Charlotte Peet

At first glance, the stretch of greenery surrounding Crofton Park station in Brockley, South East London, appears to be a simple patch of railway woodland. Tucked behind a row of back gardens and a railway line to London Bridge, scrublands and grassy glades encircle the public highway and the graffiti-splashed railway bridges traversed by schoolchildren on foot and commuters by car.
Over several years leading up to 2016, then forty-two-year-old charity worker and local Brockley resident Anna-...

President Nayib Bukele, the self-declared “coolest dictator” in the Americas, is facing growing accusations that his war on gangs is fuelling indiscriminate arrests.

Tens of thousands of people in El Salvador have been detained since Bukele, 41, launched a nationwide anti-gang offensive last year. Rights groups say a state of emergency, implemented in March last year and periodically renewed since then, has resulted in arbitrary arrests, ill treatment and deaths in overcrowded prisons.

The go...

The idea for Bolivia’s answer to Tesla came to José Carlos Marquez when he was building a wheelbarrow for miners. “This is practically a car, isn’t it?” he recalled telling his engineers.

If he could create something small and hardy enough to cope with life underground, powered by batteries, why could he not put the technology to use in a vehicle? The result is a “bubble car” that can fit up to three people and has a top speed of 34mph.

Its manufacturers argue that the unlikely rival to Elon ...

For months, Brazil’s far-right has questioned the results of the election that gave Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva another presidential term. Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, Brazilians and international observers alike have worried that cutbacks in moderation would add to the ranks of the country’s far-right.
Eight experts from digital rights organizations and universities in Brazil and the United States told Rest of World they have heard anecdotal evidence of right-wing accounts purportedly se...

COVID-19 cases and deaths are climbing in Portugal’s popular tourist hotspots like Lisbon, Porto and the Algarve region.
Faro, Portugal – Marie Braud until recently considered herself an anomaly. Despite travelling extensively for her work, the recruiter had managed to avoid testing positive for COVID-19 throughout the coronavirus pandemic. But that all changed in June.
The 37-year-old began to experience fever and fatigue shortly after attending the Santos Populares festival. She thought it ...

Out of jail and with his convictions for corruption annulled, the former president is being tipped for an astonishing comeback. Stephen Gibbs and Charlotte Peet report

Hero. Crook. Sinner. Saint. Communist. Genius. Those are just some of the words flying around to describe Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — known as Lula — Brazil’s former president, after a surprise decision by a Supreme Court judge to annul his criminal convictions.

The decision of the single judge, which still needs to be confirme...

Matt Dickinson and Charlotte Peet hear how those close to the small club on brink of its finest hour have dealt with the accident that killed 71 people

Five years after he was in a plane plummeting to earth, surrounded by team-mates praying and crying out for salvation as they hurtled to their doom, Jakson Follmann picks up his guitar, strums and sings Tocando em Frente, or “Moving On”.

The hands that once served Follman so well as a goalkeeper now find their expression in music. “Sertanejo” ...

In any normal year, preparations for Rio’s carnival would be in full swing. The sounds of samba would throb from rehearsals and in back-street warehouses massive, outlandish carnival floats, built in secret and not revealed until February, would be taking shape.

But this year, all is quiet. For the first time since 1912, Rio’s carnival has been cancelled. Coronavirus has disrupted Brazil’s daily life and tourism to such an extent that the event’s organising committee reluctantly decided that ...

Informal settlements have sprung up across the country amid Brazil’s ongoing COVID-19 crisis and its economic fallout, symbols of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro’s failure to effectively soften the coronavirus pandemic’s blow.

Itaguai, Brazil – Miani Cristina once considered herself lucky. Her employer had kept her on during Brazil’s devastating first wave of COVID-19 infections in 2020. Her monthly income of just over 1,000 reais ($190) and a monthly handout from the government of 41 reai...

Health officials in the Brazilian Amazon, still reeling from health system collapse, fear a third wave is on the way.
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – When Rosa Dos Anjos was admitted to a COVID-19 intensive care unit in the Amazonian capital of Manaus for 15 days in January, she thought her fortunes could not possibly get any worse.
The 50 year old had already lost her father to the virus during a deadly first wave of the pandemic last year – and Dos Anjos was fighting for her life as oxygen supplie...

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – Monica Cunha felt she had to speak out. That’s why the activist joined a group of other mothers – all of whom lost children to Brazilian state violence over the past several years – to denounce the brutality of Rio de Janeiro’s most lethal police operation on record.
“We’re disgusted,” said Cunha, who still lives with the scars of losing her son in a police raid 15 years ago, about the violence in Jacarezinho favela last week. “Not in 15 years have I seen a protest on...

Brazil’s police said crackdown on drug trafficking was justified but residents say there were clear signs of ‘execution-style killings’ during operation.
Correction10 May 2021
An earlier version of this story misspelled Bruno Sousa's name. This has been corrected.
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – At least 25 people have been killed after hundreds of heavily armed police stormed into one of Rio de Janeiro’s largest slum areas, reportedly targeting drug traffickers.
Local media showed live footage of s...

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – Almost a year ago to the day, the jungle city of Manaus grabbed international headlines after a flood of COVID-19 deaths forced gravediggers to dig mass burials – catapulting the city into the centre of Brazil’s coronavirus outbreak.
Those scenes are now being repeated throughout Brazil, where authorities are working day and night to bury the dead, with experts warning that the country’s funeral services could be the next to topple.
Since the start of the year, an unc...

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – When Allessandro Cabral began to experience COVID symptoms in early March, he thought nothing much of it. In fact, the 41-year-old even reassured his friends: “I have COVID,” he wrote them in a WhatsApp message from his home in Rio de Janeiro’s North Zone. “But I’m not at risk: I eat healthy, I work out. It will pass.”
After a week of light COVID symptoms, however, Cabral’s condition worsened dramatically. He couldn’t breathe and went to a local hospital, then to a fi...