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Agatha, the year’s first named storm in the eastern Pacific region, was moving across southern Mexico early Tuesday as a tropical storm, hours after making landfall as a Category 2 hurricane.

Agatha came ashore on Monday afternoon just west of Puerto Angel, a fishing town in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, with heavy rains and winds of nearly 105 miles per hour — strong enough to uproot trees, cause major power losses and rip roofs off well-built homes.

As of 10 p.m. local time, the storm was moving northeast through Oaxaca at nearly eight miles per hour, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said in an advisory. Parts of the state could receive as much as 16 inches of rain, with isolated amounts of 20 inches, the center said, and a portion of southern Mexico was at risk for mudslides and life-threatening flash floods on Tuesday.

But Agatha’s maximum sustained winds had already decreased to about 70 miles per hour and the storm was expected to dissipate over Mexico by Tuesday afternoon, the Hurricane Center said.

Agatha’s arrival marked the first time that a Category 2 storm had made landfall in the eastern Pacific in the month of May, said Dan Pydynowski, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather.

Before Agatha, only two Category 1 hurricanes had made landfall in the region: Hurricane Barbara on May 29, 2013, and, coincidentally, Hurricane Agatha on May 24, 1971, Mr. Pydynowski said.

Home to surfing hot spots, the coast of Oaxaca has long attracted tourists from around the world who are drawn to the golden sand beaches and laid back vibes of the Pacific region. The beach town Zipolite, near where Agatha made landfall, has become an increasingly popular tourism destination, particularly for the L.G.B.T.Q. community.

The industry has been an important driver for the state’s economy. In 2019, before the pandemic decimated tourism in the region, more than 200,000 foreign tourists traveled to Oaxaca State, largely visiting the colonial capital city of Oaxaca. But more than 80,000 foreigners also chose the beaches of Huatulco and Puerto Escondido.

The industry generated more than 159,000 jobs that year, according to government figures, and yielded more than $29 million in income across those three destinations, an important economic boost for one of the poorest states in Mexico.

Given the importance of tourism to Oaxaca, the arrival of a potentially devastating storm could be catastrophic for the more than half a million people who call the coastal region home.

Alejandro Murat Hinojosa, governor of Oaxaca, said the country’s national defense, the military, the Mexican National Guard and the Navy had been deployed to respond to the hurricane.

Classes had been canceled along the coast on Monday and Tuesday, he said.

Images shared on social media Monday morning showed residents of the Oaxacan coast preparing for the worst, including boarding up buildings. Videos showed winds beginning to pick up, tossing palm trees back and forth as waves crashed with increasing ferocity.

Before the storm, the head of the Huatulco Hotel and Motel Association, Pia Overholzer, said the city had an occupancy of around 60 percent with some 3,500 tourists.

Julián Herrera Velarde, representative of the Oaxaca tourism ministry in Puerto Escondido, said the town had some 2,700 visitors, of whom only 40 had been transferred to a temporary shelter.

Although not as prone to hurricanes as the Caribbean, the Pacific Coast of Mexico is no stranger to deadly storms. In 1997, Hurricane Pauline slammed into the coasts of Oaxaca and neighboring Guerrero, leaving more than 200 people dead and some 300,000 homeless.

More recently, in 2017, Tropical Storm Beatriz wreaked havoc across the state, provoking widespread flooding and mudslides. At least two people were killed and hundreds of families saw their homes damaged.

Agatha formed off the Mexican coast and was named on Saturday, not long after the official start of the eastern Pacific hurricane season, which runs from May 15 to Nov. 30.

The Atlantic hurricane season — the term used for storms that form in the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean — runs from June 1 to Nov. 30. Those regions account for the severest hurricanes that have struck the United States, Mr. Feltgen said.

This year is on track to be the first since 2014 that a hurricane has not formed in the Atlantic before the official start of the season. However, the season generally does not peak until mid-August to late October, and forecasters predict above-average Atlantic activity this year, with six to 10 hurricanes and three to six major hurricanes, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said last week.

If the prediction comes true, this year will be the seventh consecutive above-average hurricane season.

The causes for the predicted intensity of hurricanes cited by NOAA include the climate pattern known as La Niña, which affects the speed and direction of wind, and a particularly intense West African monsoon season, which produces waves that can lead to powerful and long-lasting hurricanes.

Alex Traub, Vimal Patel, Derrick Bryson Taylor, Omar Gasga, Oscar Lopez and Mike Ives contributed reporting.

OTTAWA — Most owners of what Canada calls “military-style assault weapons” would be required to turn over their firearms to a government buyback program under legislation introduced on Monday, which would tighten the country’s already stringent control of firearms.

The Canadian government also announced new regulations that will ban the sale, purchase, importation or transfer of handguns. “We are capping the number of handguns in this country,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Monday.

