No one on the Colombian island of Providencia was prepared for what happened on the night of Nov. 16, 2020. Not even Josefina Huffington, who had survived four hurricanes. That…
NUEVA VENECIA, Colombia — Sandra Milena Manjarez puts two plates of bright yellow rice topped with liza — a finger-sized mullet fish similar to a sardine — on the white…
“Don’t go to Zabaleta because they’re going to kill you.” “Why are they going to kill me if I haven’t done anything?” “They’re going to kill you, please don’t go…
In 2024, Latin America’s tiger cat, previously recognized as two species, was determined by scientists to be three species — a taxonomic reshuffling that has major conservation implications for these small cats.
Gold is universally recognized as a form of money that has retained value over decades, centuries and millennia. Since it is non-corrosive and precious, approximately 95% of the gold mined…
JAKARTA — The tropics continue to lose primary forest at an alarming rate, with an area of tree cover half the size of Panama disappearing in 2023, new data from…
On April 10, 2023, at 11:30 a.m., four men arrived at Maydany Salcedo’s house. “I’m with the target and awaiting instructions,” was a phrase repeated several times by one of…
JAKARTA — Farm-to-fork traceability has become an increasingly urgent, and often required, component of global supply chains, with a growing number of commodities now trackable all the way back to…
On May 9, 1983, Soraida Chindoy Buesaquillo’s placenta was planted in the mountains of Putumayo, where Colombia’s Amazon rainforest meets the Andes. Her mother, Concepción Buesaquillo, was a midwife by…
In September 2021, Colombian police received an alert from a shipping company urging them to inspect some cardboard boxes that were about to be exported to Hong Kong from El…
Undesignated public land One of the objectives of the ZEE process was to assist the nations of the Pan Amazon to allocate their public lands among different constituencies and stakeholder…
Ecuador The territorial planning framework in Ecuador is known as the Plan de Desarrollo y Ordenamiento Territorial (PDOT). It is one component in an ambitious effort to articulate a Plan…
The number of threatened species in Colombia is much higher than previously thought, after officials carried out a study to reevaluate the state of the country’s flora and fauna. The…
Land-use maps and their explicit recommendations are most relevant on pioneer landscapes that are in the flux of change. Recommendations can provide sound information and support an expanding agricultural production…
The unequal distribution of land in Colombia is the root cause of that nation’s violent history. Multiple policy initiatives spanning decades have failed to resolve the problem. The first agrarian…
In January 2020, Luis Carlos Galeano was traveling with his family through the Claro River Basin in Colombia’s mountainous Antioquia department when his wife, Viviana Aguirre, pointed out a tree…
Update 2/23/2024: Delegates to COP-14 approved Brazil's proposal to protect these species under Appendix II. The Amazon is the largest, most biologically diverse basin in the world. Its rainforest, the…
Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s recent announcement of a new court system to resolve land ownership conflicts in rural areas of the country has drawn a mixed response from advocates of…
MONTERÍA, Colombia — “Look at the rooms in our house,” says Remberto Gil, 45, during a sweltering day last September. “During this time of the year, they are typically overflowing…
In June 2023, where the Caquetá River leaves Colombian territory and enters Brazil, no more than 35 kilometers (21.7 miles) from the border, Custodio Yucuna Tanimuca came across a group…
The political movement that brought Evo Morales to power incorporated a latent conflict between highland and lowland Indigenous communities. The lowland nations are intent on recuperating their ancestral territories, which…
Bolivia was a leader in the agrarian reform movement in South America. A defining moment in its modern history was the national revolution of 1952, which started as an uprising…
The need to fast-track the regularização of smallholder titles motivated the Terra Legal programme, which sent teams of surveyors to selected municipalities to accelerate the process for landholdings established prior…
The third pillar of the institutional mission of the Instituto Nacional de Colonização y Reforma Agraria (INCRA) encompasses both administrative and legal aspects of land tenure and, as such, is…
Coral bleaching is on the rise along Colombia’s Caribbean coast, according to the results of several expeditions made by Corales de Paz, an NGO that works to conserve and restore…
Yuly Velásquez grew up on the banks of the Magdalena River near the Colombian city of Barrancabermeja, an area surrounded by a large network of swamps, lagoons and tropical forests.…
Rural real estate markets in the Pan Amazon are regulated by institutions that are a legacy of the agrarian reform movements that played a prominent role in domestic politics during…
The adage ‘possession is nine-tenths of the law’ is not legally true, but the concept reigns supreme on frontier landscapes in the Pan Amazon. Land grabbers and peasant pioneers share…
Occupying a plot of land is the first, and perhaps easiest, step in the process of creating a legally constituted private property. In all eight Amazonian nations, a title or…
Colombia’s environmental authorities plan to take new steps this year to restore an important national park hit hard by deforestation and pollution, most of it from illegal gold mining. Farallones…