Ben Ehrenreich

In March 2009, the former television journalist Mauricio Funes became the first leftist to win the presidency of El Salvador. ‘Now it’s the turn of the aggrieved,’ Funes said, addressing hundreds of thousands of red-clad supporters. ‘Now it’s the opportunity of the excluded.’ He was paraphrasing the poet Roque Dalton, one of the patron saints of the Latin...

On 15 September, the eve of Mexico’s bicentenary, President Felipe Calderón threw the country a $3 billion birthday party. An hour before midnight, he took the tricoloured flag from his honour guard, stepped onto the balcony of the Palacio Nacional and delivered the traditional Independence Day grito: a long succession of vivas echoing those of the soon-to-be-martyred priest...

Baraa Halabieh​ could recall almost every detail of the long journey from his family home in the Syrian city of Hama: every bus and taxi fare, where he slept or failed to sleep each night, how many hours he walked to cross each border and how long he stood crammed on a stationary train waiting to pass into Hungary. He remembered the friend of a friend who stole all his money in Turkey and...

I was​ surprised a few weeks ago to find everyone I knew in Hebron feeling cheerful. Perhaps it was the weather. Four months had passed since my last visit to the city, the largest, and lately the bloodiest, in the West Bank. It was January then, and cold, and everyone had seemed distant and shaky, glassy-eyed with trauma. The previous November, most of the neighbourhood of Tel Rumeida...

In Haro Sheikh​ the journalists kneeled to photograph a tortoise. It was nearly a metre long, with short, spikily scaled legs tucked beneath its shell. A black liquid stained the dry red earth around it. Beside it was the carcass of a donkey, white bone showing beneath what little flesh remained. A few metres away a warthog lay rotting, and beyond that a camel. For miles outside the village...