The handgun sales ban and the proposed assault weapons law are the latest in a series of steps Mr. Trudeau has taken to restrict firearms since 22 people were killed in rural Nova Scotia by a gunman in 2020, in the deadliest rampage in the country’s history. The legislation, which could apply to tens of thousands of firearms, is expected to pass.

“As a government, as a society, we have a responsibility to act to prevent more tragedies,” Mr. Trudeau told reporters on Monday. He also said: “We need only look south of the border to know that if we do not take action, firmly and rapidly, it gets worse and worse and more difficult to counter.”

The buyback proposal comes as another mass shooting in the United States has reignited an often searing debate on gun violence. Last week a gunman used a military-style rifle to kill 19 children and two teachers in the town of Uvalde, Tex. Only 10 days earlier, a teenage gunman entranced by a white supremacist ideology opened fire at a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., killing 10 people and injuring three more, almost all of them Black.

After 20 children and six adults were massacred in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., there were widespread calls in the United States for stronger controls on powerful firearms, but many Republicans aligned with the gun lobby refused to even allow a vote on any proposed legislation. American lawmakers have failed to restore restrictions on military-style semiautomatic weapons that expired in 2004.

Mr. Trudeau’s program echoes a semiautomatic weapons ban and buyback program launched by New Zealand in 2019, after a lone gunman stormed two mosques, killing 51 people and injuring dozens of others in Christchurch. After a mass shooting in 1996 in which a gunman killed 35 people in the town of Port Arthur, Australia, the government there collected more than 650,000 semiautomatic rifles and many shotguns after they were banned under new legislation.

Marco Mendicino, Canada’s public safety minister, said the buybacks should begin by the end of the year.

The Small Arms Survey, a nonprofit organization based in Switzerland, estimated in 2017 that there were 12.7 million legal and illegal guns in civilian hands in Canada, or 34.7 firearms per 100 people. In the United States, it estimates, there were more than 300 million guns in circulation, or 120.5 firearms per 100 people.

Soon after the deadly 2020 rampage in Nova Scotia, Mr. Trudeau used a cabinet order to announce it would ban more than 1,500 models of rifles, including the AR-15, a popular military-style semiautomatic rifle. But in the end, it allowed owners to keep their rifles, if they had a permit — but could no longer use them, trade them or sell them except, with permission, to buyers outside Canada.

The government followed that up in 2021 with a sweeping package of proposed changes to gun laws. That bill, which expired before making its way through Parliament, disappointed groups calling for tighter gun controls by making participation in the buyback program voluntary.

Automatic weapons have long been banned for civilians in Canada, and magazines for semiautomatic weapons are restricted: no gun may shoot more than five rounds without reloading.

The law introduced on Monday fulfills a pledge made by Mr. Trudeau last year to force owners of military-style rifles to turn them in for destruction. Mr. Trudeau’s proposal will allow some exemptions, but those weapons must be modified by the government to make them permanently inoperable.

There is, though, no legal definition of a “military-style assault weapon.” Mr. Trudeau said the government would seek to come up with one that could not be easily circumvented by gun makers.

Until then, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police will continue to evaluate weapons on a model-by-model basis to see if they belong on the ever expanding banned list introduced by Mr. Trudeau in 2020.

Most rifles and shotguns in Canada, apart from automatic weapons and handguns, have been relatively loosely regulated. The previous Conservative government closed a registry for such weapons that was set up after a man killed 14 young women and injured 13 others in 1989 at the École Polytechnique engineering school in Montreal.

The registry’s database was plagued with technical problems, and it was deeply unpopular in rural areas. Mr. Trudeau has not heeded calls from gun control groups to renew it.

Compared with hunting rifles, there are relatively few legal handguns in Canada and their use has long been heavily restricted. Aside from members of the police, border agencies, the military and some private security guards, handgun users may fire their weapons only at shooting ranges, and the guns must otherwise be stored in locked containers at their homes.

Mr. Trudeau’s earlier legislative attempt would have allowed provinces to ban all handguns within their borders, an idea that swiftly led to concerns from gun control groups about the development of a patchwork system nationally. On Monday he acknowledged those criticisms.

“We decided to take a new route, something that would tackle this issue at a national level,” he said.

While Mr. Trudeau’s Liberal Party does not hold a voting majority in the House of Commons, the left-leaning New Democratic Party has long pushed for tighter gun controls and is expected to support the new measure, allowing it to overcome any potential opposition from the Conservatives.

Handguns account for close to 60 percent of firearms-related crimes in Canada, according to a report released last week by Statistics Canada, the census agency. Rates of death linked to gun violence are far lower in Canada than in the United States.

