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"By welcoming ROA to the Olympic Games in Rio, we want to send a message of hope to all the refugees of the world. This team will be treated like all the other teams.

"This team may end up between five and 10 people maybe. We have no target -- it depends very much on the sporting qualifications."

"I cannot fight for my country. I will fight for the Olympics, I will fight for all the refugees in the world. Judo is my life. It helped me escape war, to take another path."

Nomination criteria included sporting level, official United Nations-verified refugee status and personal situation and background, the IOC said.

“It depends very much on the sporting qualifications. This team may end up between five and 10 athletes maybe.”

Hundreds of thousands of refugees, many from Syria, have crossed via Turkey and Greece into Europe.

“By welcoming ROA to the Olympic Games in Rio, we want to send a message of hope to all the refugees of the world,” Bach said.

“Having no national team to belong to, having no flag to march behind, having no national anthem to be played, these refugees will be welcomed to the Olympic Games with the Olympic flag and with the Olympic anthem

ROA will be housed in the athletes’ village along with all other national teams and will enter the stadium as the penultimate team at the opening ceremony, ahead of the host nation.

Preparations for South America's first Olympics have been dogged by concerns over the polluted bay where the sailing will be held as well as violence spilling over from heavily policed slums, or favelas. Officials say construction of venues and infrastructure remains on track, but recently admitted Brazil's recession is making delivery more difficult.

Aggreko, which has been involved in nine Olympics and six World Cups, declined to comment because the result of the tender has not yet been announced. Sector analysts said not being awarded the contract could impact Aggreko's 2016 earnings and shares in the company closed down 1.8 percent.

For London 2012, Aggreko's power deal was worth nearly $60 million, although the Rio 2016 contract is expected to be less as it is smaller in scope.

the 10 countries with the highest deaths per capita were all in Latin America or the Caribbean.

deep-seated skepticism among people like Mr. Arriaga — the workers who feed Mexico City and much of the nation — turned to shock, and eventually to resignation, as their neighbors, friends and loved ones died and their neighborhood became ground zero for the outbreak.

Officials had posted signs warning of Covid-19 and urging workers to report illnesses. In the beginning, most ignored them.“I think they made it up, to raise prices on the poor,” Mr. Arriaga said of the virus in March

A new reality set in for many: A prolonged economic shutdown was clearly impossible. People could wear masks, and distance as much as possible, but almost no one could afford to stay home. They had to keep working.

For the vast majority of people, risking illness or death has simply become the price of survival.

Mr. Arriaga’s own attempts to stay away from the market lasted only a month before he blew through his life savings and trudged back to work in fear.“I’ve got nothing left,” he said on a recent weekend, bracing himself for another long night in the market. “It’s either go out there and face the virus, or sit here and starve.”

Now, Mexico has the fourth-highest death toll in the world, with more than 70,000 lives officially lost to the virus. Experts say the real number may be tens of thousands more than that.

Tomas BravoMexico City8h agoGreat article. Even living in the same city there are different realities playing out, and this gives a good insight into the stories of some of the worst struck by the pandemic. Some local media have talked of these issues, but there is an ongoing effort from the government to deny these allegations. It is nice to see a story told from the perspective of individuals through which the bigger issues that have paved the way for this crisis are highlighted

(b) we see no arguments about mask wearing in CDMX stores/areas, and witnessed concerns about customers shooting up USA grocery stories if masks are enforced,

gtodonGuanajuato, Mexico3h ago@Ignacio Colin Perhaps in your neighborhood of sprawling Mexico City, the "community is strong and doing its part." Where I live, in Guanajuato, about half the people on the streets, and even in the stores, decline to wear masks, and half of those who do wear masks don't wear them properly; they appear to think they're chin-guards. The same is true in nearby León, a much larger city. In the state of Guanajuato, only San Miguel de Allende, with its large foreign population, takes Covid seriously.

BVINew York7h agoPowerful article with powerful images. I felt close to the shopkeepers and their families. The intimacy of these stories and revealing personal impact in such detail, without judgment, makes the story so much more human. "At every level, there is simply less." A sadly perfect summation of this pandemic's impact.

IvanMemphis, TN9h agoTwo failures seem to be conspiring to make this a catastrophe. First the governments failure to institute simple low cost and effective measures to reduce the spreed - like mandatory and enforced masks in crowded public areas. Second the failure of the public to take it serious and follow common sense guidance - because of paranoia about the motives of experts and government. I guess they are not that different from the US, except they have less resources to counter the predictable outcomes of these failures.

gnacio ColinMexico City8h agoOnce again, we are portrayed as a country that diminishes the virus’ impact and downplays it. It’s a great read but tbh most of the responsibility lays on the President, who has been adamant about employing techniques that do not combat the virus. Nonetheless, Mexico City’s government led by a PhD, Claudia Sheinbaum has done a great job and has countered the President in many ways regarding the management. We have a dormant President who chooses to look elsewhere instead of looking for solutions (he’s done the same with medication purchases, education, ecology, human rights commissions, to say the least). The Mexican community is strong and is doing its part on mitigating this national (and global) tragedy.

