Americas back issues from September 2008:
FROM THE EDITOR
Sep 01, 2008; ... In the late eighteenth century, Italian-born explorer Alejandro Malaspina spent five years exploring the Americas for the Spanish Crown, sailing around Cape Horn and making his way up to Alaska. Writer Louis Werner guides us through this fascinating expedition, which produced a bounty of ...
Aztec Wonders in Chicago
Sep 01, 2008; ... IN OCTOBER of this year, visitors to the Field Museum in Chicago will have the opportunity to view a never-before-seen exhibit about Mexico's ancient Aztec civilization. The new temporary exhibit, The Aztec World, includes priceless artifacts on loan from Mexico City's National Museum of ...
UPFRONT
Sep 01, 2008; ... A Musical Journey I was most touched by the article about the classical music heritage in eastern Bolivia by Jordi Busqué in the June 2008 issue of your lovely magazine. I have a set of sixteen antique European carving chisels which I inherited from a distant relative at least 50 years ...
Making New Connections
Sep 01, 2008; ... ON A SATURDAY morning in El Alto, Bolivia, a group of men and women at the Internet café Scorpio stare intently at computer screens. Some of these users have never had Internet access before, but now they are learning about blogging, digital photography, and video techniques-all the tools they ...
Threads of Time
Sep 01, 2008; ... TUCKED AWAY ON a quiet street in the upscale Miraflores neighborhood of Lama, Peru, the Museo Amano houses an extensive collection of pre-Inca textiles, amassed by a Japanese entrepreneur and amateur archaeologist who immigrated to Peru in the 1950s. Although the museum has thousands of ...
Chronicle of a Rebirth
Sep 01, 2008; ... ONE OF THE Most difficult challenges for a media outlet is to preserve its identity based on journalistic principles, independence, and style. The Colombian daily El Espectador-which has published in three different centuries, since it was founded in 1887 by Fidel Cano-has withstood many trials ...
REINVENTING Guayaquil
Sep 01, 2008; ... Once just a seedy seaport on the way to the Galápagos, Ecuador's largest city has come into its own with a complete makeover "Guayaquil is not for the meek," declares a 1990s travel guide. Other guidebooks from that era warn visitors, "Go with friends" and "Be alert for pickpockets." One ...
A Second Turn at the Helm
Sep 01, 2008; ... Costa Rican President Óscar Arias leads a country long known for its progress on peace and the environment, but this time around he is facing a more polarized society Costa Rica is a delight for visitors-a place of tropical forests and volcanoes set between two oceans, with an ...
FORGOTTEN Voyage
Sep 01, 2008; ... Alejandro Malaspina has the dubious distinction of being the world's greatest explorer no one has ever heard of. An unfamiliar name except to aficionados of eighteenth-century naval adventure, Malaspina led a five-year Spanish expedition around Cape Horn and up the western shores of the Americas ...
An Elusive Passage Emerges
Sep 01, 2008; ... When Alejandro Malaspina and his crew set off from Mexico in search of the Northwest Passage, his expedition was one of many Spanish voyages sent to reconnoiter the northern reaches of the continent (and thus strengthen Spanish claims in the New World). Sea captains believed that the entrance to ...
Quinoa Comeback
Sep 01, 2008; ... A staple in Inca times, this nutritious, versatile "super food" is undergoing a resurgence in the Andes and beyond Five thousand years ago, the ancestors of the Inca people grew and ate a nutritious seed crop called quinoa. Although today it makes up only a tiny fraction of the worldwide ...
Taking a Bite Out of Malaria
Sep 01, 2008; ... Efforts in Mexico and Central America are demonstrating how to fight this debilitating tropical disease without using toxic insecticides Malaria is one of the world's most serious diseases in terms of its impact on human health. Although it claims more than a million lives a year-most ...
Rescue of Hostages
Sep 01, 2008; ... IN THE WAKE of the dramatic rescue of fifteen hostages in Colombia, the OAS Permanent Council called on the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to release the rest of its hostages immediately and without preconditions. A declaration adopted by the Council also urges the FARC "to ...
Peaceful Elections
Sep 01, 2008; ... GRENADA'S July general elections were "orderly and peaceful," and anxieties expressed beforehand by various participants in the process "proved unfounded," OAS Assistant secretary General Albert R. Ramdin told the Permanent Council. The National Democratic Congress, led by Tillman ...
Passíon ON THE PAGE
Sep 01, 2008; ... Whether set in Cuba or Haítí or Puerto Ríco, Mayra Montero's novels depíct characters consumed by anxíety, loss, and desire MAYRA MONTERO entered the hotel lobby with exuberance, her bright, youthful appearance giving no hint that she had barely gotten off a plane (squeezed into a middle ...
Trans-Atlantic Concern
Sep 01, 2008; ... NEW RULES to standardize procedures on the detention and repatriation of illegal immigrants in the European Union (EU) have raised concerns on the part of the OAS member states and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). In response to the so-called EU Return Directive, ...
A Helping Hand
Sep 01, 2008; ... IN THE TEN YEARS it has been in operation, an OAS poverty-reduction fund has helped to create maps for the visually impaired, develop business skills among rural women, strengthen the competitiveness of small hotels, and give citizens tools to access information about their ...
IGNACIO ITURRIA: PAINTING FROM MEMORY
Sep 01, 2008; ... Uruguay, that beautiful country in South America's Southern Cone, has a rich aesthetic tradition. A national iconography began to take shape with the works of the nineteenth-century painter Juan Manuel Blanes and the folkloric paintings of Pedro Figari, and found its full flowering in the ...
DANCING TO ALMENDRA
Sep 01, 2008; ... On the same day Umberto Anastasia was killed in New York, a hippopotamus escaped from the zoo in Havana. I can explain the connection. No one else, only me, and the individual who looked after the lions. His name was Juan Bulgado, but he preferred to be called Johnny: Johnny Angel or Johnny ...
SCALING POETIC HEIGHTS
Sep 01, 2008; ... When it comes to Chile, it's not a bad idea to compare poets to mountains, especially when it comes to two giants of poetry such as Nicanor Parra and Gonzalo Rojas. The former is 94 years old and the latter 92, and both have more spark than many post-modern teenagers. Both are from Chile's ...
A TASTE OF HONEY ON HISPANIOLA
Sep 01, 2008; ... Germinia Mercedes, a smiling matriarch in her sixties, shows visitors her small apiary, surrounded by flowering lipia and cambronal trees. Their sweet scent is heightened in the heat of Hispaniola, the island shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti. One of four women participating in ...