The agency is pushing for more comprehensive collection of data on guns. While the police have long held that most illegal firearms, particularly handguns, are smuggled in from the United States, not much is known about the origins of guns used in crimes.

The shooter in Nova Scotia used two weapons that are now banned; both were smuggled in from the United States.

Other measures in the sweeping bill, which amends several pieces of legislation, include making it a crime to modify a rifle to increase its capacity; increasing the penalties for gun smuggling; and giving police power to seize guns from people whom a judge has determined to be at risk of hurting themselves or others.

A protester who faked a disability to get close to the Mona Lisa in a wheelchair stood up and smeared a pastry on its glass case on Sunday, according to the Louvre museum in Paris.

The painting, one of the world’s most recognizable pieces of art, was not damaged, museum officials said.

Videos on social media showed that the man, speaking in French, yelled that there were “people who were destroying the planet” and “that’s why I did it.”

The Mona Lisa, painted by Leonardo da Vinci in the 16th century and perhaps the crown jewel of the Louvre’s collection, is typically swarmed by camera-wielding tourists. The painting is held behind a thick glass case, an effective shield against pastries.

A witness who posted a video of the aftermath on Twitter said the man had “dressed as an old lady” and jumped out of a wheelchair before attempting to smash the glass.

The witness said the unidentified man smeared the pastry, which the witness identified as cake, before throwing roses around the room. He was then tackled by security guards, the witness said.

The Louvre said in a statement that officials with the museum had followed its usual procedures for people with reduced mobility, “allowing them to admire this major work of the Louvre.”

Once he was near the painting, the man threw the pastry that he had hidden, the museum said.

Security guards seized the man and escorted him out before handing him over to the police, the museum said. The museum filed a complaint, officials said.

There have been several attempts to vandalize the painting, some more successful than others. In 1956, a man threw a stone at the painting, shattering a glass shield and scratching Mona Lisa’s left elbow, causing a chip of paint to fall off.

The man initially said he had no real reason to commit the act. “I had a stone in my pocket and suddenly the idea to throw it came to my mind,” the police quoted him as saying.

He later said he was jobless, had no money and simply wanted to be jailed through the cold weather.

The painting had been moved behind glass, at the time the only piece in the Louvre to receive such protection, because years earlier a man who said he was “in love with the painting” had tried to steal it after cutting it with a razor blade.

In 2009, a woman threw a teacup at the glass. The teacup shattered and order was quickly restored.

CHERNIHIV, Ukraine — It was Yulia Hrebnyeva’s fastidiousness that saved the lives of her family.

First, she sent her husband outside to fix the lock on the door of their house. Then she brought her children down to the basement, insisting that they help her tidy the space where they had been sleeping every night to avoid the Russian missile attacks.

And that’s when a Russian Su-34 warplane crashed through the roof of their two-story home.

A few blocks away, Vitaliy Serhienko was not so fortunate. The pilot of the downed Russian plane had ejected. Mr. Serhienko and his brother-in-law, Serhiy Tkachenko, heard footsteps on their roof, and went out to investigate. “We wanted to catch him,” Mr. Tkachenko said.

The two men were approaching the source of the noise from opposite directions when Mr. Tkachenko heard gunfire. The pilot had shot Mr. Serhienko in the chest; he died in his own chicken coop.

Tragedy and serendipity are dispensed randomly in war, and on March 5, when a Russian plane fell from the sky, they produced two very different results in Chernihiv, a city in Ukraine’s north. One family lived, almost miraculously, while Mr. Serhienko, in the wrong place at the wrong time, ended up dead.

There was an added element in the equation: The Russian pilot did not have the chance to drop his bombs.

“If these bombs had fallen on Chernihiv, there would be so many more victims,” Ms. Hrebnyeva said as she surveyed the wreckage still in her yard more than two months after the crash. “Our house stopped it.”

Mr. Serhienko’s sister, Svitlana Voyteshenko, buried him the next day. “He was such a good man, he worked hard,” she said. “Everyone liked him.’’

The crash claimed yet another life when the flames spread to a house across the yard from Ms. Hrebnyeva and an elderly, bedridden man was burned to death.

Chernihiv, located just 40 miles from Belarus and 55 miles from Russia, was quickly surrounded at the start of the war, besieged by Russian troops invading from both sides. The attacks were fierce. Russian forces intentionally bombed critical infrastructure like water and electricity stations, as well as food storage, Oleksandr A. Lomako, head of the Cherhiniv City Council, said in an interview, but never gained full control of the city center.

Mr. Lomako said that prosecutors had recorded 350 people killed as a result of missile strikes, and he estimated that another 700 had died of causes related to the siege: lack of electricity, water, and food.