D. HendersonMexico City4h ago@Jorge Romero and @ E. Voigt, you have points and they are well taken. I live in CMDX and work in rural MX. In July, we made a "necessary" risky cross-country drive to see Ohio family b/c we suspect that such is impossible until a vaccine in spring 2021 or later. We used masks, face shields, alcohol solutions when at two hotels & gas stations. Some anectodal sharing

Like many people in Iztapalapa, they felt a sense of shame associated with the virus.“There’s a stigma,” said Mr. Dominguez, the organizer. “No one wants to admit they had it.”

ExPatMXAjijic, Jalisco Mexico7h ago@observer " We shouldn't be reporting on these "poor countries" as if we are so far removed on our American pedestal any longer." Thank you. Mexico is a magnificent country and the people remind me of how Americans treated each other with kindness and friendliness when I was young. They make eye contact on the streets, wish you a good day, you'll see teenage boys taking young siblings places with care and loving. There are some places in the US that this happens but a lot more places that it doesn't. Is the government corrupt? Certainly. But they are open about it while the US government is equally corrupt but hides it behind religion or other convenient excuses. We have been adopted" into a few Mexican families and attend birthdays, wedding, and fiestas. This article made me want to cry. The poor in Mexico are struggling to survive just as the poor in the US are similarly struggling. This article put faces on the essential workers who are risking their lives to feed their families (and the rest of the country) which I think is needed so the rest of us who are lucky can identify with what this disease is doing to people.

(c) CDMX is MASSIVE, centro de abastos is massive, hard to relay really its size and diversity and intensity. It IS "formally" and "informally" opening up again for many of the reasons explained in this article; it "feels" like a deal is being made with the COVID-19 devil (only time and the virus will dictate outcomes).

ONE. Thank you NYT for this article and to the commentators for their sharing. Good. TWO. When comparing citizen behavior in CDMX streets to what we saw in TX, TN, AR, KY, OH we note (a) NOW 95-100% of people in CDMX streets, metro, tianguis (markets) use masks, compared with 40-50% (or less depending on USA area),

PaulRio de Janeiro10h agoI cannot speak for Mexico, but I can speak for Brazil, where many cities have seen their numbers plummet, sometimes by over 90%. This is the case in Rio where much has been open for weeks, months in the case of malls and many other public places, without dire consequences.

At this very moment I personally know more people sick in Europe than I do here in Rio or even in Brazil. This is not to minimize the impact that Covid had on Latin America, on Brazil and on Rio. The opposite in fact: it is close to undeniable that some measure of herd immunity was attained in many of the hardest hit places, including New York City, northern Italy and several Brazilian cities.

d) urban CDMX life is different than rural MX life (and other MX cities) always and now; yet, there is a general lack of trust across the board about info and institutions, so much so that we know the death rate IS not accurate, many die in their homes rather than go to hospitals). Survive is what we all must do.

The recovery of places like Manaus, Recife, Rio, São Paulo and other Brazilian cities has been woefully underreported by the New York Times and others. It is too bad because an analysis of the data and of the facts on the ground could yield valuable insight for other countries and cities, especially in poor or emerging countries.

misinformation was as rampant as the virus itself.Ms. Aquino’s cellphone brimmed with clips sent via WhatsApp. Some claimed that the virus was a Chinese conspiracy, others that bleach was a cure. Even President Andrés Manuel López Obrador offered his own theories, contending that a clean conscience helped prevent infection.

“I’ve heard government is paying people to claim their loved ones died from Covid,” Ms. Aquino whispered. “I have two friends who were offered money.”At best, the rumors sowed confusion and doubt. At worst, they were a death sentence.

A dull acceptance of the new reality filled Iztapalapa: Coronavirus is a necessary risk, and the reward for taking it is merely survival.

Thank you for this story about our new home country. We live far from Mexico City in the state of Jalisco where the governor and local officials took the virus seriously. So far their efforts have been rewarded with per capita numbers of cases around 20 per 100,000, some of the consistently best results anywhere in the world.

I was born and raised in Mexico and all my family is still there. Back in March I received video in which a central de abastos worker mocks the pandemic and people who are quarantining calling them lazy, and those wearing masks, gullible. The video to me helped illustrate the hard truth that México, like the USA, has parallel narratives. There are those who believe the science and consume fact-checked news, like my relatives. And there are also many who believe conspiracy theories or folk remedies, including misinformation on YouTube. I believe the official tally of the sick and dead is much lower than the real numbers. This disease is exposing the fragility of Mexico’s institutions, much like it has American ones.

As a full-time resident of Mexico I can attest that most Mexicans either have had a family member ill from Covid and/or have lost a family member to Covid. It has attacked not only low income but also middle and upper classes. It is rampant here but unfortunately the wealthy have better access to adequate health care. Most Mexicans I know are very vigilant about mask wearing; unfortunately the American tourists who come to holiday here are not vigilant and are reluctant to wear masks.

ilToronto

Rachael EiermannLos Cabos, Mexico

Brad BurnsMexico

Only about 10 will probably end up actually taking part.

A refugee will carry the torch through a refugee camp in Athens — a symbolic gesture given Greece's role as both the birthplace of the Olympics and ground zero of the refugee crisis in Europe.

it comes at an enormous toll. It’s the sort of situation that we’re advising governments to try and avoid.“We don’t have another example of where for the moment it is looking bleaker.”

