While those of us from Australia and New Zealand might be starting to relax as restrictions ease, the pandemic is actually growing at an increasing rate worldwide.
Life is resuming in Uruguay, where some students returned to school in April and the remainder will go back in on June 29.
Daniel Rodrigues/adhoc/AFP via Getty Images)
Pandemic devastation surrounds it on all sides, but tiny Uruguay has COVID-19 under control – just the latest win for a country that’s always stood out.
Protesters in São Paulo declare ‘Black Lives Matter’ at a June 7 protest spurred by both U.S. anti-racist protests and the coronavirus’s heavy toll on black Brazilians.
Marcello Zambrana/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
In Brazil, black COVID-19 patients are dying at higher rates than white patients. Worse housing quality, working conditions and health care help to explain the pandemic’s racially disparate toll.
A Chilean soldier stands guard at a ransacked supermarket in Santiago, October 2019.
Marcelo Hernandez/Getty Images
Latin American history shows that sending out troops to quell unrest is a perilous move even in strong democracies. Usually, protesters die. Sometimes, the end result is authoritarianism rule.
A mass grave for COVID-19 victims in Brazil, which has more total cases than anywhere else in Latin America, Manaus, April 2020.
Chico Batata via Getty Images
In a Latin American country hard hit by COVID-19, an agricultural collective is stepping in to help where government won’t, mounting an astonishing national pandemic response.
Indigenous Shipibo people using facial masks made of leaves in the province of Uyacali, Peru.
AIDESEP / EPA
Dead bodies left at home and in streets. Quarantined people facing hunger. Political turmoil. Ecuador’s coronavirus outbreak is a grim forecast of what may await poorer countries when COVID-19 hits.
Out and about: Jair Bolsanaro waves to supporters during a rally in Brasilia on April 19.
Joedson Alves/EPA
Jair Bolsonaro has ignored and openly challenged the advice of health authorities, sacked his health minister and tried to use the pandemic for political gain.
Antonio, from the Yanomami village of Watoriki, photographed in November 1992. After contact with Brazilian society in the 1970s, more than half the Yanomami population died from infectious diseases.
William Milliken
There are telling parallels between the current pandemic and those that decimated indigenous populations in the post-Columbian era in the Amazon.
He may be praying, but so far the Pope has declined to intervene in Venezuela’s crisis to aid a unified coronavirus response.
LUIS ACOSTA/AFP via Getty Images
If anyone can convince the Maduro government and the Venezuelan opposition to come together to fight COVID-19, it’s the Pope. But the Church’s power to negotiate an emergency deal is limited.
Colombian soldiers patrol the streets of Bogota on March 30, 2020, during a mandatory national quarantine.
GUILLERMO MUNOZ/AFP via Getty Images
A nationally mandated quarantine isn’t keeping Colombia’s armed groups at home. Despite calls for a ceasefire, they are still killing activists, threatening humanitarian workers and seizing aid.
Puerto San Julián, in modern-day Argentina, where Ferdinand Magellan arrived on March 31, 1520.
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Ferdinand Magellan coined the fantasy-inspired term “Patagonians” to describe the indigenous peoples he met. It gave rise to the region’s name.
South America’s bi-oceanic highway, which will stretch from the Pacific to the Atlantic – cutting right through Paraguay – is scheduled for completion in 2022.
Joel Correia
Mennonites settled in Paraguay’s arid Chaco forest a century ago, fleeing religious persecution. Their agricultural success is now driving deforestation, social change and rapid development.
More than 2,000 women were processed through demobilization camps in Colombia as the government transitions disarmed FARC guerrillas back into civilian life, Jan. 18, 2017.
Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images
Small business grants are supposed to help Colombia’s disarmed FARC fighters start new lives as entrepreneurs. But interviews with 12 female ex-insurgents suggests the government plan may fail women.
The ‘Christ of the Pacific’ statue in Lima has caused controversy in Peru because of its financing by a graft-tainted Brazilian construction company. Both religion and corruption loomed large in Peru’s 2020 legislative elections.
CRIS BOURONCLE/AFP via Getty Images
After a bribery scandal that took down four presidents and led Congress to dissolve, some Peruvians are putting their faith in an austere religion called the Israelites of the New Universal Pact.
Obama nungara in a garden in France.
Photo by Pierre Gros
The predatory flatworm Obama nungara travelled in potted plants from Argentina to Europe, where it’s distrupting soil ecosystems. Now, citizen-scientists are helping map their distribution.
Guanacos eke out a harsh existence in the mountains of central Chile.
Solange Vargas
Negro Matapacos became famous in Chile in 2011 for joining student protests. His image has now popped up around the world.
A demonstrator protesting new austerity measures in Ecuador confronts armed police officers during clashes in Quito, Ecuador, Oct. 11, 2019.
AP Photo/Dolores Ochoa
Visiting Scholar, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University; Director of Studies at the Changing Character of War Centre, and Senior Research Fellow, Dept. of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford
Co-Director, Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention, and Professor of Public Administration, Binghamton University, State University of New York