The outrage at the devastation and death that Russia had inflicted was simmering among residents when the pilot catapulted out of the plane. Members of Chernihiv’s Territorial Defense, a volunteer army unit, heard the explosion, said one soldier, Ivan Lut. He raced to where he thought the pilot might land, saw the orange and white parachute hanging over the house and began his own chase, he said.

The pursuit ended next door to Mr. Tkachenko’s home when the Russian pilot, named in an intelligence investigation as Maj. Aleksandr V. Krasnoyartsev, was apprehended.

His face and chest were covered in blood. Flat on his back on the ground, he raised his arms, begging, “Don’t shoot, I surrender!” according to video footage shot on a Ukrainian soldier’s mobile phone.

Soon, a crowd gathered, some looking for revenge. “We had to fight with our own guys to save his life,” Mr. Lut said, noting that soldiers had been given orders that the pilot be captured alive. The co-pilot was already dead when the soldiers found him.

The remnants of the plane, a supersonic midrange bomber aircraft, are scattered across Ms. Hrebnyeva’s yard. She pointed out the remains of a sauna and a small swimming pool nearby. Tulips peeked out from the metal wreckage of the plane.

Ms. Hrebnyeva was walking over to the burned stub of a tree when she saw something amid the rubble: a tiny pair of jeans belonging to her 6-year-old son, still folded tidily, even though the drawer that once contained them was unrecognizable. There was more: a pair of red shorts with the waistband intact but the back burned out; a tiny swimsuit; the sportswear of her 10-year-old, Denys.

“I almost want to take it home and wash and iron it,” she said. She had come home that Saturday morning from a shift organizing supplies for the soldiers defending the city. She bought a lock at the hardware store across the street. Her husband, Rostyslav, was in the kitchen boiling dumplings for their three children and another child who had been separated from her parents after Chernihiv was attacked on the first day of the war.

Ms. Hrebnyeva’s husband cursed playfully when she sent him outside to install the new lock, she said. She took the children down to the basement to clean.

And then they heard crumbling. “The bricks were just pouring down,” she said. “Everything started to shake.” She thought that she had heard shooting, she added, but it was the roof shingles coming undone.

Her husband, a retired military pilot, sustained burns on his hands and face, but was able to get help to pull her and the four children out of the basement.

“If my husband had not opened the door, we would have been burned alive,” Ms. Hrebnyeva said.

From a military standpoint, the destruction of the plane was a sign of Ukraine’s success in keeping Russia from gaining air superiority. Before the full-scale invasion began, it was widely believed that Russia could subdue the Ukrainian Air Force in a matter of days and establish control over the skies. But Ukraine has been able to shoot down at least 25 Russian warplanes, according to the military analysis site Oryx. More than a third of those were destroyed over several days in early March, many by shoulder-fired portable surface-to-air missiles.

Russia’s pilots were flying low to avoid Ukraine’s missile systems, said Justin Bronk of the Royal United Services Institute, a military research organization in London.

The aircraft that crashed on March 5 was among about eight or nine others shot down in a period of several days. That loss rate convinced Russian commanders that flying low during the daytime would be unsustainable, forcing pilots to fly at night, when darkness makes it much harder for Ukraine to use surface-to-air missiles effectively, Mr. Bronk said.

On this flight, Ukraine’s military was able to shoot down the warplane before it dropped all its weapons: Images of the same type of aircraft taking off the next day, published by the Russian Ministry of Defense, showed that it had been carrying at least eight unguided 500 kilogram bombs.

Mr. Lut said that the pilot told them that he had only received the targets for the missile strikes while he was in the air, and that he was unaware they were hitting civilian objectives.

Ms. Voyteshenko, whose brother was killed in the chicken coop, said that the pilot looked her in the eyes and told her that he had not realized civilians were living there.

Did she believe him? “Of course not,” she said.

As she stood next to the site where her brother was killed, Ms. Voyteshenko looked at an apple tree planted by her parents. She and her brother had picked its fruit together since they were children.

Her brother had started installing insulation and redoing the facade of their house last fall.

“Now I don’t know if we will be able to complete it,” she said.

Ms. Hrebnyeva marveled at the turn of events in her family’s lives. “On March 5, I was handing out clothes and food to people,” she added. “On March 6, we had nothing. People started bringing it to us.”

She said she was determined to rebuild her home. Her husband is currently with the children in Norway.

“I want to stay. I really want to stay here, and rebuild my house in this very spot, just to spite the Ruscists,” she said, using a neologism for ‘Russian fascists’ that has become widespread in Ukraine since the invasion.

“I want to show everybody that war is war, but life goes on,” she added. “We Ukrainians are strong and unbreakable — unbeatable.”

Black and Asian communities in America today are often portrayed as in conflict with each other. But we have a long history of organizing with each other, too. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Asian Americans working as immigrant laborers in the United States were often subjected to racial violence. That experience of discrimination created solidarity with the Black community.

