Showing posts tagged Peru
The Doe Run smelting plant.
Miners in Corquijilca Pasco on lunch break. 2,000 work at this mine. It is co-owned by BuenaVentura with another mining company called El Brocal.
Close up of a mountain, which has been dissolved by acid rain from the smelting plant in La Oroya. Images by Jason Houston. Peru, 2015.
Peru’s Conundrum: A Pope’s Environmental Message Divides His People
A business executive sits at her desk, silently reading Pope Francis’ groundbreaking encyclical on climate change and environmental protection.
“It makes me angry,” the executive declares as she finishes. “I see a pessimistic view toward entrepreneurs, investors and economic leaders. I think the Pope is damaging his role in building relations between business, the people and the church.”
The fuming exec is not an American CEO. She is Catholic. She is from Peru and from South America where this pontiff enjoys an approval rating topping 80 percent. But she, like other Peruvian business leaders, can easily separate her admiration for the first Latin American Pope from her disdain for his call to restrain capitalism for the good of the earth.
“I believe he doesn’t have the knowledge to know how to tackle this” complicated topic, says the executive, Elena Conterno, president of the National Society of Fisheries. “If I were his adviser, I’d say, ‘Get out of it.’”
The village of Cocachacra from my hotel balcony. This is the center of town. The green municipal building is center left. Image by Justin Catanoso. Peru, 2015.
Pope’s Environmental Encyclical Arrives in Peru to Mixed Reviews
Cocachacra is the site of one of Peru’s most violent and contentious environmental clashes. For six years, local farmers have battled an international mining company, backed by government license and guns, to a bloody stalemate.
The village is almost entirely Catholic, and the popularity of the first Latin American pope runs high. If ever there were a place to test the influence of Pope Francis’ new, unequivocal call for environmental conservation to slow global warming, it is here in Cocachacra.
But no one is listening. At least not yet.
Read the full story by Pulitzer Center grantee Justin Catanoso for Mongabay.
Shuri, known as Epa, goes back and forth between his tribe and rural communities on the Curanja River in Peru’s Amazon region. Image by Jason Houston. Peru, 2015.
Do the Amazon’s Last Isolated Tribes Have a Future?
HIS name is Shuri, but everyone calls him Epa, which means father in the indigenous Pano language family. His wizened face and bare, gnomish feet are familiar to the villagers who live along the Curanja River, which flows through some of the densest rain forest of Peru’s vast Amazon region.
Most of Epa’s tribe remains deep in the jungle, unclothed, hunting with bows and arrows, picking medicinal plants to ward off illness, and avoiding outsiders. But such isolated peoples can no longer depend on the forest as a refuge. In the past year, throughout the Amazon, they have begun to emerge in settled areas in unpredictable, disturbing and occasionally violent ways, often because of hunger or desperation.
Read the full story by Pulitzer Center grantee Andrew Lawler for The New York Times.
Will a Road through the Rainforest Bring Prosperity or Disaster?
When the Peruvian government created the Alto Purús National Park in 2004 to protect biodiversity and isolated peoples (see main story), Miguel Piovesan, the priest in this frontier town, was outraged. He says the park sealed Puerto Esperanza off from the rest of Peru, leaving its people impoverished and ill, without access to medical care or modern conveniences. “People call the Amazon the lungs of the world,” he says in an interview at his modest rectory close to the town’s quiet landing strip. “But here we have children suffering from tuberculosis.”
In the past, such roads have brought economic gains but also a flood of outsiders and pathogens, alcohol, and material goods, anthropologists say. The proposed road’s only beneficiaries, says one indigenous organization, will be “illegal logging mafias.”.
Read the full feature story by Pulitzer Center grantee Andrew Lawler for Science magazine. See more Amazon stories by Pulitzer grantees here.
Peru: Counting the Invisibles
They don’t know it, but the isolated peoples in Peru’s Amazon are at the center of an international struggle involving multinational corporations, Peruvian ministries and courts, environmental groups, and billions of dollars in oil revenues. The fight also pits anthropologists against their own colleagues.
At the heart of the dispute are the massive oil and gas deposits underneath the rainforest. If researchers can demonstrate the existence of isolated peoples in a particular area, then it can be a candidate for a government reserve that can restrict—though not necessarily halt—development.
The stakes for the future of both Peru’s isolated tribes as well as the country’s growing economy are huge.
