local news from other places
A wise editor once told me, “Names make news.” Without names you have no sources, and without sources you have no story. This story has no named sources, because there are not many people in Potosí – the poorest region of the poorest country in South America – who are willing to put their name…
After standing for nearly 18 hours in the Plaza 9 de Julio in downtown Salta, Argentina, the pilgrims finally ceased their songs of prayer and I repaired to a small cafe to read the reportages of Alma Guillermoprieto, a Mexican journalist who covered this region for the New Yorker magazine in the early 1990s. Being here…
In the 1990s articles about government corruption and scandal sold a lot of newspapers in Argentina. However, over the last two decades, as most major Latin American countries passed their first freedom of information laws, Argentina’s Congress has yet to be sold on government transparency. This cultured country of 41 million people remains, along with…
BUENOS AIRES – Argentines have long been known for their passion for wine, steak and tango. But the unspoken object of desire for the past few decades has been the cash U.S. dollar, which sells for about double the official exchange rate on the black market here. On a brief stroll down Calle Florida in…
Laura Fontes, 26, was raised in the town of Rocha about 100 kilometers away from Cabo Polonio. She said growing up in Cabo Polonio is its own form of education and the students are smarter because of it. “(The students) can talk about the wind, the ocean, the animals, more than any children in the…
When you wake up in Cabo Polonio you follow a pair of footprints made in the sand by the bare feet of a pretty girl you met the previous night to a lighthouse where some horses are grazing on dry grass. Below you is the wind-swept village you have come so far to see, less…
There are many myths about Cabo Polonio and they are all true. The 40 people who live there are all mad. They live off mussels and weed, and happily roam their quiet grassy peninsula in a communal paradise, isolated by seven kilometers of sand dunes on Uruguay’s virgin eastern coast. Connecting to the main electric…