South and Central America

With high Andean peaks and a humid tropical forest, Bolivia is a country of ecological extremes. But during the Southern Hemisphere's recent winter, unusually low temperatures in part of the country's tropical region hit freshwater species hard, killing an estimated 6 million fish and thousands of alligators, turtles and river dolphins.

Scientists who have visited the affected rivers say the event is the biggest ecological disaster Bolivia has known, and, as an example of a sudden climatic change wreaking havoc on wildlife, it is unprecedented in recorded history.

"There's just a huge number of dead fish," says Michel Jégu, a researcher from the Institute for Developmental Research in Marseilles, France, who is currently working at the Noel Kempff Mercado Natural History Museum in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. "In the rivers near Santa Cruz there's about 1,000 dead fish for every 100 metres of river."

With such extreme climatic events potentially becoming more common due to climate change, scientists are hurrying to coordinate research into the impact, and how quickly the ecosystem is likely to recover.

The extraordinary quantity of decomposing fish flesh has polluted the waters of the Grande, Pirai and Ichilo rivers to the extent that local authorities have had to provide alternative sources of drinking water for towns along the rivers' banks. Many fishermen have lost their main source of income, having been banned from removing any more fish from populations that will probably struggle to recover.

The blame lies, at least indirectly, with a mass of Antarctic air that settled over the Southern Cone of South America for most of July. The prolonged cold snap has also been linked to the deaths of at least 550 penguins along the coasts of Brazil and thousands of cattle in Paraguay and Brazil, as well as hundreds of people in the region.

Water temperatures in Bolivian rivers that normally register about 15 ˚C during the day fell to as low as 4 ˚C.

As many as 340,000 of the 4.3 million babies born in the United States in 2008 had at least one parent who was an illegal immigrant, according to a Pew Hispanic Center study of Census Bureau data.

Unauthorized immigrants, who make up a little more than 4 percent of the population, are for the most part young and have high birth rates, according to the Pew study. Their children make up 8 percent of the newborn population and 7 percent of those under 18.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, is leading an effort to change the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees US citizenship to anyone born in the country.

“We just can’t have people swimming across the river having children here,’’ he told Fox News.

The study from the Washington-based Pew center said 79 percent of the 5.1 million children under age 18 of illegal immigrants were born in the United States and therefore are citizens.

Brazilian native Indians on Sunday took 100 workers hostage at the construction site of a hydroelectric plant in the southern Amazon region, local media reported.

As many as 400 Indians from several different tribes occupied a power plant they say was built on an ancient burial site.

"They didn't take into account the situation of the Indians," Antonio Carlos Ferreira de Aquino, a local administrator with the government's agency of indigenous affairs, Funai, told Folha.com.

Armed with bows and arrows, the Indians occupied the site at dawn on Sunday and confined the construction company's employees to their barracks.

There were no reports of injuries.

The Indians are demanding that government officials help negotiate a settlement with the construction company.

"We want to be compensated for the construction of the plant. The site is 30 kilometers (19 miles) from our reserve and has caused great cultural and social impact in our community, not to mention environmental damage," Aldeci Arara, a tribal leader, told the G1 news portal.

The Dardanelos dam on the Aripuana river, some 400 kilometers (250 miles) north of the Mato Grosso state capital Cuiaba, was due to come online in January 2011, the media reports said.

The construction company told G1.com that it has been in touch with Funai to define a community development program for the local native Indians.

The company was not immediately available for comment.

It is one of nearly a dozen hydroelectric power plants the administration of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has been promoting in the Amazon region.

Earlier this year the government took bids for the construction of the $17 billion Belo Monte dam on the Xingu river. The project triggered an international outcry over potential environmental damage and impact on native Indian tribes.

The Peruvian government declared a state of emergency because of the cold wave gripping a number of districts in 16 of the nation’s 24 regions, according to an urgent decree published Saturday in the official gazette.

The decree covers all districts of the country more than 3,000 meters (9,800 feet) above sea level, as well as three regions in the Peruvian jungle that have registered strangely low temperatures in the last few weeks.

According to official figures, so far this year at least 409 people have died of pneumonia and ailments related to the cold weather, most of them younger than 5 years old (200 deaths) and over 60 years (158 deaths).

