About a month ago, CCTV images of a woman in a shopping mall carrying off a toddler who was not her own were broadcast on Mexico’s most popular television news show, introduced by the anchor as a rare chance to see child-stealing in action. And that was about that. A few days later, an English six-year-old called Madeleine McCann went missing in Portugal — and in Britain the media hurricane is still swirling.
Amid the chaos of Guatemala City’s evening rush hour, a grieving father sits motionless on a concrete bench beside a main road. On New Year’s Day his seven-year-old daughter was killed. She had been sent out to buy a nappy for her baby brother but never arrived home — hours later her decapitated body was found in one of the deep gullies that run through the capital’s slums.
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/ 19 February 2007
Assaults on police stations killing seven, a chopped-up body discarded in rubbish bags, three execution-style murders and foreign tourists grazed by bullets: it was a nasty week in the resort city of Acapulco, defying a much flaunted crackdown on drug related violence and delivering a serious blow to Mexico’s tourism industry.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador rails against ”the privileged” in a staccato voice that softens as he turns to the virtues of ”the poor” and a cheeky grin accompanies the thumbs up to go with his latest slogan: ”Smile, we are going to win.” Depending on who you talk to, the presidential candidate is the great hope of the downtrodden, a messianic danger to stability, or a crafty pragmatist.
From a distance the object bobbing in the bay looked like a coconut or a buoy, but when it was washed up on the beach it proved to be a human head. ”It wasn’t pretty,” said Jose Vargas, who joined the crowd that had gathered. He was shocked but not surprised by the sight. ”This kind of thing happens in Acapulco these days.”
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/ 25 January 2006
Miguel Caballero likes to shoot people whenever he has an audience and a volunteer. ”Take a deep breath and let the air out after the shot,” he said to one recent target. ”You may get a bit of a bruise.” The range was point-blank, the bang loud and the smell of burned powder strong, but the human bullseye didn’t flinch. The bullet was embedded in an internal protective panel of his brand-new suede jacket.
Under the punishing rays of summer the shirtless Eladio Garcia throws his fishing nets over a mangrove-ringed lagoon in the isolated Costa Chica region on Mexico’s Pacific coast. Breaking off from his daily ritual, he recalls the stories his grandparents used to tell him about how his ancestors arrived in the area on a ship that sank off the coast.
Marilu Torres’s knees hurt when they swell, her varicose veins are a constant bother and cataracts are slowly stealing her vision. Even so, the 72-year-old hits the streets looking for work every day. ”This year is my golden anniversary as a sex worker,” laughed Torres, who became a prostitute as a young widow with no other means of feeding her children.
The Peruvian government has come up with an emergency plan to preserve the mountain-top Inca citadel Machu Picchu and the surrounding national park from the ravages of too many tourists and possible landslides. The ,5-million plan is to be studied by Unesco and the World Bank at a three-day meeting in Lima beginning on Saturday.
Bolivia’s embattled President Carlos Mesa this week called for early elections to replace him, amid protests against his government’s economic policies. In a move aimed at ending a wave of street protests that have almost crippled the country, Mesa said he would ask Congress to approve a poll in August, two years before the official end of his term. Bolivia is a political time bomb that, analysts say, could explode at any moment.