Monthly Archives: December 2015

A traditional dance in Tupe. Credit: Simeon Tegel  The children sit rapt as Rosalbina Valerio, 77, recounts a traditional fable in her native Jaqaru, a language now so rare that it is spoken by only 580 people in three villages scattered along a precipitous valley in the Andean foothills above Lima. The story, about a pale-skinned demon who turns up for dinner but then attempts to eat his hosts, offers a revealing glimpse into the Jaqaru psyche, and how this indigenous culture has been under siege ever since marauding Spaniards first showed up here…Read more …

 Credit: Simeon Tegel It wasn't until Esperanza Huayama awoke in a ward full of moaning women who were lying two in each bed and saw the stitches in her abdomen that she realized what had happened — she had been sterilized. "We were just innocent country women. They tricked us," she says of a mass sterilization program imposed on hundreds of thousands of poor, often indigenous, women in Peru during the hard-right presidency of Alberto Fujimori. "They treated us like animals." Fujimori is now serving a 25-year jail term for pocketing government funds, directing death squads and…Read more …

Ecuador's national legislature has approved a constitutional amendment that will force President Rafael Correa to sit out the 2017 election but could allow the charismatic leftist to resume his grip on power indefinitely from 2021. The vote on Thursday sparked protests outside the legislature in the capital, Quito, by opponents who regard the abrasive leader as a threat to democracy because of his track record of harassing critics and concentrating power in his own hands. Some of the demonstrators used sticks and stones to attack the police, who dispersed them with tear gas and mounted riot…Read more …