to curtail the power criminal groups exercise from behind bars, their leaders often deploy members on the outside to push back.

“The principal center of gravity, the nexus of control of organized crime, lies within the prison compounds,” said Mario Pazmiño, a retired colonel and former director of intelligence for Ecuador’s Army, and an analyst on security matters.

“That’s where let’s say the management positions are, the command positions,” he added. “It is where they give the orders and dispensations for gangs to terrorize the country.”

Latin America’s prison population has exploded over the last two decades, driven by stricter crime measures like pretrial detentions, but governments across the region have not spent enough to handle the surge and instead have often relinquished control to inmates, experts on penal systems say.

Those sent to prison are often left with one choice: join a gang or face their wrath.

As a result, prisons have become crucial recruitment centers for Latin America’s largest and most violent cartels and gangs, strengthening their grip on society instead of weakening it.

Prison officials, who are underfunded, outnumbered, overwhelmed and frequently paid off, have largely given in to gang leaders in many prisons in exchange for a fragile peace.

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A soldier wearing a face mask, while holding a gun, patrols a line of inmates wearing shorts and T-shirts.

A soldier standing guard over inmates at a prison during a press tour organized in February by the military in Guayaquil, Ecuador.Credit...Cesar Munoz/Associated Press

Criminal groups fully or partly control well over half of Mexico’s 285 prisons, according to experts, while in Brazil the government often divides up penitentiaries based on gang affiliation in a bid to avoid unrest. In Ecuador, experts say most of the country’s 36 prisons are under some degree of gang control.

“The gang is solving a problem for the government,’’ said Benjamin Lessing, a University of Chicago political science professor who studies Latin American gangs and prisons. “This gives the gang a kind of power that’s really hard to measure, but is also hard to overestimate.”

Latin America’s prison population surged by 76 percent from 2010 to 2020, according to the Inter-American Development Bank, far exceeding the region’s 10 percent population increase during the same period.

Many countries have imposed tougher law and order policies, including longer sentences and more convictions for low-level drug offenses, pushing most of the region’s penitentiaries beyond maximum capacity.

At the same time, governments have prioritized investing in their security forces as a way to clamp down on crime and flex their muscles to the public, rather than spend on prisons, which are less visible.

Brazil and Mexico, Latin America’s largest countries with the region’s biggest inmate populations, invest little on prisons: Brazil’s government spends roughly $14 per prisoner per day, while Mexico spends about $20. The United States spent about $117 per prisoner per day in 2022. Prison guards in Latin America also earn meager salaries, making them susceptible to bribes from gangs to smuggle in contraband or help high-profile detainees escape.

Federal officials in Brazil and Ecuador did not respond to requests for comment, while federal officials in Mexico declined. In general, Mexico and Brazil’s federal prisons have better financing and conditions than their state prisons.

The state of Rio de Janeiro, which runs some of Brazil’s most notorious prisons, said in a statement that it has separated inmates by their gang affiliation for decades “to ensure their physical safety,” and that the practice is allowed under Brazilian law.

Underscoring the power of prison gangs, some leaders of criminal groups live relatively comfortably behind bars, running supermarkets, cockfighting rings and nightclubs, and sometimes smuggling their families inside to live with them.

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A prison cell is decorated like a home with amenities including a plasma TV, a library, a DVD collection, a white sofa and matching white curtains.

The Brazilian drug trafficker Jarvis Chimenes Pavao’s luxurious cell at Tacumbu prison in Asunción, Paraguay, in 2016. Credit...Norberto Duarte/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Ecuador’s prisons are a textbook example, experts say, of the problems afflicting penal systems in Latin America and how difficult they can be to address.

The riots in January erupted after Ecuador’s recently-elected president moved to tighten security in the prisons after an investigation by the attorney general showed how an imprisoned gang leader, enriched by cocaine trafficking, had corrupted judges, police officers, prison guards and even the former head of the prison system.

The president, Daniel Noboa, planned to transfer several gang leaders to a maximum-security facility, making it harder for them to operate their illicit businesses.

But those plans were leaked to gang leaders and one of them went missing from a sprawling prison compound.

A search for the leader inside the prison set off riots across the country’s jails, with dozens of inmates escaping, including the head of another powerful gang.

Gangs also ordered members to attack on the outside, experts said. They kidnapped police officers, burned cars, set off explosives and briefly seized a major television station.

Mr. Noboa responded by declaring an internal armed conflict, authorizing the military to target gangs on the streets and storm prisons. Inmates in at least one prison were stripped to their underwear and had their possessions confiscated and burned, according to the military and videos on social media.

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Soldiers and police officers knocking down a door during an anti-gang operation this month in Guayaquil, Ecuador.

President Daniel Noboa of Ecuador authorized the military to target gangs on the street, after gangs set of riots in prisons and launched attacks outside the prisons.Credit...John Moore/Getty Images

The scenes were reminiscent of some in El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele declared a state of emergency in 2022 to tackle gang violence. About 75,000 people have been jailed, many without due process, according to human rights groups.

Two percent of Salvadorans are incarcerated, the highest proportion of any country in the world, according to the World Prison Brief, a database compiled by Birkbeck, University of London.

Mr. Bukele’s tactics have decimated the Central American country’s street gangs, reversed years of horrific violence and helped propel him to a second term.

But experts say thousands of innocent people have been incarcerated.

“What consequences does this have?” said Carlos Ponce, an expert on El Salvador and an assistant professor at the University of the Fraser Valley in Canada. “This will scar them and their families for life.”

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Protesters standing near a fence hold signs.

A protest last month to demand the release of relatives detained during the state of emergency in San Salvador, El Salvador.Credit...Fred Ramos for The New York Times

The frequent use of pretrial detentions across the region to combat crime has left many people languishing in jail for months and even years waiting to be tried, human rights groups say. The practice has fallen particularly hard on the poorest, who cannot afford lawyers and face a tortoise-like judicial system with cases backed up for years.

In the first seven months of El Salvador’s state of emergency, 84 percent of all those arrested were in pretrial detention and nearly half of Mexico’s prison population is still waiting trial.

“Prisons can be defined as exploitation centers for poor people,” said Elena Azaola, a scholar in Mexico who has studied the country’s prison system for 30 years.

“Some have been imprisoned for 10 or 20 years without trial,’’ she added. “Many go out worse than when they came in.”

In fact, prisons in some Latin American countries are to some extent a revolving door.

About 40 percent of prisoners in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Chile are released only to be incarcerated again. While the recidivism rate is much higher in the United States, in Latin America many people locked up for minor, sometimes nonviolent offenses go on to commit more serious crimes, experts say, largely because petty criminals share prison cells with more serious offenders.

Both of Brazil’s largest gangs — the Red Command and the First Capital Command — actually began in prisons, which remain their centers of power.

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A crowd of men in white shirts and blue shorts stand in a yard bordered by a tall cement wall topped with barb-wire in places.

Prisoners during a riot at the Alcacuz Penitentiary Center in Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, in 2017.Credit...Andressa Anholete/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Jefferson Quirino, a former gang member who completed five separate detentions in Rio’s prisons, said gangs controlled every prison he was in. In some, inmates often focused on running gang business outside the prison using the numerous cellphones they sneaked in, often with the help of guards who were bought off.

The gangs have such sway in Brazil’s prisons, where the authorities themselves often divide prisons by gang affiliation, that officials force new prisoners to pick a side, to limit violence.

“The first question they ask you is: ‘What gang do you belong to?’” said Mr. Quirino, who runs a program that helps keep poor children out of gangs. “In other words, they need to understand where to place you within the system, because otherwise you’ll die.”

That has helped criminal groups grow their ranks.

“Jail functions as a space for labor recruitment,” said Jacqueline Muniz, a former security chief for Rio de Janeiro.

“And for building loyalty among your criminal work force.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/21/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Why Some Colombians Call Their Mothers ‘Your Mercy’

Two centuries after independence from Spain, many Colombians still use “sumercé,” meaning “your mercy” as an everyday address.


A souvenir that reads “sumercé” or “your mercy.” In parts of Colombia the term has come to signify respect and affection.

After Altair Jaspe moved from Venezuela to the Colombian capital, Bogotá, she was taken aback by the way she was addressed when she walked into any shop, cafe or doctor’s office.

In a city that was once part of the Spanish empire, she was no longer “señora,” as she would have been called in Caracas, or perhaps, in her younger years, “muchacha” or “chama.” (Venezuelan terms for “girl” or “young woman.”)

Instead, all around her, she was awarded an honorific that felt more fitting for a woman in cape and crown: Your mercy.

Would your mercy like a coffee?

Will your mercy be taking the appointment at 3 p.m.?

Excuse me, your mercy, people told her as they passed in a doorway or elevator.

“It brought me to the colonial era, automatically,” said Ms. Jaspe, 63, a retired logistics manager, expressing her initial discomfort with the phrase. “To horses and carts,” she went on, “maybe even to slavery.”

“But after living it,” she went on, “I understood.”

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A man and a woman facing the camera with their arms around each other.

Altair Jaspe and her husband, Frank Lares, in the Usaquen neighborhood in Bogotá. After moving to Bogotá from Venezuela, Ms. Jaspe said she was taken aback at how often people addressed her using “sumercé.’’

In most of the Spanish-speaking world, the principal ways to say “you” are the casual “tú,” and the formal “usted.” But in Colombia there is another “you” — “su merced,” meaning, “your mercy,” “your grace” or even “your worship,” and now contracted to the more economical “sumercé.”

(In some parts of the Spanish-speaking world there is yet a different “you” employed — the hyper casual “vos.”)

In Bogotá, a city of eight million people nestled in the Andes Mountains, “sumercé” is ubiquitous, deployed not just by taxi drivers and shopkeepers to attend to clients (how can I help your mercy?), but also by children to refer to parents, parents to refer to children, and (sometimes with tender irony) even by husbands, wives and lovers to refer to each other (“would your mercy pass the salt?” or “your mercy, what do you think, should I wear these pants today?”).

It is used by the young and old, by urbanites and rural transplants, by Bogotá’s most recent past mayor (“trabaje juiciosa, sumercé!” she was once caught on camera yelling at a street vendor, “get to work, your mercy!”), and even by the front woman for one of the country’s best-known rock bands, Andrea Echeverri of Aterciopelados.

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A portrait of a woman with the shadow of a window falling over her face.

Andrea Echeverri, the front woman for one of Colombia’s best known rock bands, Aterciopelados, said sumercé “is affectionate, but also respectful.”
The Spanish founded Bogotá in 1538 after a brutal conquest of the Indigenous Muisca people, and the city soon became a center of colonial power.

“Sumercé” is indeed a relic of that era, and scholars have documented its use as a sign of courtesy in institutional relationships (a letter from the governor of Cuba to the conquistador Hernán Cortés in 1518); a sign of respect in families (one brother-in-law to another in 1574); and, in particular, as a sign of servitude from slaves or servants to their masters.

But modern-day advocates of “sumercé” say that its current popularity lies in the fact that it has lost that hierarchical edge, and today signifies respect and affection, not reverence or a distinction of social class.

Ms. Jaspe said she eventually came to see “sumercé” as a casual term of endearment, as in “sumercé, qué bonito le queda ese sombrero.” (“Your mercy, how lovely that hat looks on you.”)

After Colombia gained its independence from the Spanish in the early 1800s, “sumercé” hung on in the department of Boyacá, a lush agricultural region in central Colombia, just north of Bogotá.

Jorge Velosa, a singer-songwriter and famous voice of Boyacá (he once played Madison Square Garden in the region’s traditional wool poncho, known as a ruana) recalled that in his childhood home “sumercé” was how he and his siblings referred to their mother, and their mother to referred to them.

“Sumercé,” he said, was a sort of middle ground between the stiff “usted” — used only in his house as a preamble to a scolding — and the almost overly casual “tú.”

Eventually, “sumercé” migrated south along with many Boyacenses, to Bogotá, becoming as much a part of the lexicon of central Colombia as “bacano” (cool), “chévere” (also cool), “parce” (friend), “paila” (difficult), “qué pena” (sorry) and “dar papaya.” (Literally, “give papaya,” but more figuratively, “act oblivious.” As in: “Your mercy, don’t act oblivious in the street, you’ll get robbed!”).

For the most part “your mercy” has remained a feature of central Colombia, and is rarely used on the country’s coasts, where “tú” is more common, or in cities like Cali (“vos”) and Medellín (“tu,” “usted” and sometimes “vos.”)

But in the capital and its surroundings, “sumercé” is emblazoned on hats, pins and T-shirts and incorporated into the names of restaurants and markets. It is the title of a new documentary about Colombian environmental activists. And it is celebrated in songs, podcasts and Colombian Spanish lessons across Spotify and YouTube.

“At this point it marks no social class,” said Andrea Rendón, 40, of Bogotá. “We are all sumercé.”

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A woman in a red hat standing on a balcony above the street.

Andrea Rendón, who sells uniforms for a living, in downtown Bogotá, says, “We are all sumercé.”

A recently released music video, “Sumercé,” by the rapper Wikama Mc, embodies the folk-cool status the phrase has achieved.

In a house party scene that could be set almost anywhere in the Colombian Andes, the artist sports a ruana while celebrating the “Colombian flow” of the female object of his affection, who he brags “dances carranga” — folk music popularized by Mr. Velosa — and also reggaeton, modern party beats popularized by international megacelebrities like J. Balvin.

“Talk to me straight, sumercé,” he raps, before offering his girlfriend a cordial tip of his traditional felt hat.

The song has attracted more than 18,000 views since it was uploaded to YouTube in December. Impressive, considering the artist has 500 followers on the platform.

Video: https://youtu.be/GRYzmKETj3w

Ms. Echeverri, the rock star, linked her use of the phrase to a punk aesthetic, which seeks a “horizontal” relationship with everyday people. (In a recent video interview she used it to draw the program’s host closer, speaking of a remake of one of “those songs that maybe your mercy has heard so many times.”)

Sumercé, she explained in a separate interview, “is affectionate, but also respectful.”

Not everyone sees it that way, of course. Carolina Sanín, a well-known writer, has criticized those who argue that “sumercé” is so ubiquitous in Colombia that it should be embraced, uncritically, as a cultural norm.

Even in a region known for its pronounced inequality, Colombia’s class divisions remain particularly entrenched. It takes the average poor Colombian 11 generations to reach the national median income, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, two more than in Brazil, three more than in Chile and five more than in Argentina.

Decades of violence have reinforced these barriers, allowing a small group to amass capital and territory. To some, “sumercé” can feel like a perpetuation or even a celebration of these hierarchical relationships.

“Not paying into the social system and accumulating land have also been referred to as ‘our custom,’” Ms. Sanín wrote on Twitter.

“Words are important,” she continued. “With words, paths to justice are forged.”

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A busy plaza in Bogotá.

Bogotá’s central plaza, where one is likely to be greeted by vendors as “your mercy.”

A linguist in Bogotá, Javier Guerrero-Rivera, recently surveyed 40 Colombian university students, and found that 85 percent said they were not bothered by the term, and felt a sense of respect and tenderness when it was directed at them. Another 10 percent felt indifferent toward the phrase. Just 5 percent said the term was dismissive or made them uncomfortable.

Juan Manuel Espinosa, deputy director of the Caro and Cuervo Institute, which is dedicated to studying the particularities of Colombian Spanish, said that he believed the social division described by people like Ms. Sanín was precisely what attracted many Colombians to the word.

“‘Sumercé’ is a way to create a connection in a very fragmented society,” he said.

Jhowani Hernández, 42, who operates office cleaning machines, described using “your mercy” with his wife, Beatriz Méndez, 50, a housekeeper, “cuando me saca la piedra” (Colombian for “when she makes me angry”) but mostly “para dar cariño" (“to show affection”).

Still, Daniel Sánchez, 31, a documentary filmmaker in Bogotá, said that he had moved away from using “sumercé,” after he began thinking about “the whole background of the phrase,” meaning “that servile and colonialist thing that is not so cool.”

Now, when he wants to convey respect and affection, he employs a different, less fraught Colombianism: “Veci,” meaning simply “neighbor.” As in: “Veci, don’t give papaya in the street, you’ll get robbed.”

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A man sitting on a park bench.

Daniel Sánchez said that he had moved away from using “sumercé.”
Simón Posada contributed reporting from Bogotá.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/02/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

A Country Awash in Violence Backs Its Leader’s Hard-Line Stance

Voters in Ecuador gave their new president, Daniel Noboa, who deployed the military to fight gangs in January, even more powers.


Daniel Noboa, Ecuador’s new president, declared an “internal armed conflict” in January and ordered the military to “neutralize” drug-trafficking gangs. Credit...Karen Toro/Reuters

Ecuadoreans voted on Sunday to give their new president more powers to combat the country’s plague of drug-related gang violence, officials said, supporting his hard-line stance on security and offering an early glimpse of how he might fare in his bid for re-election next year.

President Daniel Noboa, the 36-year-old heir to a banana empire, took office in November after an election season focused on the violence, which has surged to levels not seen in decades. In January, he declared an “internal armed conflict” and ordered the military to “neutralize” the country’s gangs. The move allowed soldiers to patrol the streets and Ecuador’s prisons, many of which have come under gang control.

In a referendum on Sunday, Ecuadoreans voted to enshrine the increased military presence into law and to lengthen prison sentences for certain offenses linked to organized crime, among other security measures. With about 20 percent of the votes counted on Sunday night, Ecuador’s electoral authority declared that the trend toward approval of the security measures was “irreversible,” though voters rejected other proposals on the ballot.

Mr. Noboa claimed victory on social media. “I apologize for jumping the gun on a triumph that I cannot help but celebrate,” he wrote on X.

A flood of violence from international criminal groups and local gangs has turned Ecuador, a country of 17 million, into a key player in the global drug trade. Tens of thousands of Ecuadoreans have fled to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Experts saw the results of the voting Sunday as an indicator of how strongly the public supported Mr. Noboa’s stance on crime. “What is clear is that the people are saying ‘yes’ to the security model,” said an Ecuadorean political analyst, Caroline Ávila. She said the voters also had “high expectations” that the crime problem “will be solved.”

