Forrest Hylton

At sunset on a clear day you can see thirty miles across the Río de la Plata from Colonia de Sacramento to the skyscrapers of Buenos Aires as the sky behind them turns orange. Julio Cortázar once wrote: ‘I speak of Uruguay and Argentina as one country because they are, despite the nationalists.’ When Argentina’s economy collapsed at the end of 2001, Uruguay’s soon followed. It happened again with the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath. Argentina has 45 million people, Uruguay three million; the Buenos Aires metro area is more than seven times the size of Montevideo, where two-thirds of the country lives.

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.