By early June, less than 3 percent of the population had covid-19 antibodies. In Rio, where 5,000 people have died, the rate was less than 8 percent.

“From the point of view of public health, it’s incomprehensible that more rigorous measures weren’t adopted,” he said. “We could have avoided many of the deaths and cases and everything else that is happening in Rio de Janeiro.”

“It was an opportunity lost.”

The attorneys from the Federal Public Ministry say the time has come for Brazilian institutions to account for their role in slavery. They’ve called on Banco do Brasil to commit to some form of reparations.

The attorneys on Friday gave Banco do Brasil 15 days to publicly acknowledge its role in slavery and the slave trade and present plans for some form of reparations.

The bank does not deny its ties to slavery but has argued that it should not be held responsible for the sins of a society. It says it did not commit any crimes and should not be liable for the actions of those who worked for or funded the bank

Brazilians, particularly elites descended from European settlers, have historically preferred to think of their country as free of racism. “A racial democracy,” they boasted, where people could marry independent of skin color and race was defined less rigidly than in the United States.

That story, historians say, has largely obscured the primacy of slavery in Brazil’s genesis — and its enduring impact. Brazil imported around 5 million enslaved Africans — far more than any other country — accounting for roughly 40 percent of the entire trade

Nearly twice as many enslaved people were brought through a single wharf in Rio de Janeiro than arrived in all of the United States. It was the last country in the Americas, in 1888, to abolish slavery.

“Bring together capital that has found itself displaced from illicit trade and converge it into a center where the productive forces of the country could be fed,” Irineu Evangelista de Sousa, who reopened the bank, wrote in his autobiography. “This was the idea that came into my head.”

Banco do Brasil, which in 2023 reported $380.3 billion in assets and $5.8 billion in profits, according to Forbes. Chartered in 1808 by Portuguese King Dom João, the bank drew its foundational capital from taxes the crown imposed on sea trade, much of which involved slavery. The wealthy Rio elite — many of whom trafficked in enslaved Africans — were invited by the crown to finance the bank.

When the trade was outlawed in 1831, the bank’s ties to slavery didn’t diminish, historians and government attorneys say — they intensified. The bank closed for two decades but reopened in 1853 for the purpose of accumulating ill-gotten wealth, prosecutors and historians allege, most of it from the international slave trade.

“Brazil has never had a problem romanticizing its memory of slavery,” said Luciana Brito, a historian at the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia. “It likes to remember slavery as a means of producing a beautiful people, of one nation, as though it was a necessary evil.”

The openness with which he spoke of the scheme, historians say, betrays the extent to which the crime of slavery was normalized in elite Brazilian society.

Under pressure from the United Kingdom, Brazil begrudgingly signed on to an international campaign to abolish the international slave trade in 1831. But it did little to enforce it. More than 700,000 enslaved Africans were trafficked into the country until a more restrictive law was passed in 1850.

But that story, and so many others, was virtually unknown to Brazilians, said Thiago Campos, a historian at the Federal Fluminense University. So a group of historians began discussing earlier this year how to start a broader conversation.

Fourteen historians wrote a letter this autumn to government attorneys outlining what they knew of Banco do Brasil’s history and asking for a national debate on the matter. The attorneys with the Federal Public Ministry, who represent Brazilians in cases involving individual or social rights, took it even further: They called for reparations.

“Unfortunately, Brazil is very behind on this discussion,” he said. “I believe it will be likely that as we progress with this case, others will come forward, and we’ll have more discussion on this topic. It’s an important moment to put this on the national agenda.”

Democrats like Teixeira believe that the party has become culturally detached from Hispanic voters, moving too far left on issues such as immigration, policing, and transgender rights

Democrats like Odio say the real problem is a “class disconnect” in which Democrats are catering to the cultural concerns of economically secure whites at the expense of the pocketbook priorities of working-class Hispanics.

I asked him where Democrats are in the most trouble with Hispanic voters, and Odio didn’t hesitate. It’s the place where he lives: Miami, Florida.

“The idea that what we’re seeing from the Hispanic vote recently is a deviation, and that they will snap back to their historic preference for the Democrats two to one, I think it’s a total illusion,” he said. “The real question is how far this trend goes.”

The timing couldn’t be worse for Democrats. According to Pew Research, the U.S. Hispanic population has grown to 62 million from fewer than 10 million in 1970. (Hispanics accounted for more than half of America’s population growth from 2010 to 2020.) In the last election, Hispanics eclipsed African Americans in terms of raw eligible voters.

in several key battleground states, such as Florida, Texas, and Arizona, they have become the most essential, and most coveted, demographic.

Neither man is wrong. Hispanics are leaving the Democratic Party for many different reasons. This represents “a sea change” in our politics, Teixeira said,

As the 2014 midterm campaign got under way, Democrats spoke with a certainty—bordering on arrogance—about the Hispanic vote being locked up. Those who had turned out for Obama, Cuba told me, were now considered part of the party base. Charlie Crist, the Democratic nominee for governor, campaigned as if Hispanics were a sure thing. They would vote, and they would vote for Democrats.