Mr. Noboa, who is expected to seek a second term in February, has high approval ratings, though they have slipped lately. He became president after his predecessor, Guillermo Lasso, facing impeachment proceedings over embezzlement accusations, called for early elections; Mr. Noboa is in office until May 2025, the remainder of Mr. Lasso’s term.

Some human rights groups have criticized Mr. Noboa’s anticrime tactics as going too far, saying they have led to abuses in prisons and in the streets. Still, most Ecuadoreans seem willing to accept Mr. Noboa’s strategy if they think it makes them safer, analysts said.

“Noboa is now one of the most popular presidents in the region,” said Glaeldys González, who researches Ecuador for the International Crisis Group. “He is taking advantage of those levels of popularity that he currently has to catapult himself to the presidential elections.”

He deployed the military against the gangs in response to a turning point in Ecuador’s long-running security crisis: Gangs attacked the large coastal city of Guayaquil after the authorities moved to take charge of Ecuador’s prisons.

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Ecuadorean soldiers and police officers knocking down a door. One person is wielding a sledgehammer.

Mr. Noboa authorized the military to patrol the streets and take control of prisons after gangs set off riots and attacked the city of Guayaquil, Ecuador.Credit...John Moore/Getty Images

Mr. Noboa’s deployment of the military was followed by a decline in violence and a precarious sense of safety, but the stability did not last. Over the Easter holiday this month, there were 137 murders in Ecuador, and kidnappings and extortion have been increasing.

Two weeks ago, Mr. Noboa took the extraordinary step of arresting an Ecuadorean politician who had taken refuge at the Mexican Embassy in Quito, in what experts called a violation of an international treaty on the sanctity of diplomatic posts. The move, which drew condemnation across the region, sent a message in line with Mr. Noboa’s heavy-handed approach to violence and graft.

Mr. Noboa said he had sent police officers into the embassy to arrest Jorge Glas, a former vice president who had been convicted of corruption, because Mexico had abused the immunities and privileges granted to the diplomatic mission. Mr. Noboa said Mr. Glas was not entitled to protection because he was a convicted criminal.

Taken together, the raid and the deployment of the military were meant to show that Mr. Noboa is tough on crime and impunity, political analysts say. Though polls show that Mr. Noboa’s approval rating has fallen in recent months, it remains high, at 67 percent.

Voter turnout on Sunday was 72 percent, according to the country’s electoral authority. Analysts considered that low, in a country where voting is mandatory and turnout usually exceeds 80 percent.

Just as voters were heading to the polls, they received another reminder of the surge in violence, as the authorities announced that the head of a prison in Manabí, a coastal province that has become a hub for transnational crime, had been killed.

Some proposals from Mr. Noboa’s government that were unrelated to security were voted down on Sunday. Ecuadoreans voted against one that would have legalized hourly employment contracts, which are currently prohibited. Labor unions say employers could use them to undermine workers’ rights and essentially pay lower salaries than the law requires. A proposal that would have allowed international arbitration of commercial disputes was also voted down.

But analysts said the overall result yielded a robust mandate for Mr. Noboa. Ms. González said it would “help the government argue that it needs more time in power to continue with these changes and these reforms in its general fight against organized crime.”

The results of the referendum are binding, and the national assembly has 60 days to pass them into law.

Some analysts said the referendum results had more to do with Mr. Noboa’s popularity than with whether the security measures were likely to be effective.

“We do not vote for the question; rather, we vote for who asked the question,” said Fernando Carrión, who studies violence and drug trafficking at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, a regional research and analysis group.

He added that measures like increasing prison sentences were likely to exacerbate the problems of overcrowding and violence in prisons.

Despite the tumultuous few weeks that preceded the voting, some voters said they were undeterred.

“I am going to vote ‘yes’ in this referendum because I am convinced that it is the only way for Ecuador to have a change, and we can all have a better future,” said Susana Chejín, 62, a resident of the southern city of Loja.

“He is making good changes for the country, to fight crime and drug trafficking,” she said of Mr. Noboa.

Others said they thought the questions on the referendum were not enough to address the country’s insecurity.

“We are still in the vicious circle of focusing on the symptoms and not on the causes,” said Juan Diego Del Pozo, 31, a photographer in Quito. “No question aims to solve structural problems, such as inequality. My vote will be a resounding ‘no’ on every question.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/21/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

A decade-long battle between a wealthy industrialist and a band of activists led to a surprising $63 million transaction.


The Cochamó Valley in central Chile features a cathedral of towering granite walls popular with rock climbers around the world.Credit...Puelo Patagonia

In central Chile, not far from where the Andes Mountains meet the Pacific Ocean, a vast swath of pristine wilderness is changing hands under the most unusual circumstances.

Roberto Hagemann, a Chilean businessman who owns the 325,000-acre property, has agreed to sell the land to his longtime adversaries, a band of upstart environmentalists who spent years thwarting his efforts to develop the property.

The price: $63 million.

It is a landmark transaction that will preserve some of the most ecologically significant territory in South America. Known as Hacienda Pucheguin, the property is surrounded by national parks and is cut by wild rivers, forests of ancient Alerce trees and the Cochamó Valley, a cathedral of towering granite walls popular with rock climbers around the world.

The deal is also a case study in modern-day conservation. At a moment when ecologically sensitive lands are under threat around the globe, it takes a unique confluence of legal, financial and political resources — plus a bit of luck — to protect them from relentless development.

“This is an irreplaceable place,” said Jeff Parrish, a senior executive at the Nature Conservancy, which is advising the nonprofit group leading the purchase. “We need to make sure that it stays the way nature intended it to be.”

The land Mr. Hagemann came to own is almost entirely untouched by humanity. Over the past century, a few hundred settlers established small farms in the area and were granted property rights. For the most part, however, the area was left alone, providing a verdant habitat for pumas, rare Darwin’s frogs and the endangered South Andean deer.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Chilean government proposed building roads through the area. But local residents, opposing the development in an ecologically sensitive area, scuttled the efforts.

Around the same time, the Cochamó Valley developed an international reputation among climbers. With steep granite walls rising thousands of feet above the valley floor, the area was soon being called the “Yosemite of South America,” a reference to California’s rock climbing mecca.

Then in 2007, Mr. Hagemann began buying up the land, piece by piece. He knew that the land was held by more than 200 families, and he saw an opportunity to unite the properties into one parcel that could be used for both tourism and development.

Mr. Hagemann, who made a fortune through mining and real estate, and a partner spent tens of millions of dollars of their own money acquiring the property with a flurry of transactions.

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Assembling the patchwork landholdings into a single parcel was a complex task that had scared off other buyers. Doug and Kris Tompkins, American philanthropists who conserved vast swaths of land in Chile and Argentina, were aware of the property. But they concluded that it would be too difficult to navigate so many small real estate deals.

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The Cochamó Valley has been called the “Yosemite of South America,” a reference to California’s rock climbing mecca.Credit...Claro Catalina
Image
A bearded man with black hair and a blue rain jacket.

Rodrigo Condeza, founder of the nonprofit Puelo Patagonia, which is dedicated to preserving the land.Credit...David Gelles/The New York Times

Mr. Hagemann was undeterred, and he ultimately came to own 325,000 acres, or roughly 508 square miles of contiguous land, almost completely surrounded by national parks.

Shortly after assembling the property, he and his associates proposed building a hydroelectric facility in the area. The project would have entailed the construction of a power plant on a river near the valley, 39 miles of transmission lines and a network of roads in what was still unspoiled wilderness.

“Our main objective was to invest capital on nature,” Mr. Hagemann said in an email, “adding value to our Chilean productivity growth as well as the local development of Pucheguin people.”

But Mr. Hagemann met resistance from the outset. In 2013, a longtime wilderness guide named Rodrigo Condeza founded a nonprofit organization called Puelo Patagonia, which was dedicated to preserving the land. Allowing the construction of a hydroelectric facility, he argued, would disrupt an important ecological corridor that passes thorough a vast series of national parks.

Mr. Condeza began to rally public support around his cause, drumming up opposition to Mr. Hagemann and his plans to develop the land. “He was our adversary for many years,” Mr. Condeza said.

Mr. Condeza also took the fight to court. Puelo Patagonia led a community effort to sue to stop the hydroelectric project, saying that it had not secured the proper environmental reviews. In 2017, a Chilean court agreed, scuttling Mr. Hagemann’s plans for the power plant.

Thwarted in his efforts to develop the land, Mr. Hagemann decided to sell. In 2018, Christie’s listed the property for $150 million.

“The rarity and diversity of this Patagonian wilderness is an incomparable piece of environmental art to be as treasured by its next owner just as a Picasso or Monet painting would be,” Rick Moeser, executive director of Christie’s International Real Estate, said at the time. “The property has been responsibly protected and could serve as a sensitively developed eco-resort, a private residence, or await its next conservation steward.”

No buyers came forward, but the listing caught the attention of conservationists and climbers around the world.

In 2022, Puelo Patagonia decided it would make a lowball offer. A lawyer brokered a visit, and after a decade as adversaries, the two sides began talking.

Mr. Hagemann explained that he also wanted to conserve the land, but that he had wanted to do so while also creating economic value. The Puelo Patagonia team tried to persuade Mr. Hagemann that he should sell the property for a fraction of the asking price.

“Due to this meeting, a long process of mutual knowledge and respectful dialogue began, that allowed us to reach mutual understanding and respect beyond our differences,” Mr. Hagemann said.

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A rocky stream surounded by green trees.

A stream flowing from the granite mountains in Cochamó.Credit... Rodrigo Manns
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A bird with a blue crest and beak and white and orange feathers.

A kingfisher in the valley.Credit...Claudio Almarza

Shortly after the discussions began, Puelo Patagonia proposed to buy the property for $50 million. Though the organization had no money committed, Mr. Condeza and his colleagues believed they could raise the funds if a deal was secured.

“We are a bunch of hippies,” Mr. Condeza said. “We had no business doing this.”

Mr. Hagemann countered with $100 million.

For the next year, they negotiated. Mr. Hagemann’s son, a rock climber who has scaled the walls of the Cochamó Valley, also encouraged his father to sell the property to the conservationists, according to people involved in the deal.

Earlier this year, after more than a decade locking horns, the two sides reached a surprising resolution, agreeing on a price of $63 million.

Puelo Patagonia has already raised more than $15 million from two charities that support conservation efforts. The bulk of the money came from the Wyss Foundation, which was founded by Hansjörg Wyss, a Swiss billionaire who has become a major donor to liberal causes in the United States. Another major donor is the Freyja Foundation, which is focused on conservation.

Mr. Hagemann has given the group two years to raise the rest of the funds. Puelo Patagonia also plans to raise an additional $15 million that will be used to build trails and manage the growing number of tourists visiting the Cochamó Valley. The group hopes that at least half of the contributions will come from Chilean donors.

“Safeguarding this region will preserve these jewels for generations,” Ms. Tompkins said in an email.

Preserving the land will protect an ecological corridor that allows animals to roam freely through nearly 4,000 miles of contiguous wilderness. It will also connect a string of national parks in Chile and Argentina that stretch from the lakes around Bariloche to the southern tip of South America.

“This is the missing puzzle piece,” Mr. Parrish said. “Had it been developed, it would have bifurcated a bunch of protected areas.”

And when the sale is finalized, it will put to rest concerns about the fate of one of the most ecologically important lands in the region.

“Everyone who cares about Cochamó was really scared about who was going to buy it,” Mr. Condeza said. “But we all got together and stopped fighting and now we’ve made a solution to conserve it forever.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/30/clim ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

The Internet’s Final Frontier: Remote Amazon Tribes

Elon Musk’s Starlink has connected an isolated tribe to the outside world — and divided it from within.


A Starlink satellite internet antenna in the Manakieaway village of the Marubo Indigenous people in the Brazilian Amazon.

As the speeches dragged on, eyes drifted to screens. Teenagers scrolled Instagram. One man texted his girlfriend. And men crowded around a phone streaming a soccer match while the group’s first female leader spoke.

Just about anywhere, a scene like this would be mundane. But this was happening in a remote Indigenous village in one of the most isolated stretches of the planet.

The Marubo people have long lived in communal huts scattered hundreds of miles along the Ituí River deep in the Amazon rainforest. They speak their own language, take ayahuasca to connect with forest spirits and trap spider monkeys to make soup or keep as pets.

They have preserved this way of life for hundreds of years through isolation — some villages can take a week to reach. But since September, the Marubo have had high-speed internet thanks to Elon Musk.

The 2,000-member tribe is one of hundreds across Brazil that are suddenly logging on with Starlink, the satellite-internet service from Space X, Mr. Musk’s private space company. Since its entry into Brazil in 2022, Starlink has swept across the world’s largest rainforest, bringing the web to one of the last offline places on Earth.

The New York Times traveled deep into the Amazon to visit Marubo villages to understand what happens when a tiny, closed civilization suddenly opens to the world.

ImageFour girls looking at the screen of a phone with a pink exterior.

Many Marubo people have signed up for Facebook and Instagram accounts since Starlink arrived in their village.

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Three men and a woman sitting on wooden benches and looking down at their mobile phones.

The Marubo people frequently use their phones, bought in the closest city, when the Starlink antenna is turned on in their village.

“When it arrived, everyone was happy,” said Tsainama Marubo, 73, sitting on the dirt floor of her village’s maloca, a 50-foot-tall hut where the Marubo sleep, cook and eat together. The internet brought clear benefits, like video chats with faraway loved ones and calls for help in emergencies. “But now, things have gotten worse,” she said.

She was kneading jenipapo berries to make a black body paint and wearing ropes of jewelry made from snail shells. Lately, the youth had become less interested in making such dyes and jewelry, she said. “Young people have gotten lazy because of the internet,” she said. “They’re learning the ways of the white people.”

Then she paused and added, “But please don’t take our internet away.”

The Marubo are struggling with the internet’s fundamental dilemma: It has become essential — at a cost.

After only nine months with Starlink, the Marubo are already grappling with the same challenges that have racked American households for years: teenagers glued to phones; group chats full of gossip; addictive social networks; online strangers; violent video games; scams; misinformation; and minors watching pornography.

Modern society has dealt with these issues over decades as the internet continued its relentless march. The Marubo and other Indigenous tribes, who have resisted modernity for generations, are now confronting the internet’s potential and peril all at once, while debating what it will mean for their identity and culture.

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Men in a lush forest put their packs, which include Starlink equipment, down and rest.

Marubo people carrying a Starlink satellite antenna stopped for a break to eat papaya.

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A hut with a green door, surrounded by trees, plants and water.

The Javari Valley Indigenous Territory, where the Marubo people live, is one of the most isolated places on Earth.

That debate has arrived now because of Starlink, which has quickly dominated the satellite-internet market worldwide by providing service once unthinkable in such remote areas. SpaceX has done so by launching 6,000 low-orbiting Starlink satellites — roughly 60 percent of all active spacecraft — to deliver speeds faster than many home internet connections to just about anywhere on Earth, including the Sahara, the Mongolian grasslands and tiny Pacific islands.

Business is soaring. Mr. Musk recently announced that Starlink had surpassed three million customers across 99 countries. Analysts estimate that annual sales are up roughly 80 percent from last year, to about $6.6 billion.

Starlink’s rise has given Mr. Musk control of a technology that has become critical infrastructure in many parts of the globe. It is being used by troops in Ukraine, paramilitary forces in Sudan, Houthi rebels in Yemen, a hospital in Gaza and emergency responders across the world.

But perhaps Starlink’s most transformative effect is in areas once largely out of the internet’s reach, like the Amazon. There are now 66,000 active contracts in the Brazilian Amazon, touching 93 percent of the region’s legal municipalities. That has opened new job and education opportunities for those who live in the forest. It has also given illegal loggers and miners in the Amazon a new tool to communicate and evade authorities.

One Marubo leader, Enoque Marubo (all Marubo use the same surname), 40, said he immediately saw Starlink’s potential. After spending years outside the forest, he said he believed the internet could give his people new autonomy. With it, they could communicate better, inform themselves and tell their own stories.

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A man in shorts and no shirt working on Starlink equipment that is sitting on a tall wooden stump.

Enoque Marubo installing a Starlink satellite antenna in Manakieaway, a Marubo village.

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A portrait of a man in shorts and wearing several strands of beads.

Enoque has split his life between the forest and the city, working at one point as a graphic designer for Coca-Cola.

Last year, he and a Brazilian activist recorded a 50-second video seeking help getting Starlink from potential benefactors. He wore his traditional Marubo headdress and sat in the maloca. A toddler wearing a necklace of animal teeth sat nearby.

They sent it off. Days later, they heard back from a woman in Oklahoma.

The Tribe

The Javari Valley Indigenous Territory is one of the most isolated places on Earth, a dense stretch of rainforest the size of Portugal with no roads and a maze of waterways. Nineteen of the 26 tribes in the Javari Valley live in full isolation, the highest concentration in the world.

The Marubo were once uncontacted, too, roaming the forest for hundreds of years, until rubber tappers arrived near the end of the 19th century. That led to decades of violence and disease — and the arrival of new customs and technology. The Marubo began wearing clothes. Some learned Portuguese. They swapped bows for firearms to hunt wild boar, and machetes for chain saws to clear plots for cassava.

One family in particular pushed this change. In the 1960s, Sebastião Marubo was one of the first Marubo to live outside the forest. When he returned, he brought another new technology: the boat motor. It cut trips from weeks to days.





Villagers using their phones, connected to the internet via Starlink.

His son Enoque emerged as a leader of the next generation, eager to pull his tribe into the future. Enoque has split his life between the forest and the city, working at one point as a graphic designer for Coca-Cola. So when Marubo leaders became interested in getting internet connections, they went to him to ask how.

