Word: familia
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Take, for instance, Altagracia Familia, a former schoolteacher in the Dominican Republic who now lives in New York City and sells empanadas and coconut sweets. Her vending cart used to be wooden, but then she upgraded to metal. Not by way of a loan, though. Familia slowly saved profits and bought a new cart once she had amassed $7,000. What she spent her Grameen loan on is much less flashy: ingredients and cart repairs...
...breach between Washington and Caracas matters less to Brazilians than the huge chasm between the nation's rich and poor. Lula, who as an impoverished kid shined shoes on the streets of São Paulo, has pumped some $100 billion into anti-poverty projects like Bolsa Familia (Family Purse), which provide everything from rewards for poor families who keep their kids in school to financing for small farmers and entrepreneurs. As a result, 52% of Brazil's 180 million people now occupy the middle class, up from 44% when Lula took office...
...Home to President Felipe Calderon, Michoacan state is used by cartels to harvest and traffic narcotics, including marijuana and opium. In recent years, the region has spawned a particularly brutal gang known as "La Familia," who once threw five severed human heads onto the dance floor of a disco. When Calderon took office in December 2006, the bespectacled lawyer began a national crackdown against organized crime, starting the campaign in Michoacan, where he sent soldiers into mountains to burn crops and seize safe houses. And the cartels have responded with a violent counteroffensive, killing more than 500 police, soldiers, judges...
...Fernando Martí, son of the Mexican businessman Alejandro Martí, who last year sold his chain of fitness clubs for $562 million, was found inside the trunk of a parked car in Mexico City. Near the body was a note, which read, "For not paying, yours truly La Familia." The boy had been asphyxiated more than a month earlier, having been kidnapped some 53 days previously when the armored vehicle in which he was being driven was stopped at what appeared to be a checkpoint of the AFI, Mexico's Federal Agency of Investigations. The kidnappers wore AFI uniforms...
...corruption scandals that forced many of his closest advisors to resign and destroyed the credibility of his Workers' Party (PT). "Lula is no saint, he probably steals a little," said Silvana de Oliveira, an unemployed mother who gets $30 a month from his government. "[But] without the Bolsa Familia I couldn't afford anything. It isn't a lot, but people in precarious situations like me count...