Peru

By Gabriel Elizondo in Americas on August 8th, 2011
Photo by GALLO/GETTY

According to workers at the Brazilian government-run national Indian foundation, FUNAI, late last week a group of men from a paramilitary faction from Peru, armed with rifles and machine guns, entered Brazilian territory and encircled a remote jungle guard post used by FUNAI researchers to study and protect isolated indigenous tribes near the border with Peru.

The incident happened at a FUNAI post known as Xinane, a very remote monitoring location in Brazil's Acre state that serves as a small, five-person research base for the study and protection of isolated indigenous tribes in the region.

FUNAI officials say the armed men were most certainly trying to kill Indians in the area to make way for illegal logging, or new cocaine trafficking routes through the forest from Peru.

By Gabriel Elizondo in Americas on March 30th, 2011
Brazil's growing economy is hammering those of its neigbhours [GALLO/GETTY]

On Sunday, Alan Garcia, the president of Peru, said that his country, along with Colombia, Chile and Mexico would form a new regional economic bloc.

Garcia said the presidents of all four countries would meet in Lima on May 2 to hammer out the final details and make the formal announcement.

But all four countries - which have market-oriented economic priorities - already have individual free trade agreements amongst themselves. The stock markets of Colombia, Peru and Chile were even recently integrated.

There are currently no major barriers to free trade between them.

So what is the point of a formal economic block?

The point is simple: Brazil.

By Gabriel Elizondo in Americas on January 19th, 2010
Photo by Reuters
I was in Lima, Peru on that fateful day in August 2007 when an 8.0 earthquake struck that country. (Wikipedia summary here).
 
A couple hours after reporting on the phone from Lima on the initial shock of it all, the next question was being asked, like it always is after the initial trauma of a quake: "Where is the epicentre?" 
 
Word was getting out on local radio that the epicentre was near a village called Pisco, about 150km south of Lima. But no journalists had actually reached Pisco at that moment. 
 
So myself, and my friends and journalist colleagues Guillermo Galdos, Luis Del Valle and Gino Amadori of Lima-based Pacha Films got in a car shortly after midnight the first day and started motoring towards Pisco.
 
By Teresa Bo in Americas on December 16th, 2009
Photo from AFP

Alan Garcia will not be attending the Copenhagen meeting for global warming. Many here say he has more important things to do. On Tuesday I climbed the Ausangate glacier with a specialist from the area. He says that in 30 years these tropical glaciers and others will be gone.

It wouldn't be an enormous problem if entire communities did not depend on the water that comes down from the glaciers. They use it for their crops, mostly potatoes, and for their cattle.

What shocked me the most is that the indigenous people that have barely access to electricty knew about the meeting in Copenhagen. The told me "we hope they can help us build dams or other ways to save water for when the glacier is gone". It also surprised me that the pray to the mountain and call it "Apu". They know that their livelihood depends on the water coming down from there.

By Gabriel Elizondo in Americas on November 28th, 2009
Photo by AFP
It was billed as a summit of presidents of Amazon countries. But most of the presidents didn’t bother to show up, making the ‘summit of presidents’ in Manaus one with few actual presidents in attendance.
 
About half of the mysterious place called "the Amazon" is in Brazil. The other half is divided between 8 other countries - Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana.
 
So Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil's president, organised Thursday's one-day summit of Amazon countries as a chance for them to come together a forge a common agenda ahead of the all important Copenhagen climate change summit starting on December 7 - which is being billed as the biggest climate change meeting in generations.
By Teresa Bo in Americas on October 10th, 2009

The Incas' Sacred Valley is an enormous territory in the middle of the Andes Mountains in Peru. It used to be the heart of the largest empire in the Americas, and the ruins that have survived the Spanish conquest could help millions here deal with the effects of global warming.

The Andean tropical glaciers will be gone by 2050, experts say. These glaciers feed most of the lakes and rivers in the area. Those living in this impoverished area are already suffering the consequences. Shortages of water and diseases that belonged to tropical areas have started to be registered. Carrion's disease transmitted by sand flies is of great worry to many of those living in the city of Cuzco. The disease causes anemia and if not treated, could be deadly.

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