Enoque got his answer when Mr. Musk came to Brazil. In 2022, the SpaceX owner and Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s president at the time, announced Starlink’s arrival in front of a screen that said, “Connecting the Amazon.”

Enoque and Flora Dutra, a Brazilian activist who works with Indigenous tribes, sent letters to more than 100 members of Congress asking for Starlink. None responded.

Then early last year, Ms. Dutra saw an American woman speak at a space conference. Ms. Dutra checked the woman’s Facebook page and saw her posing outside SpaceX’s headquarters. “I knew she was the one,” she said.

The Benefactor

Allyson Reneau’s LinkedIn page describes her as a space consultant, keynote speaker, author, pilot, equestrian, humanitarian, chief executive, board director and mother of 11 biological children. In person, she says she makes most of her money coaching gymnastics and renting houses near Norman, Okla.

Her story is ripe for the “Today Show” — and, indeed, she has told it there. She enrolled in college at 47, got a master’s degree from Harvard Extension School at 55 and then became a traveling motivational speaker. Her social media shows her with children in Rwanda, on television in Pakistan and at conferences in South Africa.

The attention she has attracted has not always been well received. In 2021, she was interviewed on CNN and Fox News for “rescuing” an all-girls robotics team from Afghanistan during the Taliban takeover. But days later, lawyers for the robotics team told Ms. Reneau to stop taking credit for a rescue she had little to do with.

Ms. Reneau said she did not try to help people for fame. “Otherwise, I’d be telling you about all the projects I do all over the world,” she said in an interview. “It’s the look on the face, it’s the hope in the eyes. That’s the trophy.”

She said she had that perspective when she received a video from a stranger last year asking to help connect a remote Amazon tribe.

Image
A man in shorts, beads and a feathered headdress with his arm around a woman. They are both looking at her phone.

Allyson Reneau, right, has donated more than 20 Starlink antennas to the Marubo people. Here she is with Pajé Kaku of the Noke Kuī people, who was visiting a Marubo village.

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People gathering around as the Starlink equipment arrives.

The Marubo people carried the Starlink antennas to their villages via multiple boat trips and miles of hiking.

She had never been to Brazil but thought the return on investment was high. Enoque was asking for 20 Starlink antennas, which would cost roughly $15,000, to transform life for his tribe.

“Do you remember Charlie Wilson?” Ms. Reneau asked me. She was referring to the Texas congressman who secured Stinger missiles that helped the Afghan mujahedeen defeat the Soviets in the 1980s — but that critics say also unintentionally gave rise to the Taliban.

Mr. Wilson changed that war with one weapon, she said. “I could see that this was similar,” she said. “One tool would change everything in their life. Health care, education, communication, protection of the forest.”

Ms. Reneau said she bought the antennas with her own money and donations from her children. Then she booked a flight to go help deliver them.

The Connection

The internet arrived on the backs of men. They trudged miles through the forest, barefoot or in flip-flops, carrying two antennas each.

Just behind were Enoque, Ms. Dutra, Ms. Reneau and a cameraman documenting her journey.

In the villages, they nailed the antennas to the tops of poles and plugged them into solar panels. The antennas then began connecting Starlink satellites to villagers’ phones. (Some Marubo already had phones, often bought with government welfare checks, to take photographs and communicate when in a city.)

The internet was an immediate sensation. “It changed the routine so much that it was detrimental,” Enoque admitted. “In the village, if you don’t hunt, fish and plant, you don’t eat.”

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A person carrying solar panels photographed from the back.

The Marubo people also carry solar panels to their villages, which are used to power the Starlink antennas.

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Three people speaking to a crowd.

Flora Dutra, a Brazilian activist who works with Indigenous tribes, right, with Ms. Reneau and Enoque Marubo.

Leaders realized they needed limits. The internet would be switched on for only two hours in the morning, five hours in the evening, and all day Sunday.

During those windows, many Marubo are crouched over or reclined in hammocks on their phones. They spend lots of time on WhatsApp. There, leaders coordinate between villages and alert the authorities to health issues and environmental destruction. Marubo teachers share lessons with students in different villages. And everyone is in much closer contact with faraway family and friends.

To Enoque, the biggest benefit has been in emergencies. A venomous snake bite can require swift rescue by helicopter. Before the internet, the Marubo used amateur radio, relaying a message between several villages to reach the authorities. The internet made such calls instantaneous. “It’s already saved lives,” he said.

The Debate

In April, seven months after Starlink’s arrival, more than 200 Marubo gathered in a village for meetings.

Enoque brought a projector to show a video about bringing Starlink to the villages. As proceedings began, some leaders in the back of the audience spoke up. The internet should be turned off for the meetings, they said. “I don’t want people posting in the groups, taking my words out of context,” another said.

During the meetings, teenagers swiped through Kwai, a Chinese-owned social network. Young boys watched videos of the Brazilian soccer star Neymar Jr. And two 15-year-old girls said they chatted with strangers on Instagram. One said she now dreamed of traveling the world, while the other wants to be a dentist in São Paulo.

This new window to the outside world had left many in the tribe feeling torn.

“Some young people maintain our traditions,” said TamaSay Marubo, 42, the tribe’s first woman leader. “Others just want to spend the whole afternoon on their phones.”

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A small girl holds a pet monkey.

Voa Marubo with her pet monkey in the Manakieaway village.

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Communal bowls at mealtime in a Marubo village.

The Marubo eat from the same bowls placed on the ground, and their diet consists of cassava, wild boar, fish and banana porridge.

Kâipa Marubo, a father of three, said he was happy that the internet was helping educate his children. But he also was concerned about the first-person-shooter video games his two sons play. “I’m worried that they’re suddenly going to want to mimic them,” he said. He tried to delete the games, but believed his sons had other hidden apps.

Alfredo Marubo, leader of a Marubo association of villages, has emerged as the tribe’s most vocal critic of the internet. The Marubo pass down their history and culture orally, and he worries that knowledge will be lost. “Everyone is so connected that sometimes they don’t even talk to their own family,” he said.

He is most unsettled by the pornography. He said young men were sharing explicit videos in group chats, a stunning development for a culture that frowns on kissing in public. “We’re worried young people are going to want to try it,” he said of the graphic sex depicted in the videos. He said some leaders had told him they had already observed more aggressive sexual behavior from young men.

Alfredo and Enoque, as the heads of dueling Marubo associations, were already political rivals, but their disagreement over the internet has created a bitter dispute. After Ms. Dutra and Ms. Reneau delivered the antennas, Alfredo reported them for lacking proper permission from federal authorities to enter protected Indigenous territory. In turn, Ms. Dutra criticized Alfredo in interviews and Enoque said he was not welcome at the tribal meetings.

The Future

Ms. Dutra now has a goal to bring Starlink to hundreds more Indigenous groups across the Amazon, including Brazil’s largest remote tribe, the Yanomami.

Some Brazilian government officials and nongovernmental agencies said they worried that the internet was being rolled out to tribes too quickly, often without training on the dangers.

Ms. Dutra said Indigenous groups wanted and deserved connections. The criticism, she said, was part of a long tradition of outsiders telling the Indigenous how to live. “This is called ethnocentrism — the white man thinking they know what’s best,” she said.

Enoque and Ms. Dutra said they planned to provide internet training. No Marubo interviewed said they had yet received it.

In April, Ms. Reneau traveled back to the forest. At Enoque’s request, she bought four more antennas. Two were headed to the Korubo, a tribe of less than 150 people that was first contacted in 1996 and still has some members in full isolation.

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A person jumping into a river.

Mētsise Marubo playing in the river in the Kapyvanaway village of the Marubo people.

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A woman paints the back of another.

Marubo women applying traditional body paint made with fruit from the Amazon rainforest.

Sitting on a log, eating dried beef and boiled cassava served on the maloca’s dirt floor, Ms. Reneau said she recognized the internet was “a double-edged sword.” So when she posts on Facebook about bringing the Marubo internet, she said, she always stresses that a leader requested it.

“I don’t want people to think I’m bringing this in to force it on them,” she said. She added that she hoped they could “preserve the purity of this incredible culture because once it’s gone, it’s gone.”

Later at that same meal, Enoque’s father, Sebastião, said the tribe’s journey with the internet had been foretold.

Decades ago, the most respected Marubo shaman had visions of a hand-held device that could connect with the entire world. “It would be for the good of the people,” he said. “But in the end, it wouldn’t be.”

“In the end,” he added, “there would be war.”

His son sat on the log across from him, listening. “I think the internet will bring us much more benefit than harm,” Enoque said, “at least for now.”

Regardless, he added, going back was no longer an option.

“The leaders have been clear,” he said. “We can’t live without the internet.”

Image
Huts almost hidden by trees and vegetation.

The Manakieaway village of the Marubo people.

Flávia Milhorance and Lis Moriconi contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/02/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Claudia Sheinbaum Makes History as First Woman Elected to Lead Mexico

A climate scientist and former mayor, Ms. Sheinbaum became the first woman and Jewish person elected as president of the country.

Video: https://nyti.ms/3yM3Oiz
Claudia Sheinbaum was projected to win the presidential race in a landslide victory, which was a vote of confidence to continue the leftist policies of her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.CreditCredit...Cesar Rodriguez for The New York Times

Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist and former mayor of Mexico City, won her nation’s elections on Sunday in a landslide victory that brought a double milestone: She became the first woman, and the first Jewish person, to be elected president of Mexico.

Early results indicated that Ms. Sheinbaum, 61, prevailed in what the authorities called the largest election in Mexico’s history, with the highest number of voters taking part and the most seats up for grabs.

It was a landmark vote that saw not one, but two, women vying to lead one of the hemisphere’s biggest nations. And it will put a Jewish leader at the helm of one of the world’s largest predominantly Catholic countries.

Ms. Sheinbaum, a leftist, campaigned on a vow to continue the legacy of Mexico’s current president and her mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, which delighted their party’s base — and raised alarm among detractors. The election was seen by many as a referendum on his leadership, and her victory was a clear vote of confidence in Mr. López Obrador and the party he started.

Mr. López Obrador has completely reshaped Mexican politics. During his tenure, millions of Mexicans were lifted out of poverty and the minimum wage doubled. But he has also been a deeply polarizing president, criticized for failing to control rampant cartel violence, for hobbling the nation’s health system and for persistently undercutting democratic institutions.

Still, Mr. López Obrador remains widely popular and his enduring appeal propelled his chosen successor. And for all the challenges facing the country, the opposition was unable to persuade Mexicans that their candidate was a better option.

“We love her, we want her to work like Obrador,” Gloria Maria Rodríguez, 78, from Tabasco, said of Ms. Sheinbaum. “We want a president like Obrador.”

Ms. Sheinbaum won with at least 58.3 percent of the vote, according to preliminary results, while her closest competitor, Xóchitl Gálvez, an entrepreneur and former senator on a ticket with a coalition of opposition parties, had at least 26.6 percent.

If early returns hold, Ms. Sheinbaum will have captured a broader share of the vote than any candidate in decades.

ImageSparks fly from a purple platform that a line of people is standing on in front of a grand Mexican building.

Claudia Sheinbaum and her supporters celebrating the preliminary vote tally in Mexico City on Monday.Credit...Cesar Rodriguez for The New York Times

Speaking to supporters early Monday, Ms. Sheinbaum vowed to work on behalf of all Mexicans, reaffirmed her party’s commitment to democracy and celebrated her groundbreaking ascension to the nation’s highest office.

“For the first time in 200 years of the republic, I will become the first female president of Mexico,” she said. “And as I have said on other occasions, I do not arrive alone. We all arrived, with our heroines who gave us our homeland, with our ancestors, our mothers, our daughters and our granddaughters.”

Ms. Sheinbaum said she received calls from Ms. Gálvez and the third-place candidate, Jorge Álvarez Máynez, to congratulate her on the victory. Shortly after Ms. Sheinbaum’s speech, Ms. Gálvez told supporters that the early returns were “not favorable to my candidacy,” and “irreversible,” noting that she had just communicated with Ms. Sheinbaum.

Ms. Gálvez had said in an interview days before the vote on Sunday that “an anti-system vote” against Mr. López Obrador could help propel her to victory. In reality, it appeared that many Mexicans still associate the parties backing her with a system they see as inept and corrupt.

“Xóchitl Gálvez has been unable to represent change because the parties backing her embody the establishment,” said Carlos Bravo Regidor, a political analyst based in Mexico City. “Most Mexicans want a continuity of the change brought by López Obrador.”

Follow Mexico’s election results here.

Mexico Election Results: Sheinbaum Wins https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... latedLinks

Many voters seemed to endorse Ms. Sheinbaum as an agent of institutionalizing the changes brought about by her mentor. “We need to bring about more change to the country,” said Evelyn Román, 21, a chemical engineering student in Mexico City who supports Ms. Sheinbaum. “We did notice the progress in these six years.”

Ms. Sheinbaum’s experience is ample: She has a Ph.D in energy engineering, participated in a United Nations panel of climate scientists awarded a Nobel Peace Prize and governed the capital, one of the largest cities in the hemisphere.

Known as a demanding boss with a reserved demeanor, Ms. Sheinbaum has risen through the ranks by aligning herself completely with Mr. López Obrador, who built an entire political party around his outsize personality. During the campaign, she backed many of his most contentious policies, including a slate of constitutional changes that critics say would severely undermine democratic checks and balances.

As a result, the president-elect battled the perception among many Mexicans that she will be little more than a pawn of her mentor.

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Light slanting across a masonry wall, with several people standing next to a white sign that reads “El voto es libre y secreto.”

A polling station in Mexico City on Sunday.Credit...Fred Ramos for The New York Times

“There’s this idea, because a lot of columnists say it, that I don’t have a personality,” Ms. Sheinbaum complained to reporters earlier this year. “That President Andrés Manuel López Obrador tells me what to do, that when I get to the presidency, he’s going to be calling me on the phone every day.”

Even with the broad mandate voters granted her, she faces significant challenges when she takes office in October.

Mr. López Obrador benefited “from the invincible popularity that comes from being a very charismatic leader — something that Claudia is not,” said Paula Sofía Vásquez, a political analyst based in Mexico City.

Cartel violence continues to torment the country, displacing people en masse and fueling one of the deadliest campaign cycles in recent Mexican history, with more than 36 people vying for public office killed since last summer.

Carlos Ortiz, 57, a municipal official working for the Iztapalapa borough in Mexico City, said that such bloodshed compelled him to vote against Ms. Sheinbaum.

“I want everything to change,” Mr. Ortiz said, recalling the dozens of aspirants for public office killed in recent months. “I don’t want a country on fire anymore.”

Mr. López Obrador has directed government attention to addressing the drivers of crime instead of waging war on the criminal groups, a strategy he called “hugs not bullets.” Homicides declined modestly but remain near record levels, and reports of missing people have spiked. Insecurity was a top concern for voters.

Ms. Sheinbaum has said she would continue his focus on social causes of the violence, while also working to lower rates of impunity and building up the national guard.

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Several police officers standing on a city street as people pass.

Police officers at a voting station in Mexico City on Sunday. Cartel violence continues to plague the country.Credit...Cesar Rodriguez for The New York Times

On the economy, the opportunities are clear: Mexico is now the largest trading partner of the United States, benefiting from a recent shift in manufacturing away from China. The currency is so strong it’s been labeled the “super peso.”

But there are also problems simmering. The federal deficit ballooned to around 6 percent this year, and Pemex, the national oil company, is operating under a mountain of debt, straining public finances.

“The fiscal risk we’re facing at the moment is something we haven’t seen for decades,” said Mariana Campos, director of Mexico Evaluates, a public policy research group.

It’s unclear how Ms. Sheinbaum would make good on a range of campaign promises — from building public schools and new health clinics to expanding social welfare programs — given the current state of public finances.

“The problem I see is that a lot of proposals are oriented toward spending and there is nowhere to get the money from,” said Ms. Vásquez, the political analyst.

Another challenge involves the broad new responsibilities granted to the armed forces, which have been tasked with running ports and airports, running an airline, and building a railroad through the Mayan jungle. Ms. Sheinbaum has said “there is no militarization” of the country, while suggesting she’s open to re-evaluating the military’s involvement in public enterprises.

Beyond the domestic strains, Ms. Sheinbaum’s destiny will be intertwined with the outcome of the presidential election in the United States.

A re-election victory for President Biden would provide continuity, but a return of Donald J. Trump to the White House would likely be far less predictable. Mr. Trump’s plans to round up undocumented people on a vast scale and deport them to their home countries could target millions of Mexicans living in the United States. He has already threatened to slap 100 percent tariffs on Chinese cars made in Mexico.

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The smiling faces of candidates are depicted on campaign posters affixed to poles as people pass.

Campaign posters in the capital over the weekend. The election was set to be groundbreaking in several ways and the largest race in Mexico’s history,Credit...Cesar Rodriguez for The New York Times

Then there’s the festering issue of fentanyl, which cartels produce in Mexico using chemicals imported from China, the U.S. government says. Mr. Trump has suggested taking military action to combat the fentanyl trade.

Ms. Sheinbaum has said Mexico would have “good relations” with either Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden as president, and her campaign team has said it will continue to work to contain flows of migrants.

But handling such pressure from Washington, even in the form of incendiary campaign rhetoric, could prove complicated.

Voters expressed faith in Ms. Sheinbaum’s ability to deal with such challenges. Daniela Mendoza, 40, a psychologist who lives in Villahermosa, in Tabasco state, said she had long supported Mr. López Obrador, including during his previously unsuccessful bids to win the presidency.

Pleased with his social welfare programs, Ms. Mendoza voted for Ms. Sheinbaum.

“Claudia follows that line, perhaps with better ideas,” Ms. Mendoza said. “And having the first woman president in the country is an accomplishment.”

Image
Crowds amass in a public plaza, with some people waving flags and others holding up photos.

