Forrest Hylton

The fishermen at Porto da Barra agreed that the verdict was historic and celebrated all weekend. They have been in an uproar over Trump for weeks now. Some of the men who carry umbrellas and chairs down to the beach told me that Brazil’s largest organised crime faction had finally gone down; they, too, talk about how Trump needs to be put in his place. There was much mirth at the thought of Bolsonaro’s life in prison.

Miguel Uribe Turbay, a Colombian senator and presidential candidate for the far-right Centro Democrático, died from gunshot wounds on 11 August after nearly three months in hospital. The authorities have six suspects in custody but it remains unclear who was behind the assassination. Some fingers point at one of the FARC dissident groups, though no one knows. Uribe Turbay’s death marks the country’s first magnicide since the elections of 1990, in which three left-wing candidates were assassinated.

Alejandro Éder, the mayor of Cali, asked last week when Colombia had gone back to 1989. On Saturday, 7 June, in Bogotá, a fourteen-year-old had shot Miguel Uribe Turbay, a senator and potential candidate for the presidency, in the head and chest. (It was apparently a contract hit: the boy had been offered $5000.) There were candlelit vigils throughout the country. Uribe Turbay, whose mother was kidnapped and murdered by Pablo Escobar in 1991, is in stable condition after surgery.

Colombia produced a record 2600 tons of cocaine in 2023 and at least a third of it passed through Ecuador – probably more. The Calabrian ’Ndrangheta long monopolised shipments to Europe via West Africa, but called on Albanian gangs to help move the increased volume through Guayaquil; the Albanians doubled the size of the loads and took over wholesaling in Rotterdam, Antwerp, Hamburg and Spanish port cities. Since 2021 there has been a sharp spike in the numbers of Albanian ‘businessmen’ operating in Ecuador along with an increase of banana shipments to Albania. In Guayaquil, homicide grew by a factor of ten in less than a decade.

Javier Milei’s popularity and legitimacy have been significantly eroded since he came to power in 2023, as pessimism over the economy has increased, with 37 per cent of Argentinians expecting things to get worse in the coming year. Inflation, at 67 per cent annually, is among the highest in the world – with food prices skyrocketing. In January twice as many Argentinians visited Brazil as in the same month last year, while tourism in Argentina has dried up. Unwilling to devalue the peso, Milei is asking the IMF for a loan.

Juan Camilo Hernández was born in Caldono, in south-west Colombia, in 1977. When he was sixteen he took part in a day of collective work (minga) with the Nasa Indigenous people. A commission from the FARC, led by nineteen-year-old Betty Lorena Castro, showed up to help. An elder Nasa woman told Castro that they wanted no guerrillas in the minga, since the Indigenous struggle was independent of la lucha armada.

Donald Trump recently deported a planeload of 88 Brazilians, who arrived with cuts and bruises after being handcuffed, beaten and denied food and water during the flight from Louisiana. The plane had trouble with its engines and air-conditioning, and was forced to make unscheduled stops in Panama and Manaus, where the deportees were transferred to a Brazilian air force plane for the last leg to Belo Horizonte.

In response to attacks by warring guerrilla factions that have killed dozens of people and displaced tens of thousands in north-east Colombia, President Gustavo Petro has declared an ‘estado de conmoción interior’ for the country, as well as an ‘emergencia económica’ in the Caribbean department of the Guajira. (The last Colombian president to have declared a ‘state of internal commotion’ was Petro’s nemesis, Álvaro Uribe, leader from 2002 to 2010 and now facing trial on charges of bribery and witness tampering.) Petro will call on the armed forces to resolve the conflict by force rather than negotiation.

Daniela Z wanted to be a doctor like her father. He died in 2023, soon after her brother and mother, as a consequence of his efforts to protect one of his patients, Víctor Peña, a persecuted Indigenous Zenú leader. Orphaned, with only Víctor to look after her – she didn’t trust government institutions – Dani planned to attend the University of Antioquia, in northwest Colombia, after finishing high school. Instead, she died with ovarian cancer and a lung infection on 22 December, before she turned eighteen.

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.