Latin America News

A series of measures by the Bolsonaro government that attack the environment are putting indigenous peoples at risk, say the authors.

Dean Cycon spoke recently to students at Harvard Business School. A student asked him what his profit margin was at Dean’s Beans Organic Coffee, a company he founded in 1993…

In the midst of a national lockdown in Colombia, a dramatic video showing dozens of indigenous Emberá fleeing gunfire and heavy fighting by canoe in the country’s northwest emerged on…

A cattle farmer in Tefé, Brazil, has turned his ranch into a new standard for cattle raising in the forest. It’s a more productive and more profitable system that eliminates the need for cutting down forest to open new pastureland.

It's freezing cold. The wind whistles. A gentle drizzle falls from the sky, and the ground wheezes like a soaked sponge with every step. It is an inhospitable and at…

Late rainfall, intense drought, dry riverbeds, more forest fires, less food available — indigenous communities across the Amazon suffer social transformations due to climate change.

When Cristobal Pop, 41, started fishing in Lake Izabal in eastern Guatemala with his uncle nearly 30 years ago, they always returned to shore with a generous bounty of robalo,…

IBAMA officials, while trying to halt deforestation in Cachoeira Seca Indigenous Reserve, were threatened and assaulted by illegal loggers. The Bolsonaro administration is largely unresponsive.

Global outrage at Environment Minister Ricardo Salles caught on video saying "run the cattle herd" through the Amazon, "changing all the rules and simplifying standards" while public distracted by pandemic.

Ricardo Lopes Dias, an anthropologist and Christian Evangelical pastor, appointed to head Brazil’s isolated indigenous tribes department, has been removed due to a “conflict of interest”

A bill in Congress on the verge of passage this week would allow land grabbers to self-declare their ownership of government land, ultimately converting vast stretches of Amazon rainforest to cattle ranches.

For nine months, the communities near Ecuador’s Los Cedros Protected Forest have been unable to fully celebrate a win in a provincial court to protect the forest. The decentralized autonomous…

Boa Vista Quilombo — an Afro-Brazilian community of runaway slave descendants — lacks basic health services, but COVID-19 is now just a half mile away, infecting MRN mining company personnel.

What do countries like Mexico, Guatemala, Nepal and Namibia have in common? All four are home to rich repositories of biodiversity. But each country has also developed models for community…

Some 600 indigenous people have seen their crops die due to the expansion of agribusiness in the state of Pará, Brazil. The streams used by the Munduruku have also been damaged, if not dried up.

Four Alter do Châo volunteer firefighters were charged last year with setting Amazon fires; the police lack evidence, while locals say the real suspects — landgrabbers — are likely still on the loose.

The harpy eagle (Harpia harpyja) lives in tropical forests stretching from the south of Mexico to the north of Argentina. But it’s in the Brazilian Amazon that a project has…

The need to conserve and protect global forests is clear and urgent. Indigenous populations like the Amazonian Kichwa have recognized the need for action to prevent the worst effects of…

Camera traps bring you closer to the secretive natural world and are an important conservation tool to study wildlife. This week we’re meeting an elusive wild cat: the jaguarundi. The…

38 indigenous groups in Brazil are reporting 537 COVID-19 cases. In Mato Grosso state, a new map tracks the virus, while officials push measures that put indigenous land rights at risk.

The pandemic is spreading across the Brazilian Amazon, but that isn’t slowing deforestation or land grabbing or a political crisis which has left the rainforest without adequate field surveillance.

Research measured the impacts of human disruption: bird flocks declined and vanished, seed dispersion changed, while the Rupununi region showed just how bountiful an undisturbed ecosystem can be.

Scientists studying the impact of 75 road projects in five countries in the Amazon Basin have found that they could lead to 2.4 million hectares (5.9 million acres) of deforestation. Seventeen percent of these projects were found to violate environmental legislation and the rights of indigenous peoples.

BOGOTA, Colombia — Droughts are lasting longer because of climate change and human intervention, but where does climate change leave off and human exploitation of natural resources begin? The Wayuu…

The inhabitants of Culden village in northern Peru heard that the virus that causes COVID-19, the disease wreaking havoc around the world, originated in bats. So when they discovered a…

I used my Brazilian name above, but in my community, I am known as Wino Këyashëni. I belong to the Marubo people, one of the seven ethnic groups that inhabit…

President Jair Bolsonaro has revived a plan, conceived in the 1970s, to extend the BR-163 highway, the main soy corridor in Brazil, north to the border with Suriname. The Trombetas State Forest, one of the four conservation units the road would cut through, stores 2.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide — more than Brazil’s entire emissions in 2018.

Like much of the world, Argentina remains locked down, its citizens more or less homebound due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Amid the torpor, Yamana Gold, a Canada-based mining company,…

Despite the global economic slowdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon appears to be continuing largely unabated with forest clearing over the past 12 months reaching…

A sweeping policy change by the Bolsonaro government opens unregistered ancestral indigenous lands to landgrabbers, loggers, ranchers, and soy growers, with huge risk for the Amazon.