Supporters of Claudia Sheinbaum celebrating in Mexico City on Sunday night.Credit...Cesar Rodriguez for The New York Times

Emiliano Rodríguez Mega contributed reporting from Mexico City and James Wagner from Tepetitán, Mexico.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/02/worl ... ction.html

[kmaherali]

Here’s What to Know About Venezuela’s Flawed Election

Stark irregularities and suppression efforts could plunge the country back into instability and economic decline.


Polling station workers in Petare, Venezuela, moved outside as they faced challenges in the transmission of votes during the election on Sunday.Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times

President Nicolás Maduro was declared the winner in a presidential vote on Sunday that was marred by irregularities. Officials at some polling places refused to release paper tallies of the electronic vote count, and there were widespread reports of fraud and voter intimidation. Here are initial takeaways from Venezuela’s election.

Many fear a return to instability.

The government’s announcement that Mr. Maduro had beaten his opponent, Edmundo González, by seven percentage points instantly created a grim scenario for a country that only recently has started emerging from one of the largest economic collapses in modern history.

The results announced by the government-controlled electoral council varied wildly — by up to 30 percentage points — from most public polls and from the opposition’s sample of results obtained directly from voting centers. And there were many reports of major irregularities and problems at those voting centers.

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Protesters outside a building as police on motorcycles monitor them.

Protesting outside the Adolfo Navas polling station in Las Minas de Baruta on Sunday.Credit...Marian Carrasquero for The New York Times

The opposition leader María Corina Machado, who spearheaded Mr. González’s campaign, on Monday morning called the results “impossible.”

Venezuelans angered by the outcome took the streets of the capital, Caracas, and elsewhere on Monday afternoon. That could plunge Venezuela into a new period of political unrest, like those in 2014, 2017 and 2019, when security forces aligned with Mr. Maduro used deadly force to crush demonstrations.

Officials from several countries in the Americas, including the United States, expressed doubts about the announced results, raising the likelihood that a new term for Mr. Maduro would not be widely recognized abroad, either.

The opposition’s monitoring effort was blocked.

After a campaign marked by intensifying efforts by Mr. Maduro’s allies to rein in the opposition — including arrests of opposition campaign workers, intimidation and vote suppression — the opposition bet heavily on an effort to have supporters on hand to get a physical printout of the voting tally from every voting machine after the polls closed.

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A woman in white stands in front of a building as soldiers look on.

The opposition leader, María Corina Machado, after voting in the election on Sunday.Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times

That access is allowed by Venezuelan election law. But by early Monday morning, Mr. González’s campaign said it had obtained only 40 percent of the tallies. In some places, monitors were barred from entering polling places or they never appeared in the first place. Often, election officials simply refused to hand over the tallies.

That will complicate efforts by the opposition to prove undeniably that the vote had been tampered with.

The results could be disastrous for Venezuela’s economy.

After years of fighting Mr. Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan businessmen and foreign investors had largely made peace with his government in recent years. Sanctions imposed by the United States had forced Mr. Maduro to ditch some extreme policies like price and currency controls. The private sector was given an increasingly prominent role, public attacks against business owners had stopped and hyperinflation and rampant crime subsided somewhat.

The increased support from the private sector led to hopes that a credible result would keep the improvements coming and lead to some sort of political settlement. That appears unlikely now, and the dubious election results could test the thaw between Mr. Maduro and business leaders, and could possibly trigger a new wave of international sanctions.

Most critically, the result is unlikely to allow the Biden administration to unwind its sweeping economic sanctions against Venezuela. That would stunt the economic recovery, and is likely to lead to another wave of migration from a nation that has seen the exodus of one in five citizens in the past decade.

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A person places a piece of paper in a box with a colorful logo with the letters CNE on it.

A polling station in Petare on Sunday.Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times

A smooth Venezuelan election that would have led to greater economic opening also suited the country’s Latin American neighbors, including Mr. Maduro’s old allies, the leftist governments of Brazil and Colombia.

The region has received the bulk of Venezuelan migration, leading to an anti-immigration political backlash in some places.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil took a surprisingly strong stand against Mr. Maduro earlier this week. “When you lose, you leave,” he told reporters.

On Monday, the Brazilian government distanced itself from Mr. Maduro, calling for more transparency in releasing voting data.

Mr. Lula also sent his top foreign policy adviser, Celso Amorim, to Caracas for the election, and Mr. Amorim’s position on the vote could become a bellwether for the region.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/29/worl ... aways.html

[kmaherali]

Protests Erupt in Venezuela as Nations Denounce Election Result

President Nicolás Maduro’s government ejected seven diplomatic missions from countries that condemned his claim of victory, which he made despite reports of fraud.


Demonstrators protesting the outcome of the election on Monday in Caracas, Venezuela.Credit...Alejandro Cegarra for The New York Times

Protests broke out Monday in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, with hundreds of young people marching through the streets furious over a presidential election in which the incumbent, Nicolás Maduro, declared victory despite widespread accusations of fraud, officially proclaiming the election decided without releasing the full vote counts.

The United States and countries around the world denounced the official results of Sunday’s vote, which did not appear to match statistical estimates based on partial counts and other data that showed the president losing by a wide margin.

By Monday afternoon, the Venezuelan government announced it had kicked out the diplomatic missions of seven Latin American countries that had condemned the official electoral results.

The opposition leader, María Corina Machado, announced on Monday evening that her movement had received paper tallies from 73 percent of the country’s voting stations and refuted the government’s claims. Those tallies showed that Mr. Maduro’s opponent, Edmundo González, had received 3.5 million more votes than the president.

Mr. González called the margin “mathematically irreversible.”

The move by the electoral authority to declare victory but not release detailed voting results, which it had routinely done in past elections, intensified the sense among many Venezuelans and international observers that the election had essentially been stolen.

But Mr. Maduro appeared to dig in, with his government announcing that it was investigating top opposition leaders, accusing them of hacking the electoral computer systems.

Sporadic demonstrations in Caracas on Monday morning grew throughout the day as angry residents headed toward the center of the capital, reaching traditional government strongholds that had not seen political unrest for more than two decades. Large groups of young men walked more than five miles down main roads, tearing down Mr. Maduro’s campaign posters and chanting, “They robbed us!”

Another group of hundreds of people tried to make it to the presidential palace, lighting tires on fire along the way. Pro-government paramilitaries responded by opening fire in the air, and the police used tear gas to disperse the protests.


Protesters in Cumaná, 250 miles east of the capital, tried to reach the country’s election headquarters, but they were pushed back by the National Guard.

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A dense line of helmeted men wearing green uniforms, with many holding large plastic shields.

Members of the National Guard trying to disperse a protest in Caracas on Monday.Credit...Alejandro Cegarra for The New York Times

The disputed election put renewed attention on the Biden administration’s incentives to Venezuela. United States officials’ negotiations with the authoritarian government and easing of sanctions on the country’s vital oil industry had helped pave the way for Sunday’s voting. For now, the administration said it was not considering revoking any licenses to sell oil.

But the Biden administration also demanded that the Maduro government release vote tabulations, and warned that it risks diplomatic isolation as more countries — including some crucial allies — questioned the lack of transparency of an election that appeared to violate international norms.

The Brazilian government, led by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, distanced itself from Mr. Maduro on Monday, despite years of friendly relations between the two leftist leaders.

In a cautiously worded statement, Mr. Lula’s government praised “the peaceful nature” of the election, but then called for “the impartial verification of results” and the release of detailed results from polling stations.

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President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil speaking with a microphone.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s leftist president, did not congratulate Nicolás Maduro on his win.Credit...Victor Moriyama for The New York Times

Colombia, led by Gustavo Petro, a leftist who in the first months of his presidency made drawing closer to Venezuela a priority, also called for detailed tallies to be released and for international observers who monitored the vote to provide their assessment.

“It’s important to clear up any doubts about the results,” Colombia’s foreign minister, Luis Gilberto Murillo, wrote on X.

Brazil’s and Colombia’s responses were noteworthy because they showed that two of Venezuela’s biggest neighbors were seeking answers before they would recognize Mr. Maduro’s claim of re-election.

On Monday night, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico were negotiating a joint statement to call on Venezuela to release voting records from each polling station, hoping that a unified stance from three of the region’s most influential nations would help put pressure on Mr. Maduro, according to two Brazilian diplomatic officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks.

Celso Amorim, Mr. Lula’s chief foreign policy adviser, also met separately with Mr. Maduro and Mr. González in Caracas on Monday. In an hourlong meeting at Venezuela’s presidential palace, Mr. Maduro promised to deliver the full voting results, though he did not provide a clear timeline for doing so, according to one of the Brazilian officials.

The official said Brazil viewed the promise as a small step but was remaining realistic. Mr. Amorim told reporters that he could not trust vote tallies presented by both the Maduro and opposition camps because neither had provided proof.

President Biden and Mr. Lula planned to speak about Venezuela on Tuesday, according to the Brazilian official.

The Venezuelan electoral authority, run by a member of the ruling party, announced early Monday that partial results of Sunday’s election showed that Mr. Maduro had received 51.2 percent of the vote and was the clear winner.

Mr. Maduro, 61, who has been in power since 2013, had faced off against Mr. González, 74, a former diplomat, who the electoral authority claimed had received 44.2 percent of the vote.

Mr. González was essentially a stand-in for Ms. Machado, a popular opposition leader who had been disqualified from running.

Ms. Machado called the official results “impossible.”

“Everybody knows what happened,” she said.

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María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader.

The opposition leader, María Corina Machado, after voting in the election on Sunday.Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times

Much of the dispute around Sunday’s election focuses on the transparency of the vote count.

The electoral authority has yet to publish any results on its website, breaking with tradition. Opposition poll witnesses at many voting stations were also prevented by electoral officials and soldiers from receiving a paper tally of results, in breach of the regulations and precedent.

The paper tallies record the votes cast at each voting machine. Without them, it is difficult for the opposition to add up individual tallies to cross-reference — and dispute — the national results.

The opposition also said there were irregularities in the way that results were digitally transmitted from the voting stations to the electoral system.

Ms. Machado said that opposition volunteers scanned and posted the paper tallies online so everyone could see the evidence. By Monday evening, she said they had received 73 percent of the tallies, showing Mr. González had won in a landslide.

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Poll workers standing outside with the voting machines after dark, trying to get a signal.

Workers in Petare, Venezuela, moved outside after being unable to transmit vote counts from their polling station during the election on Sunday.Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times

The United States has tried to push Mr. Maduro from power for years, and the Trump administration responded to a flawed 2018 presidential vote in which Mr. Maduro claimed victory by imposing a series of tough economic sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry.

The Biden administration had lifted some of those penalties in exchange for a commitment from the Maduro government to work toward competitive elections.

John F. Kirby, a national security spokesman for the White House, would not discuss whether the United States would respond with further sanctions.

“We’re watching,” he said. “The world’s watching. I won’t get ahead of a decision that hasn’t been made here in terms of consequences.”

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People shouting, some with fists raised. on a tree-lined street.

Opposition supporters protesting outside a polling station that was kept open after the closing deadline on Sunday.Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times

The Biden administration faces a difficult choice. Sanctions could deepen Venezuela’s economic woes and increase migration toward the United States ahead of the presidential election in November. But not taking a tough stance could strengthen Mr. Maduro and allow Republicans to attack the U.S. president as weak on autocrats.

Mr. Maduro said the United States should not meddle in other nations’ affairs.

Venezuela’s justice minister, Tarek William Saab, said Monday that the government was looking into acts of vandalism against government installations, and said three opposition leaders, including Ms. Machado, were under investigation for a hack of Venezuela’s electoral system.

Mr. Maduro said the opposition was prepared to use a tired tactic: crying fraud even before the election had taken place.

“I’ve seen this movie a few times,” Mr. Maduro said.

Mr. Maduro did receive support from allied leaders in Cuba, Serbia, Nicaragua, Russia, Bolivia and Honduras, who applauded the results.

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Antigovernment protesters running from tear gas shot by the National Guard in Caracas on Monday.Credit...Alejandro Cegarra for The New York Times

Daniel Ortega, who as president of Nicaragua has overseen the end of democracy in his own country, congratulated Mr. Maduro. And Cuba’s leader, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, said Mr. Maduro had “defeated the pro-imperialist opposition.”

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said he was eager to strengthen ties between the two countries. “Russian-Venezuelan relations have the character of a strategic partnership,” Mr. Putin said in a message to Mr. Maduro, the Kremlin said in a statement.

Iran and China also congratulated Mr. Maduro.

But across Latin America, leaders of Uruguay, Peru, Panama, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Argentina and Guatemala all denounced the results.

“The Maduro regime must understand that the results they publish are difficult to believe,” Chile’s leftist leader, Gabriel Boric, said on X.

By Monday afternoon, Venezuela’s foreign minister, Yván Gil, announced that Venezuela had ousted all diplomats from Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, Panama, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay.

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A man stands in front of speakers placed on a table outdoors at night.

Speakers playing campaign songs for Mr. Maduro in an empty square near the presidential palace in Caracas on Sunday night.Credit...Alejandro Cegarra for The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/29/worl ... sults.html

[kmaherali]

How Do You Topple a Strongman?

After another dubious election victory, Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, appears firmly in power. The only real potential threat, history shows, may come if his own security forces betray him.


President Nicolás Maduro, the authoritarian leader of Venezuela, has been in power since 2013.Credit...Alejandro Cegarra for The New York Times

Venezuela is in another dark moment.

President Nicolás Maduro, the authoritarian leader who has been in power since 2013, has declared himself the winner of another election that international observers have called undemocratic. His security forces have arrested hundreds of political opponents. And new protests against him appear to be losing steam.

Is all hope for democracy in Venezuela lost? Opposition leaders are trying to push forward, and the United States has recognized their candidate as the winner of Sunday’s vote. But Mr. Maduro does not appear close to giving up power. What, exactly, would that take?

The answer — according to analysts, political scientists and a review of history — largely depends on government security forces.

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Several dozen people, silhouetted against the sky, stand on a white building’s roof, some holding flags. A banner at the building’s corner bears photographs of Presidents Nicolás Maduro and Hugo Chávez.

Soldiers holding flags on Wednesday on the roof of a military building in Caracas, Venezuela, during a demonstration in support of the government.Credit...Alejandro Cegarra for The New York Times

The Threat From Within

In a true democracy, politicians must win support from a majority of voters to keep power. In authoritarian regimes, dictators are often propped up by a small circle of influential figures.

“The less democratic a political system becomes, the more reliant you are on just a very small number of people to maintain power,” said Marcel Dirsus, a political scientist and author of “How Tyrants Fall.”

That means security forces — not the furious protesters on the street — pose the most serious and immediate danger to his tenure, researchers said. “The biggest threat are the men with guns,” Mr. Dirsus said.

Between 1950 and 2012, nearly two-thirds of the 473 authoritarian leaders who lost power were removed by government insiders, according to an analysis by Erica Frantz, a political science professor at Michigan State University who studies authoritarianism.

To combat that threat, autocrats frequently try what political scientists call “coup-proofing”: They divide security forces into various fragmented units. That can keep any one branch from amassing too much power — and also cause forces to spy on one another.

That, analysts said, describes Venezuela.

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A close-up of a soldier in a green uniform, with people sitting and standing in the background.

Mr. Maduro may have more to fear from his own security forces than from any external threat.Credit...Alejandro Cegarra for The New York Times

Propping Up a Regime

Mr. Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, created a tangled web of military, police and intelligence agencies.

Venezuela’s armed forces, with approximately 150,000 members, are split between the army, navy, air force and national guard.

There is a national police force and a national militia — partly made up of Maduro supporters with little to no training — that can be called in to take up arms in an emergency.

There are so-called colectivos, or groups of civilians who attack protesters and, according to researchers, are armed by the government.

And there are three separate intelligence agencies, as well as intelligence units within other forces, which surveil the opposition and one another.

For years these forces have quelled protests, hounded the opposition and helped preserve Mr. Maduro’s increasingly authoritarian time in power, which has outlasted many analysts’ expectations.

“It checks all the boxes for a regime that should be vulnerable to overthrow: major economic problems, difficulties with the successor establishing legitimacy, and a narrowing of the support base,” said Ms. Frantz, who studies Venezuela and co-wrote “The Origins of Elected Strongmen.”

“The critical player in ensuring the regime stays afloat has been the security apparatus,” she said.

In turn, the government has purchased loyalty by giving senior military officers high-paying jobs or control of state industries.

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A line of inscribed pillars stands in a grassy area surrounded by trees.

In São Paulo, Brazil, a monument honors those who were killed or disappeared during the military dictatorship. Brazil transitioned peacefully to democracy in part because officers who committed abuses were given amnesty.Credit...Maíra Erlich for The New York Times

Why Switch Sides?

The question then is: What would make the security forces flip?

“People need to believe there’s an actual possibility that he could fall,” Mr. Dirsus said. “Only then will the men with guns either stand aside or change sides altogether.”

In other nations, when signs have emerged that a dictator is losing power, military officers have quickly betrayed the dictator to protect themselves. Sometimes that has meant attempting a coup. Other times it has meant aligning with the opposition.

In Brazil, the military dictatorship in power from 1964 to 1985 acquiesced to a peaceful transition to democracy in part because it had secured amnesty for officers who committed abuses. As a result, few people have ever faced legal consequences for a government that killed more than 400 people.

A few years earlier in Argentina, the military dictatorship effectively collapsed after losing the Falklands War. Courts have since convicted more than 1,100 military officials for abuses during the dictatorship, which human rights groups say killed as many as 30,000 people.

Researchers said Venezuelan forces were probably considering two such possibilities. They can stick with Mr. Maduro, potentially keeping power but also risking a collapse of the government and potential jail time. Or they can participate in a transition to democracy and negotiate immunity for any crimes.

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María Corina Machado, holding a flag, stands above a crowd, smiling, as many hold phones aloft to take her picture.

The opposition leader María Corina Machado has made a direct appeal to the military.Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times

Venezuela’s Current Moment

Given those stakes, what is happening behind the scenes in the Venezuelan government is unclear.

The opposition has made direct appeals to security forces, asking for their support to ensure the election results are respected.

