Choosing between livelihoods and lives in Latin America

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SCORES OF street vendors set up an open-air food market this week in Huáscar, a shantytown in north-eastern Lima, defying Peru’s strict lockdown against covid-19. Hundreds of seasonal workers have broken quarantine, too, to travel back from the coast after the summer harvests to their homes in Andean villages. In locked-down Colombia, in Bogotá suburbs like Ciudad Bolívar and Soacha, life goes on more or less normally. Vendors offer coffee and corn bread on the street. That picture is repeated in many poorer parts of Latin America.