Monthly Archives: October 2021

Lima, Peru – For Maria Molina, a single mother struggling to take care of two granddaughters, the idea that Peru’s state schools have been providing online learning during the pandemic feels like a bad joke. She can barely afford her 10-gigabyte monthly mobile phone plan, which costs 75 sols ($19). It is the only phone the family has and must be shared by her 17-year-old daughter, who is studying nursing, and two granddaughters, Azumi, eight, and Chenely, 11. “My daughter is the priority. She has to be,” Molina, 56, who works as a freelance…Read more …

LIMA, Peru—After two months as Peru’s president, the responsibilities of leading a country ravaged by corruption and political turmoil were starting to sink in for Pedro Castillo. The country’s currency, the sol, was plummeting, and foreign investment had slowed to a trickle. Peru’s per capita COVID-19 death toll, meanwhile, remained the worst in the world. Castillo—an avowed leftist—was suddenly keen to ditch many of his populist, and potentially costly, campaign promises. When Castillo addressed the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States in Washington last month, the former union leader and rural school teacher…Read more …

Lima, Peru – Ignacio Tacas was 13 when he learned how his family was massacred. The details reached him, piece by piece, over an entire month of fragmentary television and newspaper reports. Members of the Shining Path killed his father, three sisters and brother – aged four to nine – maternal grandparents and two uncles in their remote Andean village, Lucanamarca, on April 3, 1983, while he studied at a state school on Peru’s coast. They were among 69 people, including 18 children, slaughtered in what remains the most infamous of the atrocities committed…Read more …