“Members of the armed forces, the nation needs you,” María Corina Machado, an opposition leader, said in a video to the military before the election. “The Constitution must be your North Star and guide.”

On election night, as exit polls suggested that the opposition candidate Edmundo González had won in a landslide, three top leaders of Venezuela’s security forces struck a balanced tone in a public address.

“The people of Venezuela have gone to the streets, to their voting centers, to exercise their human right,” said Gen. Vladimir Padrino López, Mr. Maduro’s longtime defense minister, “voting for the option that each conscience dictates.”

He then said the government would release vote tallies from every polling station. It has since refused to do so.

For General Padrino López and the other officers, “it was actually a very calm narrative compared to what we’re used to,” said Andrei Serbin Pont, a Latin America security analyst who has studied Venezuela’s security forces for years.

The next day, the security forces’ response to mass protests was relatively less forceful than in the past. Fewer soldiers and police officers were on the street, and they were generally less combative with demonstrators, Mr. Serbin Pont said.

It was unclear whether that was because of an order from Mr. Maduro, a decision by the forces themselves or a general deterioration in their personnel, weapons and morale. Many had left the country. “They migrate just like anyone else,” he said.

Then, on Tuesday night, as protests raged, the military leaders held another news conference and made clear they were publicly siding with Mr. Maduro. “We are in the presence of a coup d’état forged once again by these fascist factors of the extremist right,” General Padrino López said.

If any security forces are talking to the opposition, they will desperately try to guard that secret. Venezuela’s intelligence agencies “are really good at seizing opportunities like this to weed out possible dissidents,” Mr. Serbin Pont said.

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A street scene full of people standing or walking, with trees in the background. Some hold a red banner; one person in the photograph’s center is on a bike.

People in Caracas denounced the election results on Monday, but new protests against the president appear to be losing steam.Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times

The Importance of Protests

While security forces are key to Mr. Maduro’s fate, researchers said, they can be heavily influenced by protests and international pressure.

Some foreign allies’ refusal to recognize Mr. Maduro’s self-declared victory and the U.S. recognition of his challenger as the winner could weaken his standing with the security forces. Large protests could, too.

“If they look out into the streets and see a sea of ordinary Venezuelans opposing the regime, that’s going to change their expectations about the future,” Mr. Dirsus said.

But if Venezuela wants to transition to a full democracy, nonviolent protest may also be critical.

A study by Harvard’s Erica Chenoweth showed that over the past several decades, 57 percent of nonviolent resistance campaigns around the world had led to democracy, while violent campaigns led to democracy in less than 6 percent of cases.

“The key factor for democracy in Venezuela is that — should regime change happen — things go down peacefully,” Ms. Frantz said. “When there is violence and bloodshed, the chances of a new dictatorship taking control increase substantially.”

Lucía Cholakian Herrera contributed reporting from Caracas, Venezuela.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/04/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

The Mennonites Making the Amazon Their Home

Groups of Mennonites, seeking inexpensive land far from modern life, are carving out new colonies in the Amazon. They are also raising fears that they are adding to the deforestation of the vital jungle.


Mennonites traveling in horse-drawn carriages along the road they have built next to land being burned and cleared for agriculture near Loreto, Peru.

After weeks of living in jungle tents, the handful of Mennonite families trying to make a new home deep in the Peruvian Amazon began to despair. Wasps attacked as they tried to clear forest. Heavy rains turned the road to their camp to mud.

Running low on supplies, some wanted to turn back. Instead, they worked harder and eventually carved out an enclave.

“There’s a place here where I wanted to live so we came and opened part of it up,” recalled Wilhelm Thiessen, a Mennonite farmer. “That’s what everyone did to have a place to live.”

Today, seven years later, the cluster of homesteads is now a thriving colony, Wanderland, home to roughly 150 families, a church — which doubles as a school — and a cheese-processing facility.

It is one of a string of Mennonite settlements that have taken root throughout the Amazon, turning forest into thriving farms but also raising concerns among environmentalists about deforestation of a jungle already under threat from industries like cattle ranching and illegal gold mining.

Mennonite communities have come under official scrutiny, as well, including in Peru, where the authorities are investigating several, accusing them of clearing forest without required permits. The colonies deny wrongdoing.

ImageMen in hats and overalls jump from a vehicle onto a dirt road.

Mennonites from the colony of Providencia in Peru.

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Two people and a one-story home are visible through rain drops.

A simple ranch home in Providencia.

Mennonites first started migrating to Latin America from Canada about a century ago, after the country ended their exemptions from education requirements and military service.

The president of Mexico at the time, Álvaro Obregón, eager to consolidate rebellious northern regions following the Mexican Revolution, gave Mennonites uncultivated land and guarantees that they could live as they wished.

In subsequent decades, other Latin American countries, seeking to expand their agricultural frontiers, made similar invitations.

Today, more than 200 Mennonite colonies in nine countries in Latin America occupy some 9.64 million acres, an area larger than the Netherlands, where their denomination first emerged, according to a 2021 study by researchers at McGill University in Montreal.

Bolivia has seen the fastest growth of any Latin American country and now has 120 Mennonite colonies, while in the past decade a half dozen settlements, including Wanderland, have emerged in Peru, according to analysts.

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Women wearing simple black outfits stand around plastic buckets.

The women of the Friesen family from the Mennonite colony of Wanderland washing clothes.

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A family eats a meal around a kerosene lamp.

The Dyck family having dinner by kerosene light in Providencia.

Mennonites have also sought land in Suriname, a small South American country rich in pristine forests, setting off protests from Indigenous groups and Maroons, the descendants of enslaved people.

“They’re basically trying to find the last places on earth that still have these just huge, continuous areas that can support their lifestyle, and that just happens to be forested areas in the Amazon,” said Matt Finer, a senior research specialist at Amazon Conservation, an environmental nonprofit.

On the ground, Wanderland looks like a page from the past. Horse-drawn buggies carry passengers along dirt roads. Men in overalls toil in fields stretching behind simple wooden houses.

There is no electricity. As night falls, families dine by candlelight after giving grace in Plautdietsch, a Germanic dialect spoken almost exclusively among Mennonites in the Americas.

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Three people stand on a dirt floor surrounded by lumber and tools.

Abram Elias, 42, with his children at his carpentry workshop in Providencia.

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A boy plays with a toy truck in the dirt.

A boy playing on his family farm in Providencia.

Fragments of what was once wild linger. A pet monkey on a front porch. A caged parrot. In one backyard shed, Johan Neufeld, 73, showed off three lowland pacas, a large Amazonian rodent prized for its meat. He caught them in the forest and wants to try to breed them.

Wanderland is an “Old Colony” settlement, made up of Mennonites who trace their history to an 18th-century settlement, Chortitza, that is now part of Ukraine.

Like other Mennonites, they follow the teachings of a Dutch priest, Menno Simons, who was persecuted during the Reformation for opposing infant baptism and military conscription. Over time, though, living apart from the rest of the world and rejecting new technology became hallmarks of Old Colony faith and culture — and migration a means of preserving them.

“Our ancestors thought that if we live far away, in the countryside, there’s more possibility of controlling evil,” said Johan Bueckert, an Old Colony farmer who now lives in Providencia, a colony near Wanderland. “We want to live like they did. We don’t want constant change.”

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A man wearing overalls sits on bed. One child lies on a bed, another in sits in a chair. A woman is also in a chair.

Johan Bueckert at his daughter’s house in Providencia.

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Children in brightly colored clothing in a room with two women in dresses standing nearby.

Members of the Providencia community gathering in the kitchen of a home.

As Mennonite colonies in different countries grow more populated and prosperous, the value of nearby land rises — and adhering to an austere farming life, on inexpensive plots, becomes harder. So groups break off to build new settlements.

Mr. Thiessen helped found Wanderland after moving from Nueva Esperanza, one of Bolivia’s largest Mennonite settlements, because he had children who needed farmland to support their own families.

“In Bolivia there are many colonies but almost no land left,” he said.

Worldly temptations, particularly smartphones, were also creeping into daily life as Bolivian colonies became more crowded, said Hernan Neufeld, 39, one of Wanderland’s religious leaders, called bishops.

“Many brothers and sisters lost their way,” he said. “That’s why we sought a more remote place to see if we can enforce our norms.”

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A person in a hat and overalls sits in a buggy pulled by two white horses.

A boy from the Mennonite colony of Wanderland traveling by horse-drawn buggy.

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Several children sit on steps at a house. A woman wearing a hat is at the bottom of the steps.

The children of Peter Dyck, 51, the leader of Providencia.

Since Mennonite settlements first appeared in the Peruvian Amazon in 2017, they have cleared more than 17,000 acres of forest there, according to an analysis last year by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP), which tracks deforestation.

That is just a fraction of at least 370,000 acres of forest lost in recent years in Peru, most of it to small-scale farming. The overall deforestation of the Amazon worries many environmentalists since the rainforest absorbs heat-trapping carbon emissions, making it a crucial regulator of the world’s climate.

Mennonites interviewed in Wanderland and Providencia said they were not familiar with the term “climate change” or how their practices affect the Amazon.

Their leaders acknowledged that parts of the forest were cleared for their colonies, but did not believe they had done anything wrong.

“Every colony clears the forest a little bit, but it’s very little,” said Peter Dyck, a farmer from Belize and Providencia’s leader. “The forest is big.”

The colonies, he added, produce soy, rice and corn to sell in Peru, helping feed people and grow the economy.

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The sun shines over trees and the vague outline of a horse and buggy.

Wanderland is an “Old Colony” settlement, made up of Mennonites who trace their history to an 18th-century settlement, Chortitza, that is now part of Ukraine.

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Two people watch hands holding a white sack.

Mennonites buy and sell products with surrounding communities.

But the Mennonites have still come under government scrutiny.

The Peruvian authorities are investigating Wanderland, Providence and a third Mennonite colony, accusing them of clearing forest without required permits. They are seeking reparations and prison terms for colony leaders, said Jorge Guzman, a lawyer representing Peru’s environment ministry in the case.

But the three colonies deny doing anything illegal, arguing that they did not need permits because they already held agricultural titles to the land, issued by the regional government, said Medelu Saldaña, a local politician who advises the colonies.

The colonies bought their land, Mr. Saldaña added, from a logging company that had already stripped the forest of hardwood trees.

But officials and experts said satellite images showed that the colonies had cleared carbon-rich primary forest. And even if parts had been destroyed by logging, the colonies still needed permits and approvals because of the size of their operations.

“They want a piece of paper to trump reality,” Mr. Guzman said.

Some experts on Mennonites say they are being unfairly targeted given that other activities in the Peruvian Amazon are swallowing up much larger tracts of forest.

In Peru, palm and cacao plantations that supply global companies have already replaced large swaths of forest, while drug trafficking and illegal logging and gold mining continue to expand deeper.

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A man puts his hand into dirt doing farm work.

Members of the Dyck family working on their farm in Providencia.

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Three people working in a dirt field next to a truck.

The authorities are investigating Wanderland, Providence and a third Mennonite colony, accusing them of removing trees without required permits.

“I think the Mennonites are kind of the focus of a lot of critique right now because they are a distinct group of people,” said Kennert Giesbrecht, a Canadian and former managing editor of a German-language biweekly read widely in the Mennonite diaspora.

Several hours down a river from Wanderland, a new Mennonite village, Salamanca, is forming.

Cornelius Niekoley, a farmer and bishop from Mexico, traveled to Peru to assess whether he should buy property for his adult children and their families.

“Good price and nice land,” he said. “Not too many rocks. With too many rocks, it’s hard to clear the land.”

Born in Belize to a Mexican father and Canadian mother, Mr. Niekoley and his children live in a colony in Quintana Roo, in southeastern Mexico, where some of his neighbors have already moved to Salamanca seeking more affordable land.

Looking around the village, Mr. Niekoley said, “There still aren’t many, but more are going to come.”

Image
A view from above of a cleared field surrounded by trees.

The leaders of Wanderland, above, and Providencia acknowledged that parts of the forest were cleared to make way for their colonies, but do not believe they did anything wrong.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/19/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

No Evidence That Maduro Won, a Top Venezuelan Election Official Says

In an interview with The New York Times, an electoral council official expressed grave doubts about claims to victory by the authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro.


Juan Carlos Delpino, a member of Venezuela’s National Electoral Council, said the body “failed the country” in proclaiming President Nicolás Maduro the victor in elections last month.Credit...Federico Parra/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

One of Venezuela’s top election officials, in a declaration sure to jolt the crisis-weary nation, said in an interview that he had no proof that Venezuela’s authoritarian president won last month’s election.

Since the July 28 vote, governments around the world have expressed skepticism, and even outright disbelief, over President Nicolás Maduro’s claim to victory. But the statement by Juan Carlos Delpino — an opposition-member of the government body that announced Mr. Maduro’s win — represents the first major criticism from inside the electoral system.

Speaking on the record to a reporter for the first time since the vote, Mr. Delpino said he “had not received any evidence” that Mr. Maduro actually won a majority of the vote.

Neither the electoral body nor Mr. Maduro has released tallies to support assertions that the president won re-election, while the opposition has published receipts from thousands of voting machines that show its candidate, Edmundo González, won an overwhelming majority.

In declaring Mr. Maduro the winner without evidence, the country’s election body “failed the country,” Mr. Delpino said. “I am ashamed, and I ask the Venezuelan people for forgiveness. Because the entire plan that was woven — to hold elections accepted by all — was not achieved.”

Mr. Delpino, a lawyer and one of two opposition-aligned members of Venezuela’s electoral council, spoke from hiding, afraid of government backlash. In recent weeks Mr. Maduro’s security forces have rounded up anyone who appears to doubt his claim to another six years in power, and many Venezuelans are fearful that his forces are crossing borders to go after enemies.

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A smoky street scene, with people in hoodies and covered faces bending down behind a barrier.

Protesters last month in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, the day after Mr. Maduro claimed to have clinched another term.Credit...Alejandro Cegarra for The New York Times

The National Electoral Council, known in Venezuela as the C.N.E., is the five-member body charged with deciding the framework of elections, as well as receiving and announcing results. These duties make it enormously powerful.

When the country’s legislature selected Mr. Delpino as a member of the council last August, many in Venezuela saw it as an attempt to give it a veneer of balance and legitimacy.

At the time, Mr. Delpino was living in the United States, and he returned to Venezuela to serve on the council out of “great levels of commitment” to the democratic process, he said.

Most in the country believed that the council was controlled by Mr. Maduro. But Mr. Delpino, a longtime member of an opposition party called Democratic Action, said he agreed to join out of a belief that the “electoral route” was the avenue for change.

A spokeswoman for the National Electoral Council did not respond to a request for comment.

The other opposition-aligned member of the council is Aime Nogal, who has not spoken publicly since the election and, unlike Mr. Delpino, has appeared at events held by the electoral body.

Reached for comment, Ms. Nogal said she was not granting any interviews.

The July vote pitted Mr. Maduro, whose socialist-inspired movement has been in power for 25 years, against Edmundo González, a previously little-known diplomat who had the backing of a popular opposition leader, María Corina Machado.

Just hours after polls closed on Election Day, the electoral council president — Elvis Amoroso, a longtime member of Mr. Maduro’s party — proclaimed Mr. Maduro the winner, with just over half of the vote.

That very evening, Mr. Delpino decided to stop participating in the council, he said, and he did not appear at a news conference announcing Mr. Maduro’s victory.

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A mural showing the likenesses of President Hugo Chávez, Simón Bolivar and Mr. Maduro, with several people standing on a sidewalk in the foreground.

The likenesses of Hugo Chávez, Simón Bolivar and Mr. Maduro on a mural in Petare, Venezuela. Mr. Maduro succeeded Mr. Chávez, and their socialist-inspired movement has been in power for 25 years.Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times

While Mr. Amoroso has yet to produce documentation proving that Mr. Maduro won, the opposition gathered the printed tallies of more than 25,000 voting machines on July 28.

Those 25,000 receipts — representing more than 80 percent of all machines used on Election Day — showed Mr. González had won 67 percent of the vote. In recent weeks the opposition has posted those receipts on its website.

Mr. Delpino declined to say whether he had the voting data received by the government.

But in a message he said he planned to post on X after his interview with The Times, Mr. Delpino cited a long list of irregularities that led him to “a loss of confidence in the integrity of the process and in the announced results.”

These irregularities, he wrote, include:

The National Electoral Council’s refusal to release machine-by-machine results.

Claims by election witnesses that they were kicked out of polling stations as the stations closed, making it impossible for them to oversee the final moments of the vote.

An interruption in the electronic transmission of results from voting machines to the council’s data hub. (This could create an opening to tamper with the data.)

The “worrying lack” of council meetings in the months before the vote, resulting in Mr. Amoroso making “unilateral” decisions about the process. This made it difficult for Mr. Delpino to push back against policies that tilted the election in Mr. Maduro’s favor, like barriers to registration abroad.

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Three men in suits, with one leaning down to speak to another.

Elvis Amoroso, center, head of the electoral council, last week in Caracas. No documentation has been made public backing assertions that Mr. Maduro won more than half the vote.Credit...Leonardo Fernandez Viloria/Reuters

On the morning of the vote, Mr. Delpino awoke with optimism, he said in the interview, and he was at the electoral council’s headquarters in Caracas by 6 a.m. But by the end of the day, when he realized Mr. Amoroso was going to announce an “irreversible” victory for Mr. Maduro without proof, he went home, he said, rather than participate in the announcement.

Since the day of the vote, Diosdado Cabello, one of Mr. Maduro’s most powerful allies and the vice president of their party, has accused Mr. Delpino of being part of a “little group of terrorists” who hacked the electoral system in an attempt to rig a win for Mr. González.

(The month before the election, Mr. Delpino had criticized Mr. Amoroso’s management of the election council to a local news outlet, Efecto Cocuyo, helping to spotlight him as a target for the governing party.)