In 1869, Frederick Douglass spoke out against restrictions on Chinese immigration. Yuri Kochiyama, a friend and ally of Malcolm X, cradled his bleeding head when he was assassinated in 1965. Jesse Jackson took time away from his presidential bid to protest the killing of Vincent Chin in 1982. These stories of loss, struggle, change and hope are the most powerful tools we have to understand one another and bridge what divides us.

The Asian civil rights movement was inspired in part by the Black civil rights campaigns of the 1960s. It was around this time that the model minority myth emerged, portraying Asian and Pacific Islander Americans as mostly hard-working, well educated and healthy, the artist and activist Betty Yu explained. “The model minority stereotype falsely depicts Asians as a wealthy Ivy League-educated monolith while completely ignoring the economic inequalities that exist to this day,” she said.

As Americans reckon with racial injustice, police brutality and a spike in anti-Asian attacks, we have an opportunity to relearn our shared history and build on that solidarity.

I was living in Taiwan when George Floyd died after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground under a police officer’s knee. I coped by helping to coordinate the Black Lives Matter March in Taipei. It was important to me to stand up for myself and my community and close the metaphorical distance between me and my home.

In New York City, Jeanie Jay Park, the lead organizer of Warriors in the Garden, a collective of nonviolent activists and the founder of Sanitation Nation, a nonprofit youth solidarity collective, was among the thousands marching on the Brooklyn Bridge that summer when a group of young boys approached her and yelled, “Your people killed my people.” They were talking about an officer of Hmong descent who stood by while Mr. Floyd was murdered.

“I understood their reaction,” she said. She has since worked to build intersectional solidarity between Black and Asian communities. Coalition building requires having uncomfortable conversations with not just ourselves but also our families in order to dismantle generational colorism and anti-Black sentiment that exists in many Asian cultures, Ms. Park said.

Nupol Kiazolu, the founder of We Protect Us, believes that practicing love, education and patience is the key to fostering unity between Black and Asian communities. “We must be willing to listen to each other with open minds, ears and hearts,” she said.

Wendy Wang immigrated to the United States in the 1990s. She worked in restaurants around the city, until she was eventually able to open her own restaurant. She’s faced obstacles in the community — someone once shot her husband in the face with a BB gun — but over time she’s built strong relationships with the loyal customers she serves.

I come from a family of immigrants, too. My mother is from Vietnam, and my father is from Nigeria. They met and fell in love in Texas, but their families didn’t approve of their union. As a result, my siblings and I didn’t have a relationship with our extended family or with our cultures, for that matter.

Navigating a mix of identities at times felt complicated. When I’d watch my father’s interactions with law enforcement, I surmised that perhaps one part of my identity could be safer than the other. But the rise in anti-Asian violence has shattered that illusion and reminded me that the shields we hide behind can be dangerously thin.

Social media has been a powerful tool for organizing, but it can also push us into echo chambers. Chelsea Miller, a co-founder of Freedom March NYC and a social impact strategist, believes that challenging rhetorics that divide our communities is a critical step forward. “The reality is, we are all connected,” she said.

I am still striving, and struggling, to carry the weight of being both Black and Asian in this uncertain moment. I feel the push and pull of both sides, but I’m learning to lean into the liminal spaces where my intersectional identity sits. I see that there is nuance, beauty and complexity to be found in that messy middle. Belonging can happen in connections and contradictions and in bridging and breaking. Being in between can be painful but also powerful.

An Rong Xu is a photographer, filmmaker and artist. Leslie Nguyen-Okwu is a journalist and the author of the forthcoming book “American Hyphen.”

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — For years, opium has been the monster too big to slay. One Afghan government after another has pledged to stamp out opium production and trafficking, only to prove unable to resist billions of dollars in illicit profits.

The Taliban government of the 1990s ultimately managed to reduce opium cultivation. But after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, opium taxes and smuggling helped fuel the Taliban’s own 20-year insurgency.

Now, with the Taliban back in power, the insurgents turned politicians are again struggling to eradicate opium cultivation and the rampant addiction problem that has come with it. The Taliban announced on April 3 that poppy cultivation had been outlawed, with violators to be punished under Shariah law.

But stamping out opium will be more difficult than ever because of a shift by poppy farmers to green energy.

Water pumps powered by cheap and highly efficient solar panels are able to drill deep down into rapidly dwindling desert aquifers. The solar panels have helped generate bumper opium harvests year after year since farmers in southern Afghanistan’s poppy-growing belt began installing them around 2014.

Now, solar power is a defining feature of southern Afghan life. Tiny solar panels power light bulbs in mud huts, and solar-driven pumps irrigate cash crops like wheat and pomegranates, as well as subsistence farmers’ vegetable plots.

