Articles by Yvette Sierra Praeli

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…

Scientists who spent five years studying the impact of illegal mining in Peru’s southeastern Madre de Dios department recently explored that impact in La Pampa, a geographic area in the…

The health situation of indigenous peoples due to infectious-contagious diseases is already serious due to its high prevalence and the very poor health service. The coronavirus would further aggravate this…

After enduring a fraught election process that resulted in the resignation of president Evo Morales in November 2019, Bolivia will once again be holding a general election in 2020. Meanwhile,…

For 13 years, Marlene Rivas has been part of a team working to protect the red-fronted macaw (Ara rubrogenysa), a bird endemic to Bolivia that is classified as critically endangered…

A major operation across five regions of Peru has seen 47 prosecutors and 1,200 police officers arrest 18 people who, according to Peruvian authorities, were members of a criminal organization…

Late last year, historic wildfires raged through Bolivia, holding the country hostage for two months between July and September and burning more than 5 million hectares (50,000 sq km or…

The guanaco (Lama guanicoe), the spindly, wild forebear of the llama, ranges across a broad reach of western and southern South America. While the species as a whole is not…

Under the sea, jutting into the Pacific from the southern Peruvian department of Ica, rises a mountain range called Dorsal de Nasca. The 93 submarine mountains harbor more than 1,100…

When inspectors from Peru’s Technical Administration for Forestry and Wildlife (ATFFS) in Puerto Inca Province received a complaint about the presence of miners in the buffer zone around the El…

It isn’t unusual for those who defend the environment to be threatened, but sometimes their commitment to nature puts their lives directly at risk. According to a recently published Global…

An invasion of the Macuya Forest has claimed its first victim. Julio Crisanto López was the last person keeping watch at the Macuya Forestry Investigation and Training Center (Centro de…

In the Guaraní language spoken in some parts of South America, the words “Ñembi Guasu” mean “the great hideout” or “the great refuge.” Ñembi Guasu is also the name of…

Biologist Sean McHugh, along with filmmaker and photographer Jasmina McKibben, recently traveled to the Colibri cloud forest in Peru’s Pampa Hermosa district in search of the spectacled bear (Tremarctos ornatus).…

Illegal gold mining has led to historical rates of deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon, a recent analysis of satellite images shows. In the past two years alone, more than 184…

On Friday 28 December 2018, prosecutor Karina Garay of Peru's Specialized Environmental Prosecutor’s Office of Madre de Dios carried out her last investigation of the year. That morning, she entered…

According to a recent report by Global Witness, there is evidence of disarray and illegality in Peru’s timber industry. The report focuses on the regions of Loreto, Ucayali, and Madre…

For Adamo Diego Cusi, a search for oil in the Bolivian Amazon by the Chinese-backed company BGP Bolivia has been a terrible ordeal. His work as coordinator of environmental and…

The Ucayali region, one of the Peruvian Amazon’s most deforested areas according to the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP), has an ever-growing land trafficking problem. There is increasing…

Flor Rumayna and Sara Hurtado arrived in Lima this past August from their homes in the Amazon headwaters to learn more about aerial monitoring of forests. They’d been researching new technologies…

LIMA, Peru — On Oct. 25, the Peruvian government made public its satellite surveillance data on 1,300 commercial fishing vessels plying Peru’s waters via the open-access platform Global Fishing Watch.…

Illegal mining is destroying the Amazon. Most people know this, but it is chilling to see the destruction in aerial images that show details of the mining camps, trucks and…

Laura is now part of the history of Peru. She is an Andean spectacled bear (Tremarctos ornatus) and the face of the first coin of one sol (equivalent to $0.31)…

A recent publication confirmed that inhabitants of the indigenous Nahua population, located in the Santa Rosa de Serjali community in the Ucayali Region of Peru, have high levels of mercury…