Eye on the Amazon

May 28, 2020 – When the novel coronavirus first began to emerge as a global pandemic, its spread also carried centuries of collective memories of the diseases that previously decimated indigenous peoples across the Americas. Indigenous peoples across the Amazon began to ban outsiders from their territories and disperse preventative information and resources in their communities.

May 20, 2020 – Our indigenous brothers and sisters in Peru remind us that access to oxygen and healthcare must be guaranteed right in a just economic system. Our partners shouldn't have to choose between purchasing oxygen or paying their bills or feeding their families. COVID-19 is showing us the face of the global food and health crisis and demanding literal oxygen to sustain our survival.

May 12, 2020 – The Wampis Nation, one of the most organized indigenous peoples in the Peruvian Amazon, is calling out Chile-based oil company GeoPark for putting their communities at risk of the COVID-19 contagion. Leaders of the Wampis Nation have received information that GeoPark community-relations workers are violating Peru's national quarantine by continuing to visit communities as part of a divide-and-conquer strategy to fraudulently manufacture consent for oil operations.

COVID-19 isn't the only mortal threat facing Amazonian peoples

May 6, 2020 – Arbildo Meléndez Grandes, leader of the Cacataibo indigenous community of Unipacuyacu, is the latest indigenous leader of the Peruvian Amazon to be murdered for defending his indigenous territory. He was a defender of his community – demanding that the government provide a land title – and had received death threats from land-grabbers and narco-traffickers who wanted to control the same territory.

"In this time of multiple crises, we are invisible, yet again. But they're planning to open up our territories the second this is over. And we won't let that happen."

April 30, 2020 – Ecuador is grappling with a trifecta of tragedy never before seen despite its tumultuous history. The country not only has one of the highest numbers of COVID-19 cases in the world, but it is also facing a pipeline rupture that has contaminated Amazon rivers and historic flooding that has devastated local communities and left hundreds of families without homes or crops.

Killers of forest guardian Paulo Paulino Guajajara are finally indicted, as two more indigenous people are murdered

April 23, 2020 – Impunity cannot be brought to an end solely by increasing indictments and convictions against low-level henchmen. Instead, those who benefit and profit from these acts of violence must also face consequences, including the companies that benefit from illegal land grabbing and Amazon deforestation, like mining, agribusiness and logging.