latin-america
Brazil mudslides kill at least 94, with dozens still missing
Rio de Janeiro state’s government has confirmed 94 deaths from floods and mudslides that swept away homes and cars in the city of Petropolis. But even as families prepared to bury their dead, it was unclear Thursday how many bodies remained trapped in the mud.
Rubens Bomtempo, mayor of the German-influenced city nestled in the mountains, didn’t even offer an estimate for the number of people missing, with recovery efforts still ongoing.
Read: Rain-fed landslides, flooding kill at least 19 in Brazil
“We don’t yet know the full scale of this,” Bomtempo said at a news conference Wednesday. “It was a hard day, a difficult day.”
More than 24 hours after the deadly deluge early Tuesday, survivors were digging to find lost loved ones. Rio de Janeiro’s public prosecutors’ office said in a statement Wednesday night that it had compiled a list of 35 people yet to be located.
Footage posted on social media showed torrents dragging cars and houses through the streets and water swirling through the city. One video showed two buses sinking into a swollen river as its passengers clambered out the windows, scrambling for safety. Some didn’t make it to the banks and were washed away, out of sight.
On Wednesday morning, houses were left buried beneath mud while appliances and cars were in piles on the streets.
Petropolis, named for a former Brazilian emperor, has been a refuge for people escaping the summer heat and tourists keen to explore the so-called “Imperial City.”
Its prosperity has also drawn poorer residents from Rio’s poorer regions. Its population grew haphazardly, climbing mountainsides now covered with small residences packed tightly together. Many are in areas unfit for structures and made more vulnerable by deforestation and inadequate drainage.
The state fire department said 25.8 centimeters (just over 10 inches) of rain fell within three hours on Tuesday -- almost as much as during the previous 30 days combined. Rio de Janeiro’s Gov. Claudio Castro said in a press conference that the rains were the worst Petropolis has received since 1932.
“No one could predict rain as hard as this,” Castro said. More rain is expected through the rest of the week, according to weather forecasters.
Castro added that almost 400 people were left homeless and 24 people were recovered alive.
They were fortunate, and they were few.
Read: Wall of rock falls on boaters on Brazilian lake, killing 6
“I could only hear my brother yelling, ‘Help! Help! My God!’” resident Rosilene Virginia told The Associated Press as a man comforted her. “It’s very sad to see people asking for help and having no way of helping, no way of doing anything. It’s desperate, a feeling of loss so great.”
The stricken mountain region has seen similar catastrophes in recent decades, including one that caused more than 900 deaths. In the years since, Petropolis presented a plan to reduce risks of landslides, but works have been advancing only slowly. The plan, presented in 2017, was based on analysis determining that 18% of the city’s territory was at high risk for landslides and flooding.
Local authorities say more than 180 residents who live in at-risk areas are sheltering in schools. More equipment and manpower is expected to help rescue efforts on Thursday.
Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro expressed solidarity while on a trip to Russia. Petropolis’ city hall declared three days of mourning for the tragedy.
Southeastern Brazil has been punished with heavy rains since the start of the year, with more than 40 deaths recorded between incidents in Minas Gerais state in early January and Sao Paulo state later the same month.
Rain-fed landslides, flooding kill at least 19 in Brazil
Landslides and flooding caused by heavy rains killed at least 19 people in Brazil’s most populous state Sunday while high waters forced some 500,000 families from their homes over the weekend, authorities said.
Three people from the same family died when a landslide destroyed their house in the city of Embu das Artes, according to the municipal government, while four other people were rescued by firemen.
Four children died in Francisco Morato, Sao Paulo state Gov. João Doria said, and the state government said four other people died in Franco da Rocha. Deaths also were reported in Ribeirão Preto and Jaú.
Read: Wall of rock falls on boaters on Brazilian lake, killing 6
Three of the deaths involved people who were swept away by flood waters, the state fire department said.
Doria used a helicopter to survey damaged areas on Sunday and announced the equivalent of $2.8 million in financial aid to affected cities.
Overflowing rivers forced 500,000 families to leave their homes, the state government said. Several roads and highways were blocked.
Because of disruptions caused by the rain, the city of Sao Paulo canceled scheduled vaccinations against the coronavirus.
Southeastern Brazil has been punished with heavy rains since the start of the year, with 19 deaths recorded in Minas Gerais state earlier this month.
Mexico sees fake molnupiravir, 1 week after drug approved
Mexico said Friday it is already seeing black market or fake versions of molnupiravir circulating for sale, just one week after authorities approved the drug to treat those at risk of severe COVID-19.
The real medication is produced by U.S. pharmaceutical company Merck. But Mexico’s health regulatory agency found versions labelled molnupiravir for sale from an array of companies like “Merit,” “Molaz” and “Azista.”
The agency said Friday that it had no record of any permits for import or sales of those companies’ drugs and considered them a health risk.
The Federal Commission for Health Protection wrote that, because molnupiravir is approved only for prescription use, “any product advertised as over-the-counter molnupiravir should be considered a health risk because of its dubious origin.”
Also read: Merck agrees to let other drug makers make its COVID pill
Mexico's government approved molnupiravir from Merck for use last week for adults with COVID-19 and “a high risk of complications.” On Friday the agency approved a second pill, Paxlovid, from Pfizer, for use on adult patients “at risk for complications.”
Mexico has long been plagued by counterfeit medicines, corruption within the regulatory agency, and a penchant for self-medication due to the country's inadequate health care infrastructure.
The country has seen coronavirus cases spike by over 200% in the last week, apparently due to the omicron variant, and faces a shortage of tests, which tends to drive consumers toward the black market.