The United States has recognized Mr. González as the winner of the election, and even the governments of Colombia and Brazil — run by left-leaning leaders like Mr. Maduro — have expressed “grave doubts” that Mr. Maduro won.

All have called on Mr. Maduro and the National Electoral Council to release results by polling stations.

Two independent panels that observed the election in Venezuela, one from the United Nations and another from the Carter Center, have said it did not meet the minimum standards for a democratic vote.

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Fires burn in a deserted street at dusk, with a Venezuelan flag flying in the center.

Downtown Caracas during an anti-government protest last month. In recent weeks there have been sweeping arrests of anyone challenging the declared results of the vote.Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times

If Mr. Maduro is inaugurated again in January, it will extend his movement’s time in power into its third decade. Under the president and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, the oil-rich country has experienced an extraordinary economic decline, with mismanagement, corruption and U.S. sanctions eviscerating the economy.

Mr. Maduro is under investigation by the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity and is wanted by the United States on drug trafficking charges.

Since the vote, some Venezuelans have pressured Mr. Delpino to speak out and criticized him for taking weeks to do so. He said he was coming forward now out of a commitment to transparency.

In the years that Mr. Chávez and then Mr. Maduro consolidated control, some in the opposition have pushed for a military coup or foreign intervention.

But Mr. Delpino said that despite all he had seen in recent weeks, he thought elections were the answer to better future. “I believe even today that the answer for Venezuela is democratic,” he said.

“The answer is electoral. With another protagonist in the C.N.E., of course,” — a reference to Mr. Amoroso — “but I believe in that electoral solution.”

Genevieve Glatsky contributed reporting from Bogotá.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/26/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

What Happens When Half a Million People Abandon Their City

About a quarter of the residents of Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second-largest city, have moved away — and more are expected to soon follow.


Irma Palmar, 52, cares for her seven grandchildren at her home in Maracaibo, Venezuela.

It was once a thriving metropolis in the heart of oil country in Venezuela.

That city, Maracaibo, no longer exists.

Today, the city is rife with abandoned houses, some of which look like bombs were dropped on them, because homeowners tore windows and roofs off to sell for scrap before they took off on journeys to Colombia, Chile and the United States. Middle-class neighborhoods are filled with for sale signs and overgrown yards.

Fewer cars drive down the streets, and fewer criminals are around to steal them. Christmas dinners, once packed with noisy relatives, are lonely affairs aided by webcams.

Nearly eight million people — more than a quarter of the population — have fled Venezuela in recent years, driven out by economic misery and political repression.





Abandoned and empty homes in Maracaibo, which has been hollowed out by a mass exodus of residents leaving the country for better economic opportunites.

Nowhere is that exodus more staggeringly acute than in Maracaibo, which has been hollowed out by the loss of about half a million of its 2.2 million inhabitants — many of them adults in their late teens to middle age. (The population figure is based on surveys, since the government has not conducted an official census in more than a decade.)

The map highlights the city of Maracaibo, in the Zulia state in northwestern Venezuela.

Caribbean Sea

Maracaibo

Caracas

ZULIA

VENEZUELA

COLOMBIA

BRAZIL

200 MILES

By The New York Times
“The first blow you sense is the loneliness,” said Maracaibo’s mayor, Rafael Ramírez. “It’s devastating, and affects you emotionally.”

Maracaibo, which is in western Venezuela and remains the country’s second-largest city, has been battered by a collapsed economy, routine blackouts and persistent gasoline and water shortages.

Many working adults searching for jobs elsewhere have left their children home until they can establish a firmer footing, leaving aging grandparents to fill the breach.

“Right now, this is a country of old people,’’ said Antonio Sierra, 72, as he sat in his living room lounge chair and looked up at a window where outside many of the houses on his block are empty.

All three of Mr. Sierra’s adult children are gone. One of his sons left behind a baby, Rafael, who is now 7. Last year, even the boy’s teachers left. Mr. Sierra and some other grandparents took up a collection to pay a replacement $2 a week to teach first grade.

ImageA man holds a young boy while seated on a couch.

Antonio Sierra, 72, with his grandson, Rafael, at their home in Maracaibo. The boy’s father moved to the United States years ago.

Maracaibo is now bracing for another wave of departures in the coming months given the country’s plunge into instability after a national election in July that the autocratic president, Nicolás Maduro, claimed to win even though vote tallies showed he lost decisively.

His government has unleashed a brutal campaign against anyone challenging the electoral results, and with the United States among the many countries that have rejected Mr. Maduro’s claim to victory, the U.S. sanctions that have deepened Venezuela’s economic woes are not likely be eased anytime soon.

A mass departure of the country’s dwindling numbers of doctors, nurses, sanitation workers and bus drivers would be even more brutal in Maracaibo, where so many who filled those jobs are already gone.

Mr. Ramírez longs for the days when companies held conferences in Maracaibo and when the state oil company produced so much petroleum at a nearby lake that its workers enjoyed a comfortable standard of living.

“This was an oil city, a city that had designed a convention center so that all industries, people, the oil industry, would come here, ” Mr. Ramírez said. “That city is not going to come back, but it has to be reinvented.”

Image
Rafael Ramírez, the mayor of Maracaibo, standing on a street.

“The first blow you sense is the loneliness,” said Maracaibo’s mayor, Rafael Ramírez. “It’s devastating, and affects you emotionally.”

The sharp increase in migration from Maracaibo, the mayor said, began about a decade ago. It followed the collapse of the state oil company, which was caused by corruption, a lack of investment and political purges of skilled employees — and exacerbated by U.S. sanctions.

An enormous nationwide power outage in 2019 triggered days of looting in Maracaibo and tipped the scales. The State of Zulia, which includes Maracaibo, borders Colombia, making leaving on foot easier for people who could not afford airfare. (The power went out again on Friday, when a major blackout cut electricity nationwide.)

A recent survey commissioned by the Chamber of Commerce in Zulia showed that nearly 70 percent of the families interviewed had an immediate family member outside the country.

At least half of the people questioned for another survey commissioned by Maracaibo’s mayor said they were considering leaving, a number considerably higher than the overall national rate of 30 percent of survey respondents who expressed a desire to go, said Efraín Rincón, a political consultant who conducted the surveys.

“Faced with this reality, we see that the portion of the elderly is growing, but not organically — not because there are more older people,” Mr. Rincón said. “It’s because there are fewer young people.”

Image
A single bright light appears to be on in an otherwise darkened apartment building.

A residential building in Maracaibo where most of the apartments are empty because most of the tenants left Venezuela.

Much was riding on the election on July 28, when Mr. Maduro faced off against Edmundo González, a retired diplomat who took the place of a more popular opposition candidate barred by the government from running.

Polling machine tallies collected by electoral observers showed that Mr. González won easily. The government says otherwise, but more than a month after the race, officials have yet to provide precinct-level election results.

Many people, even longtime supporters of Mr. Maduro’s mentor, former President Hugo Chávez, had counted on an opposition triumph to start reversing the country’s fortunes and lure their loved ones back home.

María Corina Machado, the opposition leader who was prevented from running, made that a cornerstone of Mr. González’s campaign.

Instead, the government quickly cracked down on demonstrations in the days after the election — arresting around 2,000 protesters, activists, journalists and politicians.

Image
A view of buildings and houses in Maracaibo.

Once a city of 2.2 million, Maracaibo’s population has dwindled by half a million in recent years.

With the Maduro government showing no inclination to negotiate a solution to the electoral crisis, migration levels later this year are “going to be dramatic,” said Mirla Pérez, a professor and social science researcher at the University of Central Venezuela. “Right now, people are strategizing how to leave.”

Ms. Pérez said migrants typically first leave their children behind and then send for them later, once they are financially situated. Eventually, they send for their parents, too.

A recent trip to the airport in Maracaibo found a number of people, including several older adults, leaving for good to join their adult children in Spain and Argentina. Taxi drivers who frequently make the three-hour trip to the Colombian border reported long lines of Venezuelans leaving on foot.

Back in Maracaibo, hundreds of thousands of older people are in precarious conditions, according to a nonprofit, Convite, earning around $3 a month in retirement benefits. Though most people receive some money from relatives abroad, Mr. Rincón’s surveys showed that the average amount was less than $25 a month.

Image
A stray dog on a dirt street amid humble homes.

A street in Maracaibo where many homes have been abandoned.

The Maduro administration, in an apparent acknowledgment of the problem, created a Ministry for Older Adults to guarantee access to health care, food and public services.

Mr. Sierra’s wife, Marlenis Miranda, 68, said she managed the household around the schedule of when power and water were available.

Electricity comes on maybe once a week, sometimes every other week. When the water turns on every week or so, she fills four huge barrels to use the rest of the week, and reuses bath water to flush the toilets.

Their son, a former police officer, is driving for Uber in Texas, while their daughter is working at a nursery school in Vermont. Another son, who in 2013 was the first in the family to leave, is a graphic designer in Barcelona.

“Sometimes you look outside on a Saturday and say, ‘Oh, how this looks so alone,” Ms. Miranda said. “So alone.”

Image
A woman on her cellphone sitting in a char near a vase holding flowers.

Marlenis Miranda, 68, at her home in Maracaibo. All three of her adult children have left Venezuela.

After two of Edith Luzardo’s children left Maracaibo for the United States, Ms. Luzardo, stayed behind raising her two grandchildren. When The New York Times visited her in July, she lamented how only five people were left in a house where 24 people once lived.

She debated whether to wait to be approved for entry into the United States under a special Biden administration migration program, but in August, it was briefly suspended.

Two days after the suspension announcement, Ms. Luzardo decided to take the same treacherous route many Venezuelans have followed, through the Darién Gap, a jungle path connecting Central and South America.

“I’m not afraid,” Ms. Luzardo, 66, said. “I’m strong.”

Image
A woman wearing a T-shirt and a skirt sits in a chair near a curtained window.

Edith Luzardo, 66, in Maracaibo before embarking on a journey north to try to reunite with her children.

Low on money, Ms. Luzardo, one of her sons and the two grandchildren she had been raising were stranded for a few days in Costa Rica before finally making it to Mexico, according to her son.

Xiomara Ortega, 68, said so many people planned to leave if Mr. Maduro won that she expected to be the only one left in her Maracaibo neighborhood. Two of her daughters are in Colombia, and Ms. Ortega is raising six grandchildren.

On most days, she has no water — or even money to buy any. She sweeps neighbors patios for extra cash and steals electricity from a nearby utility pole. She looked around at the sparse low-income settlement and counted three empty houses.

“There’s no one left,” Ms. Ortega said. “I will stay.”

Image
A woman sits in a chair with three children nearby.

Xiomara Ortega, 68, takes care of six grandchildren after her daughters migrated to Colombia.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/01/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Venezuela’s Presidential Contender Flees, and Hopes for Democracy Dim

The opposition candidate’s decision to seek asylum in Spain and the autocratic leader’s antagonism toward regional powers lessen the chances of a political transition.


Supporters of Edmundo González, Venezuela’s opposition candidate, outside the gate of an air base in Madrid on Sunday.Credit...Borja Sanchez-Trillo/EPA, via Shutterstock

The news that Edmundo González, Venezuela’s opposition candidate, had fled the country on a Spanish Air Force plane this weekend took the country, and the world, by surprise.

The past year has been marked by months of repression leading up to a disputed presidential election. The vote was followed by a brutal crackdown by the authoritarian government of President Nicolás Maduro.

Still, many Venezuelans held out hope that through a negotiated exit the socialist-inspired administration might step aside and let Mr. González, a soft-spoken former diplomat, assume power.

His departure on Saturday narrowed that slim possibility even further. And it came as Venezuelan security forces surrounded the Argentine diplomatic residence in Caracas where six top opposition leaders have been taking shelter since March.

Mr. Maduro has solidified his hold on power, some analysts say, even if many Venezuelans and governments around the world have not recognized his claim that he was re-elected to the presidency in the July 28 election.

Efforts by countries in the region, including Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, to broker a resolution to the conflict have gone nowhere, and the opposition, which has called on the global community to rally behind it, has seemingly few options.

Mr. González, a 75-year-old grandfather of four, was thrown into the race in March as a stand-in for the popular opposition leader María Corina Machado after the country’s top court barred her from the presidential ballot.

Ms. Machado, who won a primary election last year organized by the opposition, has inspired a nearly religious fervor among her supporters, but for the government, her decades-long record as an unwavering opponent of the 25-year-old socialist system made her a threat.

Many analysts saw Mr. González’s candidacy as a hopeful if unexpected turn of events, and polls indicated that the opposition candidate was likely to win — if the vote was free and fair.

On election day, however, Mr. Maduro claimed victory without releasing a breakdown of results; he has yet to do so. The opposition has published thousands of receipts from voting machines showing that Mr. González won decisively.

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Mr. González and María Corina Machado, wearing white and raising their clasped hands.

Mr. González and María Corina Machado, the leader of the opposition, at a rally in Maracaibo, Venezuela, in July.Credit...Marian Carrasquero for The New York Times

Mr. Maduro has faced widespread domestic and international criticism over his victory claim.

His security forces have detained around 2,000 people, from opposition activists to ordinary citizens, over even small signs of dissent. Two dozen Venezuelans died in protests in the days right after the election. Last Monday, a Venezuelan court that focuses on crimes related to terrorism issued an arrest warrant for Mr. González, accusing him of electoral sabotage.

On Sunday, the opposition released an audio recording of the candidate explaining his decision to flee the country.

“I wanted to inform you that this morning, I arrived in Madrid,” Mr. González said. “My departure from Caracas was surrounded by episodes of pressure, coercion and threats of not allowing my departure. I trust that soon we will continue the struggle to achieve freedom and the recovery of democracy in Venezuela.”

A day earlier, Venezuela’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, said that the government had granted him permission to leave the country “for the sake of tranquility and political peace.”

The plans of Ms. Machado, the candidate kicked off the ballot, were unclear. She has been in hiding since the election, though she has made a handful of public appearances.

In a statement on Sunday, she said that Mr. González had left because his life was in danger, but that she would keep fighting “until the end,” as her campaign slogan put it.

In an interview last month, a top opposition leader, Perkins Rocha, said, “My knowledge of María Corina Machado is to have the certainty that she would never abandon the country.” He was later arrested by men wearing hoods and taken to an unknown location.

Ms. Machado now finds herself in the position of being the most prominent opposition figure in a country where all of her recent predecessors have been imprisoned or forced into exile, said Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan professor of international affairs at the University of Denver.

The Maduro government’s strategy, he said, is to force out the loudest voices of dissent, then portray them as weak and illegitimate.

“It makes it easier for Maduro to write the narrative about the opposition,” Mr. Rodríguez said. “They want to paint them as not being willing to fight, not being brave, not being strong.”

The standoff at the Argentine residence highlighted the diminishing chances that the opposition might compel the Maduro government to negotiate a resolution to the political crisis.

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Nicolás Maduro has faced widespread domestic and international criticism over his claim that he won.

An empty highway displaying billboards from President Nicolás Maduro’s campaign in July, two days after the presidential elections.Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times

Brazil assumed custody of the residence last month after Mr. Maduro ordered diplomats from Argentina and other countries that disputed his election victory claim to leave the country. Many had placed their hopes for a negotiated transition in regional powers like Brazil with leftist leaders who have been friendly toward Mr. Maduro.

But on Saturday Venezuela’s foreign ministry announced that it was revoking Brazil’s custody of the Argentine residence because, the ministry said, it was being used to plan “terrorist activities” and to plot the assassination of Mr. Maduro.

The standoff, combined with the news of Mr. González’s exit, left some Venezuelans who voted for the opposition feeling dejected and fearful. They asked that their last names not be used for fear of retaliation.

Chiquinquirá, 60, a secretary, said she nearly fainted when she learned the news of Mr. González’s departure. “What is going to happen to us?” she said. “I feel like a ship adrift.”

Lucía, 28, an administrator, said she felt saddened, hurt and demoralized.

“I feel that he is forsaking all of us who decided to stay and give a last chance for elections in Venezuela.” she said. “How do you ensure that this struggle continues if the president-elect abandons the country?”

Now that Mr. González has left Venezuela, she, too, has also decided to leave.

“I do not want to continue spending my youth waiting for something to be decided,” she said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/08/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Mexico Remakes Its Entire Judicial System as States Back Vast Overhaul

The plan, championed by Mexico’s president, would have voters elect judges at every level, dramatically restructuring the third branch of government.


Judicial workers outside the Supreme Court in Mexico City last month. In recent weeks, more than 50,000 judges and court workers have protested a judicial plan.Credit...Luis Antonio Rojas for The New York Times

Mexico’s states swiftly moved to remake the country’s entire judicial system on Thursday, approving an amendment to the Constitution that would be the most far-reaching judicial overhaul ever attempted by a large democracy.

The measure, which would replace the current, appointment-based system with one in which voters elect judges, would put Mexico onto an untested course whose consequences for the courts and the country are nearly impossible to predict.

Proponents of the plan argue it would reduce corruption and give voters a greater role in a justice system widely regarded as broken. Critics of the overhaul accuse the Mexican government, which proposed and pushed for the changes, of endangering the rule of law by politicizing the courts, giving Mexico’s ruling party greater control over judges and eroding the country’s checks and balances.

The overhaul could see thousands of judges removed from their jobs, from those in local courtrooms to the chief justice of the Supreme Court. And it would drastically restructure a major branch of government responsible for meting out justice across the third-most populous country in the Americas.

The logistics alone are daunting: The country would need to implement new elections for thousands of judges, starting next year.

Mexico’s Senate passed the amendment on Wednesday. And by Thursday morning, a majority of state legislatures had approved the amendment, ensuring that it would reach the desk of the outgoing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He has long championed the measure, which has for weeks brought thousands of people into the streets, both in opposition and support, and drawn warnings from the U.S. and Canadian ambassadors and legal experts.

Once the amendment was approved by a majority of the 32 state legislatures on Thursday (20 have so far approved), Mr. López Obrador said he would publish it on Sunday, the eve of Mexico’s Independence Day. By publishing it in the government’s official gazette, the president makes the amendment law.

