Articles by Yvette Sierra Praeli

“We couldn’t see the sun for a whole month because of the clouds of smoke. For an entire month, between October and November (2022), we didn’t see the sun,” said…

The effects of rising global temperatures are becoming increasingly apparent. Heat waves, droughts, torrential rains and flooding are becoming more frequent. In the first three months of 2023, Latin America…

Jacobo, a Mennonite farmer who preferred only his fist name be used, had just begun to explain why he left Belize to settle in the Peruvian town of Tiruntá when…

A new legislative proposal, criticized by opponents as a step backwards in recognizing the rights and protections of uncontacted and recently contacted Indigenous people, is currently under debate in Peru’s…

Inside Bolivia’s Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS), conservationists from Asociación Armonía rigged up a network of nine camera traps and 15 audio recorders. They were seeking out…

While investigating the feeding interactions of the Andean condor (Vultur gryphus) in Peru, researcher Victor Gamarra-Toledo found something that concerned him — plastics featuring in the scavenger bird’s diet. And…

The territory belonging the Indigenous Kakataibo community of Puerto Nuevo comprises some 680 square kilometers (263 square miles) of rainforest between the regions of Huánuco and Ucayali in central Peru.…

SANTA ROSILLO DE YANAYACU, Peru — Swaths of recently deforested land and images of guns spray-painted on trees greeted the Santa Rosillo de Yanayacu patrol when they visited a portion…

Plot out all the Indigenous territories in the Amazonian region of Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, and you’ll get an idea of just how important conserving these lands is for…

Across the entire 847 million hectares of Amazonian territory, some 26% of its forests are showing evidence of deforestation and degradation — 20% have suffered irreversible loss and 6% are…

For years, Ruth Alipaz has been fighting against the Chepete-El Bala hydroelectric project. The project involves the construction of two reservoirs that together would flood at least 66,200 hectares (163,500…

The central coast of Peru is cleaning up after a catastrophe due to a large oil spill on Jan. 15, 2022. The environmental emergency occurred after a pipe ruptured between…

Forest fires in Bolivia’s Santa Cruz department razed an area twice the size of Jamaica in the first 10 months of 2021, officials said, with more than half of the…

Peru is home to many Indigenous communities that don’t appear on official maps. Without government recognition, these communities’ existence rests solely on their community names and on the knowledge of…

When the threats of potential mining activity arrived in the Bolivian community of Las Mangas, in the Indigenous Lomerío territory, the community held a meeting where they decided to put…

Forest fires in Bolivia are showing no sign of abating, with blazes sweeping through ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest, Chaco scrubland, Chiquitanía savanna, and Pantanal wetland. With almost 1 million…

When Peru declared the creation of the Nazca Ridge National Reserve in the country’s southern waters this past June, it also increased — in one fell swoop — the proportion…

In September 2015, officials from the agriculture agency of Peru’s Ucayali department arrived in the district of Masisea with one goal: to create a rural land registry in a forested…

"In 2000, Loreto had only one protected natural area, which was the Pacaya Samiria National Reserve (RNPS), today there are 14," says Corine Vriesendorp, director of the Andean Amazon Program…

After nearly twenty years of discussion, the Peruvian government has moved to establish a new Indigenous reserve for "uncontacted peoples" deep in the Amazon rainforest. Yavarí Tapiche Indigenous Reserve, which…

A jaguar roars in front of a camera trap in Panama’s Mamoní Valley. The video lasts only 11 seconds, but it provides a valuable glimpse at this iconic animal of…

Forest fires in Bolivia have burned 1.4 million hectares (3.4 million acres) across the country this year, according to the government. And as in 2019, the Chiquitania and Chaco ecosystems…

Sitting in the doorway of his house, Isaac Zacharías Klassen, the patriarch of a Mennonite colony that has settled in Masisea, in Peru’s Amazonian department of Ucayali, says he was…

Wadson Trujillo is an environmental monitor in Cuninico, an Indigenous community in northern Peru. In 2014, he was a witness to an oil spill in which thousands of barrels of…

"This pandemic is taking away our wise men," Zebelio Kayap, the Indigenous leader of the Organization of Border Communities of Cenepa (ODEFROC), says in a broken voice. Kayap speaks with…

Inversiones La Oroza, a company under investigation since 2015 for alleged timber trafficking, has just been awarded $380,000 from Reactiva Peru, a stimulus program by the Peruvian government to revive…

The Bolivian government’s decision to close all national parks in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in mid-March was supposed to stop the spread of the coronavirus. But it’s also had…

A gunshot ended the life of Indigenous leader Arbildo Meléndez Grandes in Peru. On a Sunday in early April this year, he went hunting and fishing for his family and…

For the past five years, the indigenous Matsés people of the Peruvian Amazon region of Loreto ventured deep into their territory to draw up a complete map of everything that…

The first case of a member of an indigenous community in Peru testing positive for Coronavirus was recorded late last month. The person in question, Aurelio Chino, is an indigenous…