This hardy desert plant lives in the hostile Atacama Desert in Chile by sucking moisture out of passing fog. As water resources become ever more scarce, humans could follow suit.
Nicaragua’s power couple, Vice President Rosario Murillo and husband President Daniel Ortega.
INTI OCON/AFP via Getty Images
Kai M. Thaler, University of California Santa Barbara
The rule of Daniel Ortega has become increasingly authoritarian. Sanctions and repression could destabilize the region and result in increased numbers of refugees.
Reckless policies are to blame for Brazil’s high death toll.
Evaristo Sa/AFP via Getty Image
More than 600,000 Brazilians have died of COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic. A new report says the policies of President Jair Bolsonaro are responsible for around half.
Dawn in Serra do Mar, Brazil.
Carla Nichiata/Shutterstock
For one of Earth’s most biodiverse forests, 21,000 years of natural change pale in comparison to modern, man-made climate breakdown.
On the campaign trail, Pedro Castillo often wore a straw-palm hat typical of Peru’s rural Cajamarca region, where he is from.
Ricardo Moreira/Getty Images
Castillo is a farmer and teacher who has never held national office. Peru is a nation in political turmoil, with the world’s worst COVID-19 death rate. Can this unlikely leader lead it through crisis?
The knowledge generated by scientists must be shared equally worldwide.
Anton Balazh/Shutterstock
We need to guarantee that the benefits of sciences are shared between scientists and the general public, without restriction. Peru and Brazil are leading the way.
A soldier stands guard in front of the Brazilian national flag on Army Day in Sao Paulo, 18 April 2019.
Miguel Schincariol/AFP
We know surprisingly little about the millions of animals, plants and birds that live in the Amazon – here’s how we can understand them better.
With the evidence uncovered by paleontologists, an artist sketched El Bosque Petrificado Piedra Chamana as it might have looked long before humans.
Mariah Slovacek/NPS-GIP
Using remnants of fossilized trees, scientists and an artist figured out what the forest looked like long before humans existed.
A demonstration for peace in Buenaventura, Colombia, where a cartel turf war has left at least 30 people dead since the beginning of this year.
Luis Robayo/AFP via Getty Images
A lethal turf war between drug traffickers has terrorized Buenaventura, Colombia for months. Now protesters are demanding the government’s help to protect people in this mostly Black city.
A deforested piece of land in the Amazon rainforest near Porto Velho, in the state of Rondonia, in northern Brazil, on Aug. 23, 2019.
Carl De SouzaA/FP via Getty Images
Because Brazil’s economic prosperity in the last two decades is increasingly linked to the Amazon’s good health, restoring the country’s economy is a critical first step toward ending deforestation.
Venezuelans wait at the Colombian border to be processed and housed in tents in 2020. All Venezuelans now in Colombia will receive a 10-year residency permit.
Schneyder Mendoza/AFP via Getty Images
Though not a rich country, Colombia is unusually well equipped to handle mass migration because of its own history with political strife and displacement.
Victims of forced sterilizations protest in Lima, Peru, in 2014. Public hearings to uncover this dark chapter of the Fujimori dictatorship began in January.
Erneseto Benavides/AFP via Getty Images
Forced sterilization of Indigenous women was a covert part of ‘family planning’ under Fujimori. Over 200,000 Peruvians underwent tubal ligations between 1996 and 2001 – many without their consent.
Cash crop: Peruvian farmers looking over a field of coca seedlings.
Thomas Grisaffi
A race-changing scandal raises suspicion about the motivations of 4,580 newly elected city council members and mayors who only recently began to identify as Black.
The head of a monumental stone statue from Tiwanaku, Bolivia.
(Shutterstock)
Polished metal monoliths recently appeared in remote locations around the world. In some ways, they’re not unusual — standing stones have been important in many historical cultures of the world.
Stratford Hall in Westmoreland, Virginia, where enslaved cook and chocolatier Caesar lived and worked in the kitchen.
Wikipedia
There’s a bittersweet history to chocolate in America. At one plantation museum in Virginia, the story of enslaved chocolatier Caesar shows the oppression that lay behind the elite’s culinary treat.
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