Amazon

Roads, trucks, fences, cow barns, cattle herds, and vast pasturelands. Overflight images from advocacy groups have revealed all this inside what’s supposed to be the protected territory of the Piripkura people, one of the world’s most vulnerable uncontacted Indigenous peoples, in the Brazilian Amazon. The images, captured in October, show the scale of the threats […]

In the dark, early morning hours, Magali Salinas trails a troop of howler monkeys through the Amazon rainforest. Magali is particularly invested in this troop. She rehabilitated each monkey, brought them together and released them into the wild. Now, she watches and waits. “I care for them as if they were my own children,” Magali […]

A project originally aimed to fuel agribusiness in one of the most heavily deforested parts of the Brazilian Amazon is now being touted by the government as a “green” and “sustainable” initiative that will help protect the forest and may be replicated in other parts of the biome. The switch in the narrative around Amacro, […]

A one-minute audio clip made the rounds on Venezuelan Twitter last year, in which a state official being interviewed on a radio show tells citizens that, because of ongoing national shortages, they should pick and choose when to cook with gas. “Save it to make pasta, rice and those things,” said Dante Rivas, protector of […]

Early on the morning of Nov. 15, five Constitutional Court judges arrived by canoe to the Indigenous Cofan community of Sinangoe in Ecuador’s northern Amazon rainforest, wearing rubber boots and loose clothing to weather the intense jungle heat. This visit marked the first time in the country’s history that judges from the highest court have […]

Siã Shanenawa strikes a markedly different image from the stereotypical view of Brazil’s Indigenous people using bows and arrows as their main tools. Siã Shanenawa’s weapons of choice are drones and GPS devices to monitor the Katukina/Kaxinawá Indigenous Reserve where he lives, in the Amazonian state of Acre. There’s a reason he’s using these tools: […]

The 2016 peace deal that the Colombian government reached with the country’s largest and oldest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), was also heralded as being strikingly “green.” The agreement set out to correct unequal land use caused by internal displacement while also investing in the management of protected reserves. But five […]

Peru is home to many Indigenous communities that don’t appear on official maps. Without government recognition, these communities’ existence rests solely on their community names and on the knowledge of the federations that represent them. This is the case for the community of Manco Cápac, in the Loreto region, in existence for 70 years but […]

Before the pandemic, Ecuador’s Indigenous communities were on a roll, winning a series of lawsuits against the state for selling, or trying to sell, their land to oil and mining companies. In the Amazon, two of these trials were of particular importance: the Cofan trial in 2018 that led to 52 mining concessions being cancelled […]

RIO BRANCO, Brazil — In the space of just a few months, entire cities and small communities in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon have faced extreme weather conditions this year — from flood-related displacement to severe water shortage — that experts attribute to climate change and human actions, including the depletion of banks of […]