To some extent, López said, the same principle applies to other issues she feels Democrats are enamored of—green energy and racial justice, individual pronouns and group identities. “What the hell is a ‘Latinx’?

The messages used by Clinton and her Democratic allies to mobilize Hispanic voters were nothing like what they’d used in the Obama campaigns. There was little about hope and change. It was mostly about fear and victimhood.

I’m an immigrant myself, and when I think back to what worked on those Obama campaigns, it was really that he spoke to the aspirations of Hispanics. He talked about the American dream. H

“But by 2016, we’d become less the party of the American dream, and more the party of anti-Trump.”

Obama won the state’s most populous county by 16 points in 2008 and 24 points in 2012. In a place where Republicans had spent a generation building relationships with Hispanic voters—much of it thanks to Jeb Bush, the popular bilingual governor, whose brother ran two ultracompetitive presidential campaigns in Miami-Dade—Obama’s triumphs felt like a watershed.

“I’ll never forget, we did a focus group with Hispanic voters in 2019,” Cuba said. “It was clear that a lot of these Hispanics voted against Trump in 2016 because they were scared of him. And by 2019, they weren’t scared anymore.”

While Trump successfully portrayed himself as a populist achieving hard-won economic growth—signing tax cuts into law, touting a record-shattering stock market, boasting the lowest Hispanic unemployment rate in history—Democrats came across as a bunch of out-of-touch idealogues. Promises of shared social progress, she told me, offend the sensibilities of many first- and second-generation immigrants who hate the idea of government handouts.

“We’re not a political party; we’re a charity. And you know what? These people don’t want charity,” López said. “These immigrants come here to make money and keep their families safe. They are not here because the sea levels are rising, or because of social justice, or anything else. We’re out there talking about racism and the Green New Deal and defunding the police, and we’re freaking them out.”

She counts herself as a progressive on nearly every issue. But, López said, many of her fellow progressives don’t appreciate how fundamentally conservative the Hispanic community is—more religious, more entrepreneurial, more working class—relative to the other cogs in the Democratic coalition.

. I’m telling every single one of my candidates here, do not talk about abortion in this campaign,” López said. “You have a lot of Latinos who are fine with abortion being the law of the land—but they are against it morally. They may not be, quote-unquote, pro-life, but don’t shove the issue in their face. Don’t force them to choose sides. They might not choose the side you would think.”

Cuba, who rose to the position of county party chair in 2017, recalls how quickly the anti-Trump message began losing potency. The economy was roaring to life after eight sluggish years of post-recession recovery at the same time that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, emboldened by Bernie Sanders’s insurgency in 2016, was espousing an open distrust of capitalism and questioning the existence of opportunity and upward mobility in America.

López said it’s all about opportunity cost: Every minute Democrats spend on topics that appeal to small portions of their existing base is time that could have been spent speaking to a single theme that preoccupies voters across the ideological spectrum: jobs, opportunity, upward mobility. “You can still be the party of all those other things,” she said. “Just don’t talk about them so much.”

the challenge for Democrats isn’t just modulating the message; it’s also combatting the right-wing misinformation machine.

A political party is only as good as its rhetoric, Garcia told me, and in South Florida, “Democrats are losing the rhetoric war to Republicans—badly.”

Republicans have always been craftier in delivering their messages on Spanish-language TV and radio. What’s new, he said, is the way conservatives have swarmed the most popular social-media pages and WhatsApp chat groups in his community, relentlessly circulating half-sourced posts that portray the Democratic Party as weak on crime and soft on socialism.

“Look at Biden’s new Cuba policies, for instance,” Garcia said. What the administration announced in the spring—the relaunching of a family-reunification program, increased flights to the island, an easing of restrictions on the money Americans can send and invest there—“should actually be more popular with Cubans than Trump’s hard-line policies,” Garcia said.

It was a Republican dream come true. By the time Trump ran for reelection in 2020, the GOP had scaled up the socialism attacks nationwide. The reward was clearest in South Florida: Republicans knocked off two Democratic congressional incumbents, and Trump closed the gap in Miami-Dade to seven points, a 23-point swing from the 2016 election.

But the White House—according to numerous Democrats on the ground—did nothing to coordinate a messaging strategy around these policy changes. Nobody here could get booked on a local news program, or write a social-media post defending the new policies, because they found out about them at the same time everyone in the general public did. As a result, Garcia told me, puffing a massive Cuban cigar, “Democrats are getting killed, every single day, on Spanish-language media here, even though it’s an argument we should be winning.”

Garcia pointed to 2018, when Democrats nominated Andrew Gillum for governor—a candidate endorsed by Bernie Sanders. Garcia and his fellow Democrats in Miami could already recite the attacks on Gillum as a sleeper socialist. When those attacks came, Gillum didn’t do much to dispel them. (When NBC’s Chuck Todd asked if he was a socialist, Gillum replied simply, “No, I’m a Democrat.”) He wound up winning Miami-Dade by 21 points—down from Clinton’s 30-point margin two years before—and lost the election by 32,463 votes statewide. “Let’s face it,” Garcia said. “We lost the governorship to Ron DeSantis because our nominee wouldn’t come out and say, ‘I’m not a goddamn socialist.’”

