indigenous peoples

MEXICO CITY — Canada has become a major force in Latin America. It’s spent the last 30 years beefing up its portfolio with investments in mining, oil and natural gas. It’s established free trade agreements and foreign investment protections with dozens of countries, and is in the process of negotiating more. As a result, the […]

JAKARTA — Critics have questioned the Indonesian government’s priorities as it prepares to evict longtime residents of a small island to make way for a $25 billion development that includes a solar panel factory and a tourism resort. The island of Rempang, part of the Riau Islands archipelago in the Malacca Strait, has been awarded […]

TEKOA PINDÓ MIRIM, Brazil — “If we hadn’t come here, someone non-Indigenous would probably already have occupied this space,” says Neusa Poty. The 35-year-old Guarani Indigenous leader speaks in a low but firm voice. In March this year, she and other members of the Jaraguá Guarani community living on the northwestern outskirts of São Paulo […]

PANAMA CITY — Panama has been gripped by mass protests against a government deal with Central America’s largest copper mine amid claims it sacrifices national sovereignty and will damage the environment and the country’s vital shipping canal. Demonstrations started in early August in Panama City and quickly expanded nationwide, bringing together environmentalists, students, workers’ unions, […]

JAKARTA — An Indonesian court has upheld a government decision to curb the expansion of a multibillion-dollar oil palm plantation project in the country’s easternmost region of Papua. In its Sept. 9 ruling, the Jakarta State Administrative Court rejected lawsuits filed by two plantation companies that are part of the Tanah Merah mega plantation project, […]

JAKARTA — The Indonesian government has recognized the rights of 15 Indigenous Dayak communities to forests on Borneo covering a combined area larger than Jakarta. The nearly 70,000 hectares (173,000 acres) is the largest cluster of customary forests ever recognized by the state. “This recognition of 15 ancestral forests in Gunung Mas district, Central Kalimantan […]

CHANGUINOLA, Panama — Long before the Naso peoples in the northern jungles of Panama won the fight for their land, before a king came from far away to lead them against the invaders and cattle ranchers, the bureaucrats and corporations who wanted the territory to themselves — long before all of that, the Naso people […]

MONDULKIRI, Cambodia — In a rare win for conservationists and Cambodia’s Indigenous communities, the Ministry of Environment has opted to suspend a planned marble mining operation within a wildlife sanctuary along the border with Vietnam. A letter dated June 27 from then-environment minister Say Samal ordered that the mining exploration operation be suspended before it […]

After 50 years of expanding oil operations in its Amazonian region, Ecuador will close the door on crude extraction in three oil fields that are home to Indigenous communities, including one of the country’s uncontacted groups.  The reversal in policy for the oil-exporting nation was sealed when 59 percent of voters chose in an Aug. […]

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — A flurry of subdecrees released through the end of July and early August show that the Cambodian government has approved he addition of more than a million hectares of land, or 2.5 million acres, to the country’s protected areas. But amid the ongoing deforestation and privatization of Cambodia’s protected areas, civil […]