Mail & Guardian
Mail & Guardian
Jonathan Watts

Creator

Jonathan Watts

Jonathan Watts works from Bristol, England. Copywriter, Classics MA and author. Bristol, books, gigs, dogs. Jonathan Watts has over 100 followers on Twitter.

Always colourful: A protest against Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.

Great party, shame about the legacy

Despite a frightening list of problems there is confidence that Rio will be ready for the Olympic Games – but long-term benefits are in doubt.

Nation divided: Raucous ­opposition supporters watch the impeachment vote taking place in the lower house on big screens.

Rousseff’s supporters play for time

The beleagured Workers’ Party believes people will tire quickly of the opposition leaders.

Dilma Rousseff: Brazilian congress votes to impeach president

Government concedes after lower house overwhelmingly backs move to remove Rousseff, who now faces vote in senate.

Coal, a key fuel for electricity production, is a major producer of carbon dioxide emissions, a major driver of global warming. (Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters)

Brazil’s games are in a ‘bad phase’

Six months before Rio de Janeiro hosts the next Olympics, the country is struggling with a Zika epidemic and political and economic woes

Takashi Morita

Bomb victims seek a world with no nukes

Survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks are campaigning to halt Brazil’s nuclear plans.

Peru hostages rescued after 25 years

The 13 adults and 26 children had been used as slaves in remote mountain communities.

Maradona echoes approval for the arrests of Fifa’s ‘old bastards!’

From Diego Maradona’s delight to the denials of regional football bosses, Latin America has lapped up the unfolding Fifa corruption scandal.

Unlike South Africa

Child (10) denied an abortion

“The first step that should be taken in pregnancies of girls under 13 should be an abortion,” say activists.

Odds stacked against Brazil leader

Dilma Rousseff goes into her second term facing greater challenges than her first time around.

Will Brazilians say Neves again?

The left has run the country since 2003, but now is presented with a very real threat from the conservative elite.

Flames of fury: While fans cheer inside stadiums

People’s cup but politician’s stage

The 2014 World Cup has seen unprecedented levels of outrage and debate over poverty, Fifa, commercialism … and occasionally football.

Joaquim Chissano helped to resolve Madagascar’s political impasse.

Brazil’s ‘chainsaw queen’ has axe to grind

The rise of powerful politician Katia Abreu, who disregards green issues, has alarmed Brazilian environmentalists.

The theme of a modern-day Robin Hood has resonated with international audiences who are increasingly cynical and angry about banks and the entire economic order they represent.

Colombia bites the hands that feed

The bid by aggrieved farmers to starve out the state has been met with tanks and troops ahead of the presidential election on May 25.

Opposition demonstrators clash with the Venezuelan police in Caracas. The opposition wants certain conditions to be met before accepting the offer of President Nicolas Maduro to talk.

Less Lenin for Maduro, and more Lennon

Venezuela’s leader Nicolás Maduro says he’d join the protests he is trying to suppress, were they not right-wing ploys.

Tens of thousands join teachers’ protest in Rio

This week’s teachers march in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro has drawn the biggest turnout since the wave of protests during the Confederations Cup in June.

Pope’s innocence questioned

The church and Pope Francis have been accused of complicit silence during Argentina’s ‘dirty war’.

Brics countries

Brazilian soap opera beats politics

The last episode of Avenida Brasil was a melodrama

Ecuadorean villagers control 70 000 hectares of one of the most biologically diverse areas in the world.

Poor Amazonians cursed with riches

A petro-giant is sweet-talking Amazonian villagers blessed with land that has resources worth billions. Jonathan Watts reports.

Members of Brazil’s Pataxo people claim nothing is being done about the theft of their land by farmers and the loss of their water through the damming of rivers upstream.

Big ideas at sideshow to Rio+20

Only one thing unites those at the People’s Summit — unhappiness over the status quo, writes Jonathan Watts.

A landmark report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services in May last year painted a bleak picture of our planet’s health.

Alarm bells ring over activist death toll

A new Global Witness report has revealed that environmental activists were killed at the rate of more than two a week in 2011.