Forrest Hylton

Following a prolonged drought, smoke from wildfires in the Amazon basin is choking people over an enormous swath of territory in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Peru and Bolivia.

Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada García, the senior leader of the organisation known as the Sinaloa cartel, was arrested on 25 July, together with his godson Joaquín Guzmán López – one of ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán’s sons. The best Mexican coverage was informed by long experience, scepticism and sober realism. It was hard to believe the authorities had finally captured the man who never left the Sierra Madre. Across the border in the US, where the arrest took place, more than a few journalists appear to have cut their sociological teeth on the Netflix series Narcos: Mexico.

Bolivia is known for having experienced frequent coups throughout most of its history, and some have been brief and/or bizarre, but last month’s may have set a new record. On Wednesday, 26 June, General Juan José Zúñiga, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Bolivian Army, drove up to Plaza Murillo in La Paz with six tanks. He smashed his way into the Palacio Quemado (the former seat of government) through a metal door, made phone calls to the political opposition and the military, and demanded the release of Jeanine Áñez and Luis Fernando Camacho, both currently imprisoned for plotting the coup of 2019.

Argentina’s interannual inflation rate is 250 per cent – only Zimbabwe’s is higher – while subway fares have risen sevenfold since January, and the public hospitals administered by the University of Buenos Aires are in danger of closing because the university can’t pay its electricity bill. The UBA, which is consistently ranked among the best universities in Latin America, could shut down in May. With the budget frozen at 2023 levels, in real terms universities are broke.

The situation is contradictory, even paradoxical: on the one hand, the machinery of justice is moving, however slowly, to prosecute Bolsonaro and members of his entourage, including army generals, for the events of 8 January, as well as the killers of Marielle Franco and those who organised and paid for her murder. Yet on the other, without an organised left proposing alternative public security policies, and convincing people of their viability and desirability, mafias and drug gangs are rapidly expanding their reach.

In condemning Israel for its genocidal campaign in Gaza, Lula summoned the moral force of the anti-apartheid movement, as represented by South Africa at the Hague, but he was also holding the line against the new, pro-Israel right closer to home.

Considered since the 1980s to be a peaceful oasis compared to its neighbours Colombia and Peru – in part because of comprehensive land reform in the 1960s, in part because of a lack of coca production – Ecuador is now officially at war: ‘an internal armed conflict’, in the words of the president, Daniel Noboa. How did a South American republic of 18 million people (1.5 million live abroad), with deeply rooted democratic traditions, go from being one of the least to one of the most violent in the hemisphere, with a homicide rate of 46 per 100,000, up from 5.8 per 100,000, in six years?

Ahead of Javier Milei’s presidential address last month, announcing the most radical privatisation and deregulation plan in Argentinian history, protesters took to the streets of Buenos Aires, converging en masse on the Plaza de Mayo in the early evening, and staging a cacerolazo, or pot-banging session, outside Congress as Milei spoke. Synchronised cacerolazos took place nationwide.

After being elected president of Argentina, and before declaring that he would indeed abolish the central bank, the ‘paleo-capitalist libertarian’ Javier Milei announced a visit to Tel Aviv, thereby breaking ranks with Bolivia, Colombia, Chile and, most important, Brazil. While Montevideo – where the new right is also in power – may be a stop on his pre-inaugural victory lap (along with Washington, of course), Brasília will not.

Classes were cancelled at the Universidade Federal da Bahia for a couple of days a few weeks ago because two neighbouring favelas, Calabar and Alto das Pombas, were both at war, leaving at least ten people dead. Both areas were occupied by Military Police (PM). Dozens of families fled. One of my students apologised for missing our online class: he had been trapped at home listening to gunfire and helicopters for two full days; unable to read or concentrate, he had fled the city.