The Mexican president stands at a podium in front of the Mexican flag

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has championed the plan to elect judges, said on Sunday that he would sign the amendment.Credit...Alejandro Cegarra for The New York Times

“It is a very important reform,” Mr. López Obrador said at a news conference on Thursday. “It’s reaffirming that in Mexico there is an authentic democracy where the people elect their representatives. The people elect public servants from the three branches of government. That’s democracy — not the elites, the so-called political class, not the oligarchy. Everyone. Every citizen.”

The amendment, which would not immediately take effect, would reshuffle the courts at every level.

In June 2025, voters would elect all the members of the Supreme Court, the members of an oversight tribunal and about half of Mexico’s total of 7,000 judges. The remainder would be chosen in an election in 2027.

For weeks, a range of groups including more than 50,000 judges and court workers have staged protests and strikes in opposition to the plan.

This week, some protesters stormed into the Senate, calling on lawmakers to block the overhaul and forcing them to temporarily suspend debate on the amendment. The police eventually dispersed the demonstrations with fire extinguishers, and the Senate resumed in a vitriolic session, with lawmakers calling each other “liars” and “traitors.”

The amendment had passed easily through the lower house of Congress, in which the president’s party, Morena, holds a supermajority.

In the months ahead, after Mr. López Obrador makes the measure law, the Senate will issue a call for candidates and Mexico’s electoral agency will begin to organize judicial elections.

Other countries have voters elect judges to some degree, including Switzerland and the United States, but Mexico’s plan is so sweeping in its scope that it has drawn warnings.

“Democracies can’t function without a strong, independent and noncorrupt judicial branch,” the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar, told reporters last month. “Any judicial reform needs to have safeguards that the judicial branch is strengthened, and not the subject to political conditions.”

Image
Ambassador Salazar stands, holding a cowboy hat, in front of a window overlooking lush trees.

Ken Salazar, the American ambassador to Mexico, called the proposed changes to the country’s judiciary “a major risk to the functioning of Mexico’s democracy.”Credit...Alejandro Cegarra for The New York Times

Mr. Salazar added that the overhaul could pose a “risk” to Mexico’s democracy, and could “help cartels and other bad actors take advantage of inexperienced judges with political motivations.”

Mr. López Obrador said relations with the U.S. Embassy were put “on pause” after the ambassador’s remarks.

Many Mexicans have expressed support for the measure, saying it would give them leverage in a court system that few trust.

According to government surveys, 66 percent of Mexicans perceive judges to be corrupt, and analysts say nepotism remains rife. A recent diagnosis found that about 37 percent of judicial officials have at least one family member working in the judiciary.

The plan would also sever the judiciary and its oversight body, the Federal Judicial Council.

As of now, the head of that council — which, among other duties, appoints federal judges and also disciplines them — is the chief justice of the Supreme Court. A recent investigation found that, over two decades, the council imposed sanctions on about 400 of the 1,500 federal judges and magistrates it oversees, who had been accused of everything from sexual harassment to hiring family members. Only 30 people were fired.

“You can’t be judge and jury,” said Layla Manilla, a politics student who supports the overhaul. “This would imply better surveillance regarding cases of corruption, nepotism and negligence.”

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A young woman, wearing a black jean jacket, is seated next to a table covered in a blue-and-white tablecloth

Layla Manilla, a 21-year-old student, supports the judicial overhaul and has participated in demonstrations in support of the plan.Credit...Marian Carrasquero for The New York Times

But the overhaul would not affect other parts of the legal system that are also widely regarded as flawed and corrupt, such as state prosecutors’ offices and the local police. Less than 4 percent of criminal investigations are ever solved in Mexico, studies show.

Critics of the plan say it would eliminate long lists of requirements to become a judge, especially at the federal level, opening the way for people who have a law degree and a few years of legal experience to run.

“It undoubtedly affects judicial independence and is seriously against the legal profession,” said Víctor Oléa, the president of Mexico’s national bar association, who called the amendment “an erosion of the separation of powers.”

Simply holding the new slate of elections could be an expensive and significant challenge, experts say.

“Judicial geography is not the same as electoral geography; ballots never have so many names,” said Carla Humphrey, a member of the National Electoral Institute’s governing council.

Some from both sides say the debate has at least raised the justice system — often regarded as a distant force — as a topic of discussion for many Mexicans.

“Justice is being talked about in this country,” said Juan Jesús Garza Onofre, a constitutional law researcher. “That’s a very important and good thing.”

And these conversations, in the view of some experts, give the country the chance to at least ask the right questions.

“How do we get better referees of democracy? How do we get them to be more independent? How do we make them more solid? How do we get them to resolve conflicts sooner?” said Javier Martín Reyes, a law professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/12/worl ... 778d3e6de3

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Mexico’s Contentious Judiciary Overhaul Becomes Law

Going forward, Mexican voters will now elect judges at every level, dramatically restructuring the third branch of government.

Mexico passed into law on Sunday a constitutional amendment remaking its entire judiciary, marking the most far-reaching overhaul of a country’s court system ever carried out by a major democracy.

The results demonstrate the exceptional influence of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, who championed the legislation. The victory of his allies in June elections afforded them substantial legislative majorities to advance the contentious proposal in the leader’s final weeks in office. On the eve of Mexico’s Independence Day, the measure was published in the government’s official gazette, making it law.

The law shifts the judiciary from an appointment-based system, largely grounded in training and qualifications, to one where voters elect judges and there are fewer requirements to run. That puts Mexico onto an untested course, the consequences of which are difficult to foresee.

“Now it’s different,” Mr. López Obrador said in a video posted on social media on Sunday night in which his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, was seated next to him. “Now it’s the people who rule, the people who decide.”

Roughly 7,000 judges, from the chief justice of the Supreme Court down to those at local courts, will have to run for office under the new system. The changes will be put into effect gradually, with a large portion of the judiciary up for election in 2025 and the rest in 2027.

Mexico’s Judicial Overhaul, Explained
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What’s happening? In a monumental change, thousands of judges would be elected instead of appointed, from local courtrooms to the Supreme Court. The measure could produce one of the most far-reaching judicial overhauls of any major democracy.

Why do people oppose it? The biggest fears among experts and some citizens is that in the overhaul, judicial independence would be lost and the courts would become highly politicized. Critics also fear that it will open the way for people with very little legal experience to become judges.

Why are some people in favor? According to government surveys, 66 percent of Mexicans perceive judges to be corrupt — though official data on how many of them have been punished for corruption is scarce. Proponents of the plan say it would reduce corruption and give voters a greater role in a justice system widely regarded as broken.

Is it law? Mexico’s government passed the constitutional amendment into law on Sept. 15, on the eve of their independence day. Roughly 7,000 judges will have to run for office under the new system.

What’s next? The changes will be put into effect gradually, with a large portion of the judiciary up for election in 2025 and the rest in 2027.

The government said the overhaul was needed to modernize the courts and to instill trust in a system plagued by graft, influence peddling and nepotism. Ms. Sheinbaum, takes office on Oct. 1 and has fully backed the plan.

But the proposal was met fierce resistance from judicial workers, law experts, investors, judges, students, opposition legislators and other critics. Mr. López Obrador’s vow to push it through kept financial markets on edge and caused a diplomatic spat with the U.S. and Canadian ambassadors.

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President Andrés Manuel López Obrador standing with Claudia Sheinbaum and two military officers behind them.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, center, with his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, in Mexico City on Friday.Credit...Sashenka Gutierrez/EPA, via Shutterstock

Mr. López Obrador first presented his idea of overhauling the judiciary last year. Angered by Supreme Court rulings that blocked some of his administration’s plans, among them weakening Mexico’s electoral watchdog agency and putting the National Guard under the military’s control, he vowed to have judges and justices elected by popular vote. That move seen as retaliation by some analysts.

“The judiciary is hopeless, it is rotten,” he told reporters back then, calling on his supporters to give his political movement large majorities in Congress at the polls in order to pass the overhaul and change the constitution.

Despite protests and strikes by a range of groups including more than 50,000 judges and court workers over the past several weeks, the proposal passed easily through the lower house of Congress, in which the president’s party, Morena, holds a supermajority. On Wednesday, the Senate narrowly passed it despite a delay caused by protesters forcing their way into the building.

By Thursday, the bill was approved by a majority of the 32 state legislatures, the final requirement before being published into law.

“Mission accomplished,” Gerardo Fernández Noroña, the president of the Senate, said on Friday, announcing that the measure had been sent to Mr. López Obrador for publication.

Many Mexicans have expressed support for the measure, saying it would give them leverage in a court system that few trust.
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According to government surveys, 66 percent of Mexicans perceive judges to be corrupt, and analysts say nepotism remains rife. A recent assessment found that about 37 percent of judicial officials have at least one family member working in the courts.

Now comes the complicated part.

The Senate will have to issue a call for candidates for the thousands of judgeships nationwide. And Mexico’s electoral agency would have to start organizing the judicial elections. At some point, state legislatures would modify their local constitutions.

The plan is for voters next June to elect all the Supreme Court justices, whose number would be reduced to nine; members of the newly created Disciplinary Tribunal; and about half of the country’s 7,000 judges, with the rest elected in 2027. An average Mexican might have to sift through anywhere from hundreds to thousands of candidates when they vote.

Miriam Castillo contributed research from Mexico City.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/15/worl ... 778d3e6de3

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Mexico’s First Female President Takes Office

A climate scientist and former mayor, Claudia Sheinbaum was inaugurated on Tuesday as the first woman to lead the country.


“For the first time, we women have arrived to lead the destinies of our beautiful nation,” President Claudia Sheinbaum said during her inauguration ceremony on Tuesday in Mexico City.Credit...Luis Antonio Rojas for The New York Times

Claudia Sheinbaum took office on Tuesday, the first woman and Jewish person to lead Mexico in the country’s more than 200-year history as an independent nation.

“For the first time, we women have arrived to lead the destinies of our beautiful nation,” Ms. Sheinbaum said during her inauguration ceremony on Tuesday. “And I say we arrived because I do not arrive alone. We all arrived.”

Thousands packed into Mexico City’s main square on Tuesday afternoon to wait for Ms. Sheinbaum to address supporters.

Licet Reséndiz Oropeza, a resident of Tijuana, traveled more than 50 hours by bus to be in the capital on the day a woman became the country’s president for the first time.

“It’s something historic,” said Ms. Reséndiz Oropeza. “It’s a joy that I cannot begin to describe.”

The leftist former mayor of Mexico City, Ms. Sheinbaum triumphed in June elections with the largest margin of victory since Mexico transitioned to democracy and a sweeping mandate to follow through on her promise to continue the social policies of her predecessor and political mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

But while Ms. Sheinbaum is stepping into office with considerable power in her hands, she will also have to contend with a multitude of forces that may constrain her, analysts say.

She is inheriting a complex set of challenges: the largest budget deficit in decades, a deepening security crisis, the largest wave of migration in recent history and a fractious political movement that has moved to profoundly redesign the judiciary, among other institutions.

Ms. Sheinbaum is known as a capable executive, but not as a transcendent political talent like her predecessor. Mr. López Obrador built an entire movement largely on the force of his charisma, reinforcing his enormous influence with a regular morning news conference that he used to keep his allies in line and back adversaries into a corner.

Now the Morena party that he founded has a near hegemonic grip on the nation’s political system, with an effective supermajority in congress, and control over the vast majority of state legislatures and governorships.

But as it has expanded, the party now encompasses a mishmash of disparate factions that don’t always share the same goals or vision. Some analysts wonder whether Ms. Sheinbaum will be able to corral such a restive coalition.

“She no longer has the control of the party as López Obrador did,” said Fernanda Caso, a political analyst and journalist, adding that rather than unifying the party, Ms. Sheinbaum would at best be able to discipline it. “She is going to constantly live with internal power struggles within her party.”

There are also questions over how much influence the larger-than-life Mr. López Obrador will exert over his protégé. His allies have filled her cabinet and his son, known as Andy, was recently named to one of the most powerful positions in the party.

Ms. Sheinbaum has been close to the outgoing president for decades and has insisted that she will have the same priorities and policies as Mr. López Obrador not because she is his puppet, but because she genuinely believes in him.

“Being ideologically tied to López Obrador doesn’t mean that you will be manipulated by López Obrador,” said Viri Ríos, a political analyst.

“She is exercising a leadership that is perhaps more quiet than what we are used to in Mexican macho politics,” Ms. Ríos said, “but that leadership is there.”

Here is what to know about Mexico’s new president.


Ms. Sheinbaum greeting supporters on Election Day in Mexico City, in June.Credit...Fred Ramos for The New York Times

Who is Claudia Sheinbaum?

A trained scientist with a Ph.D. in energy engineering, Ms. Sheinbaum (pronounced SHANE-balm) spent years straddling academia and politics, where her career has closely tracked Mr. López Obrador’s rise. Her first foray into government was as the environment minister of Mexico City when Mr. López Obrador became mayor in 2000.

Years later, she participated in a United Nations panel of climate scientists that was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. When Mr. López Obrador became president, she won office as mayor of Mexico City, one of the largest metropolises in the hemisphere.

Ms. Sheinbaum, 62, describes herself as “obsessive” and “disciplined.” She is known as an exacting boss with little patience for laziness, someone who can squeeze every last drop out of her staff.

The descendant of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews who emigrated to Mexico in the 20th century, Ms. Sheinbaum is also the country’s first Jewish president — a watershed moment for some and a trivial detail for others who have rarely seen her discuss her heritage.

Analysts say Ms. Sheinbaum’s administration will try to blend her technocratic and pragmatic approach to governing with Mr. López Obrador’s populist rhetoric.

At times, she pulled away from his policies. During the pandemic, she tested aggressively while he trusted in good-luck charms; when fighting crime, she invested in intelligence and the police while he relied on the military.

But during the campaign, she supported many of Mr. López Obrador’s most contentious policies, including constitutional changes that critics say would undermine democratic checks and balances. She has, as a result, battled the perception among some Mexicans that she could just be a pawn of her mentor.

Police approach a fenced off building protected by a dog.

Police officers securing the perimeter of a clandestine fentanyl lab that the Sinaloa cartel is suspected of operating in Lomas del Valle, Mexico.Credit...Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

What challenges will she confront?

Ms. Sheinbaum will face pressure to show progress in the fight against increasingly powerful drug cartels, which retain their sway over large swaths of Mexico. While homicides declined modestly during the López Obrador administration, reports of extortion and disappearances have shot up since 2018. Killings, including spates of mass murders, are still near the highest levels recorded.

In recent weeks, violence between warring factions of the Sinaloa Cartel has caused a spike in deaths and kidnappings in northwest Mexico, bringing people’s lives to a standstill in cities such as Culiacán.

Ms. Sheinbaum will have little financial maneuvering room to fulfill her campaign pledges. Mexico’s budget deficit is nearing 6 percent of gross domestic product, the largest shortfall in the past 24 years. Pemex, the state-controlled oil giant, is now the world’s most indebted oil company, requiring multibillion-dollar bailouts.

It will also be up to Ms. Sheinbaum to deal with the consequences of the constitutional amendments that Mr. López Obrador pushed through in the last weeks of his administration. Critics warn that one of them, under which thousands of judges are to be elected by popular vote as soon as next year, could erode judicial independence.


What are her plans?

Besides continuing Mr. López Obrador’s infrastructure projects and keeping his popular antipoverty programs, including a yearly increase in the minimum wage, Ms. Sheinbaum comes to office with her own plans.

She has announced that all women ages 60 to 64 will receive a cash payment; currently, old-age pensions are given to anyone 65 and older. She has said most children will receive a stay-in-school scholarship, which would be an expansion of a current social program. And starting next year, she said, 20,000 doctors and nurses would begin visiting the homes of senior Mexicans, an effort to reverse the massive drop in access to public health care seen in the past few years.

Ms. Sheinbaum also wants to expand renewable energy infrastructure and increase green technology. At the same time, she has vowed to rescue Mexico’s massively indebted oil company and support a costly $16 billion oil refinery that remains far from fully operational.

Then there’s security. Ms. Sheinbaum has signaled that she will allow the armed forces to keep the power Mr. López Obrador granted them during his administration. But she also plans to create a new intelligence agency, with the ability to investigate criminal cases, and replicate the law-and-order approach she adopted in Mexico City.

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President Biden and President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico embrace next to an American flag.

President Biden with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador at the National Palace in Mexico City last year.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

What will her relationship to the U.S. look like?

A real test for Ms. Sheinbaum’s leadership might come later this year once the outcome of the U.S. presidential election becomes clear.

A victory by Vice President Kamala Harris would likely represent an extension of the Biden administration’s relationship with Mexico, which has been marked by a tense yet sustained cooperation to beef up migration enforcement, counter drug trafficking and stanch the flow of U.S. guns that are fueling bloodshed south of the border. And some American officials have said privately that they believe security coordination could improve with Ms. Sheinbaum.

But a second term by former President Donald J. Trump could ratchet up tensions between the two countries. Mr. Trump has threatened to impose tariffs if he wins the election. And he has proposed using U.S. military force against the drug cartels on Mexican soil — without the consent of Mexico’s government.

The plans risk rupturing the United States’ relationship with the Sheinbaum administration and curtailing other types of cooperation. Still, Ms. Sheinbaum and members of her government have told The New York Times that she is prepared to work with whichever candidate wins the U.S. election.

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A young Sheinbaum supporter.

A young Sheinbaum supporter in Mexico City on election night in June.Credit...Fred Ramos for The New York Times

What does a female president mean for Mexico?

While Ms. Sheinbaum has signaled that her administration represents a true change for Mexican women, her record as mayor of Mexico City offers a more nuanced picture.

As mayor, Ms. Sheinbaum supported the creation of a special prosecutor’s office to investigate femicides. Her programs helped reduce the number of violent deaths of women by 34 percent.

