Oliver Balch

Broken dreams

8 July 2023 9:00 am

Interviewing the Continent’s refugees and poorest rural inhabitants, Ben Judah reveals a world far removed from Brussels politics or Eurovision optimism

Cold-blooded murder in Amazonia

4 February 2023 9:00 am

Criminal syndicates, corrupt officials and faceless assassins now control the increasingly depleted rainforest, killing or enslaving all who stand in their way

Has Cuba’s revolution finally fizzled out?

6 August 2022 9:00 am

In 1968, the US anthropologist Oscar Lewis arrived in Cuba with a tape recorder and a mission to capture the…

How I narrowly escaped joining Argentina’s ‘disappeared’

26 March 2022 9:00 am

A bully-boy leader. A corrupt, out-of-touch regime. A twisted reading of history. An unprovoked, military-led landgrab. A domestic disinformation blitz.…

A Canadian’s experience of the migrant’s ordeal

12 February 2022 9:00 am

No one boards an overladen dinghy and sets out across a choppy sea without very good reason. Laden into migrant…

In defence of capitalism – ‘the greatest engine of human progress ever invented’

4 December 2021 9:00 am

For all its faults and foibles, its busts and bailouts, modern market capitalism demonstrates a remarkably bullish resilience. We don’t…

A scandalous cover-up: the El Bordo mining tragedy of 1920

27 June 2020 9:00 am

On the morning of 10 March 1920, on the edge of the city of Pachuca in central Mexico, 87 miners…

Children should get out more — even if it’s for hide and seek in the park

20 June 2020 9:00 am

We live in an urban world. It’s a statistical fact. The great outdoors for most of us is a thing…

It takes a former drug dealer to explain the global narcotics scene

7 September 2019 9:00 am

In the early 2000s, Yekaterinburg was in the grip of a major heroin problem. For Yevgeny Roizman, ‘Russia’s vigilante king’,…

How Polynesia came to be inhabited is still one of the world’s great mysteries

23 March 2019 9:00 am

Later this month, a boat builder from Lake Titicaca in Bolivia will fly to the Russian city of Sochi to…

Drystone walling in the Brecon Beacons, Wales

My brilliant career hits the drystone wall

26 May 2018 9:00 am

We all tell stories about ourselves, every one of us. ‘I’m a useless cook.’ ‘Spiders don’t scare me.’ Not all…

Migrating cranes in Vasterbotten, Sweden

The swallows that herald spring

7 April 2018 9:00 am

Sweet lovers, Shakespeare reminds us, love the spring. How can they not? All that wonderfully wanton colour, all that sensual…

Portrait of Franco as Generalissimo

Spain has effectively obliterated Franco’s memory

24 February 2018 9:00 am

Spanish restaurants in Germany are relatively rare, but not nearly as rare as biographies of General Franco. So when the…

Neither green nor pleasant

14 April 2017 11:00 pm

The old coaching inn on the green. The Sunday morning toll of church bells. The ducklings paddling on the pond.…

Writing on the fly

10 September 2016 9:00 am

Bogotá airport, immigration form in hand. Tourist, migrant, businessman? Andrés Neuman ponders the descriptors, unsure which to tick. He opts…