With hundreds of highly prized species, bird tourism is thriving in the country – and farmers are increasingly turning their land into nature reserves

When it came to dividing up his late father’s farm between five brothers, Vinicio Bacuilima says he drew the short straw. Maraksacha, on the main road out of Ecuador’s capital Quito, is a tiny patch of land on the edge of a steep ravine, making it very difficult to make a living from farming.

Then Bacuilima’s wife Anita Cajas had an idea: turn their paltry inheritance into a site to attract visiting birders. Creating the Maraksacha Reserve was a risky venture, but it paid off, with feeders attracting a host of colourful hummingbirds and tanagers.

There’s great joy as well as pain in this luminous story of Indigenous life and the battle against exploitation

When Nemonte Nenquimo was little, she and her sisters and brothers would hear planes flying over their village in the Amazon and race one another to the nearby landing strip to see who was arriving. Only white people – known as cowori – travelled by plane, and they would bring gifts of candy, clothes, earrings and dolls with blond hair. Over the years, they brought other things too: God, polio, alcohol and oil executives waving contracts allowing them to plunder indigenous land for its oil reserves. One village elder reported signing papers with his thumbprint after being given bread and Coca-Cola and assured that the oil companies would build schools and medical clinics.

In her richly detailed memoir, written with and translated by her American partner Mitch Anderson, Nenquimo documents her path from early childhood in a Waorani village deep in the Ecuadorian rainforest to becoming an environmental activist, named in 2020 as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people. The Waorani tribes, which live traditionally as nomadic hunter-gatherers, once claimed the largest territories of all Indigenous Amazonians in Ecuador – land that was among the most biodiverse on Earth. But that was before it was reduced by settlement, cattle grazing, oil extraction, gold mining and logging, and its rivers poisoned with oil. In 2019, Nenquimo helped win a historical lawsuit against the Ecuadorian government protecting more than[LJ add] half a million hectares of Waorani ancestral territory from being auctioned to oil companies.

In 2010, Mexico led the way, followed by Ecuador, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Argentina and Colombia

• What are those weird ingredients in our favorite packaged foods?

Candy lines every inch of the mercado de dulces in Mexico City’s historic center. Tantalizing strawberry-flavored chocolates and Tajín-covered mango gummies pack the narrow aisles of the meandering marketplace. But many of the colorful packages are somewhat dampened by black stop signs printed on their fronts. Alongside dreamy descriptions of creamy and chocolatey confections, the stop signs warn “Excess calories” or “Excess sugars”. For some customers, the warnings are enough for them to pause and reconsider their purchases.

Latin America is leading the world in a movement to print nutritional warning labels on the fronts of food packages. Currently, the labels warn when a food product exceeds a consumer’s daily recommended value of any “nutrient of concern” – namely, sugar, salt or saturated fat (some countries have added trans fats, artificial sweeteners and caffeine). But research led by scientists across the continent is increasingly pointing towards another factor consumers may want to consider: how processed a food is.