Alma Guillermoprieto

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Por qué hemos querido ser tan ciegos

MundoAmérica,

Inconcebiblemente, el habitante de la Casa Blanca, que vive rodeado de manifestantes que lo odian a gritos, no está dispuesto a desocupar el predio. Habrá que reflexionar por qué no logramos deshacernos de este meteoro anaranjado que cayó tan imprevistamente en el ya de por sí atormentado mar de nuestras vidas, pero el caso es que a base de ofensas a la moral, a la ley, a la decencia, logra que aún derrotado no nos lo podamos sacar de la cabeza. Tiene ese talento en común con el difunto Hugo Chávez: también él invadía todos los rincones del pensamiento de los venezolanos, estuvieran a favor o en contra.…  Seguir leyendo »

Moises Saman/ Magnum Photos Evo Morales, Mexico City, November 2019

MundoAmérica

Flying over the Andes in the dead of night, you know you’ve reached Bolivia because towns and villages become visible: neat crosshatches of light, every street illuminated. The terminal at El Alto International Airport may not have the best design or the most punctilious construction standards, but in the freezing predawn of this high plateau—the Andean altiplano—one could weep with gratitude that it is heated. Thirty years ago El Alto was not a city but a straggle of unpaved, unlit streets spreading out from a ramshackle improvisation of piled-up luggage and technology-free checkpoints. Visitors arriving to the shock of 13,000 feet above sea level gasped for air, stumbled into a taxi, and rattled their way down a pitted, hairpin road to the capital, La Paz.…  Seguir leyendo »

Spencer Platt/Getty Images. The entrance to Rikers Island jail complex, New York City, March 31, 2017

ReflexionesSocial,

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK—“If someone says ‘Love in the Time of Corona’ one more time I am literally going to punch them,” a woman said to her friend as I passed along Eastern Parkway on the course of my daily walk. “Corona and Chill” surfaced in my mind as an arguably tackier alternative, but I didn’t stop, from six feet’s distance, to ask her thoughts.

It’s a strange time for dating. One friend had gone on an especially promising first date just before people across the city were sent home to work remotely. She knows so little about him, she told me, except that she liked him, and he liked her, and they want to see each other again.…  Seguir leyendo »

La rabia poderosa

ReflexionesSocial,

No es solo que en México, hace un mes, el novio de Ingrid Escamilla la haya asesinado de la manera más brutal; es que a los directores de dos medios mexicanos les pareció conveniente publicar las fotos de su cuerpo desollado y descuartizado. Es también que lo mejor que se le ocurrió decir al presidente de México, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a raíz del grotesco asesinato fue que se ha manipulado mucho sobre este asunto en los medios.

No es solo que un hombre diga que las mujeres denuncian el acoso nada más si viene de una persona fea. Es que eso lo dijo hace un mes el presidente de Ecuador.…  Seguir leyendo »

Claudia Andujar: Yanomami firing a maloca (which they may do when they migrate or want to get rid of disease, or when an important leader dies), Catrimani, Roraima State, 1976

MundoAmérica,

All that is overwhelming about public space in São Paulo, Brazil’s business capital—the noise, the teeming crowds, the endless stream of cars and buses—is exacerbated on the Avenida Paulista, a stretch of concrete lined end to end with shiny glass office towers. The tropical noonday sun bounces off in splinters from the towers, the evening rush-hour turns the avenue’s wide sidewalks into a mob scene and, in short, everything about this urban landscape seems to confirm one’s suspicion that present-day capitalism shrivels or denatures everything it touches.

It is with a sense of prayerful relief, then, that a traveler might find herself in a quiet exhibition space several floors above the Paulista, wandering through a visual forest of images of the upper Amazon basin’s first peoples—a retrospective of work by the Swiss-born emigré photographer Claudia Andujar, titled “A luta Yanomami” (The Yanomami Struggle), mounted at the Moreira Salles cultural institute.…  Seguir leyendo »

Javier Valdez, Sinaloa, Mexico, May 23, 2013. Fernando Brito/AFP/Getty Images

MundoAméricaReflexionesTestimonios, ,

Yet another journalist has been murdered in Mexico. It was the usual pattern: Javier Valdez, fifty, wrote a drug story, revealed too much information, said something someone did not want said, and was killed at noon on a busy street near his place of work. Six other journalists, none of them quite as prominent as Javier, have been killed in drug-infested cities since the year began, but because he was a friend of mine the details matter more to me this time. On reflection, I was grateful that, unlike many of the more than one hundred reporters killed in Mexico over the last quarter century, he was not abducted, tortured for hours or days, maimed, dismembered, hung lifeless from an overpass for all to see.…  Seguir leyendo »

Bolivar Square after Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos cast his ballot there in the referendum on a peace accord, Bogotá, Colombia, October 2, 2016. Mario Tama/Getty Images

MundoAméricaInternacionalTerrorismo Internacional, , ,

On Monday, September 26, President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia and Rodrigo Londoño Echeverri, alias Timochenko, leader of the Fuerzas Armadas de Colombia, or FARC, signed a peace accord in the photogenic coastal city of Cartagena. I was in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, that afternoon, packed into the central Plaza de Bolivar along with several thousand celebrants. Giant screens had been set up in public parks and squares, and in the Plaza de Bolivar three of Colombia’s top musical groups were announced as warmup acts to the peace-signing itself. It was a gorgeous afternoon, the best this Andean city can offer, with clear skies and a high breeze.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAméricaReflexionesTestimonios

Durante los 13 años, 10 meses y seis días que se pavoneó por las pantallas de televisión de todo el mundo, entre su primera toma de posesión como presidente de Venezuela y su desaparición del escenario público el pasado mes de diciembre, nunca se supo exactamente qué pensar de Hugo Chávez, que murió el martes a los 58 años. Bailó, rió, parloteó, amenazó, cantó, bravuconeó, alardeó, y ahora el comandante, que en realidad era teniente coronel, ha dejado un gran hueco. En sus años en el poder, nunca faltaba tema de conversación en una cena o una fiesta venezolana: siempre estaba Chávez, y solo Chávez, como objeto de lamentaciones, elogios, burlas o ruegos.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica, ,

In my country we’ve been learning under extreme duress to live in a different nation from the one we grew up in. Some 30,000 people have died in Mexico in the last four years in a grotesque carnival of shootouts, beheadings and mutilations; the city of Juárez has emerged as a worldwide symbol of lawlessness and horror; tens of thousands of children have been left orphaned and permanently embittered against the state. But what happened in August and unfolded throughout September and the fall was something else.

In the northern state of Tamaulipas, on an abandoned ranch some 100 miles south of the American border, a young Ecuadorean man escaped from beneath a pile of bodies to tell his story.…  Seguir leyendo »