Rapaz, Peru

High in the Andes, Keeping an Incan Mystery Alive
By Simon Romero

SAN CRISTÓBAL DE RAPAZ, Peru — The route to this village 13,000 feet above sea level runs from the desert coast up hairpin bends, delivering the mix of exhilaration and terror that Andean roads often provide. Condors soar above mist-shrouded crags. Quechua-speaking herders squint at strangers who arrive gasping in the thin air. CONTINUE READING

multimedia piece: Mysteries Woven Into Peru's Past

Curaçao Island

preserving papiamentu

A Language Thrives in Its Caribbean Home
By Simon Romero

WILLEMSTAD, Curaçao — Thousands of languages spoken by small numbers of people, including many of the Creole languages born in the last centuries of human history, are facing extinction. But a little-known language spoken on a handful of islands near the coast of Venezuela may be an exception.

Papiamentu, a Creole language influenced over the centuries by African slaves, Sephardic merchants and Dutch colonists, is now spoken by only about 250,000 people on the islands of Curaçao, Bonaire and Aruba. But compared with many of the world’s other Creoles, the hybrid languages that emerge in colonial settings, it shows rare signs of vibrancy and official acceptance. CONTINUE READING

NYT multimedia slideshow:
Preserving Papiamentu

world cup in the netherlands antilles

Venezuela’s Military Ties With Cuba Stir Concerns

By Simon Romero

CARACAS, Venezuela — The ties between President Hugo Chávez and Cuba’s Communist leaders are plain enough: Cuba has thousands of doctors here, not to mention a smaller number of advisers who help on a breadth of issues, like agricultural engineering and even training Olympic athletes.
But the quiet expansion of Cuba’s military role here has raised a particular concern among critics of Mr. Chávez, who maintain that the military is being retooled — with Cuba’s help — into an institution that can be used to quell any domestic challenge to the president. CONTINUE READING

Bolívar's Bones

By Simon Romero
CARACAS, Venezuela — The clock had just struck midnight. Most of the country was asleep. But that did not stop President Hugo Chávez from announcing in the early hours of July 16 that the latest phase of his Bolivarian Revolution had been stirred into motion.
Marching to the national anthem, a team of soldiers, forensic specialists and presidential aides gathered around the sarcophagus of Simón Bolívar, the 19th-century aristocrat who freed much of South America from Spain. A state television crew filmed the group, clad in white lab coats, hair nets and ventilation masks, attempt what seemed like an anemic half-goose step. CONTINUE READING

guyana

a few of my favorite outtakes from Guyana:

Muddy Road Molds Debate on the Future of Guyana

By SIMON ROMERO
Published: May 8, 2010

FIFTY EIGHT, Guyana — A battered, decades-old Bedford truck that would not look out of place in a “Mad Max” movie pulled off the road. Gold miners crawled out of its mud-splattered cab, sauntered into Peter Rajmenjan’s diner and asked if he had any bush hog for sale.

“The only wild meat I have left today is deer,” replied Mr. Rajmenjan, 55, whose establishment lies at the 58-mile marker on the main road cutting through the Guyanese jungle.

Over plates of deer curry, travelers chatted in Caribbean-accented English or murmured in indigenous languages like Macushi, Arawak and Wapishana. Around them, the forest buzzed with mosquitoes. The siren moan of howler monkeys could be heard in the distance.
CONTINUE READING


Multimedia Link: The Road to Georgetown

albouystown, guyana

port kaituma, guyana

JONESTOWN, Guyana — Carlton Daniels was sweating as he sliced through the jungle with his cutlass. He pointed at some bushes and said a chimpanzee named Mr. Muggs had once lived there in a cage. Then he emerged in a clearing, proclaiming, “Welcome to the People’s Temple Agricultural Project.”
Better known as Jonestown, where more than 900 Americans committed suicide or were murdered one night in 1978 at the behest of the cult leader Jim Jones, the site yields few signs of remembrance. Rains, termites and scavengers have laid waste to its buildings. Vines camouflage its rusting vehicles, including an old flatbed truck and a tractor.
But while nature seems intent on erasing the utopian experiment that went tragically awry here, some enterprising souls in Guyana, South America’s only English-speaking nation, have another idea. They want Jonestown reborn as a tourist destination and are even getting some tepid help from the government, which spent more than 30 years largely trying to live it down. CONTINUE READING

pemon of the gran sabana

"Yunék Journal In Venezuela’s Savanna, Clash of Science and Fire" by SIMON ROMERO

