With a blue sky and the snow-covered mountains in the background, it was a perfect day to celebrate the 41st anniversary of the Iranian Revolution. I walked for hours with people chanting slogans, burning american and israeli flags, carrying a fake coffin of Donald Trump, throwing stones at his portrait and mourning the death of the all powerful general Qasem Soleimani, the “living martyr” who was assassinated by a US…
I reach the border between Ecuador and Colombia: a forgotten corner of the Amazon, and yet a very busy place. On the banks of the Putumayo and the San Miguel rivers, and deep in the rainforest’s no man’s land, illegal miners and loggers cross path with gas smugglers and arms traders, renegate guerrillas and ruthless paramilitary thugs, coca farmers and shadowy cocaine dealers. The region is a drug producing and…
The road to Ayotzinapa winds up the hills of the dreaded Sierra de Guerrero, a major drug producing and trafficking hub where coca and poppy fields have replaced coffee plantations and soldiers man checkpoints between rival gangs of narcos militias. It’s a land of sicarios, peasants’ uprisings, armed insurrections and utter poverty. The Raúl Isidro Burgos rural school in Ayotzinapa is a large compound at the edge of Tixtla, a…
The mood is quite somber as Havana prepares to celebrate 500 years of its foundation. The stunning historical downtown district has been cleaned and polished, ancient buildings have been restored and carefully repainted, fleets of old pastel color American cars line up for tourists. But 5 stars hotels are nearly empty and the casas particulares struggle to find guests. Don Onofrio, a retired university professor, enjoys the view of…
Armed with a bamboo stick, an old woman in a pink robe steps out of her wooden shack on the Pluit lagoon and stumbles through the thick garbage layer leading to the water. “It’s my balcony” she jokes. “But I must constantly keep the drains open with this stick or I’ll be drowned by the waste”. The mostly plastic/rubbish embankment is also a makeshift floodgate against the rising ocean. I…
Life goes on as usual in the Casbah. Old women clad in the white haik climb up the narrow impasses with their grocery bags. Young boys play football between the crumbling houses. A man sipping coffee sits on the doorstep of the centuries-old hammam, a cane in his hand. The laundry float in the wind on the rooftops where the girls hang out at sunset, staring at the dark…
You go inside the colonia at daylight with the car’s windows lowered and your hands in sight. Strangers are closely watched by lookouts on the hill and at the street corners. You slowly find the way among the breeze block huts to a wasteland of rubble and shabby deserted buildings: la linea, the invisible border dividing the strongholds of the two main gangs fighting a turf war to…
I walk past the burned shacks, stepping on shattered glass, metel scraps, charred bed nets, smoking ashes. This informal settlement close to the Cato Crest township in Durban, South Africa, has been raided severeal times by policemen. “Yesterday they came with 9 mm guns and petrol jerrycans” says Sbongile, 34, Hiv positive, who lives alone here in Khenana. “The police razed all our houses. Set fire to our mattresses,…
The latest massacre took place two days ago. Emerging silently from the forest, the attackers stormed the village of Chicuaia Velha killing 12 people, women and children included, and burned 40 houses. The men used machetes and knives on their victims. Then they disappeared, long before the security forces arrived. Over the past twelve months hundreds lost their lives and thousands are now displaced in Cabo Delgado, the remote northern…
A frenzied ticking of lighters hail from behind the scarves, as ghost-like shapes crouch down to inhale the smoke. Bluish flames glitter in dark when the dope pipe makers trigger the gas burners. Poder, heroin, is cheap in Afghanistan: a dollar for a double dose. The opium harvest has hit a record mark of 9,000 tons in 2017. Heroin production is skyrocketing. And tens of thousands of junkies drag themselves…