The solar arrays have been central to ensuring Afghanistan’s status as the global leader in opium. Afghanistan produced 83 percent of the world’s opium from 2015 to 2020, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Even with a grinding war and persistent droughts, opium cultivation in Afghanistan rose to 224,000 hectares in 2020 from 123,000 hectares in 2009, the U.N. reported.

The previous American-backed government had spent $8.6 billion on poppy eradication, but top Afghan officials were deeply complicit in the opium trade, building garish “poppy palaces” in Kabul, the capital, and buying gaudy villas in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. A 2018 government inspector general’s report concluded that the campaign “had no lasting impact.”

The Taliban, for their part, have condemned opium as anti-Islamic, as Afghanistan’s poppy crop sustains addicts in Europe and the Middle East, as well as a huge number inside Afghanistan. But given their own deep ties to opium smuggling during the insurgency, Taliban leaders are walking a fine line between hypocrisy and holiness.

A widespread crackdown would exacerbate Afghanistan’s already devastating postwar economic collapse and antagonize the Taliban’s core constituency among Pashtun farmers, impoverishing families that rely on the crop to be able to afford food. Eradication would require not only seizing farmers’ solar panels, but also confronting Taliban commanders complicit in the trade — at a time when the movement is facing internal dissatisfaction as the money dries up.

The opium trade earned about $1.8 billion to $2.7 billion last year, the United Nations has estimated. Opium sales have provided 9 to 14 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, compared with 9 percent provided by legal exports of goods and services.

“The cultivation of opium and export of opiates is hugely important for the Afghan economy as a whole, and any implementation of the ban will have wide-ranging consequences,” the Afghanistan Analysts Network, an independent research group, wrote in a report last month.

Opium farmers now rely on at least 67,000 solar-power-fed water reservoirs across Afghanistan’s desert southwest, according to a European Union-funded research project by David Mansfield, a consultant who has studied illicit economies and rural livelihoods in Afghanistan for two decades.

The panels, which supplanted more expensive and less reliable diesel to run water pumps, have helped turn the desert green. The population of previously uninhabited desert areas in Kandahar, Helmand and Nimruz Provinces ballooned to at least 1.4 million people in recent years as solar-driven pumps helped expand arable land, according to Dr. Mansfield’s research.

“For many opium farmers, abundant water is now a given,” he said. “No one perceives it to have a cost.”

The Taliban have taken aim at some solar-powered pumps. On May 13, the governor of Helmand Province, adjacent to Kandahar Province in the opium belt, ordered the police to confiscate panels and pumps so that newly planted poppies would die in parched fields.

“Do not destroy the fields, but make the fields dry out,” Gov. Maulave Talib Akhund said in a statement. He added, “We are committed to fulfilling the opium decree.”

The opium ban comes amid catastrophic levels of hunger, poverty and drought. The United Nations estimates that 23 million Afghans are suffering acute food deprivation. An economy once propped up by Western aid has collapsed under sanctions and freezing of Afghan government funds abroad.

“It’s too bad for Afghans because poppy is the wealth of the Afghan people,” Shah Agha, 35, a poppy farmer from the Zari District of Kandahar, said of the ban.

After investing about $500 on seeds, fertilizer, labor and other expenses, Mr. Agha said, he hoped to gross about $5,000 after selling the 20 kilograms of opium he expected to harvest this spring.

The opium ban was met with a collective shrug this spring by southern farmers, many of whom were already harvesting their spring crops. Opium prices surged almost immediately, several farmers said, to roughly $180 per kilogram from $60 per kilogram.

“I think they banned it for their own benefit because most of the smugglers and Taliban commanders have tons of opium, and they might want to increase the prices,” Mr. Agha said.

Taliban forces this spring seemed unable or uninterested in initiating a swift eradication campaign. Taliban patrols drove leisurely past bountiful opium fields where the spring crop was being harvested. Workers flanked by bright solar panel arrays used curved knives to scrape sticky opium paste from poppy bulbs

The government has indicated that it will allow the spring harvest because it was already underway. But the Taliban have vowed to crack down on farmers who try to cultivate any new crops.

As the United States did during its long presence in Afghanistan, the Taliban have suggested shifting to alternative crops like wheat, pomegranates, cumin and almonds. But even if poppy growing were eliminated, alternative crops would still be at risk because desert aquifers are being rapidly depleted.

Dr. Mansfield said that determining how long the aquifers could continue to supply water was uncharted territory because no one had been able to conduct a rigorous scientific study of the desert groundwater.

Amir Jan Armani, 45, who said he hoped to gross about $4,000 from 45 kilograms of opium he harvested in Kandahar Province this spring, said he had watched water levels drop precipitously since solar panels arrived.

