Kelly Hearn is a correspondent to National Geographic News and The Christian Science Monitor. His work has been funded by The Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting and The North American Congress on Latin America. A former UPI reporter, he has published in The Nation, Grist, High Country News, and The Washington Times.
QUILLABAMBA, Peru -- On June 5, in the dense Amazonian slopes of Peru's southern Andes, a group of rainforest natives from the sleepy Machiguenga Indian village of Andioshiari dug up a natural gas pipeline and threatened to explode it. The "social action" was part of an effort to force Peru's Congress to roll back a set of land reforms, instituted through executive order by Peruvian President Alan Garcia. more
Recent news reports indicate the Venezuelan government is pushing a plan to make weekly Marxism courses mandatory.
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By six oclock, Hugo Chavez's Argentine anti-Bush rally was pounding with some 32,000 drum-banging, flag-waving leftists. more
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina -- In South America's Southern Cone, "Dirty War" wounds are getting a fresh coat of pain. Under populist governments in Uruguay and Argentina, human rights investigators have been turning over old stones to prosecute crimes dating back to the region's 1970s dictatorships, a period of state violence against dissident citizens known as the Dirty War. Uruguayan President Tabaré Vasquez is following up on campaign promises to go after former officials and Argentina's President Nestor Kirchner has been locking horns with military leaders since coming to power in 2003. more
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina -- Washington watchers say advocates for toothy Chavez containment are searching for new things to call the fiery leader who, if the heavy, hard-to-refine crude in Venezuela 's Orinoco region is counted, controls the world's largest oil estate. In other words, Washington is hunting for a smoking gun to link to Chavez. But not a few Latin America experts say the effort will likely lead to a buffet of see-through pretexts. more
Had they been short on rally slogans, Sudan activists behind last weekend's Global Darfur Day could have tapped Benjamin Disraeli's classification of the three kinds of lies - lies, damn lies, and statistics. A new study in the journal Science says the U.S. State Department's death toll estimates for Darfur, released last year, underestimated the count by "hundreds of thousands" of lives. This is no news flash for Sudan watchers who've been accusing the Bush administration of low-balling the figures to avoid intervening in what the UN has called the "worst humanitarian crisis" in the world today. more