On May 16, Natalha Theofilo rushed her 1-year-old son to the public hospital on the Trans-Amazonian Highway in the Brazilian state of Pará. Erasmo Alves Theofilo, her husband, waited outside…
RINCON VITINA, Colombia — In this small Indigenous reserve, or resguardo, in the Colombian department of Guainía, people tend to their cassava, plantain and pineapple crops, raise ornamental fish, and…
In-person Indigenous plea leads to key Swiss gold refiners promising to stop import of gold illegally mined inside Brazilian Amazon Indigenous reserves — a pledge, if fulfilled, that may be a game changer. (Video)
Tangãi Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau recalls the evening of April 17, 2020, when his brother left their village deep in the Amazon rainforest to go out for a routine motorbike ride. It was…
“Many people have died on this railroad, killed by the trains,” says Deusimar de Oliveira Santos, a resident of the community of Auzilândia in Brazil’s Maranhão state, echoing a common…
Since I became an environmental journalist six years ago, my family, friends and acquaintances all labeled me “crazy”. Why? Because they were extremely scared after reading my articles and hearing…
Authorities in Brazil have uncovered the bodies believed to be those of Dom Phillips, a British journalist, and Bruno Pereira, a prominent Indigenous rights defender. The discovery, on June 15…
Alexandra Narváez and Alex Lucitante, two young Indigenous leaders from the A’i Cofán community of Sinangoe, located in the Ecuadoran Amazon, have been awarded the 2022 Goldman Environmental Prize for their…
It was over twenty years ago when locals in Bolivia’s northern plains told archaeologist Heiko Prümers, with the German Archaeological Institute in Bonn, about mysterious mounds of earth in the…
Thirty years ago, Brazil issued a decree officially recognizing the ancestral land of the Yanomami people as an Indigenous territory. The new designation made the area, located deep in the…
Aldeli de Jesus Ribeiro, also known as Pan Akroá Gamella, has scars all over his body as a result of gunshot wounds, stabbings, beatings with sticks and kicks suffered during…
Packed into a thatched-roof meeting hall in the village of Urucurituba, deep in the Brazilian Amazon, hundreds of Mura Indigenous people mulled over whether to allow a massive potash mine…
Surf enthusiasts and volunteers are mapping out hotspots of a spectacular form of surfing on Brazil’s northern coast, in a bid to both preserve the practice and help boost tourism…
Seven grassroots environmental activists will receive the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize today, on May 25. Known as the Green Nobel Prize, the Goldman Prize honors environmental activists from each of…
On some days, a strong smell of oil wafts through the Indigenous Kichwa community of October 12, located in Peru’s Amazonian region of Loreto. Residents going outside to see what…
Illegal miners expanded their footprint in Indigenous territories in Brazil by nearly 500% between 2010 and 2020, according to a recent report from the research collective MapBiomas. It also shows…
Satellites have detected forest clearing within Triunfo do Xingu this year, an area that’s supposed to be a legally protected swath of Amazon rainforest in Brazil’s northern state of Pará.…
Protected areas and lands managed by Indigenous and traditional communities have been bulwarks of forest preservation and restoration in the Brazilian Amazon in recent years, a new study shows. It…
Based on the best scientific data available, the unprecedented Amazon Water Impact Index draws together monitoring and research data to identify the most vulnerable areas of the Brazilian rainforest. According to the index, 20% of the 11,216 Brazilian Amazon microbasins have an impact considered high, very high or extreme; half of these watersheds are affected by hydroelectric plants.
Before Jair Bolsonaro took office as Brazil’s president in 2019, Canadian investment bank Forbes & Manhattan was facing problems with its business activities in the Brazilian Amazon. The situation began…
MANAUS, Brazil — In the historic center of Manaus, the largest city in the Brazilian Amazon, a giant mural depicting the city’s Indigenous history looms above pedestrians jostling for space…
CANELOS, Ecuador — An almost invisible trail snakes through thick buzzing forest leading to a chakra, an ancestral food garden in the Kichwa Cuya community located in Ecuador’s largest province,…
The central Purus River Basin is one of the best-preserved regions of the Brazilian Amazon. But deforestation here, in the state of Amazonas, could clear an area larger than England…
Brazil’s Amazon dam plans have been slowed down over the past decade due to realization by the country’s electrical authorities that obtaining environmental licenses would be difficult when Indigenous peoples…
The myth of a “demographic void” in the Amazon and of the “virgin forest” has been systematically debunked by a series of scientific studies showing that the rainforest has a…
As thousands of people protested in Brazil’s capital against a “death package” of bills deemed anti-environmental and anti-Indigenous, the lower house of Congress agreed to fast-track one of those bills,…
Three young women from the Munduruku Indigenous group in the Brazilian Amazon run an audiovisual collective that uses social media to raise awareness about illegal invasions of their territory. “Many people no longer believe what we say, they only believe what they see,” says Aldira Akai, who, at 30, is the oldest member of the collective.
Since 2013, the Ka'apor expelled the Federal Brazilian Indigenous Agency from their territory in the state of Maranhão, creating a new government council, adopting their own education system and establishing permanent settlements along their borders to contain the illegal advance of loggers, land grabbers and miners.
To support ongoing conservation efforts in the Amazon rainforest, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation is putting an additional $300 million toward its Andes-Amazon Initiative, which is the largest private…
Autazes in the heart of Brazil’s Amazonas state is a municipality that’s six times the size of Rio de Janeiro. This corner of the rainforest is so remote that the…