Also read: US panel backs first-of-a-kind COVID-19 pill from Merck
Mexico does so little testing that, while test-confirmed COVID-19 deaths hover around 300,000, a government review of death certificates places the real toll at around 460,000.
Tarnished Gold: Illegal Amazon gold seeps into supply chains
The medals were billed as the most sustainable ever produced.
To match the festive spirit of South America’s first Olympics, officials from Brazil, the host country for the 2016 games in Rio de Janeiro, boasted that the medals hung around the necks of athletes on the winners' podium were also a victory for the environment: The gold was produced free of mercury and the silver recycled from thrown away X-ray plates and mirrors.
Five years on, the refiner that provided the gold for the medals, Marsam, is processing gold ultimately purchased by hundreds of well-known publicly traded U.S. companies — among them Microsoft, Tesla and Amazon — that are legally required to responsibly source metals in an industry long plagued by environmental and labor concerns.
But a comprehensive review of public records by The Associated Press found that the Sao Paulo-based company processes gold for, and shared ownership links to, an intermediary accused by Brazilian prosecutors of buying gold mined illegally on Indigenous lands and other areas deep in the Amazon rainforest.
The AP previously reported in this series that the scale of prospecting for gold on Indigenous lands has exploded in recent years and involves carving illegal landing strips in the forest for unauthorized airplanes to ferry in heavy equipment, fuel and backhoes to tear at the earth in search of the precious metal. Weak government oversight enabled by President Jair Bolsonaro, the son of a prospector himself, has only exacerbated the problem of illegal gold mining in protected areas. Critics also fault an international certification program used by manufacturers to show they aren’t using minerals that come from conflict zones, saying it is an exercise in greenwashing.
“There is no real traceability as long as the industry relies on self-regulation,” said Mark Pieth, a professor of criminal law at the University of Basel in Switzerland and author of the 2018 book “Gold Laundering.”
“People know where the gold comes from, but they don’t bother to go very far back into the supply chain because they know they will come into contact with all kinds of criminal activity.”
___
Much like brown and black tributaries that feed the Amazon River, gold illegally mined in the rainforest mixes into the supply chain and melds with clean gold to become almost indistinguishable.
Nuggets are spirited out of the jungle in prospectors’ dusty pockets to the nearest city where they are sold to financial brokers. All that’s required to transform the raw ore into a tradable asset regulated by the central bank is a handwritten document attesting to the specific point in the rainforest where the gold was extracted. The fewer questions asked, the better.
At many of those brokers’ Amazon outposts — the financial system’s front door — the gold becomes the property of Dirceu Frederico Sobrinho.
Read:Leftist millennial wins election as Chile’s next president
For four decades, Dirceu has embodied the up-by-your-bootstraps myth of the Brazilian garimpeiro, or prospector. The son of a vegetable grocer who sold his produce near an infamous open-pit mine so packed with prospectors — among them Bolsonaro’s father — they looked like swarming ants, he caught the gold bug in the mid-1980s and began dispatching planeloads of raw ore from a remote Amazon town. He secured his first concession in 1990, one year after the nation rolled out a permitting regime to regulate prospecting.
Today, from a high rise on Sao Paulo’s busiest avenue, he is a major player in Brazil’s gold rush, with 173 prospecting areas either registered to his name or with pending requests, according to Brazil's mining regulator's registry. In the same building is the headquarters of the nation’s gold association, Anoro, which he leads. Dirceu, until last year, was also a partner in Marsam.
But even with gold jewelry dangling from his fingers and wrist, Dirceu still proudly boasts his everyman garimpeiro roots.
“You don’t motivate someone to go into the forest if they’re not chasing after a dream,” he said in a rare interview from his corner office studded with a giant jade eagle. “Whoever deals in gold has that: They dream, they believe, they like it.”
“We have a saying among the garimpeiros: ‘I’m a pawn, but I’m a pawn for gold,'” he adds.
At the center of Dirceu’s empire is F.D’Gold, Brazil’s largest buyer of gold from prospecting sites, with purchases last year totaling more than 2 billion reais ($361 million) from 252 wildcat sites, according to data from the mining regulator. Only two international firms that run industrial-sized gold mines paid more in royalties in 2021, a sign of how once artisanal prospecting has become big business in Brazil — at least for some.
In August, federal prosecutors filed a civil suit against F.D’Gold and two other brokers seeking the immediate suspension of all activities and payment of 10 billion reais ($1.8 billion) in social and environmental damages.
The complaint alleges the companies failed to take actions that would have prevented the illegal extraction of a combined 4.3 metric tons from protected areas and Indigenous territories, where mining is not allowed. Dirceu said his company complies with all laws and has implemented extra controls, but he acknowledged that determining the exact origin of the gold it obtains is “impossible” at present. He has proposed an industry-wide digital registry to improve transparency.
The ongoing suit is the result of a study published inuly by the Federal University of Minas Gerais which found that as much as 28% of Brazil’s gold produced in 2019 and 2020 was potentially mined illegally. To reach that conclusion, researchers combed through 17,400 government-registered transactions by F.D’Gold and other buyers to pinpoint the location where the gold was purportedly mined. In many cases, the given location wasn’t an authorized site or, when cross-checked with satellite images, showed none of the hallmark signs of mining activity — deforestation, stagnant ponds of waste — meaning the gold originated elsewhere.
Dirceu’s name and those of F.D’Gold and his mining company Ouro Roxo have popped up repeatedly over the years in numerous criminal investigations. He has been charged but never convicted.
A decade ago, federal prosecutors in Amazon’s Amapa state accused his company of knowingly purchasing illegal gold from a national park that was later transformed into gold bars. The charges were dismissed in 2017 after a federal judge in Brasilia ruled that F.D’Gold made the purchases legally, as evidenced by the invoices. Separate money laundering charges against Dirceu were also dismissed, due to lack of evidence. Dirceu has denied wrongdoing.
