Foreign Policy September - October 2015

JOÃO PINA “In August 2011, I was in the Araguaia region of the Amazon jungle in northern Brazil. There I met Adalgisa Silva. She had lived with her family in the small village of Chega com Jeito, and when the war between the left-wing guerrillas and the Brazilian Army broke out decades ago, she started guiding, feeding, and helping the guerrillas buy ammunition and supplies. In retaliation, security forces tortured her husband and kidnapped her daughters, using them as slaves. I listened outside her home, where she’d settled after these traumatic events, and I decided I wanted to return to the village to shoot a portrait of her there. As we drove, a dirt road became a sand road, and the car—packed with me, my guide, Adalgisa, and her daughters—got stuck,…

Partners in Prosperity Historic Georgetown, Kentucky claims to be the first place where Kentucky bourbon whiskey was produced. Today, this town just north of Lexington has another claim to fame: it’s one of the state’s fastest-growing economies and a prime example of how foreign direct investment can spur U.S. economic growth and generate employment. Japanese companies play an integral role in Kentucky’s economy. In 1988, the first Camry rolled off the line at Toyota’s largest North American vehicle manufacturing plant in Georgetown. The new plant generated 7,000 jobs, transforming the community. “Japanese investment in Georgetown-Scott County ... has been magnanimous to say the least,” said Jack Conner, Executive Director of the Georgetown-Scott County Chamber of Commerce. “We have been able to establish great relationships with our Japanese partners as well as use their…

Forty years ago this November, six rightwing South American governments—in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay—covertly banded together to eradicate the threat of communism. Through Operation Condor, the countries, all led by military juntas, cooperated on everything from intelligence sharing to the assassinations of suspected leftists. Over several years—the operation foundered in the mid-1980s after a number of participating dictatorships collapsed— security forces killed and disappeared tens of thousands of people. Condor’s existence has come to light through leaks and declassified documents, yet accountability for the perpetrators’ atrocities remains elusive. In part, this is due to long-standing national amnesty laws protecting former government officials from prosecution. Some Condor countries, however, have shifted legal course: In Argentina, for example, hundreds of people have been tried since 2003, when amnesty laws were…

“For weeks after the Saturday Evening Post published Norman Rockwell’s The Gossips on one of its 1948 covers, thousands of readers sent letters asking the same question: What exactly was the juicy piece of information? The answer was never given. Here, I attempt to modernize Rockwell’s work by applying his characters—their movements, expressions, and tones—to Greek society. The country’s severe economic instability has caused social decay, violence, poverty, and corruption. My piece shows the gossip being circulated among teens, anarchists, policemen, politicians, soldiers, judges, reporters—the conversation involves all walks of life— about a possible exit, or Grexit, from the eurozone. My country’s debt crisis did two things: It displayed the flaws of our political aesthetic, and it also showed the problems of our society. The masked person, whose identity will never be…

1, 2 Beer and granola bars Our ships are dry, so we drink Red Stripe—sometimes the only beer we can find—when we return to port. I also bring a snack since, in the past, we’ve had lunches consisting of white bread and something resembling baloney. 3 Cameras The big camera is a $5,000 Canon and is used when we can devote one diver to just taking photographs. The smaller one, a $500 Nikon, attaches to my wrist and floats out of the way when I’m not using it. 4 Mask and snorkel Last year, when taking students out for a snorkel, I spotted an octopus. To encourage it out of its hiding hole, I gave it a gentle poke with my snorkel. The octopus grabbed my snorkel’s end and didn’t let go. That’s why it’s…

IN APRIL, A 66 FOOT BOAT carrying some 850 migrants across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy capsized, killing almost all those on board. The tragedy catapulted migration issues to the forefront of Brussels’s political agenda, as ministers grappled with how to deal with Europe’s influx of asylum-seekers and migrants without documentation. The crisis, of course, had been simmering long before April. According to the Genevabased International Organization for Migration (IOM), some 3,200 people died trying to cross the Mediterranean in 2014. (The number was nearly 2,000 for just the first half of 2015.) And globally, the number of people displaced by conflict, persecution, or human rights violations topped 59.5 million at the end of 2014, according to a report by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees—numbers not seen…