Forrest Hylton

On 30 October, days after the largest police massacre in the history of a city infamous for them, which left at least 121 dead, President Lula approved a law to fight organised crime. He expressed sympathy, first, for four dead policemen, then for innocent residents and children murdered in the ‘mega-operation’ in the Complexo da Penha and the Complexo do Alemão, in the north of Rio de Janeiro. A photographer discovered the head of one young Comando Vermelho soldier, 19-year-old Yago Ravel Rodrigues Rosário, on a tree. He had no criminal record, but we know he was CV from his social media feeds. Police killed more people than the number of weapons recovered.

Part of Rodrigo Paz Pereira’s success in the Bolivian presidential election lies with his choice of running mate, Edmand Lara, a forty-year-old lawyer and former police captain in Santa Cruz, who was raised in a small town in Cochabamba. He became famous for his TikTok videos about police corruption, and knows how to speak a different language from that of either the middle-class doctores or the coca growers’ leaders.

At sunset on a clear day you can see thirty miles across the Río de la Plata from Colonia de Sacramento to the skyscrapers of Buenos Aires as the sky behind them turns orange. Julio Cortázar once wrote: ‘I speak of Uruguay and Argentina as one country because they are, despite the nationalists.’ When Argentina’s economy collapsed at the end of 2001, Uruguay’s soon followed. It happened again with the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath. Argentina has 45 million people, Uruguay three million; the Buenos Aires metro area is more than seven times the size of Montevideo, where two-thirds of the country lives.

The fishermen at Porto da Barra agreed that the verdict was historic and celebrated all weekend. They have been in an uproar over Trump for weeks now. Some of the men who carry umbrellas and chairs down to the beach told me that Brazil’s largest organised crime faction had finally gone down; they, too, talk about how Trump needs to be put in his place. There was much mirth at the thought of Bolsonaro’s life in prison.

Miguel Uribe Turbay, a Colombian senator and presidential candidate for the far-right Centro Democrático, died from gunshot wounds on 11 August after nearly three months in hospital. The authorities have six suspects in custody but it remains unclear who was behind the assassination. Some fingers point at one of the FARC dissident groups, though no one knows. Uribe Turbay’s death marks the country’s first magnicide since the elections of 1990, in which three left-wing candidates were assassinated.