___
Whatever its origin, all the raw ore purchased by F.D’Gold ends up at Marsam.
F.D’Gold accounts for more than one-third of the gold Marsam processes, according to André Nunes, an external consultant for Marsam.
After almost two years as a partner in the Sao Paulo-based refiner, Dirceu stepped down last year and his daughter, Sarah Almeida Westphal, assumed management responsibilities. It was part of an effort to put different family members in charge of their own businesses, which function as separate legal entities, said Nunes, who previously worked for F.D’Gold.
“As much as it’s the same family, it’s important that each monkey has its own branch,” he said.
But the federal tax authority's corporate registry shows Dirceu and Westphal remain partners in a machine rental and air cargo venture based in the Amazonian city of Itaituba, the national epicenter of prospecting. And Westphal could be seen working on a computer at F.D’Gold’s office on the day the AP interviewed Dirceu.
From Marsam, the gold travels far and wide. More than 300 publicly traded companies list Marsam as a refiner in responsible mining disclosures they are required to file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The refiner has been virtually the only supplier to Brazil’s mint over the past decade, according to data provided to the AP through a freedom of information request.
“Why do they want our bars? Because they’re accepted all over the world,” said Nunes, who is also a member of Marsam's six-person compliance committee.
Enabling such robust sales around the world is a seal of approval from the Responsible Minerals Initiative, or RMI.
The certification program, run by a Virginia-based coalition of manufacturers, emerged with the passage a decade ago of legislation in the U.S. requiring companies to disclose their use of conflict minerals fueling civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Later, its standards were supplemented by tougher guidelines developed by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development or OECD
Marsam is one of just two refiners in Brazil certified as compliant with RMI’s standards for responsible sourcing of gold, having successfully completed two independent audits. The last one was performed in 2018 by UL Responsible Sourcing, an Illinois-based consultancy.
But its ties to Dirceu's family and its strategic positioning at the pinch point between the Amazon rainforest and global commerce raises questions about its previously unexamined role in the processing and sale of gold allegedly sourced from off-limit areas.
Marsam hasn’t been accused by prosecutors of any wrongdoing and insists that it only refines gold, not sell it, on behalf of third-party exporters and domestic vendors.
The company in 2016 introduced a supply chain policy, which it has updated over the years, requiring it to seek out information from suppliers whenever they are publicly linked to illicit activities. They are also expected to analyze a mandatory declaration of origin form submitted by each client. No such risks were identified in the most recent RMI report and Marsam was moved to a lower risk category requiring an audit once every three years.
Critics say one problem is that the OECD’s guidelines RMI measures companies against pay scant attention to environmental crimes or the rights of Indigenous communities. Instead, they are geared toward risks stemming from civil wars and criminal networks. In Latin America, only Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela — where drug cartels or guerrilla insurgencies are active — are classified as conflict-affected and high-risk areas deserving greater scrutiny for sourcing practices.
But the influx of illegal miners into Indigenous territories has been on the rise in recent years in Brazil — sometimes ending in bloodshed.
In May, hundreds of prospectors raided a Munduruku village, setting houses on fire, including one that belonged to a prominent anti-mining activist. The attack followed clashes farther north in Roraima state, where miners in motorboats and carrying automatic weapons repeatedly threatened a riverside Yanomami settlement. In one incident, two children, ages one and five, drowned when a shooting sent people scattering into the woods.
In their suits against F.D’Gold and the two other brokers, prosecutors blame expanding mining activity for the illegal clearing in 2019 and 2020 of some 5,000 hectares of once pristine rainforest located on Indigenous territories as well as exacerbating “internal rifts that may be irreconcilable.”
Read:Brazil reopens amid looming threat from delta variant
Experts say these kinds of activities barely register in corporate boardrooms where sourcing decisions are made and given the seal of approval by international certification programs.
“Certification connotes a degree of certitude that isn’t at all possible in the gold industry, especially in Brazil,” said David Soud, an analyst at I.R. Consilium, which recently prepared a report for the OECD on illegal gold flows from neighboring Venezuela. “The result is a lot of blind spots that can easily be exploited by bad actors.”
___
Some of those blind spots are created by Brazil’s own weak oversight.
Under Brazilian law, securities brokers like F.D’Gold can’t be held responsible if the prospector whose ore they buy lies about its provenance. Nor is there any effective way to track the information provided at the point of sale.
It’s a system that inhibits tracking and accountability at best, and at worst enables willful ignorance as a means to launder illegal gold, according to wildcat mining experts including Larissa Rodrigues of the environmental think tank Choices Institute. For starters, experts say there need to be electronic invoices feeding a database that allows information to be verified.
“The supply chain is absorbing gold that doesn’t come from that chain. We know this happens,” said Rodrigues. “It’s a fact that fraud exists, but you can’t prosecute because you can’t prove it.”
Dirceu didn’t deny the possibility that F.D’Gold has unwittingly bought dirty gold. But he insists F.D’Gold, as an entity regulated by Brazil’s powerful central bank, follows the law and goes beyond what is required — such as hiring in 2020 two companies to monitor through satellite imagery the sources of its gold.
“The moment we had knowledge this could be happening, we hired them,” he said.
As president of the nation’s gold association, he claims to have been pushing since at least 2017 a plan to create a digital profile of every participant in the supply chain, complete with the garimpeiro’s photo, fingerprints and ID number.
“Digitalization and automation is the start of traceability,” he said. “The more legality, the more security there will be for our activities.”
Yet for all the apparent industry goodwill, and the support of Brazil’s tax authority, the proposal remains just that — an idea that hasn’t even been taken up by Congress. In the past two decades, the central bank hasn’t revoked authorization for any company that purchases gold.
