San Juan, Puerto Rico
Going bankrupt: Puerto Rico got slammed this week when all three major credit agencies downgraded its debt to a junk rating. The U.S. territory has been in recession for nearly eight years, and unemployment is more than 15 percent. Its per capita income of $15,200 is half that of the poorest U.S. state, and 37 percent of households use food stamps. In the past two years, some 50,000 Puerto Ricans—mostly those with means and education—have moved to the U.S. “Sometimes you have to hit rock bottom to restore yourself,” said Mike Soto of the Puerto Rican think tank Center for a New Economy. “I’m hoping that’s what’s happening.”
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Touchy, touchy: President Rafael Correa’s attempt to censor a newspaper cartoon about the arrest of a political dissident backfired this week. The cartoon showed police breaking down Fernando Villavicencio’s door and hauling off computers. Correa went on the radio to denounce the artist, Xavier Bonilla, as “a shameless, ignorant, hating coward disguised as a cartoonist,” and a media oversight agency ordered that the cartoon be “corrected.” Bonilla then published a sarcastic cartoon showing Villavicencio offering up his computers willingly to excessively polite police. The Committee to Protect Journalists rates Ecuador as the second-worst country for press freedom in the Americas, behind only Cuba.
Rio de Janeiro
Violent protests: The death of a cameraman covering anti–World Cup protests has sparked a national debate over the long-running protest movement. Santiago Andrade was killed when a firecracker thrown by a protester hit him in the head. It was the seventh fatality since protests began in June, when a million people marched to demand that the government spend money on social services instead of on hosting the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics. Since that first mass event, subsequent, much smaller protests have been dominated by militant anarchists who attack police and destroy property.
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