A girl rests on her mother’s shoulder, whose eyes reflect concern, as she wades through a waist-deep river in the Darien Gap.
Another woman waits sitting next to the train tracks on her way north, with her husband, through central Mexico. With her eyes covered by her hands, she could be crying. But the photo shows her holding a bouquet of bright yellow flowers that her partner has just picked.
He’s laughing.
Associated Press photographers documented the violence and vitality across Latin America in 2023, creating vivid portraits of the ability to move forward despite suffering.
The gangs expanded their control in Haiti, terrorizing civilians. In one of the images, a police officer rides on the back of a motorcycle holding a man who had been shot in the head.
After being inaugurated president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, stands at the top of the ramp of the presidential palace next to a leader from the Amazon dressed in a feather headdress. Days later, the broken glass of the building frames a group of riot police on the same ramp: they had arrived late to prevent an unprecedented uprising that sought to overthrow Lula.
In Peru, protesters continued to demand the resignation of Dina Boluarte following the impeachment and subsequent arrest of President Pedro Castillo, and police killed dozens of protesters. A photograph shows their coffins lined up on a street, surrounded by hundreds of mourners.
Seen from the sky with an AP drone, a school of fish swirls in a net cast in crystal blue waters. More and more women are dedicating themselves to fishing to earn a living in the broken Venezuelan economy. Also on the coast, but a few dozen kilometers (miles) to the west, environmentalists watch as a hatchling of the world’s largest sea turtle species makes its way to the sea.
The tiny hummingbirds have also found a way to survive in an apartment in Mexico City. About 60 sick, injured or hatchlings are fed with a dropper and flutter around the makeshift clinic until they are fit to return to the wild.
Across town, at the National Museum of Fine Arts, a burly wrestling wrestler looks at a painting from Claude Monet’s water lily series. He is the embodiment of energetic aggression that yields to delicate grace, and the blue and yellow-green of his mask perfectly reflect the water and plants of the painting.
That serenity contrasted with the climatic chaos in the region.
Hurricane Otis devastated the tourist resort of Acapulco, on the Mexican Pacific coast, causing at least 51 deaths and leaving yachts piled up on the beaches. Defying normally reliable computer models that predicted a tropical storm, the meteor quickly became a Category 5 monster that, with its 165 mph (266 km/h) winds, was the most powerful to make landfall. in the eastern Pacific. More than a month later, residents are still clearing debris.
In Bolivia, indigenous women dressed in multi-layered skirts who guided the ascent of the 6,000-meter-high Huayna Potosí mountain had to cross rivers of water on a peak that was once covered in snow, now melted. The Aymara fear that climate change could take away their jobs.
With so many difficulties in their countries, many leave in search of a better life, even if it is a risky bet.
A man holds up the suitcase containing a baby, wrapped comfortably in blankets, as he walks down a steep slope to the south bank of the Rio Grande. He hasn’t entered the water yet.
The fragile tranquility, for the moment, endures.
2023-12-08 08:24:17
#Photos #Images #show #violence #effervescence #Latin #America
