WINTERS IN LIMA, Peru’s capital, are dreary. By now the city is normally enveloped in a cold mist. This year, though, daytime temperatures are around 21°C (70°F). Ice-cream sellers are still doing brisk business at Lima’s beaches. “Will there be a winter this year?” ask headlines in local newspapers.
“It is time for the left to come to power,” says Nicole Gómez, a student in Bogotá. “We are tired of the inequality, and of everything staying the same.” She and the rest of the Colombian electorate go to the polls on May 29th to elect a new president. The right-wing incumbent, Iván Duque, is stepping down after his constitutionally-allotted one term in office.
PEDRO MORALES, a 73-year-old retired farmer, sits at the table of his sparsely furnished house in Santa Rosa and flicks through faded pictures of José, one of his sons. In 1990 José, then just 19, left this small village two hours outside of Guadalajara, in the central Mexican state of Jalisco, where chickens still roam the streets.
ALEJANDRA LEMONNIER joined the convent of the Handmaids of the Sacred Heart of Jesus when she was 20. She came from a religious family, attended a Roman Catholic school and lived in a conservative part of Buenos Aires.
An ode to Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower THE NAKAGIN CAPSULE TOWER stands out from its unremarkable neighbours in Tokyo’s Shimbashi district. Made up of 144 identical cuboids, stacked upon and jutting out from each other, the modular tower is both unabashedly futurist and subtly respectful of tradition. Each cuboid has a round window that evokes both space travel and the ancient architecture of Kyoto. They contain built-in living spaces composed of bath units, beds, desks and household electronics. Kurokawa Kisho, the building’s architect, envisioned his cramped “capsules” as...
OVER THE next four decades Canada’s growth per person is expected to be the lowest in the OECD, a club mostly of rich countries. On April 7th Chrystia Freeland, the finance minister, sought to correct that. In presenting the federal budget for the 2022-23 fiscal year, which began on April 1st, she vowed to tackle the “insidious” problem of low productivity growth.
ON APRIL 9TH, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, commonly known as Lula, is expected to announce he is running for the presidency of Brazil.
The price of high prices BRAZILIANS ARE no strangers to inflation. In the mid-1980s people crowded around supermarket gates and, as soon as they opened, raced in to buy as much as they could carry. With inflation running on average at 300% that decade, it paid to be early. If an unlucky customer missed the morning rush, they would end up paying higher prices in the afternoon. Today’s Brazilians are not yet racing down supermarket aisles, nor even stockpiling as much as their inflation-beset neighbours in Argentina. But...
Private equity is buying up America’s newspapers AMERICA’S LOCAL newspapers have been struggling to stay afloat for years. Since 2005 roughly 2,200 of them have folded. Private-equity firms, which often swoop on businesses in distress, have descended on the industry. The share of American newspapers owned by private-equity groups increased from 5% to 23% between 2001 and 2019 (see chart). The covid-19 pandemic has presented new opportunities for buy-outs of troubled media companies. That has led many of those who read the papers, or write for them, to...
Juan Orlando Hernández IT WAS A swift public humiliation. On February 15th, just 19 days after he left office as his country’s all-powerful president, Juan Orlando Hernández was arrested at his mansion in Tegucigalpa and taken away in handcuffs. The arrest was in response to an extradition request from prosecutors in New York who have charged him with taking part in a violent conspiracy to export 500 tonnes of cocaine to the United States since 2004. He says he is innocent. His arrest holds out the possibility of...
Restyling China Inc: A new supermodel AMANCIO ORTEGA, founder of the Zara fast-fashion empire, got his start selling bathrobes in northern Spain. Erling Persson of H&M peddled women’s clothing in a small-town shop in Sweden for decades before going global. Xu Yangtian had none of their tailoring experience when he founded Shein (pronounced she-in) in 2008. Instead, the creator of the fashion world’s latest sensation was a specialist in search-engine optimisation. This expertise gave Mr Xu an understanding of how to draw shoppers’ attention in the digital world....
Mexican wave KAVAK, A MEXICAN startup, provides an elegant solution to a glaring problem: how to buy a used vehicle in a market that is both one of the world’s biggest and its most informal second-hand car markets. Few buyers trust a seller’s assessment of the good’s quality. Few sellers trust the buyer to cough up the money. Transactions often involve “meeting someone at a corner store and seeing how it goes”, says Alejandro Guerra, Kavak’s general manager in Mexico. On Kavak’s app people can buy and sell...
Chipmaking: A golden-ish age IT LOOKS LIKE the perfect time to be a chipmaker. The market for semiconductors continues to grow rapidly. By the end of the decade it will exceed $1trn globally, up from $500bn this year, forecasts VLSI Research, a firm of analysts. Demand keeps outstripping supply; the chip shortage is now expected to last well into 2023, paralysing factories of everything that needs processors—which in this day and age is basically everything. Western governments have earmarked billions to build chipmaking capacity within their borders in...
Schumpeter: The carbon-tax crackdown MANY QUESTIONS are on the minds of business leaders in the run up to the UN’s COP26 climate summit from October 31st to November 12th. For CEOs making the trip to Glasgow, they range from the mundane (travel by train? eat only plant-based food?) to the profound (why am I going in the first place?). The most important question, though, is barely asked: what would happen if governments agreed, sooner or later, to commitments serious enough to limit global warming to 1.5-2.0°C above pre-industrial...
WHEN “SQUID GAME” appeared on Netflix in mid-September, many South Korean reviewers were underwhelmed by the home-grown survival drama.