Kidnapping and international adoption.

In Goiânia, a city of 1.3 million in Brazil’s agricultural heartland, one in twenty homeless residents have been murdered in the last two years.

The rise and fall of travel writing.

How the Chilean miners survived.

Behind the doors of Centaurus, Rio’s most infamous brothel.

A utopian German settlement in Chile had already turned darkly cultish by the time it became a secret torture site for enemies of the Pinochet regime.

A profile of Uruguay President José Mujica, a former revolutionary who’s been shot six times, was imprisoned for 14 years and, since taking office, has shunned the presidential mansion in favor of a small farm while legalizing gay marriage, abortion and marijuana.

“In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That’s the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.”

The story of a massacre in El Salvador.

The battle for Rio de Janeiro’s iconic Cristo Redentor statue.

Brazil’s restless youth in the lead-up to the World Cup.

What did soccer have to do with two brutal murders after a pickup game?

Forty years after the dirty wars and Pinochet’s coup, photographer David Burnett journeys back to Chile to visit the subject of his most famous image.

The son of an American anthropologist returns to the Amazon to reunite with his mother, an indigenous tribeswoman.

Roy Petersen was blind in one eye, had two replaced hips, and was twice divorced. His job was to solve a gold mine robbery case in the Peruvian Andes. He would need some help.

The Mennonite women of the Manitoba Colony would awake with blood and semen stains, dried grass in their hair, and tiny bits of rope on their wrists and ankles. Their rapists, armed with a veterinary tranquilizer converted to spray form, were eight young men from their own community.

On the holy city of Canudos, and other attempts at better living “by the dispossessed and marginalized the world over.”

Covering an election in Peru’s largest prison.

A world-renowned physicist’s miscalculation.

Before he died, Sun Myung Moon, cult father to massive Unification Church (known better as the Moonies), sent 14 Japanese “national messiahs” deep into the Paraguayan jungle to build an utopian “ideal city.” Thirteen years later, the author catches a trading boat down river in search of their hidden town.

Life in the French Foreign Legion.

On the experimental favela police force UPP (aka “The Big Skull”) and their efforts to clean Rio’s largest slum in advance of the World Cup and Olympics.

A California martial arts instructor’s secret past.

Previously: Finding Oscar

In Argentina, where the fútbol underworld controls everything from t-shirt vending to murder, and “rowdy gangs” have turned the stadium into a battleground.

On the perils and poisons of mining for gold in southeastern Peru.