But there is a Catch 22. Anthropologists don’t want to seek out isolated tribes for fear of violating their privacy, and therefore cannot collect direct evidence of their existence.
Read the full Untold Story by Pulitzer Center grantee Andrew Lawler. See more Amazon stories by Pulitzer grantees here.
From Deep in Peru’s Rainforests, Isolated People Emerge
“The figure of the uncontacted native jungle dweller” is a fiction created by environmentalists eager to halt oil and gas development in the Amazon, Peru’s then-President Alan García said in 2007.
As reports of contacts proliferate, however, the reality of at least some isolated tribes has become impossible to ignore. In August 2013, some 100 armed members of the Mashco Piro, an isolated tribe that lives primarily in national parks in eastern Peru, appeared near the community of Monte Salvado and made threatening gestures.
If isolated people do manage to avoid epidemics, the loss of land, and violence by hostile outsiders, they may find little comfort in the struggling villages along the Curanja. These villagers themselves have yet to reap many of the benefits of modern civilization, including electricity, clean water, or employment opportunities. “After initial contact, these people are often left to their fate, struggling to survive, cut off from other groups, begging for food, and with no land to call their own,” Huertas says.
Read the full story by Pulitzer Center grantee Andrew Lawler for Science magazine. See more Amazon stories by Pulitzer grantees here.
An ochre-bellied flycatcher (Mionectes oleagineus) in the hand of a field researcher. Image by Daniel Grossman.
In this project, journalist Dan Grossman looks at what might happen when the present, stable and slowly evolved assemblage of species gets jumbled up? Biologist Gustavo Londoño’s early findings show optimistic results—that Manu’s birds can handily survive much higher temperatures. As a result, they may not migrate uphill even as adjacent species around them do. But Londoño’s research suggests that this strategy might itself threaten these birds with extinction. He is accumulating intriguing evidence suggesting that predator-prey relationships, not physical inability to withstand heat, may partly determine why birds restrict their ranges of altitude.
Read more from the project, Uphill Climb: Amazon Birds Might Survive Warming But They’re Not Out of the Woods
AN AGE OLD PROBLEM
Pulitzer Center student fellow Michelle Ferng, a Johns Hopkins Global Health Scholar, sheds light on an underreported epidemic: “Older adults worldwide suffering from abuse and abandonment, often by those closest to them. The majority of victims remain hidden from public view. Only rarely do extreme cases command attention.”
In her feature story for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health magazine, Michelle writes that “one of the most tragic facets of the coming demographic shift is elder abuse, which can take various forms: physical, psychological/ emotional, financial/material and sexual, as well as abandonment or neglect.”
Examining the crisis in Peru, Michelle documents the cases of several older adults who have been left to fend for themselves. It is a surprising problem that appears to be growing across the region. “In many ways, time is running out,” says Michelle. “Between 2000 and 2050, the proportion of the world’s population over 60 years old is projected to double from about 11 to 22 percent, according to the WHO. One million people turn 60 every month, and 80 percent of these are in the developing world.”
BUYER’S REMORSE IN CRIMEA
It’s not just the Russian flags fluttering from atop public buildings. Everything has changed in Crimea, writes Pulitzer Center grantee Dimiter Kenarov.
“Nearly a year after Putin’s annexation, the Crimean Peninsula—unrecognized as Russian by the vast majority of U.N. countries, and facing severe international isolation—is virtually an island. The place feels sad and forlorn—like an abandoned amusement park. Gone are the bustling days of tourism, of boisterous vacationers. Foreigners have become as rare a sight here as they were during the Soviet era.”
Crimean residents had legitimate complaints about Ukrainian rule when they voted overwhelmingly last March to rejoin Russia, but Moscow, with its supposedly more dynamic economy, has hardly offered a better alternative, reports Dimiter in this dispatch for Foreign Policy.
“Most understood that moving from one country to another would not be easy, but the real hardships still appeared distant and abstract back then, obscured by a patriotic carnival of flags and songs. But with the holidays over, the reality of the new Crimea has reasserted itself. For better or worse, Crimea is Russian now and there is no turning back.”
AN AGE OLD PROBLEM
Pulitzer Center student fellow Michelle Ferng, a Johns Hopkins Global Health Scholar, sheds light on an underreported epidemic: “Older adults worldwide suffering from abuse and abandonment, often by those closest to them. The majority of victims remain hidden from public view. Only rarely do extreme cases command attention.”