When farmers used diesel-powered pumps, groundwater levels dropped about three meters a year, Mr. Armani said. But since solar panels arrived, they have sometimes sunk up to nine meters annually. His well is 30 meters deep, he said, but his neighbor’s well across the river is 60 meters deep.

“We have to continue to dig our wells deeper and deeper,” Mr. Armani said.

He and other farmers have saved money this spring by not paying opium taxes imposed by the Taliban in previous years. No such taxes have been levied this year, said Noor Ahmad Saied, the Taliban’s director of information in Kandahar.

Many farmers in Arghandab, a district in Kandahar famous for its pomegranates, have chopped down pomegranate trees killed by drought or fighting. They planted poppies instead.

Even when prices are high, many poppy farmers say, they earn only about $2 a day for each family member. They are at the very bottom of a narcotic trafficking system in which profits increase exponentially from growers to middlemen to processing labs to major cross-border traffickers.

Ehsanullah Shakir, 31, an opium smuggler in Helmand Province, said Taliban enforcement of the ban this year had been uneven so far. Some farmers had planted almonds, cumin or basil after harvesting their spring poppies, he said, but others had ignored the ban and planted poppies for a second harvest. And opium markets continue to operate as usual in many areas, Mr. Shakir said.

Farmers whose poppy fields were plowed under by the previous government could send their sons to paying jobs as soldiers or police officers — or to the constellation of unskilled jobs provided by the United States and NATO. But those options are gone, and unemployment has soared under the Taliban.

In the Maiwand District of Kandahar, Nek Nazar, 41, worked to install a new water pump at the edge of his poppy field. He began growing poppies five years ago, he said, because they produced far more income than the wheat he had grown.

Mr. Nazar spoke as though the crop shift had been preordained and was not a matter of choice. For him, it was either plant poppies or starve.

“Growing poppies is the only option to survive right now,” he said.

Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar.

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Dos candidatos antisistema, el líder de la izquierda Gustavo Petro y el populista de derecha Rodolfo Hernández, tomaron los primeros lugares en las elecciones presidenciales de Colombia, asestando un duro golpe a la clase política dominante y conservadora del país.

Los dos hombres se enfrentarán en una segunda vuelta electoral el 19 de junio, que se perfila como una de las más importantes en la historia del país. Está en juego el modelo económico del país, su integridad democrática y los medios de vida de millones de personas que se sumieron en la pobreza durante la pandemia.

Con más del 99 por ciento de las boletas contadas el domingo en la noche, Petro logró el respaldo de más del 40 por ciento de los votos, mientras que Hernández recibió poco más del 28 por ciento. Hernández superó por más de cuatro puntos de porcentaje al candidato de la clase dirigente conservadora, Federico Gutiérrez, que figuraba en segundo lugar en las encuestas.

La inesperada victoria de Hernández al segundo lugar muestra a una nación deseosa de elegir a cualquiera que no represente a los dominantes líderes conservadores del país.

Según el politólogo colombiano Daniel García-Peña, el enfrentamiento entre Petro y Hernández representa el “cambio contra el cambio”.

Durante meses, las encuestas habían mostrado a Petro, que plantea una modificación al modelo económico capitalista del país, aventajando al exalcalde conservador de Medellín Federico Gutiérrez.

Fue solo recientemente que Hernandez, postulándose con una plataforma populista y anticorrupción, empezó a subir en los sondeos.

Si Petro al final gana en la próxima ronda de votaciones sería un momento histórico para una de las sociedades más políticamente conservadoras de América Latina, lo que pondría a Colombia en una senda nueva y desconocida.

En su discurso luego de las elecciones, en un hotel cerca del centro de Bogotá, Petro estuvo acompañado por su candidata a la vicepresidencia y dijo que los resultados del domingo mostraban que el proyecto político del actual presidente y sus aliados “ha sido derrotado”.

Luego, rápidamente emitió advertencias sobre Hernández y dijo que votar por él era una regresión peligrosa y desafió al electorado a arriesgarse en lo que calificó como un proyecto progresista, “un cambio de verdad”.

Su ascenso refleja no solo un viraje a la izquierda en toda América Latina, sino un impulso contra los gobiernos de turno que ha cobrado fuerza a medida que la pandemia ha agravado la pobreza y la desigualdad, intensificando la sensación de que las economías de la región están construidas principalmente para servir a las élites.

Ese resentimiento contra el establecimiento político parece haberle dado a Hernández un empujón en la segunda vuelta e indica el poder menguante del uribismo, un conservadurismo de línea dura que ha dominado la política colombiana en las últimas dos décadas y que se llama así por su fundador, el expresidente Álvaro Uribe.

