Naturally we in the Cidade Maravilhosa are delighted to have beaten out the Windy City and snatched the 2016 Olympics from under the nose of the not-quite-glamorous-enough First Couple of the United States: even Obama can’t compete with Copacabana when it comes to wowing Olympic committees.
But now that the cheering has died down along with [...]

A couple weeks ago, after another of those planning meetings that take up so much time in the less-glamorous-than-you-might-think world of international conservation, I spent a day in one of the world’s great museums, Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropology.
A day in a great museum teaches you as much about conservation as a month visiting [...]

I spent a day a few weeks ago in São Paulo at the headquarters of a major Brazilian beef company — or, to put it another way, the cutting edge of tropical conservation.
The image people have of conservationists in the tropics is often drawn from Indiana Jones films: intrepid biologists in the jungle swatting away mosquitoes while [...]

The death of at least 45 people in rioting between police and indigenous demonstrators in the town of Bagua in the Peruvian Amazon on June 5th was, among other things, a neat demonstration of what doesn’t count as news in the global village. (See video above of the clash from Enlace Nacional, a Peruvian news [...]

Brazilians are realists when it comes to politics. We have dozens of political parties here — based not so much on ideology as personal networks, sectional interests and marriages of convenience. No president can command a working majority in the Brazilian Congress, so issues are resolved through wheeling and dealing, case by case. Brazilians view [...]

Over the last week — as the Obama administration once again assumed its increasingly familiar role as polite undertaker at the funeral of a failed U.S. policy — it has become clear that a new phase in the long, intimate, but tormented, relationship between the United States and Cuba has begun.
As the two countries flutter their diplomatic eyelashes at [...]

Last month I suggested a hemispheric dimension be added to the proposed U.S. cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, to allow U.S. companies to offset some of their emissions through projects in Latin America.
This idea was picked up by the environmental blogs of The New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor, while a report in The Economist [...]

Time was when the U.S. economy sneezed, Latin American economies keeled over from pneumonia or worse, but no longer.
While not exactly immune from the economic turmoil in the United States, economies like Brazil and Mexico will suffer less and recover earlier. There is more than a little schadenfreude south of the border at seeing Uncle [...]

The photo above shows the extraordinary way one can often trace the outline of indigenous reserves in the Amazon on satellite images: Total destruction outside reserve boundaries gives way to standing forest on the dividing line between indigenous and non-indigenous land.
The image comes from the Waiãpí reserve in the Brazilian state of Amapá, in the [...]

Last Thursday’s New York Times published a fascinating article, “New jungles prompt a debate on rainforest,” where two well-known Smithsonian scientists traded interpretations about the meaning of regeneration of rainforests in Panama.
Not the least of the issues the article raised was the climate around the Smithsonian office watercooler these days, as Drs. Joe Wright and Bill [...]