Pablo Nogueira
Until recently the Awá-Guajá tribe were one of the last indigenous peoples in Brazil to lead a fully nomadic life, surviving through hunting and gathering. There may be about 60 uncontacted Awá-Guajá still at large in a protected area of the rainforest, but most of the other 300 live in three reservations, where they are learning to adapt to village life and practise agriculture—with difficulty.
Brazil has an indigenous population of 460,000. They are the responsibility of FUNAI—the National Indian Foundation— which demarcates and protects their land, most of which is in the Amazon, and supports villages from a series of nearby “posts.” These pictures were taken at Juriti post in the northern state of Maranhao, next to a village that is home to 37 Awá-Guajá. Juriti’s administrator, Patrilino Viana, helps them grow crops, especially the starchy root vegetable manioc, or cassava. But it’s an uphill battle. Many families disappear for days back into the forest, surviving on fruit and hunting monkey, tapir and wild birds with rifles or bows and arrows.
The Awá-Guajá traditionally lived in small communities of up to 30, avoiding stronger tribes and white men, who in the past often killed them. In the 1970s the construction of a railroad devastated their territory. FUNAI tried to gather together the native population and settle them near the posts, but more than two thirds of the Awá-Guajá died, victims of malaria and flu.
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William Gill
Discuss this article at First Drafts, the Prospect blog.
Elections in Argentina can be strange affairs, and the mid-term vote for Congress on 28th June was no exception. But this time the event acquired a particularly bizarre twist: for the first time anywhere in the world, the result of an election was influenced, and perhaps decided, by a reality TV show.
It’s said that if you put three Argentines in a room, you get five opinions. In the city of Buenos Aires alone, 19 parties and 8 coalitions (formed by 33 other parties) fought 13 seats in congress. This inability to seek common ground, always part of the national ethos, was magnified by the catastrophic collapse of the economy in 2001, which nearly dragged the political system into its whirlpool. “Que se vayan todos!” (Politicians should all go!) was the angry chant of demonstrators in city streets.
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Anastasia Moloney
To discuss this article visit First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
With the G20 spectacle behind us, the next big gathering of world leaders scheduled this month is the 5th Summit of the Americas. Heads of states from 34 nations from Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada and the US, will gather in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago’s colonial capital between the 17th and 19th April. It will be the first time President Obama steps foot in Latin America; an ideal opportunity to kick-start a new approach in US foreign policy in the region. And in Washington, there are high hopes pinned on the increasingly assertive regional leadership of Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva. Lula is the key player who can help open the doors to a new era in Washington’s relationship with Latin America—less Chavez-and-Bush-style aggression, and more mutually beneficial cooperation.
Ahead of the summit, Obama has begun to tentatively nurture a new relationship with Brazil. In March, Lula, a former shoe shiner and metal worker, was the first Latin American leader to be invited to the White House since Obama took office, signaling the end of the “special relationship” that Colombia’s conservative President Álvaro Uribe enjoyed with the US during the Bush era. And with Brazil’s other main regional rivals—Venezuela, Mexico and Argentina—consumed with domestic problems, the timing couldn’t be better for Lula to assert his country’s regional leadership. While Mexico grapples with drug violence, Venezuela suffers double-digit inflation and Argentina struggles to keep its economy afloat, Brazil is emerging as the natural regional leader. It has enjoyed steady economic growth (an average of nearly 4 per cent) for the past 5 years, driven largely by the global commodities boom. The tenth largest economy in the world, Brazil is the leading producer of sugar cane-based biofuels, and its newly discovered offshore oil reserves which could propel it to a top ten oil exporter by 2011. It is already overshadowing the influence of oil-rich Venezuela.
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Michael Reid
Fortunately it turned out to be mere melodrama, not tragedy. After Colombia’s armed forces killed a leader of the Farc guerrillas by bombing a camp just across the border inside Ecuador on 1st March, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez ordered troops and tanks to his own border with Colombia and threatened to unleash his newly acquired Sukhoi fighter-bombers. Ecuador, Venezuela and Nicaragua all broke off diplomatic relations with Colombia—only to promise to restore them days later amid bearhugs and handshakes all round at a Latin American regional summit in Santo Domingo, Ecuador.
On the face of things this episode showed the extent to which Colombia’s stern president, Álvaro Uribe, has been isolated in the Americas. George W Bush was the only leader to express unequivocal support for a government to which he gives aid of around $700m a year. Led by Brazil and Chile, the Organisation of American States scolded Colombia for its violation of Ecuador’s sovereignty. Yet look more closely, and a more important dynamic is at work in Latin America. It is Chávez who is fast losing ground in the region. Other governments ignored him even as they expressed their solidarity with Ecuador’s leftist president, Rafael Correa. Chávez’s intemperate mobilisation in response to a squabble that did not involve his country seemed to betray a growing desperation.
