National Security Archive: Inter-American Court Orders Opening of Military Archives. “On Friday, January 20, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights set a new legal precedent for access to human rights information when it ordered the government of Bolivia to open historical military archives concerning a case of assassination and forced disappearance.”
Library of Congress: Connecting Andean Voices and Heritages. “The Hispanic Reading Room has a new research guide, Interconnecting Worlds: Weaving Community Narratives, Andean Histories & the Library’s Collections. This guide, with resources in English, Spanish and Quechua, facilitates research about Andean peoples through language, literature, visual arts and music. We used video interviews to connect with Indigenous people from Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru and their communities in New York, Massachusetts and the greater Washington, D.C. area.”
Ars Technica: Lidar reveals networks of pre-Columbian cities and towns in Bolivia. “An airborne lidar survey recently revealed the long-hidden ruins of 11 pre-Columbian Indigenous towns in what is now northern Bolivia. The survey also revealed previously unseen details of defensive walls and complex ceremonial buildings at 17 other settlements in the area, built by a culture about which archaeologists still know very little: the Casarabe.”
CNN: Bolivia’s interim president becomes third Latin American head of state to test positive for Covid-19. “Bolivia’s interim president Jeanine Añez has become the third Latin American leader to test positive for the coronavirus, as several members of her cabinet also confirmed infections. Añez announced on Twitter she had contracted the virus and that she would be quarantining for 14 days. Her announcement comes after Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro and Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández also announced they had been infected with Covid-19.”
Bloomberg: It’s Covid Code Red in Latin America With No Signs of Peaking. “When a top World Health Organization official this week declared Latin America the new epicenter for Covid-19, few experts in the region needed to be persuaded. The data are overwhelming — and overwhelmingly dreadful. The number of regional cases stands at 1.17 million. Demographic giants Brazil and Mexico are posting among the fastest growth rates and logging daily death records. Viral illness is also rising in Peru, Colombia, Chile and Bolivia.”
The Verge: Bot campaign on Twitter fuels confusion about Bolivian unrest. “Since last week, a network of Twitter bot accounts has been spreading confusion about the events surrounding Bolivian President Evo Morales’ abrupt resignation. The messages, which appear in English and Spanish, all carry the exact same text, beginning with the words, ‘Friends from everywhere, in Bolivia there was no coup.’”
Mongabay: New app tracks down forest fires in Bolivia. “Called ‘Amazon Fires — Bolivia,” the application pulls in data on the pollutant particles that get trapped in the air above a fire from a sensor on the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-5 satellite. By combining that ‘aerosol’ data with recent satellite images using Google Earth Engine, app users can plot out the locations of fires in ‘near real time.’”
Ars Technica: Archaeologists reconstruct pre-Columbian temple with 3D-printed blocks. “The unfinished temple in a southern valley of the Lake Titicaca Basin in modern-day Bolivia has been a mystery for at least 500 years. Now known as the Pumapunku—’Door of the Jaguar’ in the Quechua language—the complex stone structure is part of a sprawling complex of pyramids, plazas, and platforms built by a pre-Columbian culture we now call the Tiwanaku. Construction began around 500 CE and proceeded off and on, in phases, over the next few centuries until the Tiwanaku left the site around 900 or 1000 CE.”
New York Times: In Some Countries, Facebook’s Fiddling Has Magnified Fake News. “One morning in October, the editors of Página Siete, Bolivia’s third-largest news site, noticed that traffic to their outlet coming from Facebook was plummeting. The publication had recently been hit by cyberattacks, and editors feared it was being targeted by hackers loyal to the government of President Evo Morales. But it wasn’t the government’s fault. It was Facebook’s.”
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