Jonathan Friedland

SANTIAGO, Chile -- After 20 years abroad, Ignacio Meyer came home to find that his family logging firm was about to cut down the area's last stand of virgin forest. Ignacio confronted his brother Diego, arguing passionately that an eco-tourism resort, though less profitable, would be far better for both the family and the town.
The brothers are fictitious characters in "Oro Verde," a hit television series that takes as its theme a dilemma facing this nation of 14 million: Is it worth maintain...

PORT KAITUMA, Guyana -- Having cut through their own tropical forests, Southeast Asia's loggers are now taking on the Amazon. But they may have met their match. Just ask Soon Khiew Chan, the logging boss of Barama Co.
His concession, which is about half the size of Switzerland, is short on trees big enough to cut. Torrential rains make it impossible for him to operate during five months a year. He has environmentalists watching him closely. And his workers have laid down their saws over, amon...

When President Trump addresses the National Association of Realtors on Friday afternoon in Washington, the mood in the ballroom at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel no doubt will be celebratory. But the bonhomie at the gathering will mask troubles in the residential real estate industry, one of the last meaningful sectors of the U.S. economy yet to be radically transformed by advances in computing and communications.
Instead, the industry remains one in which many of the nearly 1.4 million real...

TACNA, Peru -- Earlier this year, the mayor of Arica, a Chilean town just across the border here, dispatched bulldozers at dawn to pave over 100 yards of Peruvian territory on Arica's outskirts.
Ivan Paredes had his reasons. The mayor says he had asked Peruvian authorities for the property to widen a particularly dangerous stretch of the Pan-American highway, where car crashes had become a weekly event. When they dragged their feet, the mayor decided to pave first and argue about it later.
"E...

PUNTA DEL ESTE, Uruguay -- This ritzy vacation hotspot on an Uruguayan peninsula is open for only a few weeks each year, is prohibitively expensive and, to hear its most avid -- and wealthiest -- admirers tell it, has just been going to the dogs ever since the middle class discovered it in the 1970s.
But try to keep the Argentines away.
Every January -- the peak of summer in this part of the world -- 300,000 Argentines flock to beach-lined Punta del Este to do some sunning, some swimming, som...

ASUNCION, Paraguay -- At a carnival party here two years ago, Army commander Lino Oviedo entered on the shoulders of his aides dressed as Julius Caesar. Last year, he came dressed as Al Capone.
Mr. Oviedo's naked political ambition, combined with his thuggish behavior, didn't serve him as well in real life. Last week, he failed in an attempt to lead a coup against Juan Carlos Wasmosy, Paraguay's first democratically elected president in half a century. Though it was the first time he failed i...