Chávez has been fortunate to rule Venezuela during an oil boom unrivalled since the 1970s. On his watch, government oil revenues have more than tripled. Thanks to oil, Venezuela’s GDP grew at double-digit rates between 2003 and 2006. Chávez has spent part of his windfall on social programmes known as misiones: these include a government-run supermarket chain called Mercal, a literacy programme and a scheme under which Cuban doctors provide GP services in poor barrios. He has also used his oil wealth to try to buy influence abroad—most visibly in Cuba. Venezuelan aid allowed Fidel Castro to roll back some of the market-based reforms he was forced to adopt in the 1990s after the collapse of his Soviet sponsor.
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William Gill
Argentina’s recently elected president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, was due to visit London this week for the Progressive Governance conference. She was forced to cancel her trip owing to a national strike by Argentinian farmers, who are outraged by a series of new taxes. This has led to food shortages, road blockages and anti-government demonstrations—not the kind of image Kirchner wanted to project abroad.
Argentina has been a constitutional democracy ever since the fall of the last military junta in 1983. The experience has not been successful. Ever since becoming a republic in 1853, the country has had a fraught relationship with the notion of a constitution, guaranteed rights, separation of powers, press freedom and the role of the opposition. Democracy in Argentina, unlike its neighbours Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, grows weaker with every president because, as with the western diet adopted by suddenly wealthy Asian nations, the body politic is not suited to it. Other than the populist Peronist movement, no political party has an effective national presence. The country has for all intents and purposes become a one-party state, with the inevitable financial corruption and authoritarianism.
When Cristina’s husband Néstor was inaugurated as Argentina’s president in 2003, nobody imagined that his wife would succeed him. But then many people thought there would be no successor. The economic collapse of 2001 had brought the country close to disintegration. Néstor Kirchner became president only because none of the bigger figures in the Peronist party wanted the job, which was seen as a political tombstone. As governor of Santa Cruz (a Patagonian province larger than Britain but with only 200,000 inhabitants) between 1991 and 2003, Kirchner was an effective administrator and an authoritarian leader. As president of Argentina, he applied the same tactics to a country of 40m. Arguing that the fallout from the financial crisis demanded strong leadership, Kirchner asked congress to extend the extraordinary powers that were granted to his predecessor, Eduardo Duhalde, after Argentina defaulted on its foreign debt. Two years ago, he asked for those powers to be made permanent, and this was granted. They removed most of the levers the legislature had over the executive, including approval of the national budget and control of provincial funds.
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Philip Oltermann
The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer
(Picador, £16.99)
The death of Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño in 2003 was not premature in the way rock-star deaths are premature, but for those familiar with his life and work, it was tragic. Born in Santiago in 1953, Bolaño moved to Mexico in 1968 with his parents, and was soon moving in Trotskyite poet-revolutionary circles. Returning to Santiago in the summer of 1973, Bolaño witnessed the military coup led by Augusto Pinochet on 11th September, and ended up in prison. He managed to escape by sheer luck—one of the guards recognised him as a childhood friend—and fled from his homeland, first to Mexico, later to Spain.
From the 1970s to the early 1990s, Bolaño wrote poetry and was extremely poor. In 1993 he published his first novel, La Pista del Hielo (The Ice Rink), and in 1998 his fourth, Los Detectives Salvajes (The Savage Detectives), which won him the prestigious Herralde and Rómulo Gallegos prizes and has now finally been translated into English. His death, by liver failure in a hospital in Blanes near Barcelona, came at the height of his career, as he was finishing off his 1,100-page magnum opus 2666.
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Bella Thomas
When Javier heard the news on the radio last July, his first reaction was to go out and buy 15 packets of cigarettes, in case any ensuing tension lead to scarcities in the city. Then he returned to his flat to wait and to watch. He stayed inside for several days. Many others did the same. Fidel Castro had handed over power to his brother, Raúl. It should have been momentous. There were rumours of further political change, there was speculation that the comandante en jefe was actually dead, there was talk of jubilation in Miami, but all was quiet on the streets of Havana.
The subsequent months have been like a continuous Sunday evening, says Javier: quiet, expectant, but laced with an underlying anxiety. “Nothing really has happened, nothing really has changed.” He looks at me knowingly. We rock to and fro on his rocking chairs and ease back into our old ways. “Es igual, Bella, es exactamente igual.” It’s exactly the same as it was.
In spite of his intestinal illness, Fidel Castro has stage-managed yet another brilliant manoeuvre to ensure the survival of his 48-year-old regime—to act out a rehearsal for his eventual death, to hand power to his younger brother Raúl, and to be there to witness the consequences. Some have described it as an ensayo of what might happen: an essay, a trial death, almost a magic realist death in which the ambiguity of a living death paralyses those left behind. It is a way, too, for Fidel to see how his influence may be perpetuated after he steps aside.