For its part, Marsam says it uses its “best efforts” to identify the origin of the metals it refines. That includes requiring clients to sign affidavits attesting to the metal’s legality, demanding original invoices and conducting client visits to verify they have systems in place to prevent fraud.
But it doesn’t visit the mines themselves — something that RMI requires of refiners operating only in high-risk jurisdictions.
“We have to be diligent, but not do work that isn’t ours,” Nunes said. Asked when was the last time Marsam suspended a client it suspects of trading in dirty gold he shook his head, struggling to recall.
“I don’t remember it ever happening,” Nunes said before finally harkening back to one instance more than a decade ago.
___
RMI wouldn’t discuss prosecutors' allegations against F.D’Gold, despite its close affiliation with Marsam, citing confidentiality agreements to encourage refiners to participate in its grievance process.
In a statement, it said that it takes all allegations “very seriously” and works with companies to address concerns. As part of that process, refiners are expected to trace activities all the way back to the mine whenever red flags are detected. If they don’t then address the concerns, they will be removed from the conformant list.
A 2018 report by the OECD found that while RMI's standards are aligned with its guidelines there are significant gaps in the way RMI and other industry initiatives carry out audits, relying more on a refiner’s policies and procedures than its due diligence efforts. RMI-approved auditors also demonstrated a lack of basic technical skills and familiarity with the OECD guidelines, the study found.
“There was also an observed absence of curiosity, professional skepticism and critical analysis,” according to the report. RMI said it has since strengthened implementation efforts and is awaiting the outcome of a new assessment being conducted for the European Union.
Additional analysis in 2017 by Kumi, a London-based consulting firm that advises the OECD, found that only 5% of 314 end-user companies then registered with RMI, most of them U.S. based, had policies on sourcing conflict materials that were in line with the OECD guidelines.
“End-user companies set the tone for what happens in their supply chains,” said Andrew Britton, managing director of Kumi, which is conducting a new assessment of certifiers now for the European Commission. “It’s really important that companies’ due diligence on their supply chains really probes into potential risks and is not simply a box-ticking exercise.”
___
While land grabbing by ranchers, loggers and prospectors is hardly new in the Amazon, never before has Brazil had a president as outspokenly favorable to such interests.
Bolsonaro campaigned for the nation’s top job with promises of unearthing the Amazon’s vast mineral wealth, and his support for prospectors has encouraged a modern-day gold rush.
Bolsonaro’s father prospected for gold at Serra Pelada, where Dirceu first saw gold mining, and the president sometimes draws on his upbringing to rally support from prospectors. While campaigning, he aired videos in the Amazon region in which he boasted of sometimes pulling over at jungle stream and pulling a pan from a car to try his luck.
“Interest in the Amazon isn’t about the Indians or the damn trees; it’s the ore,” he told a group of prospectors at the presidential palace in 2019, vowing to deploy the armed forces to allow their operations to continue unfettered.
Then in May 2021, he attacked environmentalists for trying to criminalize prospecting.
“It’s really cool how people in suits and ties guess about everything that happens in the countryside,” he said sarcastically.
Beyond the rhetoric, Bolsonaro’s administration recently introduced legislation that would open up Indigenous territories to mining — something federal prosecutors have called unconstitutional and activists warn would wreak vast social and environmental damages.
Dirceu said he opposes allowing mining of Indigenous lands unless local people support the activity and are given first priority to pursue it themselves. But even as he fashions himself a reformer from the inside, he’s also benefitted from the current free-for-all. For one, he doesn’t even consider prospectors working without a permit to be illegal — just irregular.
Given persistent efforts to deregulate gold extraction, calls by Dirceu and the gold association to increase accountability over the gold supply chain “ring hollow,” said Robert Muggah, who oversees an initiative on environmental crime in the Amazon at think tank Igarape Institute.
Soon, Dirceu may stand to profit even more. Recently, F.D’Gold received approval to begin exporting directly. Dirceu said the company is currently seeking clients abroad and hopes to begin shipments soon.
If he succeeds, it means that, for the first time, someone will have a hand in the entirety of Brazil’s gold supply chain: from the Amazon where the gold is mined, to the outposts where it is first sold, to the planes that bring the ore to his daughter’s refinery in Sao Paulo and, finally, into the hands of foreign buyers.
"It’s really important to understand that the nature of gold extraction in countries like Brazil is linked, ineluctably, to the global markets,” said Muggah.
Leftist millennial wins election as Chile’s next president
A leftist millennial who rose to prominence during anti-government protests was elected Chile’s next president Sunday after a bruising campaign against a free-market firebrand likened to Donald Trump.
With 56% of the votes, Gabriel Boric handily defeated by more than 10 points lawmaker José Antonio Kast, who tried unsuccessfully to scare voters that his inexperienced opponent would become a puppet of his allies in Chile’s Communist Party and upend the country’s vaunted record as Latin America’s most stable, advanced economy.
In a model of democratic civility that broke from the polarizing rhetoric of the campaign, Kast immediately conceded defeat, tweeting a photo of himself on the phone congratulating his opponent on his “grand triumph.” He then later traveled personally to Boric’s campaign headquarters to meet with his rival.
Meanwhile, outgoing President Sebastian Pinera — a conservative billionaire — held a video conference with Boric to offer his government’s full support during the three month transition.
Amid a crush of supporters, Boric vaulted atop a metal barricade to reach the stage where he initiated in the indigenous Mapuche language a rousing victory speech to thousands of mostly young supporters.
Read: Islamic world pitches ways to aid desperately poor Afghans
The bearded, bespectacled president-elect highlighted the progressive positions that launched his improbable campaign, including a promise to fight climate change by blocking a proposed mining project in what is the world’s largest copper producing nation.
