There were flowers every few hundred meters or so at the side of the road from the Bolivian capital La Paz to the country's Yungas region further east.
The flowers marked the spots of a grim carnage. The road runs through a mountain pass, soaring above 5,000m in some places and narrowing to less than two meters. With boulders to one side and a sheer drop of hundreds of meters on the other, the road often could not cope with the press of traffic negotiating its uneven surface.
Typically this traffic is made up of lorries loaded with fruit and vegetables from mountain villages on their way to market, often with the villagers themselves sitting on top of their produce.
All too frequently, a truck goes off the road and plunges down the mountainside. Hence the flowers, laid over the years by grieving relatives.
"They are aerial deaths," quipped my driver, not a joke calculated to reassure. About 200 people a year died on that one stretch of road, he told me.
In western Europe, the road would have been closed as just too dangerous. In low-income Latin America it remains a lifeline for local farmers and, ironically, a death trap.
More than 1 million people in developing countries die every year in road traffic accidents out of a global total of 1.18 million road deaths, the World Health Organization (WHO) said. While this is about the same as malaria, the problem of road deaths receives only scant attention. The WHO is now attempting to put that right.
This Wednesday is World Health Day, an annual day organized by the WHO to mark its foundation. This year, for the first time in its history, the WHO is devoting the day specifically to road safety.
The WHO says road crashes currently account for one in five of injury-related deaths and rank as the ninth leading cause of global mortality.
The WHO warns that current figures are bad enough, but the statistical trends are even more alarming.
If projections prove correct, by 2020 the number of people killed or maimed every day on the world's roads will grow by more than 60 percent and the number of road accident fatalities will pass the death tolls of both malaria and tuberculosis, WHO director-general Lee Jong-wook said.
‘GREAT OPPRTUNITY’: The Paraguayan president made the remarks following Donald Trump’s tapping of several figures with deep Latin America expertise for his Cabinet Paraguay President Santiago Pena called US president-elect Donald Trump’s incoming foreign policy team a “dream come true” as his nation stands to become more relevant in the next US administration. “It’s a great opportunity for us to advance very, very fast in the bilateral agenda on trade, security, rule of law and make Paraguay a much closer ally” to the US, Pena said in an interview in Washington ahead of Trump’s inauguration today. “One of the biggest challenges for Paraguay was that image of an island surrounded by land, a country that was isolated and not many people know about it,”
DIALOGUE: US president-elect Donald Trump on his Truth Social platform confirmed that he had spoken with Xi, saying ‘the call was a very good one’ for the US and China US president-elect Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) discussed Taiwan, trade, fentanyl and TikTok in a phone call on Friday, just days before Trump heads back to the White House with vows to impose tariffs and other measures on the US’ biggest rival. Despite that, Xi congratulated Trump on his second term and pushed for improved ties, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. The call came the same day that the US Supreme Court backed a law banning TikTok unless it is sold by its China-based parent company. “We both attach great importance to interaction, hope for
‘FIGHT TO THE END’: Attacking a court is ‘unprecedented’ in South Korea and those involved would likely face jail time, a South Korean political pundit said Supporters of impeached South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol yesterday stormed a Seoul court after a judge extended the impeached leader’s detention over his ill-fated attempt to impose martial law. Tens of thousands of people had gathered outside the Seoul Western District Court on Saturday in a show of support for Yoon, who became South Korea’s first sitting head of state to be arrested in a dawn raid last week. After the court extended his detention on Saturday, the president’s supporters smashed windows and doors as they rushed inside the building. Hundreds of police officers charged into the court, arresting dozens and denouncing an
CYBERSCAM: Anne, an interior decorator with mental health problems, spent a year and a half believing she was communicating with Brad Pitt and lost US$855,259 A French woman who revealed on TV how she had lost her life savings to scammers posing as Brad Pitt has faced a wave of online harassment and mockery, leading the interview to be withdrawn on Tuesday. The woman, named as Anne, told the Seven to Eight program on the TF1 channel how she had believed she was in a romantic relationship with the Hollywood star, leading her to divorce her husband and transfer 830,000 euros (US$855,259). The scammers used fake social media and WhatsApp accounts, as well as artificial intelligence image-creating technology to send Anne selfies and other messages
RSS