This photo gallery highlights some of the top news images made by Associated Press photographers in Latin America and the Caribbean published in the past week.
Merrymakers took to the streets in hundreds of open-air “bloco” parties ahead of Rio’s over-the-top Carnival, while in Bolivia costumed revelers vied to be elected one of the three beloved Carnival characters. In another part of Rio, a distraught woman is helped by police after taking cover from a gunfight between police and suspected drug traffickers.
In Honduras, soldiers and police launched tear gas at demonstrators protesting the inauguration of President Juan Orlando Hernandez following November elections marred by allegations of fraud.
Ecuador’s former president Rafael Correa rallied against this weekend’s constitutional referendum that will present voters with seven questions, including one that would make it impossible for Correa to run again for president.
A tourist kicked up her heels in a hot pink classic American Chevrolet convertible before taking a driving tour of Havana, Cuba.
In Peru, more than 480 finches died while being transported illegally in overcrowded cages, without water or food.
Anti-corruption demonstrators in Lima wore defaced masks of Peru’s former president Alberto Fujimori, protesting his medical pardon that put the brakes on his 25-year sentence for human rights abuses and graft during his 1990-2000 rule.
A youth scraped grains of corn off the street after it fell from a truck that was looted at gunpoint outside the port in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela.
A supporter of the political party launched by former rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia listened to its presidential candidate Rodrigo London in Bogota, Colombia.
Ballet shoes hung from a rope as Argentine ballerinas protested the reduction of funding for the state-run dance company in Buenos Aires. About 80 dancers, choreographers, and other workers at the National Ballet of Dance lost their jobs in December due to government austerity measures.
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This photo gallery was curated by photo editor Leslie Mazoch in Mexico City. On Twitter @LeslieMazoch
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AP photographers and photo editors on Twitter at https://twitter.com/AP/lists/ap-photographers
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