He also promised to end Chile’s private pension system — the hallmark of the neoliberal economic model imposed by the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
“We are a generation that emerged in public life demanding our rights be respected as rights and not treated like consumer goods or a business,” Boric said. “We know there continues to be justice for the rich, and justice for the poor, and we no longer will permit that the poor keep paying the price of Chile’s inequality.”
He also gave an extended shout out to Chilean women, a key voting bloc who feared that a Kast victory would roll back years of steady gains, promising they will be “protagonists” in a government that will seek to “leave behind once and for all the patriarchal inheritance of our society.”
In Santiago’s subway, where a fare hike in 2019 triggered a wave of nationwide protests that exposed the shortcomings of Chile’s free market model, young supporters of Boric, some of them waving flags emblazoned with the candidate’s name, jumped and shouted in unison as they headed downtown to join thousands who gathered for the president-elect’s victory speech.
“This is a historic day,” said Boris Soto, a teacher. “We’ve defeated not only fascism, and the right wing, but also fear.”
At 35, Boric will become Chile’s youngest modern president when he takes office in March and only the second millennial to lead in Latin America, after El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. Only one other head of state, Giacomo Simoncini of the city-state San Marino in Europe, is younger.
His government is likely to be closely watched throughout Latin America, where Chile has long been a harbinger of regional trends.
It was the first country in Latin America to break with the U.S. dominance during the Cold War and pursue socialism with the election of Salvador Allende in 1970. It then reversed course a few years later when Pinochet’s coup ushered in a period of right-wing military rule that quickly launched a free market experiment throughout the region.
Read: Cuba begins vaccinating children as young as 2
Boric’s ambitious goal is to introduce a European-style social democracy that would expand economic and political rights to attack nagging inequality without veering toward the authoritarianism embraced by so much of the left in Latin America, from Cuba to Venezuela.
It’s a task made more challenging by deepening ideological divisions unleashed by the coronavirus pandemic, which sped up the reversal of a decade of economic gains.
Kast, who has a history of defending Chile’s past military dictatorship, finished ahead of Boric by two points in the first round of voting last month but failed to secure a majority of votes. That set up a head-to-head runoff against Boric.
Boric was able to reverse the difference by a larger margin than pre-election opinion polls forecast by expanding beyond his base in the capital, Santiago, and attracting voters in rural areas who don’t side with political extremes. For example, in the northern region of Antofagasta, where he finished third in the first round of voting, he trounced Kast by almost 20 points.
An additional 1.2 million Chileans cast ballots Sunday compared to the first round, raising turnout to nearly 56%, the highest since voting stopped being mandatory in 2012.
“It’s impossible not to be impressed by the historic turnout, the willingness of Kast to concede and congratulate his opponent even before final results were in, and the generous words of President Pinera,” said Cynthia Arnson, head of the Latin America program at the Wilson Center in Washington. “Chilean democracy won today, for sure.”
Kast, 55, a devout Roman Catholic and father of nine, emerged from the far right fringe after having won less than 8% of the vote in 2017. An admirer of Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, he rose steadily in the polls this time with a divisive discourse emphasizing conservative family values and playing on Chileans’ fears that a surge in migration — from Haiti and Venezuela — is driving crime.
As a lawmaker he has a record of attacking Chile’s LGBTQ community and advocating more restrictive abortion laws. He also accused Pinera, a fellow conservative, of betraying the economic Pinochet. Kast’s brother, Miguel, was one of the dictator’s top advisers.
In recent days, both candidates had tried to veer toward the center.
“I’m not an extremist. ... I don’t feel far right,” Kast proclaimed in the final stretch even as he was dogged by revelations that his German-born father had been a card-carrying member of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party.
Boric’s victory likely to be tempered by a divided congress.
In addition, the political rules could soon change because a newly elected convention is rewriting the country’s Pinochet-era constitution. The convention — the nation’s most powerful elected institution — could in theory call for new presidential elections when it concludes its work next year and if the new charter is ratified in a plebiscite.
10 bodies, 9 hanging from overpass, found in central Mexico
Mexican authorities on Thursday discovered 10 bodies — nine of them hanging from an overpass — in the central state of Zacatecas, the scene of a battle for territory among drug cartels.
The Zacatecas state public safety agency said in a statement the bodies were found in Ciudad Cuauhtemoc, about 340 miles (550 kilometers) north of Mexico city. The 10th body was found on the pavement. All of the victims were men.
The Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels have been battling for control in the state, which is a key transit point for drugs, especially the powerful synthetic pain killer fentanyl, moving north to the U.S. border.
Also read: Over 2,000 migrants march out of southern city in Mexico
Cartels sometimes make such public displays of bodies to taunt their rivals or authorities and terrify local residents.
In the first nine months of the year, Mexico had more than 25,000 murders, a number 3.4% less than the same period a year earlier, according to federal data.
Also read: At least 1 dead, 10 missing in landslide near Mexico City
Cuba begins vaccinating children as young as 2
Sitting on her mother’s lap, 2-year-old Lucía looked at the illustrations in her book while around her several children watched the doctors in white coats and nurses with thermometers in amazement. In an adjoining room, Danielito, also 2, sniffled while getting a shot as a clown tried to distract him.
Cuba on Thursday began a massive vaccination campaign for children between the ages of 2 and 10, becoming one of the first nations to do so. Health officials here say Cuba’s homegrown vaccines have been found safe to give to young children.
“Our country would not put (infants) even at a minimal risk if the vaccines were not proven save and highly effective when put into children,” Aurolis Otaño, director of the Vedado Polyclinic University, told The Associated Press in a vaccination room.
