‘Daughters of the Forest’

The Mbaracayú forest is located at a remote spot in Paraguay, formed by the upper basin of the Jejuí river and the Mbaracayú Forest Nature Reserve. The place is a sanctuary for a number of endangered species and a hotspot of biodiversity.

But for people living around the area, daily life can be a challenge. Going to school, for instance, is not easy, not only because children have to make their way there by cutting through the thick vegetation that takes over the roads, but also because of a lack of resources for education as well as the prejudices society has against women.

In 2008, Moises Bertoni Foundation, the body that manages the natural reserve, established the Mbaracayú Educational Center as an initiative to offer quality education for teenage girls living in and around the reserve. It offers high school technical degrees in environmental sciences.

This is the focus of the 2015 film “Daughters of the Forest,” directed by San Francisco, California-based Samantha Grant. The documentary will be shown at the 10th Annual Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival, to be held in March 23-27.

Read More Here @ Global Voices

See Also: 

• Daughters of the Forest
• The Daughters of the Forest

Lady of Cao

Harvard University to conduct DNA study on Lady of Cao - Peru this Week

Archaeologist Regulo Franco Jordán announced that specialists from Harvard University began conducting a DNA study of the Lady of Cao, a woman considered by many as the first ruler of Pre-Columbian America. The investigation will also include the 6 occupants who were buried with her.

The Lady of Cao is a name given to a female Moche mummy discovered at the archaeological site El Brujo, an Archaeological Complex, just north of Trujillo.

Read More Here @ Peru This Week

Ancient tombs in Peru hint at human sacrifice

Archaeologists find ancient tombs in Peru hinting at human sacrifice | Science | The Guardian

Archaeologists in Peru have found more than a dozen tombs suggesting human sacrifice at sprawling ruins on the northern coast, a seat of power for three ancient cultures and the possible center of a pre-Inca legend.

At Chotuna-Chornancap, a coastal ruin complex in the arid valleys far north of Lima, archaeologists with Peru’s ministry of culture found more than 17 graves dating to at least the 15th century.

“There is at least one fairly high-status tomb,” said Haagen Klaus, a bioarchaeologist at George Mason University has worked at Chotuna-Chornancap before. Klaus told the Guardian that he hopes to analyze the new finds, discovered by the ruins of a temple, to confirm whether the victims were sacrificed.

“It’s not unusual that sacrifices are made to those individuals, sometimes during the funeral or even years or generations afterward,” he said. “But we can see that a number of the individuals that were buried were children – and that does fit into the larger pattern of ritual sacrifice.”

Continue reading article here at The Guardian and also at Seeker

Discovery of 4,500-year-old female mummy sheds light on ancient Peru

Discovery of 4,500-year-old female mummy sheds light on ancient Peru | World news | The Guardian

Archaeologists in Peru have discovered the 4,500-year-old mummy of a woman buried near one of the most ancient cities of the Americas.

Dr Ruth Shady Solís said the mummy was probably a noblewoman who died aged 40 to 50 years old and was buried in the coastal ruins of Aspero, about 14 miles away from Caral, a city with some of the most ancient pyramids in the Americas. Both sites stand about three hours north of the modern capital of Lima.

The mummy was buried with carved objects of monkeys and birds, which Shady Solís said suggested possible trade between the coastal town and Caral, a larger inland city. Shady Solís deduced the woman’s social status from the value and diverse origins of the objects around her: seashells, carved desert birds and designs of jungle monkeys.

The mummy was buried with carved objects of monkeys and birds, which Shady Solís said suggested possible trade between the coastal town and Caral, a larger inland city. Shady Solís deduced the woman’s social status from the value and diverse origins of the objects around her: seashells, carved desert birds and designs of jungle monkeys.

Shady Solís’s team has dated the mummy to about 2,500BC, around the same time that people of the region began building pyramids, but has not offered a theory as to the woman’s death.

See also: Mummy perfectly preserved for 4,500 years lifts secrets of mysterious ancient civilization

Women in the Wari Empire

From Peruvian Times: Archaeologists Uncover Remains of Girl Sacrificed Some 1,500 Years Ago

Archaeologists have uncovered remains of a girl who was most probably used as a sacrifice some 1,500 years ago, according to RPP Radio.

The discovery was made in the district of Yautan, 40km inland from Casma in the Ancash region. The remains of the girl were discovered in a tomb by a group of archaeologists and students from the University of Santiago Antunez de Mayolo in Huaraz.

The archaeologists believe the girl could have been sacrificed as an offering to gods of the sea, perhaps as protection against the climate changes caused by the El Niño ocean current.

The Wari empire spanned much of modern Peru during the 8th and 9th Centuries A.D. Experts say that its capital, Huari, had a population of some 40,000 people, which would have been a major global urban center at the time. Much is still not known about the Wari, which like other pre-Hispanic civilizations, is overshadowed in Peru by the Incas.

From the Telegraph: Wari empire royal tomb discovered in Peru

Archaeologists in Peru say they have unearthed a massive royal tomb full of mummified women that provides clues about the enigmatic Wari empire that ruled the Andes long before the Incas.

From Adventure Life: Ancient Peru Brewery

Archeologists have only scratched the surface of discovery in many areas. A recent itch: the historic mountain-top city of Cerro Baúl. Here, at over 8,000 feet above sea level, an ancient brewery of the Wari Empire was found. Twenty ceramic 10 to 15 gallon vats suggest that this was much more than a Mom-and-Pop-shop. In fact, it may be the oldest large-scale brewery ever found in the Andes. It was used to produce great quantities of chicha, a fermented beverage similar to beer made from barley and berries of the pepper tree, Schinus molle.

