Monthly Archives: April 2021

Human Rights Are Under Threat in Peru’s Election The presidential runoff pits a hard right dictator’s daughter against a dissident union leader with an old school Soviet agenda. Both dislike the free press, LGBT and gender rights.

Human Rights Are Under Threat in Peru’s Election The presidential runoff pits a hard right dictator’s daughter against a dissident union leader with an old school Soviet agenda. Both dislike the free press, LGBT and gender rights.
  • April 28, 2021
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LIMA, Peru — Peru’s next president is expected to be a socially conservative authoritarian with ambitions to clamp down on the media and roll back protections for gender rights. The only question remaining for voters in the June 6 runoff is whether their new head-of-government will be hard left or hard right. Dark horse leftist Pedro Castillo, a provincial primary school teacher and dissident union leader who ran on a Soviet-style policy platform, beat 17 other candidates in the surprise first round result earlier this month. He promised to abolish the constitutional court,…Read more …

Far-Left primary school teacher vowing to nationalise all mines pitted against heir to homicidal family dynasty in election no-one wants Peruvian voters have been left in despair at being forced to choose from two deeply unpopular and politically extreme candidates

Far-Left primary school teacher vowing to nationalise all mines pitted against heir to homicidal family dynasty in election no-one wants Peruvian voters have been left in despair at being forced to choose from two deeply unpopular and politically extreme candidates
  • April 17, 2021
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Fanny Cornejo is one of Peru’s more fortunate voters. Unlike most of her compatriots, she has been able to decide which of the two politically extreme and deeply unpopular presidential candidates who emerged from Sunday’s general election, she will back in the June 6 runoff. “Castillo will not have a majority in Congress. He will have his hands tied and won’t be able to implement his crazy ideas,” says the biologist, 37, from Lima, explaining why she will vote for Pedro Castillo, the leftist dark horse who, to widespread surprise, beat 17 other…Read more …

Politically weary Peruvians to elect new president and Congress The April 11 vote comes as Peru is grappling with a coronavirus surge and years of political scandals.

Politically weary Peruvians to elect new president and Congress The April 11 vote comes as Peru is grappling with a coronavirus surge and years of political scandals.
  • April 9, 2021
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Lima, Peru – Weary Peruvians heading to the polls this Sunday face an unlikely conundrum – an overwhelming majority of them will have rejected whomever they elect as their new president. That is the inevitable outcome of a five-way statistical tie between the leading presidential candidates, all of whom face unprecedentedly low support in a country devastated by the coronavirus pandemic and five years of political scandals. Any of the five could make it to an inevitable June 6 runoff, required when no candidate takes more than 50 percent of the vote. With the…Read more …

COVID Is Threatening the World’s Rarest Indigenous Languages From the Amazon to Siberia, COVID-19 is killing off tribal elders who are the last speakers of tongues that help us better understand how our brains work.

COVID Is Threatening the World’s Rarest Indigenous Languages From the Amazon to Siberia, COVID-19 is killing off tribal elders who are the last speakers of tongues that help us better understand how our brains work.
  • April 8, 2021
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LIMA, Peru — Emilio Estrella was a linguistic treasure trove, possibly the only ageing speaker of Cacataibo, an endangered indigenous language in the Peruvian Amazon, still sharp enough to teach the purest, most traditional version of the tongue to an outsider. After an odyssey last November that took him and his family out of the jungle to the nearest town in search of medical care, Estrella, aged 90 (according to his government ID although no one really knows when he was born), died from suspected COVID-19. “He was like a father to me,”…Read more …