Also read: UK OKs vaccines for 12 year olds, aims to avoid lockdowns
Otaño said the circulation of the Delta variant produced an increase in infections among the youngest, so Cuba’s scientific community decided to “take the vaccine to clinical trial” and it was approved for children.
The Polyclinic expects to vaccinate about 300 children between 2 and 5. Those between 5 and 10 are receiving their first shot at their schools.
Lucía’s mother, Denisse González, watched the children in the vaccination room while waiting the hour that her daughter had to be under observation after being vaccinated.
“I was very doubtful and worried at first, really, but I informed myself,” she said.
“Our children’s health is first and foremost, which is the main thing and (contagion) is a risk because young children are always playing on the floor,” added González, a 36-year-old engineer.
In previous weeks, the vaccination of Cubans between 11 and 18 began. The plan includes two doses of Soberana 02 vaccine and one of Soberana Plus, as was done with adults.
Cuba faces a persistent COVID-19 outbreak that almost collapsed its health-care system. Provinces such as Matanzas, Ciego de Ávila and Cienfuegos received support from doctors from other parts of the country and even from international donors.
Also read: Global vaccine disparity gets sharper amid talk of boosters
In addition to the Soberanas, Cuba has developed another national vaccine, Abdala. According to Cuba’s Ministry of Health, 776,125 positive cases of COVID-19 have been registered with 6,601 deaths.
In June, Chinese regulators approved the use of the Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines for children ages 3 to 17. The United States and many European countries currently allow COVID-19 vaccinations for children 12 and older.
Children have largely escaped the worst of the pandemic and show less severe symptoms when they contract the virus. But experts say children can pass the virus on to others and suffer negative consequences.
“As more adults receive their COVID-19 vaccines, children, who are not yet eligible for vaccines in most countries, account for a higher percentage of hospitalizations and even deaths,” said Carissa F. Etienne, director of the Pan American Health Organization. “We must be clear: children and young people also face significant risks.”
Brazil reopens amid looming threat from delta variant
With the number of coronavirus deaths starting to recede in Brazil, a renewed sense of optimism has led state governors to roll back restrictions, soccer fans are starting to return to stadiums, and the mayor of Rio de Janeiro has said the city’s famous New Year’s party is back on.
But one question looms over these early signs of recovery: What will happen as the delta variant of COVID-19 spreads through the mostly unvaccinated country, which already has the world’s second-highest death toll with 547,000 fatalities?
The variant is boosting cases and deaths globally after a period of decline, and the World Health Organization anticipates it will become dominant within months. The race is on to vaccinate as many Brazilians as possible.
Countries that succeeded in doing so, like the U.K., have seen infections soar in recent weeks — but without a corresponding rise in serious illnesses or deaths.
Experts are concerned that it is unlikely Brazil can do the same in time.
“It will be explosive,” said Gonzalo Vecina, a professor of public health at the University of Sao Paulo. “There will be a new wave. We are opening too much.”
Brazil’s Health Ministry counted 140 cases of the delta variant by Friday, including its three most populous states, and 12 deaths. Analysts say the figures are vast undercounts due to lack of testing and genome sequencing.
President Jair Bolsonaro has long opposed restrictions and played down COVID-19′s risks, often saying infection is inevitable. Lawmakers have begun investigating his administration’s handling of the pandemic, particularly why officials appear to have been slow to acquire vaccines.
Health Minister Marcelo Queiroga says getting more of the population vaccinated is the best way to stop the variant, but he insists that Brazil must resume its economic activities.
“We have available hospital bed capacity and we will live with this pandemic until we can control it definitively,″ Queiroga said Wednesday. He stressed the importance of knowing whether each person infected with the variant has already had one shot or two.
READ: As Brazil tops 500,000 deaths, protests against president
British researchers found that two doses of either the Pfizer or AstraZeneca vaccines were only slightly less effective at blocking delta’s symptomatic illness, compared with earlier variants. Importantly, the vaccines were hugely effective at preventing hospitalization.
But just one dose proved far less effective than against other variants. That prompted Britain, which earlier extended the gap between doses, to speed up second shots. There’s little information on the efficacy of other vaccines against the variant.
That’s worrisome for Brazil, where 17% of the population is fully vaccinated and 44% have received the first of two shots. The AstraZeneca shot makes up nearly half of all vaccines administered, China’s Sinovac more than a third, and Pfizer most of the rest.
Sao Paulo Gov. João Doria is among those leaders considering a booster shot for those who got two Sinovac doses. At the same time, he allowed businesses to stay open later and increase their customer capacity.
Pernambuco’s government similarly loosened restrictions for bars and social events on July 5 — the same day the northeastern state identified its first two delta cases.
Federal District Gov. Ibaneis Rocha allowed 15,000 spectators to attend a soccer match this week — the first professional club match attended by fans in Brazil since the pandemic began. Shortly before the game, the district’s health secretary confirmed delta variant cases in the region.
“The information that governors are conveying to people is that the pandemic is under control,” said Ethel Maciel, an epidemiologist at the Federal University of Espirito Santo. “We shouldn’t be talking about control, or the pandemic coming to an end when less than 20% of people are fully vaccinated and more than 1,000 people are dying every day.”
Israel and the Netherlands reopened widely after vaccinating most of their citizens, but they had to reimpose some restrictions after new surges of infections. The Dutch prime minister said lifting restrictions too early “was a mistake.”
In the U.K, where delta has become dominant, infections have surged in the past two months to the highest level since January. Officials repeatedly expressed confidence that, with more than two-thirds the adult population fully vaccinated, the impact would be lessened. Indeed, daily deaths remain under 5% of the peak.