Democrats here say the national party should have learned a hard lesson from that campaign. Instead, after 2018, the party’s ranks began to swell with influential young progressives, such as New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who championed far-left policies while openly embracing the socialist label

The conviction that history and demography are on the Democrats’ side dulls the political instinct of persuasion. “Look, I’m a big fan of Barack Obama. But he turned our party into a religious order,” he said. “When you think you’re right—no, when you know you’re right—everybody should just get it. You stop making the argument.”

By turning the young representative into a boogeyman, Garcia told me, Republicans forced Democrats to play defense over labels and abstractions while rendering the left’s version of 21st-century populism unacceptable to a huge swath of the electorate that might otherwise be receptive to it.

“She is not Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, Mao, or anything like that. She’s a classic northeastern liberal who’s pushing a social agenda that, in many respects, has real viability at a time like this,” Garcia said of Ocasio-Cortez. “So, how do you shut down the debate? You engage in name-calling. You use propaganda to scare us from acting on the issues most important to our base.”

This is what Carlos Odio meant when he told me national Democrats have “let go of the rope” in Miami-Dade County. It wasn’t that his party would no longer compete for votes down there; rather, it was that his party was acknowledging a new reality, in which affluent white voters are a higher political priority than are working-class Hispanics. This would have been unthinkable just five years ago. I asked Garcia if he was comfortable with such a trade-off.

The city could not handle the influx; its border-processing facilities were at capacity, its humanitarian workers past their breaking point. The community was panicked. Lozano, then the mayor, was desperate. Some of these migrants, he thought, were going to die.“I’m right here, at the bridge, watching this thing spiral out of control. And Democrats in Washington are like, ‘Nothing to see here,’” Lozano said.

Lozano said he began sounding the alarm almost as soon as Biden took office. He told his fellow Democrats that, for all the damage done by Trump’s cruel border-security policies, a relaxed approach to border enforcement could prove even more disastrous. He warned them of a potential humanitarian or national-security crisis

He told me they refused to listen. And today, Lozano said, pulling into the parking lot of a Ramada Inn a few miles from the border, the problem is worse than ever.

“Where is our respect for laws? Where is our respect for the people already here?” Perales said. “I’m an immigrant; I’m also an American. We are allowing our country to be overrun.”

Technically, the border is not open. But you wouldn’t know it from spending a few days in Del Rio. People I spoke with down there said they’d never seen anything like the mass of humanity moving across the border since Biden became president. In fairness, apprehensions at the southern border began to rise in the spring of 2020 and continued to climb throughout Trump’s final year as president. But the numbers spiked much higher after Biden took office.

the conclusion that Democrats have made it easier for migrants to attempt and complete an unlawful crossing into the U.S., making a historically bad problem much worse.

She hated some of the hard-line policies of the Trump administration, including the forced separation of families at the U.S.-Mexico border. But the more she listened to activists and elected officials on the left, the more worried she became that Democrats would embrace the other extreme—refusing to secure the border at all.

Perales ended up voting for Trump. Despite disagreeing with him and the Republican Party on a host of issues, she told me, she plans to vote a straight-GOP ticket in 2022, because of the chaos Democrats have brought to her community.

“This is the biggest wave of illegal immigration in American history, and we’re at the epicenter of it here in Del Rio,” Jason Owens, the Border Patrol’s chief patrol agent of the Del Rio sector, announced at the luncheon. “In the last 24 hours, we’ve apprehended 2,240 people in this sector alone.”

Studies and polling suggest that Hispanics who entered the U.S. legally tend to be more conservative on questions of immigration. S

Martinez said most of the Democrats he’s known over the years have become skeptical of the party. For longer than he can remember, he’s had a weekly breakfast with the same group of seven or eight guys at the Ramada. They were always Democrats—all of them. Now, he said, there’s only one holdout. The rest have switched sides.

In the sheriff’s view—and he said it’s part perception, part reality—his party has become too progressive for Hispanics in a community like his. “This talk of defunding the police, it’s had a real impact,”

“Democrats refuse to even call it a crisis. They’re gaslighting me,” Lozano said. He ran through a list of requests: more funding for Border Patrol; better technology to monitor movement; more support for humanitarian groups on the ground; stricter processing policies to deter would-be migrants; and, yes, in certain places, reinforced physical barriers. Above all, he wants Democrats to stop signaling that America has an open border.

Throughout the 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign, he noted, the party’s aspiring leaders took a host of positions—on decriminalizing border crossings, or providing health insurance to undocumented immigrants—that broke with decades of orthodoxy, to appease the progressive base.

Even if their social-justice efforts are regarded as genuine, Democrats are pushing an agenda that doesn’t resonate with a wide array of voters during this time of economic uncertainty.

“A lot of Latinos, they’re just not moved by these issues,” he said. “They may think Republicans are racist, but some of them are going to vote for the Republicans anyway, because they’re better on the economy, better on small business, better on regulation.”

“It’s very hard for an individual to vote for somebody who leans more on social justice than on the economy,” Chávez told me in a coffee shop not far from the state capitol. “When a person has to choose between paying for a gallon of milk or a gallon of gas, every other issue goes out the window.”