The emergency declaration, which has a duration of 60 days, covers districts in the regions of Ancash, Apurimac, Arequipa, Ayacucho, Cusco, Huancavelica, Huanuco, Junin, Lima, Moquegua, Pasco, Puno and Tacna, which in recent days reached a temperature of -24 C (-11 F).

A state of emergency was also declared in the jungle regions of Madre de Dios, Ucayali and Loreto.

The decree published Saturday also includes a series of measures that will allow regional and local governments to supply the affected populations with food and vaccines.

The armed forces were also called upon by Defense Minister Rafael Rey to carry out civic actions to help those populations most vulnerable to the cold.

Doctors say contributing factors to the deaths have been malnutrition, extreme poverty and poor living conditions.

This week Peru’s capital, Lima, has recorded its lowest temperatures in 46 years at 8 centigrade. In Peru’s hot and humid Amazon region, temperatures have also dropped to as low as 9 centigrade.

Larry Rohter attacks our film, “South of the Border,” for “mistakes, misstatements and missing details.” But a close examination of the details reveals that the mistakes, misstatements, and missing details are his own, and that the film is factually accurate. We will document this for each one of his attacks. We then show that there is evidence of animus and conflict of interest, in his attempt to discredit the film. Finally, we ask that you consider the many factual errors in Rohter’s attacks, outlined below, and the pervasive evidence of animus and conflict of interest in his attempt to discredit the film; and we ask that The New York Times publish a full correction for these numerous mistakes.

...

Rohter tries to frame the film’s treatment of the 2002 coup in Venezuela as a “conspiracy theory.” He writes:

“Like Mr. Stone’s take on the Kennedy assassination, this section of ‘South of the Border’ hinges on the identity of a sniper or snipers who may or may not have been part of a larger conspiracy.”

This description of the film is completely false. The film makes no statement on the identity of the snipers nor does it present any theory of a “larger conspiracy” with any snipers. Rather, the film makes two points about the coup: (1) That the Venezuelan media (and this was repeated by U.S. and other international media) manipulated film footage to make it look as if a group of Chavez supporters with guns had shot the 19 people killed on the day of the coup. This manipulation of the film footage is demonstrated very clearly in the film, and therefore does not “[rely] heavily on the account of Gregory Wilpert” as Rohter also falsely alleges. The footage speaks for itself. (2) The United States government was involved in the coup...

Read the entire letter here.

Every year, more than a million people from central America travel thousands of miles attempting to reach the promised land: the US. It's a journey fraught with danger. Jumping onto moving trains, they run the risk of being killed or severely mutilated should they fall. We follow two young Salvadorians, Jaime and Lupita, who are eloping to Texas. Theirs is an emotional rollercoaster, full of hope and fear, as they dodge border police, brave robbers and rapists and face the journey's hardships.

Mountains of rotting food found at a government warehouse, soaring prices and soldiers raiding wholesalers accused of hoarding: Food supply is the latest battle in President Hugo Chavez's socialist revolution.

Venezuelan army soldiers swept through the working class, pro-Chavez neighborhood of Catia in Caracas last week, seizing 120 tons of rice along with coffee and powdered milk that officials said was to be sold above regulated prices.

"The battle for food is a matter of national security," said a red-shirted official from the Food Ministry, resting his arm on a pallet laden with bags of coffee.

It is also the latest issue to divide the Latin American country where Chavez has nationalized a wide swathe of the economy, he says to reverse years of exploitation of the poor.

Chavez supporters are grateful for a network of cheap state-run supermarkets and they say the raids will slow massive inflation.

Critics accuse him of steering the country toward a communist dictatorship and say he is destroying the private sector.

They point to 80,000 tons of rotting food found in warehouses belonging to the government as evidence the state is a poor and corrupt administrator.

Jose Guzman, an assistant manager at a store raided in Catia, watched with resignation as government agents pored over the company's accounts and computers after the food ministry official and the television cameras left.

"The government is pushing this type of establishment toward bankruptcy," said Guzman, who linked the raid to the rotten food scandal. "Somehow they have to replace all the food that was lost, and this is the most expeditious way."