From ABC News: Royal Peruvian tomb with scores of mummified women sheds light on Wari empire

Archaeologists in Peru have unearthed a massive royal tomb full of mummified women which provides clues about the enigmatic Wari empire that ruled the Andes long before their better-known Incan successors.

The mausoleum, unearthed a few months ago at a coastal pyramid site called El Castillo de Huarmey, 299 kilometres north of Lima, contained gold pieces, ceramics and 63 skeletons about 1,300 years old.

Researchers said the discovery will help them piece together life in the Andes centuries before the rise of the Incan empire, which was written about in detail by the conquering Spaniards.

From National Geographic: First Unlooted Royal Tomb of Its Kind Unearthed in Peru

Three queens were buried with golden treasures, human sacrifices

It was a stunning discovery: the first unlooted imperial tomb of the Wari, the ancient civilization that built South America's earliest empire between 700 and 1000 A.D. Yet it wasn't happiness that Milosz Giersz felt when he first glimpsed gold in the dim recesses of the burial chamber in northern Peru.

Giersz, an archaeologist at the University of Warsaw in Poland, realized at once that if word leaked out that his Polish-Peruvian team had discovered a 1,200-year-old "temple of the dead" filled with precious gold and silver artifacts, looters would descend on the site in droves. "I had a nightmare about the possibility," says Giersz.

Brazil: Dilma Rousseff President

From Forbes:

Brazil made history yesterday, when the country elected former chief of staff Dilma Rousseff as its President, making her the highest ranking woman and first female head of state there. She was handpicked as the candidate for the Workers’ Party by popular president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and beat out opponent Jose Serra in Sunday’s runoff election.

In her victory speech, she cited goals of eradicating poverty and improving gender equality. Rousseff has already made tremendous progress. In her posts as Minister of Energy and Chief of Staff, she helped 31 million Brazilians move into the middle class and saw 24 million escape poverty. Moreover, her presence at the top serves as an example for girls around the world. She joins Cristina Fernandez, the first elected female president in Argentina, and Costa Rica’s President Laura Chinchilla as another strong female leader in Latin America. She was named this year to our list of The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women.

Argentina: Illusions of Care

From the Guardian:

Anybody wonder why we need a UN women's agency? Maybe the latest report from Human Rights Watch - out today - will offer some clues. It's about Argentina - not the poorest or the least sophisticated or illiberal country in the world. It voted to legalise gay marriage, after all. It has a woman president. Yet thousands of women and girls there, says the report, "suffer needlessly every year because of negligent or abusive reproductive health care".

Argengtina has far from the worst record in Latin America. No less than five countries ban abortion under any circumstances. Chile, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic refuse to allow it even if it means the woman's death. Argentina and the others are not quite so harsh.

But international human rights law says that women have a right to make decisions about if, when and how many children they have, says Human Rights Watch. In Argentina, those rights have been "systematically flouted for years", it says.

Chile: Mapuche Women

From Latin America Press:

Life in Araucania is tense and distressing. Residents in this southern Chilean region, where 30 percent of the Mapuche population lives, say the police routinely violate their rights and face constant threats of losing their lands to transnational companies.

"For us, the land is very important," said historian and Mapuche leader Millaray Painemal. "Mapuche means people of the earth, and our struggle is to recover the lands we´ve historically had that are now in the hands of plantation owners or transnational companies."

This historical demand to recover communal lands is at the root of a bitter struggle with the state, which has responded with repression.

Women Mapuche leaders, even though they do fight for their people´s general cause, are also struggling to overcome historical repression against their gender."We have had to fight for women to know which international treaties there are," said the Rayen Voygue president, referring to the United Nations´ Convention on the Elimination on All Forms of Discrimination against Women. "That´s why the role of women´s organizations is important so we can empower ourselves with these instruments."

Ingrid Betancourt

Finally - after six long years, Ingrid Betancourt has been released from her jungle prison. Along with a number of other prominent people, Betancourt had been taken hostage by FARC, one of the oldest surviving guerrilla armies in South America.

From the Times Online:
"To the rest of the world, Betancourt, 46, a Colombian politician, may have been just one of dozens of VIP hostages held in the jungle by Farc, Latin America’s oldest surviving guerrilla army. But this “Joan of Arc of the Andes”, as she has been dubbed by the Colombian press, was French-educated and a dual national by a first marriage.

For six years her epic ordeal of solitude and survival has caught the popular imagination in France, her image as resonant as Madeleine McCann’s in this country. Betancourt’s portrait has been suspended from hundreds of town halls, including in Paris, her spirit of resistance and force of character touching a nation as details of her plight filtered out sporadically in videos, letters and accounts from fellow captives.

Throughout this time she attracted the full might of the French Establishment — first from Dominique de Villepin, the former Prime Minister, and later from Sarkozy, who even pledged to win her freedom in his election-night victory speech last year. "

Betancourt had been taken hostage in 2002 - she was one of 2000.
"Betancourt had made four attempts to escape, was chained by the neck day and night and often tortured. She remained defiant, acting as leader of her hostage group, fighting for small privileges.

Betancourt said that she drew great strength during her years in the jungle from hearing the voice of her mother, a former beauty queen, in broadcasts to her on the radio."