Coronavirus is serving Latin American organised crime well.
Protesters cross the Brooklyn Bridge on June 19, 2020 – Juneteenth – in the United States’ third straight week of protest.
Pablo Monsalve / VIEWpress via Getty Images
Unrest in the US looks familiar to Latin Americans, who are accustomed to resisting undemocratic governments – and to their protest movements being met with violent suppression.
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.
Venezuelans try to enter Colombia at the closed Simon Bolivar international bridge borders crossing, March 16, 2020. Normally, 40,000 Venezuelans come into Colombia every day.
Schneyder Mendoza/AFP via Getty Images)
The coronavirus-related closure of the Colombian border hasn’t stopped desperate Venezuelans from entering – but it has made the trip more dangerous.
Ladijane Sofia da Concecão, one of millions of unemployed housekeepers in Brazil, accepts a food donation from a friend in São Paulo, May 7, 2020.
Alexandre Schneider/Getty Images
Maids were among Brazil’s earliest COVID-19 victims, infected by employers who had been to Italy. Now 39% of Brazilian ‘domésticas’ have been let go, most without severance or sick leave.
Food and supplies, labelled with the name and image of Mexican narco Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, is distributed during the coronavirus pandemic in Guadalajara.
Francisco Guasco/EPA
Social bandits have a long history in Latin America.
Even before COVID-19, El Salvador’s prisons were contagious disease hotspots. Here, MS-13 gang members with tuberculosis at Chalatenango prison, March 29, 2019.
Marvin Recinos/AFP via Getty Images
El Salvador is arresting thousands of people for violating its COVID-19 quarantine, further packing a ‘hellish’ penal system once described as a ‘petri dish’ for infectious disease.
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.
Valley of the Dawn members celebrate ‘Day of the Indoctrinator’ at their temple complex in Brazil on May 1. This year’s event is postponed due to coronavirus.
Márcia Alves
Brazil’s Valley of the Dawn faith is often dismissed as a cult. But many of the group’s fantastical rituals are a recognizable reaction to this harsh world of inequality, loneliness and pandemics.
Coffins await burial at the Jardines de Esperanza cemetery in Guayaquil, Ecuador, April 10, 2020.
Eduardo Maquilon/Getty Images
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.
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
The way richer nations respond to the coronavirus crash will have significant economic ramifications for countries dependent on remittances.
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.
Health workers test for COVID-19 in Asuncion, Paraguay.
Nathalia Aguilar/EPA
A group of population experts have called on governments in Latin American and the Caribbean to urgently ramp up testing for COVID-19 before it’s too late.
Undocumented migrants climb on a train known as ‘La Bestia’ in Las Patronas town, Veracruz state, Mexico, Aug. 9, 2018, to travel through Mexico and reach the U.S.
Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP via Getty Images
The US may be in sight from the border towns of Sonora, Mexico, but the trip is far from over. Cartels control the desert territory that divides the two countries – and no one gets through for free.
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.
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