One woman, a longtime progressive activist named Petra Falcon, tells me that Hispanics “have no idea what Democrats really stand for anymore.” Anita Ritter, who serves as the secretary of the American Legion post next door, says she doesn’t know of many of her members who still vote for Democrats.

Luis Acosta. A respected Democratic campaign consultant, Acosta is also a so-called Dreamer. His mother brought him to the U.S. when he was 2; his earliest memory is crawling under the chain-link border fence. Inspired by Obama’s candidacy, Acosta threw himself into Democratic politics. He helped elect numerous candidates to office. But now, he tells me, he’s “absolutely done” helping the Democratic Party win elections.

We’ve supported the Democrats my whole life. Now, we want to know: Are we more than a talking point to you?”

“Maybe the best we can hope for is that these voters”—Mary Rose nods toward one of her adult grandsons nearby—“become independents, and we fight for them on a race-by-race basis,” she says. “And honestly, that’s a win for Republicans.”

Worldwide, solar and wind capacity now tops 300 gigawatts, three times as much as the total capacity in Britain, or roughly as much electricity as 50 nuclear reactors, nearly half the number now operating in the United States. Most of this renewable capacity has been installed in just the last five years. In fact, over that period, solar capacity has been growing by over 50 percent a year, wind by 25 percent.

The cost of photovoltaic cells has fallen by two-thirds in three years. Today, solar energy costs around 15 cents a kilowatt-hour in the United States. In some regions, like Southern California, the cost of solar power is nearly on par with what consumers pay for electricity now.

But not until the Spanish conquest of Peru was the conquest of the Aztecs matched in scope by the victory over the Inca empire in 1532.

A second (and permanent) settlement was established in 1580 by Juan de Garay, who arrived by sailing down the Paraná River from Asunción (now the capital of Paraguay). He dubbed the settlement "Santísima Trinidad" and its port became "Puerto de Santa María de los Buenos Aires." The city came to be the head of the Governorate of the Río de la Plata and in 1776 elevated to be the capital of the new Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata.

Spain's administration of its colonies in the Americas was divided into the Viceroyalty of New Spain 1535 (capital, México City), and the Viceroyalty of Peru 1542 (capital, Lima). In the 18th century the additional Viceroyalty of New Granada 1717 (capital, Bogotá), and Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata 1776 (capital, Buenos Aires) were established from portions of the Viceroyalty of Peru.

During the Napoleonic Peninsular War in Europe between France and Spain, assemblies called juntas were established to rule in the name of Ferdinand VII of Spain

The Libertadores (Spanish and Portuguese for "Liberators") were the principal leaders of the Spanish American wars of independence. They were predominantly criollos (Americas-born people of European ancestry, mostly Spanish or Portuguese), bourgeois and influenced by liberalism and in some cases with military training in the mother country.

These began a movement for colonial independence that spread to Spain's other colonies in the Americas. The ideas from the French and the American Revolution influenced the efforts. All of the colonies, except Cuba and Puerto Rico, attained independence by the 1820s

In 1898, the United States won victory in the Spanish–American War from Spain, ending the Spanish colonial era

It has been estimated that in the 16th century about 240,000 Spaniards emigrated to the Americas, and in the 17th century about 500,000, predominantly to Mexico and Peru.

The population of the Native Amerindian population in Mexico declined by an estimated 90% (reduced to 1–2.5 million people) by the early 17th century. In Peru the indigenous Amerindian pre-contact population of around 6.5 million declined to 1 million by the early 17th century.[citation needed] The overwhelming cause of decline in both Mexico and Peru was infectious diseases.

The Spaniards were committed, by Royal decree, to convert their New World indigenous subjects to Catholicism. However, often initial efforts were questionably successful, as the indigenous people added Catholicism into their longstanding traditional ceremonies and beliefs. The many native expressions, forms, practices, and items of art could be considered idolatry and prohibited or destroyed by Spanish missionaries, military and civilians. This included religious items, sculptures and jewelry made of gold or silver, which were melted down before shipment to Spain.

The IAAF responded by saying it will consider sanctions against Russia, including a possible suspension that would ban Russian track and field athletes from international competition, including the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. IAAF President Sebastian Coe gave the Russian federation until the end of the week to respond.

"If they are suspended — and it sounds like the IAAF is moving in that direction already — and they are still suspended, at the time of Rio, there will be no Russian track and field athletes there," Pound said in an interview with The Associated Press after the release of the findings.

At least 12 groups are working to develop a vaccine.

European Medicines Agency (EMA), Europe's drugs regulator, said it established an expert task force to advise companies working on Zika vaccines and medicines, mirroring similar action during the two-year-long Ebola epidemic that started in December 2013 and the pandemic flu outbreak in 2009.

There are no vaccines or treatment for Zika and none even undergoing clinical studies. Most infected people either have no symptoms or develop mild ones like fever and skin rashes.

"The good news is this is not like Ebola; people don't die of Zika. A lot of people get it and don't even know that they have it," Obama told CBS News

Most of the money sought by Obama, who faces pressure from Republicans and some fellow Democrats to act decisively on Zika, would be spent in the United States on testing, surveillance and response in affected areas, including the creation of rapid-response teams to contain outbreak clusters.

Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said she was not expecting "large-scale amounts of serious Zika infections" in the continental United States as warmer months bring larger and more active mosquito populations.

