Group items tagged

Most of the thousands who packed the Movistar Arena for Milei’s campaign-closing rally on Wednesday were men, many of them young and all of them seemingly angry.

Angry with a leftist establishment that has failed to control spiraling inflation and economic stagnation. Angry with a government that has allowed their currency to plummet and their earnings to vanish.

Young people are a political force in Argentina. Young women here were on the front lines of massive protests for the “green wave” abortion rights movement that spread across Latin America. They’ve led a campaign for gender-inclusive Spanish and helped bring the populist movement of former Argentine leaders Juan and Eva “Evita” Perón back to power.

Mr. Molfino’s mother, Noemí Gianotti de Molfino, a 54-year-old Argentine, was a victim of Operation Condor, a plan devised by six South American military governments in the 1970s to hunt down and eliminate leftist dissidents across national borders.

In a landmark trial that spanned three years and involved the cases of more than 100 victims, a four-judge panel on Friday convicted and sentenced 14 former military officers for their roles in Operation Condor, a scheme of kidnappings, torture and killings.

For the first time, a court in the region ruled that the leaders of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay had worked together in a regionwide criminal conspiracy against opponents, some of whom had fled to exile in neighboring countries, during an era of military dictatorships in the 1970s and ’80s.

Despite the horrifying figures, few Argentinians seem aware of the gravity of the pandemic, Edul said: many people are disregarding restrictions, attending clandestine parties or refusing to wear a face mask.

“We are witnessing the failure of a foolish and stubborn society, a dehumanizing society in which our own interests are routinely privileged above those of our neighbours.”

And the situation has been compounded by the politicization of the pandemic, with midterm legislative elections approaching this October and presidential hopefuls for the 2023 general elections already competing for nomination.

The bill’s approval in Argentina’s lower house of Congress by 131 to 117 votes, after more than 20 hours of debate, was a legislative victory for Mr. Fernández, who has dedicated funding and political capital to improving conditions for women and for gay and transgender people

“It’s a false dilemma to say it’s one thing or the other,”

Argentina would become only the fourth nation — and by far the most populous — to make abortion legal in Latin America

Opposition candidate Mauricio Macri is poised to become Argentina's next President after a runoff vote that marks the end of a political dynasty.

Macri spoke shortly after Daniel Scioli, Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner's hand-picked successor, conceded defeat.

With more than 98% of votes counted, Macri of the Let's Change coalition had won 51.4% of votes, while Scioli had garnered nearly 48.6%, elections officials said.

Four years ago, Argentina shocked the international community by turning its back on Peronism, the divisive political movement that had ruled the South American country of 44 million consistently since 2001

Two decades of economic dysfunction and state intervention made the country a pariah on global capital markets, and, Macri argued, severely limited the country’s growth. Economists around the world rejoiced about the measures he was taking.

But today, with the value of the peso plummeting, inflation soaring and several million Argentines falling into poverty in a single year, many inside the country say Macri’s experiment with economic liberalism has failed.

BUENOS AIRES — Argentina’s Senate is on the verge of a vote that could turn the nation, homeland of Pope Francis, into the largest country in Latin America to legalize abortion, a move that would reverberate widely in a region where the church has long wielded power.

The measure would make it legal for women to end pregnancies of up to 14 weeks, and its fate appears to rest in the hands of a handful of senators who remain undecided or are keeping their position under wraps.

The president, the vice president and many members of the executive branch have been working to bolster support for the measure, Mariela Belski, the head of Amnesty International in Argentina, said. “The government has really done its homework.”

Argentina’s election has quickly become a testing ground for A.I. in campaigns, with the two candidates and their supporters employing the technology to doctor existing images and videos and create others from scratch.

A.I. has made candidates say things they did not, and put them in famous movies and memes. It has created campaign posters, and triggered debates over whether real videos are actually real.

A.I.’s prominent role in Argentina’s campaign and the political debate it has set off underscore the technology’s growing prevalence and show that, with its expanding power and falling cost, it is now likely to be a factor in many democratic elections around the globe.

With the temporary residency, parents can begin the process to gain citizenship, migration authorities say. An Argentine passport can be obtained in as little as two years, immigration lawyers and migration officials say, and gives the holder the ability to travel visa-free to Europe, which Russians can’t do.

Ms. Davydova and other new arrivals say they feel welcomed. Argentina has historically been a destination for emigrants from Europe and more recently from Bolivia, Paraguay and Venezuela.

On Feb. 9, 33 young Russians in advanced stages of pregnancy arrived on that flight, Ms. Carignano told a local radio station. Two days later, another 83 passengers, 16 of them pregnant Russian women, arrived via the same route, she said.

South America's greatest soccer contest may be moved to Brazil in a last-minute maneuver to save the troubled tournament less than two weeks before kick-off, but Brazilian officials say there is more to consider.

He added that if it goes ahead, teams and their staff will have to follow health guidelines, including being vaccinated. Ramos also said that the competition, which is being called the Cornavirus Cup by critics, would be held in empty stadiums without spectators.

