Fusion | No one ever expected Cuninico, a small riverside fishing village tucked in the heart of the world’s largest rainforest, to run out of drinking water. But it happened last June. Since then this remote Amazon hamlet has relied on state-run oil company PetroPeru to deliver shipments of bottled water from the nearest city, nine hours down river.
For thousands of years the rainforest provided indigenous peoples with all they needed for subsistence and income. It gave them everything – fresh food, water, life. Now, after decades of drilling, many of these territories are ravaged by oil contamination. More and more, people who lived in sustainable balance with the forest are being...
Mongabay.com | The Munduruku indigenous tribe have begun to mark out the limits of their land, in an action that could halt the giant São Luiz do Tapajós hydroelectric dam, the apple of the Brazilian government's eye.
It's carnival time in Brazil, but for people of the Xingu there is no time to celebrate. Three years after construction initiated on Belo Monte dam, the consortium used the distraction of carnival to request an Operating License.
The Guardian | The Manu national park and its buffer zone in Peru was international news early last year after scientists found it is "top of the [world's] list of natural protected areas in terms of amphibian and reptile diversity", beating off stiff competition from the Yasuni national park in neighbouring Ecuador. What these news reports didn't acknowledge...
Yes! Magazine | Sarayaku lies in southern Ecuador, where the government is selling drilling rights to a vast swath of indigenous lands – except for Sarayaku. The community has become a beacon of hope to other indigenous groups and to global climate change activists as it mobilizes to stop a new round of oil exploration.
Tomorrow in the US and as part of Global Divestment Day thousands of activists around the world will be calling on governments, universities, places of worship, and in some cases, their own families, to pull their investments from the fossil fuel companies that are threatening the future of life on Earth.
Amazon Watch, allies, friends and wee ones joined some 8,000 mostly Californians in downtown Oakland over the weekend to call for an end to the state’s use of fracking and to demand stronger leadership on combating climate change within a climate justice framework.
Once again, the most prolific oil complex in Peru's Amazon region has exploded with local indigenous protests, grinding oil production to a halt. Both Achuar & Kichwa indigenous communities have risen up, stopping roughly 3,100 barrels/day of oil production.
VICE News | As reservoirs shrink and taps run dry in Brazil's worst ever water crisis, some scientists are making a connection between Amazonian deforestation and the monster drought.
VICE | A conflict is raging in Peru's Amazon forests between indigenous groups and an Argentinian oil company. The Amazon dwellers have halted drilling and blockaded a jungle road for two weeks in protest of what they claim is a decades-long environmental catastrophe.
The battle against Belo Monte is far from over, as last week's protests illustrate. Many lessons have been learned, steeling resistance and resilience for the coming clash over the government's plans to wreck the spectacular Tapajós.
The Guardian | Hundreds of indigenous people deep in the Peruvian Amazon are blocking a major Amazon tributary following what they say is the government's failure to address a social and environmental crisis stemming from oil operations.
Last Friday Amazon Watch returned to Davos to attend the 16th and final Public Eye Award ceremony where the international web community awarded Chevron the Lifetime Award for its disaster in Ecuador and subsequent efforts to evade responsibility.
Munich, Germany – Dozens of protestors from a coalition of German and international organizations converged today on the shareholder meeting of leading German corporation Siemens to condemn the company's role in egregious human rights violations from Brazil to Mexico.
Common Dreams | As global elites gather in Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum, the oil giant Chevron was singled out on Friday for a highly competitive – if unflattering – international distinction: the Public Eye Lifetime Award for its extraordinary corporate irresponsibility, which includes monumental environmental destruction in...
Davos, Switzerland – Prominent Swiss environmental organizations have crowned Chevron with an embarrassing "lifetime achievement" award for dumping billions of gallons of toxic waste into streams and rivers in Ecuador's rainforest relied on by local indigenous communities for their water.
As 2015 kicks off, it's important to reach out to our supporters and followers and to take a moment to assess our work last year and take a peek at the year to come.
It's been weeks since a Petroperú pipeline ruptured just upriver from San Pedro – again – one of five known breaks in the region in less than six months that spewed crude into the jungle and contaminated the river and surrounding rainforest within Kukama territory and the buffer zone of the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, the largest...
Ecuador's President Correa was well-rewarded for his trip last week to China, but this could have grave impacts for the Amazon and the people who live there.
Amazon Watch and 13 other environmental and human rights organizations urged the Ecuadorian government to ensure a just, transparent, and expeditious investigation into the murder of indigenous leader and anti-mining activist José Tendetza. We also condemned the SWAT team raid on José Tendetza’s house and urge the investigators to refrain from...
Fusion | Determined to defend their territory in the city as well as the jungle, several hundred indigenous activists trekked from the Amazon to Ecuador's capital this week to start an extended occupation of a building that has served as their urban political center for more than two decades.
Global Voices | The removal of indigenous peoples is prohibited by Article 231 of the Brazilian Constitution. In the project's defense, the government argues that since Sawré Muybu was never officially demarcated it cannot be recognized as Munduruku land – provoking the wrath of warriors and village chiefs all across the Tapajós basin.
The Society Pages | Yesterday, in Quito, Ecuador, hundreds of Indigenous people from around the country, including those from the Amazon, the Sierra and the Coast, gathered outside the offices of CONAIE, in the north of the city, to continue the fight against a government plan to close the organisation's headquarters.
