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Last month I was in Canberra for a landmark day in the campaign for National Mental Health Reform in Australia. I was in the Australian capital for the Budget Lockup, an event at which members of the media and other stakeholder groups surrender their liberty and mobile phones for four hours in exchange for a preview of the nation's budget. Some of the happier expressions to be seen at this year's Lockup belonged to representatives of the mental health sector. A central theme of Budget 2011 was a major focus on mental health reform, with an injection of $1.5b of new Government money, complemented by reconfirming or reallocating $700m of pre-existing commitments, as part of a total investment of $2.2b over five years in a new National Mental Health Reform initiative. more »

In 2010 Central America experienced its first military overthrow of a government for 16 years with the forced removal of Hoduran President Manuel Zelaya. For this reason the stability of other Latin American democracies has come under more scrutiny, with Guatemala, which shares a border with Honduras, one source of particular concern. more »

The news that over 230 children have been killed since Israel launched its recent Gaza campaign is one of the bleaker aspects of a case study in how normally reasonable human beings become complicit in acts of the most stupid and vicious violence.My own attempts to make sense of this year's depressing Christmas message from the Holy Land has been shaped by my experiences over the last 16 months in Latin America. more »

Bolivia's Old Yungus Road is widely reported as the world's most lethal. The spectacular Andean route between Coroico and La Paz has earned a grisly cache amongst adventure travelers wanting to earn "I cycled the Death Road" t-shirts. The Yungus is just one of six Latin American roads that make the Association for Safe International Road Travel's list of the twenty most dangerous roads in the world. Interstate 116 in Brazil, the Panamerican highway in Costa Rica, the Cotopaxi Volcan road in Ecuador, Highway 1 in Mexico and Kuelap-Celendin-Cajamarca road in Peru are the others. more »

My travel across the Argentina-Brazil border was marked by perhaps the most striking set of images that I have encountered in my travels in Latin America. With unexpected symmetry, I noticed something unsettling about a young female traveler shortly after my land crossing into each country. Both women had long blonde hair framing significant stretches of purple and black bruising around their eyes. Something bad had recently happened to each - the exact nature of which remaining the private history of strangers carrying their backpacks along their own journeys. more »