Indonesia trails Brazil in the rate of vaccinations, and on Thursday, the Southeast Asian country reported its deadliest day since the start of the pandemic. Sinovac was the predominant vaccine there, but with growing concern that the shot is less effective against delta, the government is planning booster shots of other vaccines.
Brazilians are paying attention to reports of the delta variant causing havoc in U.S. states with low vaccination rates. Still, many remain optimistic with Brazil’s death toll down almost two-thirds from April.
Claudio Santos, 64, was calmly ordering food at a juice bar in Rio on Wednesday when he remembered his mask was too old and needed replacing.
“It’s a little different since the start of this month. We have this perception more people are vaccinated, we don’t hear every day that someone we know got COVID,” Santos said. “Of course, we are worried about the new variant, but I haven’t panicked since the pandemic began and don’t plan to now. I got my shots and life is going back to some kind of normal.”
Delta’s impact may be cushioned by the highly contagious gamma variant, which emerged in the Amazonian city of Manaus and has already established dominance across Brazil, said Felipe Naveca, a Manaus-based virologist at the state-run Fiocruz Institute who studies the variants.
Brazil conducts hardly any genomic sequencing of coronavirus tests, compared with the U.S and the U.K., said Maciel, the epidemiologist. In Rio state, the most recent study found gamma accounted for 78% of 380 samples and delta 16%, according to its health secretariat.
Delta has been detected in at least 18 Latin America’s countries, according to the Pan-American Health Organization.
It comprises almost two-thirds of all sampled cases in Mexico City, health officials said last week. Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard suggested that its spread had contributed to the U.S. decision to postpone reopening its border. The death toll in Mexico has begun ticking upward after months of decline.
READ: Brazil still debating dubious virus drug amid 500,000 deaths
In Cuba, the delta variant has caused the collapse of Matanza province’s health care system. A medical team sent to aid Venezuela was recalled to cope with a crush of patients.
A greater share of Cuban and Mexican populations are fully vaccinated than Brazil’s, according to Our World in Data, an online research site.
Denise Garrett, an epidemiologist and vice president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute, said she believes the Brazilian health care system will buckle if it doesn’t prepare for surging COVID-19 infections.
“We are seeing it happen in countries with a bigger vaccination coverage,” Garrett said. “There is nothing that should make us think that Brazil will be any different.”
As global COVID-19 deaths top 4 million, a suicide in Peru
On the last day of Javier Vilca’s life, his wife stood outside a hospital window with a teddy bear, red balloons and a box of chocolates to celebrate his birthday, and held up a giant, hand-scrawled sign that read: “Don’t give up. You’re the best man in the world.”
Minutes later, Vilca, a 43-year-old struggling radio journalist who had battled depression, jumped four stories to his death — the fifth suicide by a COVID-19 patient at Peru’s overwhelmed Honorio Delgado hospital since the pandemic began.
Vilca became yet another symbol of the despair caused by the coronavirus and the stark and seemingly growing inequities exposed by COVID-19 on its way to a worldwide death toll of 4 million, a milestone recorded Wednesday by Johns Hopkins University.
At the hospital where Vilca died on June 24, a single doctor and three nurses were frantically rushing to treat 80 patients in an overcrowded, makeshift ward while Vilca gasped for breath because of an acute shortage of bottled oxygen.
“He promised me he would make it,” said Nohemí Huanacchire, weeping over her husband’s casket in their half-built home with no electricity on the outskirts of Arequipa, Peru’s second-largest city. “But I never saw him again.”
Read:13 die in Peru disco stampede during police raid amid coronavirus lockdown
The number of lives lost around the world over the past year and a half is about equal to the population of Los Angeles or the nation of Georgia. It is three times the number of victims killed in traffic accidents around the globe per year. By some estimates, it is roughly the number of people killed in battle in all of the world’s wars since 1982.
Even then, the toll is widely believed to be an undercount because of overlooked cases or deliberate concealment.
More than six months after vaccines became available, reported COVID-19 deaths worldwide have dropped to around 7,900 a day, after topping out at over 18,000 a day in January. The World Health Organization recorded just under 54,000 deaths last week, the lowest weekly total since last October.
While vaccination campaigns in the U.S. and parts of Europe are ushering in a period of post-lockdown euphoria, and children there are being inoculated so that they can go back to summer camp and school, infection rates are still stubbornly high in many parts of South America and Southeast Asia. And multitudes in Africa remain unprotected because of severe vaccine shortages.
Also, the highly contagious delta variant is spreading rapidly, setting off alarms, driving up case counts in places and turning the crisis increasingly into a race between the vaccine and the mutant version.
The variant has been detected in at least 96 countries. Australia, Israel, Malaysia, Hong Kong and other places have reimposed restrictions to try to suppress it.
The variants, uneven access to vaccines and the relaxation of precautions in some wealthier countries are “a toxic combination that is very dangerous,” warned Ann Lindstrand, a top immunization official at WHO.
Instead of treating the crisis as a “me-and-myself-and-my-country” problem, she said, “we need to get serious that this is a worldwide problem that needs worldwide solutions.”
While the U.S. missed President Joe Biden’s goal of getting at least one shot into 70% of American adults by the Fourth of July, deaths nationwide are down sharply to around 200 per day, from a peak of over 3,400 per day in January.
And the U.S. economy has been roaring back, with growth this year forecast to be the fastest in almost seven decades. Even cruise ships, an early vector for the virus’s spread, are resuming voyages after a hiatus of more than a year.
In Britain, despite persistent fears about the delta variant, Prime Minister Boris Johnson plans to lift all remaining restrictions this month. Britain this week recorded a one-day total of more than 30,000 new infections for the first time since January.