Obama's funding request to Congress includes $335 million for the U.S. Agency for International Development to support mosquito-control, maternal health and other Zika-related public health efforts in affected countries in the Americas.

Fauci said he anticipated beginning a so-called Phase 1 trial this summer for a Zika vaccine that would take about three months to test if it is safe and induces a good immune response before further studies can be conducted.

The CDC said its Zika emergency operations center, with a staff of 300, has been placed on its highest level of activation, reflecting a need for accelerated preparedness for possible local virus transmission by mosquitoes in the continental United States.

Much remains unknown about Zika, including whether the virus actually causes microcephaly, a condition marked by abnormally small head size that can result in developmental problems.Brazil is investigating the potential link between Zika infections and more than 4,000 suspected cases of microcephaly. Researchers have identified evidence of Zika infection in 17 of these cases, either in the baby or in the mother, but have not confirmed that Zika can cause microcephaly. 

Word that Zika can be spread by sexual transmission and blood transfusions and its discovery in saliva and urine of infected people have added to concern over the virus.

The World Health Organization declared the outbreak an international health emergency on Feb. 1, citing a "strongly suspected" relationship between Zika infection in pregnancy to microcephaly.

Brazil is grappling with the virus even as it prepares to host the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro in August, with tens of thousands of athletes and tourists anticipated.The U.S. Olympic Committee has told U.S. sports federations that athletes and staff concerned about their health due to Zika should consider not going to the Olympics.

Former Olympian Donald Anthony, president and board chairman of USA Fencing, said, "One of the things that they immediately said was, especially for women that may be pregnant or even thinking of getting pregnant, that whether you are scheduled to go to Rio or no, that you shouldn't go."

El Salvador’s Health Ministry is particularly concerned about the rise of cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome, which leads to paralysis, usually temporary; researchers are exploring a possible link between Guillain-Barré and Zika. Forty-six suspected cases of the syndrome had been reported as of last week, Violeta Menjívar, the health minister, said in a radio interview.

virus has appeared in only three Mexican states. The mosquitoes that carry the virus, he said, could not survive in the high altitudes of the central plateau, including Mexico City.“I think it’s good to have these warnings,” he said, “but these things should be explained to people.”

Their model for Zika’s possible spread, using worldwide temperature profiles and air travel routes, also determined that more than 60 percent of the population in the United States lives in areas conducive to seasonal Zika transmission. And about 23 million people in the United States live in places with climates like Florida and parts of Texas where Zika can be transmitted by mosquitoes year-round, the researchers said.The authorities in Brazil insist that they are taking steps to fight Zika, including vaccine research.

If vaccines are the ultimate way out from this global pandemic, Brazil has a long way to go to seeing this through. As of Friday, less than 10 million people in the country of about 220 million had received at least one dose,

Only 1.57% of the population had been fully vaccinated.

That is the result of a slow rollout program that has been plagued by delays. During the announcement of its distribution plan in early February, the government promised some 46 million vaccine doses to be available in March. It's been repeatedly forced to lower that number, now estimating only 26 million by month's end.

In-country production of what the governments says will eventually be hundreds of millions of doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine only just got off the ground. The first 500,000 doses were delivered and celebrated by top Ministry of Health officials in Rio de Janeiro this week, despite being months behind schedule.

If vaccines are to remain in short supply for the foreseeable future, the only remaining ways to control the epidemic's exponential growth in Brazil are the methods the world has heard ad nauseam -- social distancing, no large crowds, restricted movements and good hygiene.

But in many places throughout Brazil, that is just not happening. In bustling Rio de Janeiro, it is easy to find maskless crowds walking the streets, conversing in close quarters. Though the city's famed beaches are closed this weekend, restaurants and bars can still be open until 9 p.m., many likely to be filled to capacity.

Many states have imposed much harsher restrictions including nighttime curfews, but local leaders are fighting against federal leadership, or a lack thereof, determined to keep things open.

President Jair Bolsonaro, a Covid-19 skeptic who has mocked the efficacy of vaccines and hasn't publicly taken one himself, announced Thursday that he would be taking legal action against certain states in the country's Supreme Court, claiming the only person who can decree curfews is him -- something he has promised never to do.Despite thousands of people dying from the virus each day, he claims the real threat is from the economic harm virus-prompted restrictions can impose.

Millions of his supporters are following his lead, openly flaunting local regulations of social distancing and mask wearing.All of this would be concerning enough on its own, but it is exacerbated by a deeply concerning reality -- the spread of Covid-19 variants.

The P.1 variant was first discovered in Japan. Health authorities detected the viral mutation in multiple travelers that were returning from Amazonas state, an isolated region in Brazil's north replete with rainforest.

Nearly two months later, more and more research points to the P.1 variant as a crucial factor not only in the Manaus outbreak but in the nationwide crisis Brazil faces today.A study from Brazil's top medical research foundation, Fiocruz, from early March found that of eight Brazilian states studied, Covid-19 variants including P.1 were prevalent in at least 50% of new cases.

