'Uncle Covid', a man who survived interment at a secret mass-burial site in Iquitos, has become a macabre symbol of the disaster that engulfed the Peruvian Amazonian city of Iquitos, where 70 per cent of the inhabitants had been infected with Covid-19 by July 2020. A decrepit health system, an acute lack of medical oxygen, poverty, the corruption of local elites and the power of criminal gangs conspired to aggravate this catastrophe.
A new project, ‘Archiving Real-Time Literary Responses to the Covid-19 in Latin America’, is housed at the University of Birmingham. aims to document some of this literary production in this exceptional period of global history. It will make a body of viral literature in Latin America available through open access for future researchers and the wider public before it is lost.
Chinese companies are behind rapid expansion of gold mining in the Mayaya region of Bolivia, and are invading the Madidi National Park. Bolivian journalist and LAB correspondent Sergio Mendoza travelled by canoe down the Beni and Quendeque rivers, witnessing how the illegal mining activity is hidden by Bolivian mining cooperatives and supported or permitted by the government.
A wave of protest paralysed Ecuador, with roads blockaded and food running short in some areas. The protests were led by indigenous organizations, but backed by students and trade unions. After various authoritarian actions and threats, Lasso has been forced to conciliate and the protests have subsided for now.
Covid-19 has caused untold damage in Latin America. The region accounts for almost a third of Covid-19 deaths despite making up less than 10 percent of the world’s population. Many of the region’s economies also suffered disproportionately when compared to the rest of the world. While global production had contracted by approximately three per cent […]