But she also called women’s rights demonstrations in the capital to protest the rape of a minor by police officers “provocations.” Female protesters were met with excessive use of force by authorities under her command, according to a report by Amnesty International.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/01/worl ... 778d3e6de3

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An Alarming Glimpse Into a Future of Historic Droughts

Record dry conditions in South America have led to wildfires, power cuts and water rationing. The world’s largest river system, the Amazon, which sustains some 30 million people across eight countries, is drying up.

Electricity cuts across an entire nation. A capital rationing water. A mayor encouraging people to shower together to save precious drops. The world’s largest river system, the Amazon, which sustains some 30 million people across eight countries, is drying up.

A record-breaking drought that is well into its second year is punishing much of South America, including the Amazon rainforest, upending lives and local economies and providing an alarming glimpse into the future as the effects of climate change become more apparent.

In Brazil, wildfires fueled by searing heat and prolonged dry conditions have consumed vast swaths of forest, wetlands and pastures, with smoke spreading to 80 percent of the country. It has led to canceled classes, hospitalizations and a black dust coating the inside of homes.

ImageFlames and smoke in a part of a forest burned by a fire.

A forest fire last month consumed part of Brasília National Park in Brazil.Credit...Evaristo Sa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

To the south, in Paraguay, the Paraguay River has hit new lows. Ships are stranded and fishermen say their most valuable quarry — including the enormous surubí catfish — have all but disappeared, forcing many people to look for work elsewhere to feed their families.

With much of South America dependent on hydropower, electricity production has plunged. In Ecuador, people are enduring energy cuts of up to 14 hours per day, knocking out the internet and sapping the country’s economy.

In Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, the government is cutting water to residential homes at regular intervals and the mayor has suggested that people “bathe as a couple” to reduce consumption.

Long sections of the Amazon River have turned into dry, brown beaches, and officials are dredging sections to make them deeper.

How big is the problem?

The drought has touched every country on the continent except Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. It stretches, roughly, from the province of Córdoba in north-central Argentina to the continent’s northern tip, according to the U.S. agency NOAA.

Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela have been hit particularly hard, with significant swaths of these countries experiencing “exceptional drought,” marked with a deep red color on a NOAA map.

The drought covers large parts of the Amazon rainforest, especially worrying because it is the globe’s most important carbon sink, absorbing heat trapping gases.

Dryer conditions diminish the forest’s ability to take in those gases, worsening global warming, said Lincoln Muniz Alves, a climate scientist at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research.

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A person walks along a sandy stretch near shallow water on a sunny day.

A boy walking on exposed sandbanks of the Paraguay River in Paraguay. Water levels in the river have plunged during an extended dry spell across much of South America.Credit...Cesar Olmedo/Reuters

Why is the drought happening?

The drought is fueled by two trends linked to climate change, said Carlos Nobre, a Brazilian scientist. First, a particularly strong El Niño weather pattern parched the region.

While El Niños, a natural climate occurrence linked to warmer conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean, have caused droughts for millions of years, stronger El Niños have become more frequent as the planet warms.

Second, the temperature in the North Atlantic has hit a new high, contributing to the drier conditions.

In the Amazon, the drought has crossed several unsettling milestones: never has so little rain fallen in the rainforest, never have dry conditions lasted so long, and never has such a vast region of the jungle been in drought, Mr. Nobre said.

The drought comes amid another worrisome moment: In January, for the first time, the planet’s average temperature hit 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels for 12 consecutive months. Temperature levels beyond that would lead to consequences that would make it challenging for societies to cope.

Many scientists and policymakers hadn’t expected the globe to hit that mark for years, said Mr. Nobre, and the announcement has raised concern that the earth’s warming is accelerating.

It will take more time to understand if that is true, and if the planet has passed that 1.5 degree mark for good.

“We are scared,” Mr. Nobre said.

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A boat is seen floating in shallow water in an area filled with sand banks.

The prolonged drought has exposed sand banks that have stranded boats on the Solimoes River in Brazil, one of the largest tributaries of the Amazon River.Credit...Bruno Kelly/Reuters

What are some of the effects on people?

In recent weeks, wildfire smoke has fallen like a dusty curtain over São Paulo, Brazil’s economic capital and Latin America’s biggest city, causing the metropolis to register the world’s worst air quality.

Other Brazilian cities have also suffered a sharp rise in air pollution, prompting the authorities to cancel classes, delay outdoor parades and urge people to stay indoors.

The smoke has sickened Brazilians and placed hospitals under pressure, as more people seek medical care for respiratory issues, according to the country’s health ministry. Even a Supreme Court justice wound up hospitalized when dense smoke blanketed the capital, Brasília.

Patrícia de Andrade, 50, woke one September day to a blood-red sun and heavy air. “It was just a curtain of smoke,” said Ms. Andrade, a public relations specialist who lives in Indaiatuba, a city some 50 miles northwest of São Paulo.

After exercising outdoors, she struggled to catch her breath. Just after lunchtime, she collapsed in her home and had to be rushed to a hospital with respiratory problems.

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People walking along cracked earth.

The dry river bed of the Tapajos River in the Amazon rainforest. The drought in South America is now into its second year.Credit...Amanda Perobelli/Reuters

The air quality has improved, but the wildfire effects are inescapable. “You clean and clean that black dust,” Ms. Andrade said. “It’s everywhere.”

The drought has also pummeled Brazil’s energy grid, since hydropower supplies over half of the country’s energy. The country’s biggest dams have had their water reservoirs dwindle to just over 40 percent in September.

Months without rain have dried rivers and streams in the Amazon that serve as practically the only way to connect communities and move commerce in some of the planet’s most remote areas.

Distant Indigenous villages have become isolated. Some face shortages of drinking water, medicine and food, with the authorities delivering aid by helicopter.

Looking to cut back energy consumption, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva even considered returning to the daylight savings system, which the government scrapped in 2019.

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Trees burning in a wildfire that produced an orange glow.

A hill burning during a wildfire last month in Quito, the capital of Ecuador. A lack of rain helped fuel the fires. Credit...Galo Paguay/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

What about the rest of the continent?

In Ecuador, more than 70 percent of the country’s electrical system depends on hydroelectric plants. Low water levels, combined with a lack of maintenance and investment, have pushed the system to a breaking point.

Ecuador has also experienced a surge in forest fires that have devastated more than 23,450 hectares of vegetation — about 69 Central Parks, according to Ecuadorean officials. The fires sent many fleeing last month when the flames raced into Quito, the capital.

The blaze consumed the home of the Moya family, prominent figures in Ecuador’s architectural scene, incinerating a cultural treasure trove: an extensive library and editorial archive dedicated to the country’s architectural history.

Rómulo Moya, 60, recounted frantic hours working to save his parents, who are in their 80s, and trying to save their possessions.

The family’s publishing business, which produced hundreds of architectural titles, was wiped out in a matter of hours. Mr. Moya estimated that about 15,000 titles were destroyed, including rare books dating to the 19th century.

When the Moyas returned, they were awed by the devastation. “Our hearts exploded and our breathing stopped,” Mr. Moya said “We remained silent.”

In Paraguay, drought in the Pantanal — the world’s largest tropical wetland — has caused the Paraguay River to fall to historic lows.

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A man stands in a boat next to other boats as dogs play in the water.

Fishermen whose livelihoods depend on the Paraguay River say they have seen their catch disappear because of shallow water. Credit...Cesar Olmedo/Reuters

Fishermen say their catch is disappearing. Shipwrecks on the now shallow river are snaring nets and damaging motors. In the absence of larger predators, piranhas are proliferating, chewing rods and tackle.

“How are you supposed to survive if you’re a poor person and you make a living from fishing?” said Dionisio González, 51, the leader of a local fishermen union, camped out on a rocky beach that was underwater a few weeks ago.

In Colombia, almost 70 percent of the country’s energy is generated through hydroelectric dams, and experts say the drought could lead to electricity rationing nationwide.

The national government is already encouraging utility companies to increase thermal energy production by burning coal and natural gas.

The drought is also shifting complex natural relationships. A 400-pound river dolphin, for instance, was probably fishing for food in a parched part of the Colombian Amazon known as Monkey Island when water levels dropped.

The dolphin found itself trapped in what had become a lake, said Daniel Alonso, a veterinarian and director of a nature sanctuary near Leticia, Colombia.

Now, the animal is alone, isolated from food sources and other dolphins. Dr. Alonso hopes water levels will soon rise, allowing it tosurvive the drought.

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Several boats floating in shallow water.

Boats stranded in shallow water in Aleixo Lake, west of the Brazilian city of Manaus. Credit...Michael Dantas/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

When will the drought end?

Scientists expect a new weather pattern, known as La Niña, to begin soon, said Mr. Alves, bringing “some chance” of increased rainfall across the continent and better conditions by year’s end. Still, that won’t change the larger trend: Temperatures are rising, reshaping life across the region.

Laurence Blair contributed reporting from Asunción, Paraguay, and Jorge Valencia from Bogotá.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/19/worl ... 778d3e6de3

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Where Glaciers Melt, the Rivers Run Red

As the glaciers of South America retreat, the supply of freshwater is dwindling and its quality is getting worse.

Video: https://vp.nyt.com/video/2024/11/14/129 ... _1080p.mp4

Dark red pools of meltwater from acid rock drainage on Pastoruri peak in the Cordillera Blanca, a Peruvian mountain range containing the world’s largest concentration of tropical glaciers.Credit...

Dionisia Moreno, a 70-year-old Indigenous farmer, still remembers when Shallap River, nearly 13,000 feet up in the Cordillera Blanca, brought crystal clear water brimming with trout to her village, Jancu. “People and animals alike could drink the water without suffering,” she said. “Now the water is red. No one can drink it.”

At a glance the river looks like a casualty of mining pollution; Peru is a major producer of copper, silver and gold, and the waters near abandoned mines often run a shade of rust. But the culprit is climate change. The Cordillera Blanca mountain range harbors the world’s largest concentration of tropical glaciers, which are particularly sensitive to rising temperatures and are a major source of freshwater in Peru.

For thousands of years, the glaciers were replenished with ice in the winter. But they have shrunk by more than 40 percent since 1968, uncovering rocks that, when exposed to the elements, can trigger chemical reactions that leach toxic metals into the water and turn it acidic.

The process, known as acid rock drainage, “creates a cascade reaction that pollutes water sources,” said Raúl Loayza, a biologist at Peru’s Cayetano Heredia University who researches water quality in the Andes. “It’s a big problem and is getting worse and worse.”

ImageA portrait of Dionisia Moreno, who stands over a bucket with water and a long hose extending from it, with tall mountain peaks behind her.

Dionisia Moreno washing her food with water from mountain canals. Glacial retreat has exposed rocks that turn the waters vital to Indigenous communities acidic and toxic.

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A child reaches down into a small pool of water at a grassy bank while his mother stands near him with a bucket. Another child sits on the hill behind them.

Alipia Cruz and her children Jeyson, 9, and Ruth, 11, draw water from their well in Cacapaqui village for consumption. Ms. Cruz said the spring water now tastes sour and members of her family suffer from stomach aches.

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A portrait of Emilio Mendez, who sits on rusty-colored rocks at a river's edge. The rocks' color contrasts with the gray-colored stones further away from the water behind him.

Emilio Mendez, 46, sits by the Quilcay River, which has been polluted by acid rock drainage. His village, Paquishca, once kept a small fish farm there, but the project was abandoned as the water turned acidic. “The fish died with water,” he said.

Deglaciation above Lake Shallap, the headwaters of Shallap River, has exposed more than 380 acres of the Chicama Formation, which is rich in pyrite, an iron sulfide. As meltwater trickles across the rocks, the pyrite transforms into iron hydroxide and sulfuric acid, a corrosive chemical that releases heavy metals from the rock into the meltwater, Dr. Loayza said.

Pure water has a neutral pH of 7; Lake Shallap now has a pH of less than 4, nearly as acidic as vinegar. It also contains lead, manganese, iron and zinc at levels that surpass environmental quality standards, according to Peru’s National Institute of Glacier and Mountain Ecosystem Research, or Inaigem.

Health authorities have declared Shallap River and several other acidified streams off-limits for human consumption. But most villages continue to use it for crops, even though it does not meet water quality standards for agriculture. Farmers say it can cause some plants to wither.

Acid rock drainage can degrade ecosystems and corrode infrastructure. Juan Celestino, 75, the husband of Ms. Moreno, said that when the trout first disappeared from Shallap River, villagers thought that someone had dumped pollution into it. “We didn’t think that it was the river itself,” he said. That the problem stemmed from shrinking glaciers was not reassuring. “What can we do?” he added. “Who can help us?”

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An elevated view looking down on a small lake in the high mountains tinted an opaque green from interaction with minerals.

Shallap Lake, high in the Cordillera Blanca mountain range, contains high levels of heavy metals.

To identify hot spots, Dr. Loayza and other scientists used satellite images to analyze the spectrum of sunlight reflected by glacial lakes. Their model has identified 60 lakes in the Cordillera Blanca that are highly acidic. Inaigem has confirmed acid rock drainage in five of the eight glacial gorges it has tested so far. “There are areas we’re aware of that are very affected and others where the process is just beginning,” said Yeidy Montano, a scientist with the institute.

Meltwaters are most acidified, and most laden with heavy metals, in the high Andes, where the glaciers are actively melting. Indigenous villages at these elevations are the most vulnerable, and, being small, tend to lack influence with authorities who might help secure access to cleaner alternatives.

“These places in the Cordillera Blanca are a time bomb for highland people, for their way of life, for ecosystems,” Dr. Loayza said.

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Alicia Leyva sits at a riverbank full of bright orange contaminated rocks and throws water from a bucket into a larger bucket at the feet of a hog and dog for drinking.

Alicia Leyva draws water from the Rio Negro, another contaminated river in the Andes, in Canrey Chico.

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A close-up view of leaves coated with an orange-red dusty substance that also has gotten on the fingertips.

Leaves covered in oxidized sediments from the river in Canrey Chico, a village along the Rio Negro.

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An elevated view looking down on a farmer in a bright red shirt walks across a discolored spot on his hilly plot of farmland.

Federico Rondan de Paz, a farmer in Canrey Chico, inspects an irrigated spot of his alfalfa farm that was stained by acidified waters.

With help from a local nonprofit, the village of Canrey Chico, which sits on the Rio Negro, another rust-red river, built a system of ponds and canals planted with native reeds to raise pH levels and reduce heavy metals in water drawn from the river. But provincial government officials abandoned an effort to expand it.

Vicente Salvador, the farmer who had promoted the effort, died of gastric cancer in 2021. “His main source of drinking water came from the river,” his son, Joel Salvador, 45, said. “On our land, we don’t have access to spring water.”

Springs have long been seen as cleaner sources of water than rivers in the Andes, but some are drying up, and others now contain heavy metals. “We suspect that groundwater will also be affected in the long term by acid rock drainage,” said Francisco Medina, a research director with Inaigem.

Video https://vp.nyt.com/video/2024/11/14/129 ... _1080p.mp4

Members of the National Institute of Glacier and Mountain Ecosystem Research, or Inaigem, taking water samples in wetlands in the basin of Pastoruri.CreditCredit...

Sixto León, 59, a farmer from the village Cacapaqui, said that in the past year the spring water that his family consumed started to taste sour. “A lot of us have been having stomachaches,” he said.

At first, the melting of the glaciers brought an abundance of water. But research has shown that watersheds in the Cordillera Blanca have since passed “peak water,” meaning that less water is now trickling down in the dry season.

The quality of the water that remains is increasingly threatened by acid rock drainage. In recent years, leaching has been detected on the rocks above Lake Palcacocha, the headwaters of the watershed that supplies drinking water for Huaraz, the regional capital. The lake has maintained an alkaline pH of around 7.5, but scientists say it will probably turn acidic as the glaciers above it continue to retreat.

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Joel Salvador sits on the small boxy mausoleum for his late father in a hill with other such graves.

Joel Salvador at the grave of his father, Vicente Salvador, who died in 2021 of stomach cancer. “His main source of drinking water came from the river,” the younger Mr. Salvador said.

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Two older women and a teenager peer into large squarish buckets containing mud, reeds and water.

From left, Fructosa Cruz, Jhasuri Cruz and Santa Cruz examine a project in Canrey Chico that uses native plants to improve the local water quality. “We always demand that the river be cleaned,” Fructosa said. “It’s sad what has happened to the river. Life is sad.”

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An overhead view looking down on a zigzag of canals that have turned brown and mossy with disuse.

An overhead view of the bioremediation project.

The two other watersheds that flow into the city were already turning acidic. EPS Chavin, the utility company that provides water for Huaraz, stopped drawing on one of them in 2006 after manganese, a metal that can be toxic to the nervous system, was detected. But with water in shorter supply, the company plans to build a $10 million treatment plant to process acidified waters with heavy metals.

“It’s more complicated to treat, and more expensive,” said María Marchena, a manager at the company. “But the situation is very critical and will become more so every year.”

By 2030, Inaigem anticipates that glaciers in the Cordillera Blanca below 16,000 feet will have disappeared. “That is going to leave a large surface of minerals exposed,” Ms. Montano said.

Video https://vp.nyt.com/video/2024/11/14/129 ... _1080p.mp4

Lake Palcacocha, which has maintained an alkaline pH of around 7.5, but scientists expect it to turn increasingly acidic as leaching expands.CreditCredit...

One peak, Pastoruri, has already shed so much of its ice that it no longer qualifies as a glacier. Tourists once flocked to the mountain to ski, camp and climb its slopes. Today, meltwater gathers there in reddish pools that resemble open wounds.

Ms. Moreno said she longed for the abundance of her youth, when trout could be plucked from the river, thick snow and ice covered the peaks, springs gushed from the mountainside and grasses for grazing livestock grew waist-high.

Sometimes, she said, she thinks that the evangelical Christians who have spoken to her about the end of the world may be right. “They say the glaciers will disappear, and the rivers will run red,” she said. “That’s coming true.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/19/scie ... ution.html