Mining in the Amazon has terrible effects on the livelihoods and health of Indigenous peoples and frontline communities as well as the overall balance of the Amazon’s biological diversity. Yet, mining giants with well-known track records of devastation and rights violations are eyeing Indigenous and traditional communities’ lands and other protected areas in the Amazon.
Despite committing to withdraw from all mining interests in Indigenous lands, multinational companies continue to bulldoze through communities and their territories to complete their mining projects. Banks and asset managers are once again behind this extractive surge by financing these company’s projects.
Reports of oil companies leaving the Peruvian Amazon made weekly headlines in March, providing encouragement to those of us who love the Amazon and know that humanity must move away from fossil fuels. In addition to the announcement by two oil companies that they will abandon drilling projects in important oil blocks, a Peruvian court annulled a...
Indigenous lands help regulate the planet's climate, for they are obstacles to deforestation. There is ten times less deforestation in indigenous lands than in non-titled lands.
According to Christian Poirier of Amazon Watch, "there is no plan for the removal of the mine waste – it's a ticking time bomb."
On the banks of Brazil's lower Xingu River, a toxic controversy looms large, threatening to heap insult upon the grievous injuries of the nearby Belo Monte hydroelectric dam. Belo Sun would become Brazil's largest open-pit gold mine, straddling the territories of three indigenous peoples and other traditional communities that are already reeling...
Regardless of who wins, the response to the escalated social conflicts over extractive industry projects, rollback of indigenous rights, and criminalization of civil society protest will be an early and pressing challenge for the incoming administration.
Meeting contractual loan payments with oil is a major driver behind Ecuador's effort to open up new, pristine Amazon indigenous rainforest territory to oil drilling. All this new drilling has led to massive impacts in the Amazon rainforest that have been dire both for its world-renowned biodiversity and its indigenous peoples.
Indigenous people make up as much as 30 percent of Ecuador's 16.5 million citizens, and their swing to Lasso could be the deciding factor in the run-off elections.
Throughout these years of peaceful resistance and advocating for the Amazon, I have grown to understand that a great way to fight against exploitative oil, gas, and mining development is to support community-based economic initiatives.
From the snow-covered plains of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe of North Dakota to Shuar rainforest territories in the Ecuadorian Amazon, there is a resurgence of resistance to extractive industry projects around the world. These conflicts have major implications for China, Latin America's largest trading partner, whose state run companies are...
"You cannot deny land to indigenous people that are ancestrally attached to it and expect them to continue to exist as a culture," said Christian Poirier, program director at Amazon Watch.
Brazil's current economic and political shifts and its effort to attract Chinese investment are part of a concerted effort by the Brazilian government to industrialize vast sections of the Amazon, with grave ramifications for the forests, rivers, and peoples who help sustain this irreplaceable biome for the benefit of humanity.
Military drones and police helicopters circle above the Shuar indigenous village of El Tink, an Amazonian community in Ecuador where a high-profile dispute against a Chinese copper mine has become a standoff and a siege.
"We are being persecuted by the military and the police who are invading the territories of the Shuar communities," Elvia Dagua, a local indigenous member of CONFENIAE told the media Thursday. "They have destroyed homes. So the Shuar people, women, men, and children have had to flee."
In a colorful and highly energized samba parade at Rio de Janeiro's world-famous Carnival on Monday morning, Imperatriz Leopoldinense, one of Brazil's most traditional and respected samba schools, paid a special tribute to indigenous peoples of the Amazon's Xingu River, highlighting threats to their territories, livelihoods and rights.
The impacts of new drilling in the Amazon rainforest have been dire both for its world-renowned biodiversity and its indigenous peoples, many of whom have long rejected controversial drilling plans on their lands.
In the face of too many previous agreements left unfulfilled, more unity is the best strategy forward, affirm the indigenous federations united in Saramurillo.
Make no mistake about it, indigenous rights and territories are under attack in Brazil. We recently reported on attempts by the administration of President Michel Temer to roll back indigenous rights and environmental protections, moves that fundamentally undermine land demarcation norms while portending dire consequences for the Amazon and its...
At Belo Monte, the writing is on the wall because, all over the Amazon, new dams are planned or being built. A key role in the protection of the forests, rivers and animals will now be played by the indigenous person.
With the issuance of a federal decree in mid-January, Brazil's government announced major changes to the procedure by which it formally demarcates indigenous lands – a move applauded by the ruralistas industrial agriculture lobby and large landowners, but greeted with alarm by indigenous land rights activists.
CONFENIAE'S Governing Council rejects the raid on the community radio Voz de Arutam this morning by more than 100 policemen, who removed equipment from and ransacked the offices of the Interprovincial Federation of Shuar Communities (FICSH).
Despite its professed commitment to protection of Mother Earth and to placing sustainable living over profits, Ecuador under Correa has pursued a resource extraction strategy that prioritizes short-term revenue generation over environmental protection and indigenous territorial rights.
"We believe that justice has been done, and we will continue to work with the same courage and strength to defend the rights of nature and the rights of the people as we have been doing for 30 years," said Alexandra Almeida, the group's president.
As many of you know, recent days have been very dangerous for our people. These days have not yet ended and are, indeed, probably only the beginning of a great territorial dispute initiated by the National Government against the Shuar Arutam People.
Carlos Fávaro's dream of turning the Tapajós River into "Brazil's Mississippi" is now within the grasp of Brazil's agribusinessmen – with only indigenous people, traditional riverine communities, environmentalists and the ever-increasing concern of climate scientists about the damage that will be done to the forest, and thus indirectly...
With a 30-day state of exception imposed across the entire Amazonian province of Morona Santiago, the government has reportedly mobilised up to 1,000 military and police personnel to protect the mining camp and hunt down what top officials have called an "illegally armed group" that they say does not represent the Shuar nation.
We are grateful for the solidarity of the Ecuadorian people and indigenous peoples' organizations, human rights throughout Latin America and the world, and call on the international community to be alert and vigilant to what happens in Ecuador, especially with our sisters and brothers of Shuar Nationality whose territory, life, and survival are in...
Ecuador became an even more difficult place to be a defender of indigenous rights and the environment in recent days. You would think a country with constitutionally-enshrined protections for Mother Nature would support and encourage indigenous and environmental rights defenders, but sadly that is not the case, and it has implications for the...
Brazil's conservative National Congress has rushed to pass a wave of legislative initiatives, which taken all together, would dismantle much of the nation's body of law protecting the environment and indigenous people – an effort likely to escalate in 2017.
Ecuador's Environment Ministry announced yesterday its intention to shutter Acción Ecológica, the country's leading grassroots environmental organization. The move is a clear reprisal to the group's efforts to raise awareness about environmental and indigenous rights concerns over a planned mega-copper mine on the lands of the Shuar indigenous...