Read: Citing pandemic, judge agrees to free ex-Peru leader on bail
Elsewhere in Europe, tens of thousands of soccer fans in several cities were able to watch in person their national teams compete in the European Championship a year after the tournament was postponed, though attendance in some stadiums was severely restricted.
In parts of the developing world, it is a story of desperation.
In Latin America, just 1 in 10 people have been fully vaccinated, contributing to a rise in cases in countries such as Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia and Uruguay. Meanwhile, the virus is penetrating remote areas of Africa that were previously spared, contributing to a sharp rise in cases.
Peru has been one of the hardest hit by the virus, with the highest mortality of any country in the world as a percentage of its population.
In Arequipa, Vilca’s suicide was splashed across the front pages of the tabloids in the city of 1 million. His widow said his death was a protest against the deteriorating conditions faced by COVID-19 patients.
Nationwide, Peru has just 2,678 intensive care beds for a population of 32 million — a trifling number even by the low standards of Latin America. Nor was Vilca among the lucky 14% of Peruvians who have received a single dose of the vaccine.
Across the country, a new routine has emerged as people spend their days scrambling to fill heavy, green oxygen tanks bought on the black market that are a lifeline for sick loved ones. Some businesses have tripled the price for oxygen, forcing many people to plunder their savings or sell belongings.
From the hospital where Vilca took his life, “he’d call and say they were all abandoned. Nobody was paying attention,” his widow said, showing on her cellphone a photo her husband sent of himself in one of the rare moments he was lucky enough to have an oxygen mask.
Along with South America, which accounts for around 40% of the daily deaths from COVID-19, India has emerged as the other main driver of mortality. Even then, experts believe the roughly 1,000 deaths recorded daily in India are almost certainly an undercount.
In the state of Madhya Pradesh, with over 73 million people, one journalist found that that the spike in registered deaths from all causes in May alone was five times pre-pandemic levels and 67 times the official death toll from the virus for the month, which was 2,451.
Rich countries including Britain, the U.S. and France have promised to donate about 1 billion COVID-19 shots to help close the inequality gap. But experts say 11 billion are needed to immunize the world. Of the 3 billion doses that have been administered globally, less than 2% have been in the developing world.
Read:Eight Barcelona de Guayaquil fans die in bus crash in Peru
“Pledging to provide 1 billion doses is a drop in the ocean,” said Agnes Callemard, Amnesty International’s secretary-general. She slammed politicians for opting for “more of the same paltry half-measures and insufficient gestures.”
The U.N.-backed effort to distribute vaccines to poor countries, known as COVAX, has also faltered badly. Its biggest supplier, the Serum Institute of India, stopped exporting vaccines in March to deal with the epidemic on the subcontinent.
Meanwhile, countries including Seychelles, Chile and Bahrain, relying on Chinese-made vaccines, have seen outbreaks even after reaching relatively high levels of coverage, raising questions about the shots’ effectiveness.
Dora Curry, an Atlanta-based director of health equity at the charity CARE, said she is deeply worried that while children in Germany, France and the U.S. are getting immunized, relief is slow to arrive for people far more vulnerable in poor countries.
“If there were a way I could give that dose to somebody in Uganda, I would,” said Curry, who acknowledged she will probably have her 11-year-old daughter immunized when she is eligible. “But this just speaks to the problems with the distribution system we have.”
As Brazil tops 500,000 deaths, protests against president
Anti-government protesters took to the streets in more than a score of cities across Brazil on Saturday as the nation’s confirmed death toll from COVID-19 soared past half a million — a tragedy many critics blame on President Jair Bolsonaro’s attempt to minimize the disease.
Thousands gathered in downtown Rio de Janeiro waving flags with slogans such as “Get out Bolsonaro. Government of hunger and unemployment.”
Read:Sinovac vaccine restores a Brazilian city to near normal
“Brazil is experiencing a great setback. The country was an exemplary country for vaccination in the world. We have widely recognized institutions, but today we are in a sad situation ”, said Isabela Gouljor, a 20-year-old student who joined the protest in Rio.
Other marchers hoisted posters reading: “500 thousand deaths. It’s his fault,” alluding to Bolsonaro.
Similar marches took place in at least 22 or Brazil’s 26 states, as well as in the Federal District, Brasilia. They were promoted by left-wing opposition parties who have been heartened by Bolsonaro’s declining poll ratings with next year’s presidential race looming.
“Get out Bolsonaro, genocidal,” yelled Rio demonstrators, some of them wearing t-shirts or masks with the image of former leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva — who leads Bolsonaro in some polls.
Read:In Brazil’s Amazon, rivers rise to record levels
In São Paulo, protesters dropped red balloons as a tribute to the victims of the virus
Bolsonaro’s supporters have taken more often to the streets over the past month, in large part because many agree with his dismissal of restrictions meant to stifle the coronavirus and anger that lockdown measures have hurt businesses.
Critics say such messages, as well as Bolsonaro’s promotion of disproven treatments such as hydroxychloroquine, have contributed to the soaring death toll and a sluggish vaccine campaign that has fully inoculated less than 12% of the population. The country of some 213 million people is registering nearly 100,000 new infections and 2,000 deaths a day.
“For the leftists, putting their followers in the streets is a way of wearing Bolsonaro down for the election,” said Leandro Consentino, a political science professor at Insper, a university in Sao Paulo. “But at the same, time they are contradicting themselves and losing the discourse of maintaining health care, because they are causing the same agglomerations as Bolsonaro.”
Read:Why are so many babies dying of Covid-19 in Brazil?
Saturday’s marches came a week after Bolsonaro led a massive motorcycle parade of supporters in Sao Paulo, though his allies and foes differ dramatically on the size of that event.
“Bolsonaro needs to show that he maintains significant support to give a message of strength to those who are investigating the actions of his government in Congress”, Consentino said.