Is El Salvador preparing to reverse its landmark mining ban?

MEXICO CITY — It was considered a major environmental victory, back in 2017, when El Salvador’s government announced it would be the first country in the world to issue a total ban on metal mining. For a half-century, the industry had been dumping waste and toxic chemicals into local rivers. Prioritizing clean drinking water was […]

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Indigenous communities threatened as deforestation rises in Nicaraguan reserves

It’s hard to know exactly what’s happening to the environment in Nicaragua. Data on everything from mining to deforestation to biodiversity loss is nearly impossible to get from the government. Hundreds of journalists and environmental defenders have been arrested or fled the country, including much of the newsroom of La Prensa, Nicaragua’s oldest newspaper. And […]

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Illegal road found in Yanomami land accelerates destruction

On Dec. 5, a flight over the Yanomami Indigenous Territory in Brazil’s northern Amazon showed the Greenpeace and Brazilian NGO Socio-Environmental Institute (ISA) members on board an illegal road, already 150 kilometers (93 miles) long, and four hydraulic excavators nearby. “The road is the road to chaos. It will turn the Yanomami Indigenous land into […]

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Venezuela’s Yapacana National Park suffering increasing mining deforestation: report

Illegal gold mining is accelerating deforestation in one of Venezuela’s most threatened national parks, a new report from Amazon Conservation revealed. Satellite imagery analyzed by the NGO shows that thousands of excavators, bulldozers and other illegal mining equipment are clearing the rainforest in the southwestern part of Yapacana National Park, located in the Venezuelan state […]

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Shady contracts, backdoor deals spur illegal gold mining in Bolivian Amazon

LA PAZ — Gold is Bolivia’s second-biggest export, valued at more than $1 billion annually and employing hundreds of thousands of people in the country. But much of that gold has uncertain origins, coming from somewhere deep in the Amazon rainforest, where environmental regulations often go unenforced. Setting up camp in secluded parts of the […]

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In revising its criminal code, Indonesia risks unraveling environmental laws

JAKARTA — An ambitious and long-anticipated plan by Indonesian lawmakers to revise the country’s criminal code, inherited from the Dutch colonial era, could make it much more difficult to prosecute polluting companies, experts warn. The latest draft of the revised penal code, known as the RKUHP, was only recently made publicly available after an uproar […]

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Fighting extractive industries in Ecuador: Q&A with Indigenous rights activist María Espinosa

National protests overwhelmed Ecuador in June, with Indigenous groups mobilizing in nearly every province of the country and President Guillermo Lasso announcing a state of emergency that restricted travel and allowed law enforcement to use aggressive force. The protests were in response to a variety of grievances — gas prices, healthcare, education — but they […]

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Brazilian miners ramp up their invasion of Yanomami land in Venezuela

In southern Venezuela, the headwaters of some of the country’s largest rivers snake through remote parts of the Amazon rainforest near the Brazilian border, where Yanomami, Ye’kwana and other Indigenous communities have lived for hundreds of years. For most of their history, the Yanomami survived without much contact from the outside world, relying on traditional […]

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