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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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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Big banks fund the heavy machinery used for Amazon deforestation, report says

The deforestation sweeping across the Brazilian Amazon is driven largely by industrial agriculture, mining and cattle ranching. But those activities wouldn’t be possible without heavy machinery like bulldozers and tractors, and the big banks that often finance their purchase. Questionable business practices, weak government oversight and a lack of transparency make buying heavy machinery in […]

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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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Miners, drug traffickers and loggers: Is Costa Rica’s Corcovado National Park on the verge of collapse?

News articles and opinion pieces have popped up in the pages of different Costa Rican newspapers over the past several years, warning of the imminent collapse of Corcovado National Park, one of the country’s most treasured protected areas. The park is in “agonizing” condition and “on a downward spiral,” some of the opinion pieces said. […]

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Court setback doesn’t sway Indonesian villagers fighting a mining firm

JAKARTA — A court in Jakarta has rejected a lawsuit by a remote island community against a gold-mining operation that overlaps onto their villages, in a ruling deemed “problematic” by anti-mining activists. In its April 20 ruling, the Jakarta State Administrative Court said it had no jurisdiction to decide the case, which it characterized as […]

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