local news from other places
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…
Last night I had a home-cooked meal at the house of Uruguayan journalist and single mother Laura Lacurcia – a working meal while producing our video about the animal cruelty in Uruguay. In 2009, Uruguay passed its first laws prohibiting the mistreatment of animals by their owners. Unfortunately, the enforcement has not caught up with…
Shed this illusion that, ‘Uruguay is the new Switzerland.’ Nearly 30 years after the military dictatorship, the country is still a volatile environment. Just this evening, on my way to a restaurant, I passed a burning dumpster in the Plaza del Entrevero. In the few short minutes that I stood there, I saw the dumpster transform…
The official website of the president of Uruguay, José “Pepe” Mujica, lists the president’s occupation as chacarero floriculture – a small-scale farmer of flowers. Dubbed “the poorest president in the world,” Mujica, a former left-wing revolutionary, has proven his devotion to the Uruguayan socialist party ‘s cause through his many feats of austerity, including giving 90 percent of…
One of my last assignments at the Killeen Daily Herald was covering the first day of the trial of Nidal Hasan, the Army major convicted today of the largest shooting on a U.S. military instillation in history. Today, on Fort Hood, a jury of 13 unanimously declared him guilty of 13 counts of murder and…