Wasted Food

Much of the wasted food, including powdered milk and meat, was found last month in the buildup to legislative elections in September. The scandal is humiliating for Chavez, who accuses wealthy elites of fueling inflation and causing shortages of products such as meat, sugar and milk by hoarding food.

"They are not going to stop us in the plan, which is to give the people what is their right," Chavez said Friday during the inauguration of a supermarket chain the government bought this year from French retailer Casino.

Food prices are up 41 percent in the last 12 months during a deep recession, government figures show, despite the government's growing network of state-run supermarkets that sell at discounts of up to 40 percent and are popular with his poor supporters.

South America's top oil exporter, Venezuela imports about 70 percent of its food and analysts say the economic hardships could give the opposition a boost at the ballot box—although most expect Chavez to retain a reduced parliamentary majority.

Fighting back, Chavez says he is in an economic war against the "parasitic bourgeoisie" that tries to convince Venezuelans that socialism does not work by twisting facts and taking advantage of honest mistakes.

"They know where we are headed, we are going to take from the Venezuela bourgeoisie the hegemony of dominance in this country," Chavez, who calls himself a Marxist, said to applause from supporters on his TV show on Sunday.

He has also revived threats to take over the country's largest private food processor, miller and brewer, Polar.

The president rushed to give public support to Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez, who as the boss of PDVSA is also responsible for food unit PDVAL, over the case of the rotting food.

Two former PDVAL managers have been jailed in the scandal, but that has not stifled opposition charges of government incompetence.

A string of expropriations and buyouts of companies during the last couple of years means the government now controls between 20 percent and 30 percent of the distribution of staple foods.

A devastating earthquake struck Chile early Saturday, toppling homes, collapsing bridges and plunging trucks into the fractured earth. A tsunami set off by the magnitude-8.8 quake threatened every nation around the Pacific Ocean - roughly a quarter of the globe.

Chileans near the epicenter were tossed about as if shaken by a giant. It was the strongest earthquake to hit Chile in 50 years and one of the strongest ever measured anywhere. President-elect Sebastian Pinera said more than 120 people died, but that number was rising quickly.

A U.S. Geological Survey geophysicist told CBS' "The Early Show" that the 8.8-mag. quake released 500 times the energy as last month's 7.0 earthquake in Haiti.

The quake shook buildings in Argentina's capital of Buenos Aires, and was felt as far away as Sao Paulo in Brazil - 1,800 miles to the east.

In the Chilean capital of Santiago, 200 miles northeast of the epicenter, a car dangled from a collapsed overpass, the national Fine Arts Museum was badly damaged and an apartment building's two-story parking lot pancaked, smashing about 50 cars whose alarms rang incessantly.

Experts warned that a tsunami could strike anywhere in the Pacific. Emergency officials set off shrieking alarm sirens across parts of Hawaii, which could face its largest waves since 1964 starting at 11:19 a.m. (4:19 p.m. EST, 2119 GMT), according to Charles McCreery, director of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.

Police and troops in Tonga began evacuating people from low-lying coastal areas and experts warned that tsunami waves were likely to hit Asian, Australian and New Zealand shores within 24 hours of the earthquake. The U.S. West Coast and Alaska, too, were threatened.

Waves 6 feet above normal hit Talcahuano near Concepcion 23 minutes after the quake, and President Michelle Bachelet said a huge wave swept into a populated area in the Robinson Crusoe Islands, 410 miles off the Chilean coast.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center called for "urgent action to protect lives and property" in Hawaii, which is among 53 nations and territories subject to tsunami warnings.

"Sea level readings indicate a tsunami was generated. It may have been destructive along coasts near the earthquake epicenter and could also be a threat to more distant coasts," the warning centre said. It did not expect a tsunami along the west of the U.S. or Canada.

The largest earthquake ever recorded struck the same area of Chile on May 22, 1960. The magnitude-9.5 quake killed 1,655 people and left 2 million homeless. The tsunami that it caused killed people in Hawaii, Japan and the Philippines and caused damage to the west coast of the United States.

Saturday's quake matched a 1906 temblor off the Ecuadorean coast as the seventh-strongest ever recorded in the world.