In her feature story for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health magazine, Michelle writes that “one of the most tragic facets of the coming demographic shift is elder abuse, which can take various forms: physical, psychological/ emotional, financial/material and sexual, as well as abandonment or neglect.”
Examining the crisis in Peru, Michelle documents the cases of several older adults who have been left to fend for themselves. It is a surprising problem that appears to be growing across the region. “In many ways, time is running out,” says Michelle. “Between 2000 and 2050, the proportion of the world’s population over 60 years old is projected to double from about 11 to 22 percent, according to the WHO. One million people turn 60 every month, and 80 percent of these are in the developing world.”
HOMOPHOBIA IN JAMAICA
Over the years, we’ve supported a number of projects on the problem of homophobia in Jamaica. The work has been highly praised in the U.S., but we also hope that it will have impact in the place where it matters most: Jamaica. For that reason we were surprised and pleased when Pulitzer Center grantee Micah Fink’s documentary “The Abominable Crime” received favorable notice in The Jamaica Gleaner, the country’s oldest newspaper.
Discrimination against the LGBT community in Jamaica is sanctioned by the country’s legal code, endorsed from the pulpits of its churches and deeply embedded in popular culture. Micah’s film follows the story of two Jamaicans, a man and a woman, who were forced to leave Jamaica because of their sexual orientation.
“This is a film that gives voice to gay Jamaicans forced to flee their homeland due to endemic anti-gay violence,” Micah told the newspaper. “I am hoping that people will come to understand the damage that has been done by Jamaica’s culture of homophobia.”
Until next week,
Tom Hundley
Senior Editor
“In my week of covering the summit, where delegates from 196 nations gathered to draft an imperfect accord to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and thus try to slow global warming, I felt too often that the task of literally saving the earth was beyond our reach,” writes Justin Catanoso.
Leaders of nations from all over the world seem to be conflicted about the issue of climate change. Pulitzer Center journalist Justin Catanosos investigates what stance mayors seem to take. Read more on his project, “Peru: Race in the Rainforest.”
“The brick walls are crumbling. The roof leaks. A stale, slightly rotten odor permeates the tattered room. A modest bed, an antique dresser, a wooden table and a few fading portraits stand awkwardly in the repurposed space—once the entrance hall of the single-story house.Waving her trembling fingers, perpetually swollen from years of washing clothes and housecleaning, 76-year-old Josefina Womani Espinoza points at a closed door at the far end of the long, dim passage,” writes Michelle Ferng.
Peru is in the midst of a major demographic shift, causing older adults so suffer. “Peru: Silent Crimes” for Johns Hopkins Public Health from the project, “Peru: An Aging Revolution.”
Peru, along with the rest of Latin America, is experiencing one of the fastest demographic shifts in the world. By 2040, there will be more people over 60 than children under 14.
“Is the country ready?” Michelle Ferng, Pulitzer Center student fellow from the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins, asks while reporting in Peru about the legal, social, and economic challenges of a rapidly aging population.
From left to right: Eduardo Santaya Chamorro (age 47), Eduardo Chamarro Moncada (78), Carmen Leticia Moncada Palacios (age 90), and Maria Chamarro Moncada (age 69).
The family of five, including Eduardo Santaya’s wife (not pictured), represent a post-nuclear family structure in Lima, Peru, where a greater number of older adults are now caring for the oldest-old.
Image and text by Michelle Ferng. Peru, 2014.
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health-Pulitzer Center student fellow Michelle Ferng, reports from Peru on the aging crisis underway.
Peru: An Aging Revolution
Peru, along with the rest of Latin America, is experiencing one of the fastest demographic shifts in the world. By 2040, there will be more people over 60 than children under 14.
“Is the country ready?” Michelle Ferng, Pulitzer Center student fellow from the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins, asks while reporting in Peru about the legal, social, and economic challenges of a rapidly aging population.
Peru, along with the rest of Latin America, is experiencing one of the fastest demographic shifts in the world. By 2040, there will be more people over 60 than children under 14.
“Is the country ready?” Michelle Ferng, Pulitzer Center student fellow from the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins, asks while reporting in Peru about the legal, social, and economic challenges of a rapidly aging population.