En las mesas de votación de todo el país el domingo, los seguidores de Petro mencionaron esa frustración y un renovado sentimiento de esperanza.

“Es un momento histórico que está viviendo Colombia. No queremos más continuismo, no queremos más Uribismo”, dijo Chiro Castellanos, de 37 años, seguidor de Petro en Sincelejo, una ciudad cercana a la costa caribeña. “Siento que esto es un cambio, es un proyecto de país que no es solo Gustavo Petro”.

Pero en muchos lugares también había temor de lo que ese cambio podría significar, así como llamados a un enfoque más moderado.

“Realmente este país está vuelto nada”, comentó Myriam Matallana, de 55 años, simpatizante de Gutiérrez en Bogotá, la capital. Pero con Petro, dijo, “sería peor”.

Petro ha prometido transformar el sistema económico de Colombia, que dice que alimenta la desigualdad, con la expansión de programas sociales, un alto a la exploración petrolera y el cambio del enfoque del país hacia la industria y la agricultura nacional.

Durante mucho tiempo, Colombia ha sido el aliado más fuerte de Estados Unidos en la región y un triunfo de Petro podría significar un enfrentamiento con Washington. El candidato pidió un reajuste de la relación, lo que incluye cambios en el enfoque de la guerra contra las drogas y una reevaluación de un acuerdo comercial bilateral.

Las elecciones se producen en un momento en el que las encuestas muestran una creciente desconfianza en las instituciones del país, incluido el Congreso, los partidos políticos, el Ejército, la prensa y la Registraduría Nacional, un organismo electoral.

También sucede en momentos en que la violencia va en aumento; a principios de este mes un grupo criminal emitió una orden de inamovilidad que paralizó a una parte considerable del país por al menos cuatro días.

Antes de las elecciones existía la preocupación generalizada de que esos factores podrían afectar el proceso democrático.

“Si nos quedamos en casa diciendo ‘todo el mundo es corrupto’, no vamos a lograr nada”, dijo María Gañan, de 27 años, que votó por Hernández en Bogotá. “Queremos cambiar la historia del país”.

Hernández, quien era relativamente desconocido hasta hace unas pocas semanas, se presentó a los votantes como un candidato anticorrupción, y propuso recompensar a los ciudadanos por denunciar actos de corrupción y nombrar a colombianos que ya residen en el exterior en posiciones diplomáticas, lo que él dice que ahorrará en gastos de viaje y otros costos, además de prohibir festejos innecesarios en las embajadas.

“Hoy perdió el país de la politiquería y la corrupción”, dijo Hernández en una nota que publicó en Facebook para sus seguidores, tras los resultados del domingo.

“Hoy perdieron las gavillas que creerían que serían gobierno eternamente”, añadió.

Pero algunas de las propuestas de Hernández han sido criticadas como antidemocráticas.

En específico, ha propuesto declarar un estado de emergencia por 90 días y suspender todas las funciones judiciales y administrativas para combatir la corrupción, generando temores de que pueda clausurar el congreso o suspender a los alcaldes.

Muchos votantes están hartos del aumento de precios, el alto desempleo, el alza en los costos de la educación, la violencia y los sondeos muestran que una clara mayoría de colombianos tienen una opinión desfavorable del actual gobierno conservador.

Otros candidatos que impulsaron cambios han sido asesinados durante las campañas electorales en Colombia. Petro y su compañera de fórmula, Francia Márquez, han recibido amenazas de muerte, lo que ocasionó que se reforzara su seguridad con guardaespaldas y escudos antibalas.

Sin embargo, la elección también se caracterizó por la ampliación del espectro político.

En cuestión de meses, Márquez, una activista ambiental que, de triunfar se convertiría en la primera vicepresidenta negra del país, se transformó en un fenómeno nacional, y brindó a las elecciones un enfoque de género, raza y conciencia de clase que pocos candidatos han logrado invocar en la historia del país.

Su popularidad ha sido considerada como el reflejo del profundo deseo de muchos votantes —negros, indígenas, pobres, campesinos— de verse representados en los cargos más altos del poder.

El domingo, Márquez podría haber votado en la capital del país. Pero decidió viajar al departamento suroccidental del Cauca, donde se crió.

“Hoy están partiendo la historia de este país en dos”, dijo poco después de depositar su voto. “Hoy una de los nadies y las nadies, de los históricamente excluidos, se pone de pie para ocupar la política”.

Sofía Villamil, Megan Janetsky y Genevieve Glatsky reportaron desde Bogotá, y Federico Rios desde Suárez, Cauca.

Julie Turkewitz es jefa del buró de los Andes, que cubre Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Perú, Surinam y Guyana. Antes de mudarse a América del Sur, fue corresponsal de temas nacionales y cubrió el oeste de Estados Unidos. @julieturkewitz