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Aarathi Prasad
Two hundred years ago, the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act was passed. British captains caught continuing the trade were fined £100 for every slave found aboard their ships. It was not a particularly effective piece of legislation: many slavers who found themselves under a naval frigate’s guns found it more economical simply to throw their cargo overboard. But even the risk of that wasn’t high—after 1807 at least 82,000 slaves left the coast of Africa and most of those made it to the Caribbean. As its name suggests, the act didn’t abolish the owning of slaves, merely their trade. It would take another act, 27 years later, to initiate emancipation by making slavery illegal. All this is well known. And yet the act certainly did mark the beginning of the end for African slavery. As such, it is right that we remember it. In doing so, however, we should not forget that in hastening the demise of one form of slavery, the act gave birth to another.
Emancipation caused an acute labour shortage on plantations throughout the British colonies—unsurprisingly, ex-slaves showed little inclination to work for their former masters. A new labour force was required, and one was found—in Asia. Between 1834 and 1917, 2.5m Indians and thousands of Chinese were used to replace slave labour in the West Indies, South America, Mauritius, Fiji, South Africa, east Africa and the Seychelles. These labourers were not slaves but rather “indentured”; that is, they were contracted to work on the plantations for a certain number of years, typically five, after which they could stay and farm independently, or else return home, their fares paid.
It seemed like a civilised solution to a pressing economic problem. But it was not. Edolphus Swinton, wife to the captain of the coolie ship The Salsette, recorded in 1859 that 99 per cent of the Indians being transported on that voyage from Calcutta to Trinidad knew neither their destination nor why they were being taken there. It seems many were simply kidnapped by emigration agents scouring the alleys of Calcutta. Herded into detention centres, and thence on to coolie ships, they embarked on a voyage that could take as long as 200 days. They were not shackled, but the conditions under which they were transported were otherwise little better than those of the old African slavers. Confined to the lower deck, they ate, sat and slept in unsanitary conditions; if they died en route—and due to cholera, typhoid, dysentery, measles, venereal diseases, putrid food and lack of milk for infants, around 17 per cent did—their remains were unceremoniously thrown overboard. It was their own “middle passage.”
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Ed Smith
Writing in Wisden in 1986, at the peak of the Caribbean’s cricketing supremacy, David Frith argued that West Indies cricket had inspired the entire Afro-Caribbean people: “In the pre-war depression years, Don Bradman stood for the powers of endurance of the ordinary bloke. His triumphs brought pride and inspiration to the masses of struggling Australians in town and bush… For ten years now Viv Richards has done something similar for the black man.”
In that winter of 1985-86, England had endured a brutal 5-0 defeat on their tour of the Caribbean, having also been “blackwashed” at home in the summer of 1984. An array of brilliant West Indies batsmen—led by Richards—and a seemingly endless battery of fast bowlers had once again blown England away.
Like most cricketing kids who grew up in the 1980s, I came to associate both success and style with the West Indian team. The most terrifying cricketer in the world was Malcolm Marshall, the coolest was Jeffrey Dujon, the best and most iconic was Viv Richards. Even the most passionate England fan knew that the West Indies were playing at a higher level. They were the masters now.
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Nick Pearce
As 2006 came to a close, the president of Argentina, Néstor Kirchner, made a televised address to the nation. Reading closely from his script in a thick, guttural accent, his cross-eyes scanning the pages, Kirchner angrily declared that he would stand firm in the defence of human rights and the rule of law. He would not, he said, be blackmailed by rogue elements into reversing his policy of bringing the torturers and killers of Argentina’s notorious military dictatorship to justice.
Half an hour later, a man was thrown out of a car in northern Buenos Aires. He was Luis Gérez, a 51-year-old construction worker and left-wing activist who had gone missing two days earlier. Gérez had testified that he’d been tortured by a former mayor and police chief of Escobar in the 1970s. Earlier in the year, another witness in the trial against a police chief had gone missing and hadn’t been found. Political kidnapping had returned to Argentina.
The use of the corpse as a political weapon has a long pedigree in Argentina. The country’s most famous daughter, Eva Perón, was embalmed on the night of her death in preparation for display to her millions of followers. But her body disappeared when the military overthrew her husband Juan in 1955, turning up years later in a cemetery in Milan, where the generals had dispatched it, terrified by its symbolic power. To secure its return, left-wing guerrillas kidnapped the corpse of the former military dictator Aramburu, having murdered him for his role in the repression of Perón’s supporters. Both now lie in Recoleta cemetery. Eva’s tomb is now a premier tourist attraction, her body protected by vaults and trapdoors.
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