@ajak6 That's going to give you some weird results depending on where on the planet you are. Here in Stockholm, one degree of longitude is about half as long as a degree of latitude. In Longyearbyen, it's one fourth!

I used PostGIS, because that is what I happened to have at hand. :-) There is probably some projection library for R, but I'm not very familiar with R so I can't give any details.

Notice that the X coordinate is in the millions. That is much too high for the "east" coordinate in a UTM system. It is, however, a reasonable value for the "north" coordinate. Plugging this into UTM zone 19 S puts you here: openstreetmap.org/#map=18/-12.81363/-71.39762

Notice that the polygons Geofabrik use are available for download!

If using psycopg2, for extra credit, check out the psycopg2.sql module, which contains means to do this sort of thing without nasty surprises when table names have funny characters in them: psycopg.org/docs/sql.html . (To be honest, I have never used it myself...)

If I run those two hex strings through ST_AsText(ST_GeomFromEWKB(E'\\x0101...')) I get the same value, down to a few nanometers (I think — I got lost counting the decimals).

As far as I know, there is no entity type called "waypoint" in openstreetmap. Neither am I aware of any special significance of node 0. Where have you found these concepts?

It does indeed seem like your basemap is in the (somewhat brutal) "projection" of letting x=longitude and y=latitude. To me, who knows little about earthquakes, the positions of your circles look plausible (you get them in California, Iceland and S. E. Asia, but not in Sweden :-) ). What is the problem you are seeing?

This does not add upp. EPSG:4326 is not a projection, it is a geodetic datum, but it could be taken to mean "just plot longitude along the X axis and latitude along the Y axis", in which case there is no need to drag pyproj into the equation. Are you sure your basemap is just unprojected lat/lon? Could you put a link to the map image somewhere so we can have a look at it? And regardless of which projection it is, a circle on the surface of the planet almost certainly won't project to a circle on the map.