On 8 March 2017 Guatemala woke up to the news that a state-run home for vulnerable children was on fire. Nineteen girls died at the scene and 22 others later in hospital. Fifteen survived with life-changing injuries.

Vianney was determined to wrest Ashly from the hands of the gang. She told the police, and after they found Ashly, Vianney sent her to a state-run home for at-risk children so she would be far away from the boy and his gang. "She never told me what went on there," her mother Roxana Tojil recalls. "Once she said: 'I can't tell you anything, because they would beat me, lock me up in a dark room or leave me without food'." An investigation later revealed that the girls were not even allowed to le

On one side is the mainstream media, which presents itself as the defender of journalistic values against disinformation. On the other side, there are the so-called 'alternative media', which claim to fight against censorship. Migration has become their prime battleground, and refugees the victims. Slovakia has hardly felt the migration crisis that has affected Europe since 2015. There are only a few hundred refugees in the country. Still, many people feel uneasy about them. According to a 20

Colombia’s peace deal promised the return of stolen lands. But it isn’t so easy to achieve, Mira Galanova discovers.

Six months after the Colombian government and the country’s largest insurgent group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), agreed to end a five-decade-long conflict, many Colombians remain skeptical about the deal. In October, a narrow majority voted against the peace agreement in a national referendum.

Colombia is set to succeed in its fight against drug trafficking, following the FARC peace deal. But coca-growing farmers worry they will be left without any means of support. Mira Galanova reports.

The infiltration of illegal firearms has led to a rise in violent cattle raids. Pastoralists are now arming themselves.

Six young revolutionaries pose on a photo from 1979. Side by side with Nicaragua’s current leader Daniel Ortega is Carlos Brenes. Then comrades, today they are fierce political opponents.

On May 12, the Chilean Supreme Court upheld an 18-year-long prison sentence for Celestino Córdova, a Mapuche machi (shaman), for setting a house ablaze last year, killing an elderly couple. The case has sparked anger among his supporters since he was first sentenced by a lower court in late February. The couple, Werner Luchsinger and Vivian McKay, had been involved in a dispute with a local indigenous group over land they owned in Chile’s Araucanía region, an area historically inhabited by the M