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An exhausted man and child rest in the Darien Gap, with a week of walking still ahead across the 66-mile stretch of jungle terrain between Colombia and Panama. Two crises are converging as record numbers of Venezuelans risk the deadly trek to reach the U.S. border: the economic and humanitarian disaster underway in South America and the bitter fight over immigration policy in Washington.
Elizabeth Eckford ignores the hostile screams and stares of fellow students on her first day of school. She was one of the nine African-American students whose integration into Arkansas' Little Rock Central High School was ordered by a federal court following legal action by the NAACP. September 6, 1957.
In this photo, civil rights activist James Meredith grimaces in pain as he pulls himself across Highway 51 after being shot in Hernando, Mississippi, in the summer of 1966. Meredith was leading the March Against Fear to encourage African Americans to vote when he was shot. He completed the march from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi, after his wounds were treated.
This photo taken by Jean-Marc Bouju in 1994, shows a starving woman at a makeshift health clinic in Ruhango, Rwanda, where thousands of civilians took refuge from the fighting between government troops and the Rwandan rebels. With no access to sufficient medical care, doctors said 20 to 25 people in Rwanda died every day from disease and hunger during the fighting.
His winning image, Landfill Ballerina, was made in Guwahati, India, and captures a young girl from the larger Guwahati community searching for recyclable items in a mountain of trash. “The garbage is stacked very high and is very unpredictable—the ground beneath their feet can collapse suddenly. The stench and the fumes from the garbage are strong and heavy, and there are animal feces everywhere and worms swimming throughout this ocean of trash,” Yaghmaian says.
A group of Central American migrants near the El Chaparral crossing in Tijuana climb the fence between Mexico and the U.S. on Nov. 25. This picture by photographer Pedro Pardo of Agence France-Presse emerged on a particularly chaotic Sunday there, as U.S. border agents had fired tear gas at those attempting to cross through a barbed wire fence. Scenes of desperate families dispersed by, or coughing from, bursts of tear gas were displayed atop news articles and on television news networks that evening.
The war in Bosnia had not yet begun when American Ron Haviv took this picture of a Serb kicking a Muslim woman who had been shot by Serb forces. Haviv had gained access to the Tigers, a brutal nationalist militia that had warned him not to photograph any killings. But Haviv was determined to document the cruelty he was witnessing and, in a split second, decided to risk it.
In the vast migration that is changing the US, a Honduran boy rides a freight through Mexico. Each year thousands of undocumented Central Americans stow away for 1,500 miles on the tops and sides of trains. Some are parents desperate to escape poverty. Many are children in search of a parent who left them behind long ago. Only the brave and the lucky reach their goal.