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They call themselves "the multicolored people," or Siekopai, after the eye-catching traditional body paint and adornments they used to wear in their ancestral home in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. But the feathered crowns and animal tooth necklaces are now stored away for special occasions as the Siekopai live scattered between villages straddling the Ecuador-Peru border, far from their hunter-gatherer way of life and ancestral territory, which they are fighting to reclaim.

Amazonian Siekopai people battle for return to ancestral land | AFP

A small group of protesters throw rocks at Congress and at police who push them back by firing rubber bullets during a demonstration outside Argentina's Congress as lawmakers debate a plan for the country to repay a ruinous $45-billion debt to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Police, protesters clash outside Argentine Congress during IMF protest | AFP 

People do not take seriously the severity of Covid-19 "until the dead are your dead," say the medical staff of a private hospital in Uruguay, which went from being an example in the management of the pandemic to, in the last month, leading the rankings for daily Covid-19 infections per capita in the world.

'Until the dead are your dead' Covid is ignored: Uruguayan hospital staff | AFP

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