The variant is widely agreed to be more easily transmissible, up to 2.2 times so according to a recent study. That is more transmissible than the widely discussed B.1.1.7 variant first identified in the United Kingdom, which is up to 1.7 times more transmissible, according to a December study.That same study also found that people are 25% to 65% more likely to evade existing protective immunity from previous non-P.1 infections.

Finally, there remain concerns the different vaccines might not be as effective against the P.1 variant. Though a recent study from the UK did find that the "existing vaccines may protect against the Brazilian coronavirus variant," CNN spoke to several epidemiologists who remain concerned.

Amidst Brazil's unmitigated viral spread lies two additional, distinct threats. One, the easier export of the existing P.1 variant abroad. It's already in at least two dozen countries and counting and international travel to and from Brazil is still open to for most countries.Two, if the P.1 variant was created here, so can others.

Under the laws of viral evolution, new variants are created to try and allow the virus to spread more easily. Along the way, more dangerous iterations can be created.

With a lack of a vaccines and a government unwilling to take the steps necessary to prevent that from happening, it is unclear how things get better in Brazil anytime soon.

Many municipal and state health officials and lawmakers blame Bolsonaro's government for undermining their efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus. And the country's National Council of Health Secretaries (CONASS) has asked the federal government to adopt stricter measures to support hospitals and enforce social distancing.

"The health system in Brazil is on the verge of collapse," Sao Paulo Governor Joao Doria told CNN's Becky Anderson during a recent interview. "There is no national coordination to combat the pandemic in Brazil. It would be important for the President and the governors to send the same message to the population, but this unfortunately, doesn't happen in Brazil.

He has made disobeying health guidance a point of pride, congratulating agricultural workers at an event last week for not staying home "like cowards."

"The emergence of new variants, which combine both the potential to be more transmissible and the absence of broad and articulated mitigation and suppression measures, are highly worrisome," the study's authors wrote, urging Brazil to encourage behaviors that limit the viral spread.

"The data showing the prevalence of this variant in several states and its ample spread throughout the country, as well as the challenges presented due to its high level of transmission, reinforce the immediate need to adopt non-pharmaceutical measures in order to reduce the speed or its spread and the increases in cases."

"This is what viruses do: They evolve, they get stronger. The only way to stop it is to contain its spread, which is why we need restrictive measures -- there is no other solution. Even if the Government decrees a national lockdown, we need the population to adhere. The action of each one of us will impact everyone as a whole," Naveca said.

Hope could be on its way, in the form of vaccines. But Brazil's vaccination rollout was slow in comparison to other countries, including others in the region, like Chile and Mexico.

Since then, roughly 4% of Brazil's 211 million citizens have received at least one vaccine dose, according to data from the Brazilian Health Ministry, and 2.3 million have had two doses.

"Pfizer says this very clearly on the contract, 'we are not responsible for any collateral side effects' - if you turn into an alligator it's your problem," Bolsonaro said in December. "If you become Superman, or grow a beard as a woman, or a man's voice becomes high pitched, they say they have nothing to do with that."

"I thank you for this meeting and we recognize Pfizer as a great world company," Bolsonaro said, during an excerpt of the meeting posted to his official Twitter account. "We would like to close these deals with you, even more given the aggressiveness of this virus in Brazil."

"The story in Brazil can be and will be repeated elsewhere if we stop implementing the measures as we need to implement them," he said. "Countries are going to lurch back into third and fourth surges if we're not careful."

"Unfortunately, I don't think we've learned our lesson," Molina said. "We [health workers] are tired, exhausted and are getting sick. We feel powerless. We need a more coordinated action if we're going to keep this from happening again.

To get an idea why the government is spending so much on Trump's border wall, look no further than the construction sites down in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.

On one side of a caliche road, you can see the pedestrian fence that was erected more than a decade ago. At 18 feet, it looks downright puny. On the other side of the road are massive steel bollards topped with an "anti-climbing plate" that rise 30 feet above the cotton fields, surrounded by men in hardhats and heavy equipment.

"The cost of almost $20 million per mile cost is four times as much as the most expensive other walls being built,"

Border walls are much in vogue in the post-Cold War era, he said, and there are now at least 60 around the world.

The federal contractors are mostly giant construction companies with experience handling complex federal projects.

Taking private land through eminent domain involves multiple agencies, including the Department of Justice, and can lead to lawsuits.

"Where you have private property and the government has to go through the courts to get that property, it takes a lot longer and it drives the cost up because you have to pay for that land,"

Contrary to President Trump's claims, the wall is not "going up at a record speed." In fact, construction has fallen months behind schedule because of the complexities of acquiring private land in the South Texas.

Democrats say they do want border security, but the way to do it is with manpower and technology, not steel and concrete.

"I live on the border. I don't want to see chaos. I want to see law and order at the border," Cuellar continued. "But I don't want to just be spending billions of dollars to those federal contractors."

Some of the extra money will be used to build the wall higher and 10 miles longer. There have also been "increased project costs due to unforeseen site conditions" — to wit, serious seepage problems where the levee wall crosses a canal that empties into the Rio Grande.

Now, the Pentagon inspector general is reviewing the contract. Auditors want to know if the White House steered it to Fisher, who maintains his bid was the best.

The Rio Grande Valley is located near the U.S.-Mexico border and is a majority Hispanic region with a large number of undocumented and mixed-status families.