-
-
The Landfill Harmonic
In the huge rubbish dump in the barrio of Cateura, on the south side of Asunción, Paraguayan youngsters who sort through the capital’s rubbish have found the means to make music. The orchestra known locally as Melodias de la Basura or Los Reciclados, and in English as the Landfill Harmonic, was started in 2006 by…
-
Book Review: The Island that Dared: Journeys in Cuba by Dervla Murphy
Dervla Murphy has always been a remarkable traveller but becomes even more notable as she continues her intrepid walks (if no longer so many bike rides) well into her ‘third age’. This book of her journeys in Cuba, undertaken when she was in her mid-seventies, is full of excursions on foot for several days along…
-
School of the Assassins
On Friday, thousands of protesters will converge on Fort Benning, Georgia, home to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Co-operation (WHINSEC). It’s had this title since 2001, but when it was set up in Panama in 1946 it was the School of the Americas. In 66 years it has trained 64,000 soldiers from Latin America in…
-
Mothers of the disappeared
Three weeks ago a remarkable caravan of vehicles arrived at the Mexican town of Reynosa, just across the border from Hidalgo, Texas. It left the northern border of Nicaragua on 12 October, carrying the relatives of migrants who made the journey north to cross illegally into the United States, but vanished along the way. The…
-
Imagine a place…
Imagine a place with the world’s highest homicide rate, where crimes are committed with impunity, a few powerful families call the shots, poor people get driven off land they have been awarded and prisons burn down. Sounds like the Wild West? Add in a couple more ingredients – a recent military coup and airstrips in…
-
In the red
Yesterday we went into the red. According to the Global Footprint Network, between 1 January and 22 August mankind used up a year’s worth of the earth’s resources. Earth Overshoot Day came sooner this year than ever before. Ten years ago it fell on 3 October, and as recently as the 1970s we were still living within…
-
-
-
Honduras, three years on
It’s three years since the coup in Honduras that sent President Manuel Zelaya into exile in his pyjamas. Porfirio Lobo, who took over as president in January 2010 following highly questionable elections, is more than halfway through his term. The only grounds for optimism are offered by the resistance movement that sprang up after the…