The confusion on Monday is just the latest chapter in the chaos leading up to the tournament as much of South America, including Brazil, is in the grips of the global pandemic with some of the world's worst infection and death rates.

The Idealist. The author’s revisionist thesis is that Kissinger was not in fact a realist, as he is so frequently portrayed

The ideals and deepest hopes of mankind? Kissinger and Nixon bombed Cambodia to pieces in a secret four-year campaign that annihilated some 100,000 civilians. “Anything that flies, on anything that moves,” were the parameters Kissinger gave to Alexander Haig. He countered African liberation movements by embracing the white supremacists of Rhodesia and South Africa, a policy known as the “Tar Baby option.” Kissinger facilitated the overthrow of the governments of Chile and Argentina by right-wing generals, and then worked tirelessly to deflect criticism of the new governments’ torture and murder. A declassified memorandum of his meeting with Augusto Pinochet in 1976 shows Kissinger in a particularly unflattering light: “We welcomed the overthrow of the Communist-inclined government here. We are not out to weaken your position.” In 1975 Kissinger and President Ford met with Indonesian strongman Suharto and authorized him to invade East Timor, which he promptly did the following day; another 100,000 lost their lives. “It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly,” Kissinger advised.

[A]rguments that focus on loss of life in strategically marginal countries—and there is no other way of describing Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, and East Timor—must be tested against this question: how, in each case, would an alternative decision have affected U.S. relations with strategically important countries like the Soviet Union, China, and the major Western European powers?

soccer, really, is not “the world’s game.” Though it has the highest global participation rate of any sport, there are quite a few countries where it is not the most popular game. Those include eight of the world’s 10 most populous countries. On the whole, people in China, India, the U.S., and Indonesia—the top four in population—play soccer but have other sports they prefer. Only in No. 5 Brazil and No. 7 Nigeria does soccer have a clear edge.

There were years of painstaking building of teams and leagues before a national squad could be assembled that was good enough to challenge at World Cup level. (For a brief history, I recommend National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball and the Rest of the World Plays Soccer by Stefan Szymanski and Andrew Zimbalist.)

All the countries who have ever won a World Cup have at least one thing in common: Soccer has no real competitor for athletic talent.

first non-Peronist president in 14 years

Mauricio Macri has been sworn in as Argentina’s first non-Peronist president in 14 years,

vowed to eradicate poverty, stamp out drug cartels and bring “unity” to a nation sharply divided between Peronists and their opponents.

Russia's Sputnik V has seen rising popularity across Latin America as more countries announce shipments and deals to purchase the Covid-19 vaccine.

Nine Latin American countries so far have approved usage of the Sputnik V vaccine -- Argentina, Bolivia, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay and Venezuela. Distribution of the vaccine has also begun in Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay and Venezuela

As Russia struggles to keep up with demand, some countries have received only very small shipments. Bolivia received 20,000 Sputnik V doses in January, though it expects enough to eventually vaccinate 2.6 million people. Paraguay announced the purchase of one million doses, but has so far only received 4,000.

Government officials in Peru announced on Monday the country's official COVID-19 death toll had been far lower than the real number. Instead of 69,342 Peruvians perishing from COVID-19 as of May 22, as the Peruvian government previously reported, more than 180,000 actually have died from the virus.

Officials blamed the undercounting on "a lack of testing that made it difficult to confirm whether a person had died due to the virus or some other cause,"

CONMEBOL, the governing body of the tournament, announced on Sunday that they dropped Argentina as the host country with less than two weeks to go until the start of the event.

The three women, who had suffered obstetric emergencies, had been sentenced to 30 years in prison under the nation’s strict anti-abortion laws.

resident Nayib Bukele’s government has freed three Salvadoran women who were sentenced to 30 years in prison under the nation’s strict anti-abortion laws after suffering obstetric emergencies, according to abortion rights groups.

Morena Herrera of the Citizen’s Group for the Depenalization of Abortion said late Friday that the group was told one woman would be set free at presidential order, but when they went to the prison to greet her, three were released.

Given the Jesuits’ watchword to find God “in all things,” some are hoping that the leadership of a Jesuit pope will allow the church to engage more openly and fearlessly with the world, to project the church’s message in new ways and to emphasize service to, and solidarity with, the poor. With an outsider now at the helm, they hope Francis will be able to shake up the culture of the Vatican.

Shaped by their experiences with the poor and powerless, many Jesuits lean liberal, politically and theologically, and are more concerned with social and economic justice than with matters of doctrinal purity. Jesuits were in the forefront of the movement known as liberation theology, which encouraged the oppressed to unite along class lines and seek change.

Francis, when he was head of the Jesuits in Argentina in the 1970s, was opposed to liberation theology, seeing it as too influenced by Marxist politics. The future pope came down hard on Jesuits in his province who were liberation theology proponents and left it badly divided, according to those who study the order and some members who did not want to be identified because he is now pope.