YUNÉK, Venezuela — The mist-shrouded mountains rising out of the forest here form one of the world’s most beguiling frontiers of exploration and research, inspiring Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 fantasy novel “The Lost World” and teams of biologists who still mount expeditions to remote escarpments in hopes of finding species new to science.
But in the savannas below, the tendrils of smoke hanging over the landscape attest to a custom that has set off a fierce debate among scientists in Venezuela and beyond: the Pemón Indian tradition of repeatedly burning grassland and forest to hunt for animals and grow food. CONTINUE READING

full edit on meridithkohut.com: Pemon of the Gran Sabana

caracas urban art

Caracas Journal
Artists Embellish Walls With Political Visions
By SIMON ROMERO
Published: April 11, 2010

CARACAS, Venezuela --Mr. Zerpa, 26, a slightly built painter sporting a few days of stubble, shrugged at the possibility that American visitors to Caracas — or Mrs. Clinton for that matter — might find the mural offensive. “It’s a metaphor for an empire that is being defeated,” he said nonchalantly in an interview. “My critics can take it or leave it, but I remain loyal to my ideas.”

So does the government, which supports Mr. Zerpa’s creations and the work of many other street artists, and is increasingly making them a central element of its promotion of a state ideology. Government-financed brigades of graffiti artists and muralists are blanketing this city’s walls with politicized images, ranging from crude, graffiti-tagged slogans to bold, colorful works of graphic art. CONTINUE READING

full nyt slide show: POLITICAL GRAFFITI

extended edit on meridithkohut.com: CARACAS URBAN ART

criticism of chávez stifled by arrests

By SIMON ROMERO
Published: April 3, 2010

“I’ve received threats from inmates telling me they will burn me alive because they see me as a symbol of the system that put them in prison,” said Judge Afiuni, 46, in her prison cell. “I’m in this hell because I had the temerity to do my job as a judge in a way that didn’t please Chávez.” CONTINUE READING

tim & paige

villa lorena in cali, colombia

By SIMON ROMERO
Published: March 30, 2010
CALI, Colombia — Of all the animals that come to die under Ana Julia Torres’s samán trees, the ocelots are among the most numerous. There are eight of them here, seized from the estate of a murdered cocaine trafficker, who apparently collected them in the belief that any self-respecting drug lord should always have eight ocelots in his dominion.

Ms. Torres’s sanctuary houses hundreds of animals rescued largely from drug traffickers and paramilitary warlords, as well as from circuses and animal-smuggling rings, offering a strange window into the excesses and brutalities carried out in this country’s endless drug wars. CONTINUE READING

full NYT slideshow here: "A Rescued Menagerie"

extended edit on meridithkohut.com: Villa Lorena-Cali, Colombia

El Chigüire Bipolar

By SIMON ROMERO
Published: March 20, 2010

CARACAS, Venezuela — This may be a perilous time to operate a Web site focused on politics here, given President Hugo Chávez’s recent push for new controls of Internet content. But one plucky Venezuelan satirical site is emerging as a runaway success in Latin America as it repeatedly skewers Mr. Chávez and a host of other leaders.

Named in honor of the capybara, the Labrador retriever-sized rodent that Venezuelans are fond of hunting and eating, the 2-year-old Web site, El Chigüire Bipolar, or Bipolar Capybara, is rivaling or surpassing in page views leading Venezuelan newspapers like the Caracas daily El Nacional.

The rise of Chigüire Bipolar, which has already drawn the wrath of state-controlled media here, and a handful of other popular Venezuelan sites focused on politics is taking place within a journalistic atmosphere here that international press groups say is marked increasingly by fear, intimidation and self-censorship. CONTINUE READING

basque

"Arrests in Europe Expose ETA’s Ties to Venezuela" by Simon Romero

CARACAS, Venezuela — The shadowy underworld of Basque exiles in this city is coming under sharp scrutiny after recent arrests in Europe and an indictment this month from one of Spain’s top judges asserting that Venezuelan intelligence officials were involved in training Basque separatists and Colombian guerrillas in Venezuela. CONTINUE READING

baruta

felipe

lo extraordinario de lo ordinario

La asociación civil Comunicación y Cultura (CYC) se complace en
invitarle a la inauguración de la Exposición Fotográfica Itinerante.

"LO EXTRAORDINARIO DE LO ORDINARIO"

4 de marzo de 2010 – 6:00 p.m.
Brindis: 6:30 p.m.
Recorrido por la sala: 7:00 p.m.

Lugar: Fundación Centro de Arte Daniel Suárez
Av. Del Ávila con San Miguel. Qta. Veneyork
Urbanización Alta Florida
Caracas – Venezuela

Fotógrafos:

- Marjorie Cabrita
- Meridith Kohut
- Argenis Bellizio
- Trevor Cornilliac
- Aaron Sosa
- Jean Herrera

Curadores:

- Kelly Martínez
- José Luís Omaña


Más información:
comunicaciónycultura.ac@gmail.com
RIF. J-298265850