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 land rights of quilombos — communities of runaway slave descendants —are assured by Brazil’s Constitution; but those rights are now largely disregarded by agribusiness and Bolsonaro.
Some 400 indigenous people displaced from an informal settlement in Manaus have struggled to make a living amid scarce jobs and limited income sources during the COVID-19 crisis. The capital of Amazonas state, Manaus accounts for Brazil’s fourth-highest number of deaths due to COVID-19; authorities warn that the state’s health system is close to its limit.
Brazil’s environmental agency IBAMA has stepped up efforts to fight environmental crimes during the COVID-19 crisis. But the fate of these operations is now uncertain, following the firing of IBAMA’s enforcement director.
With half a century of Earth Days behind us, we face a new level of urgency in our environmental crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us that we live in…
An unprecedented court settlement guaranteed reparations to the Ashaninka people of the state of Acre, in the Brazilian Amazon, whose lands were deforested in the 1980s to supply the European furniture industry. The indigenous people only agreed with the negotiation because it included an official apology and a recognition of their "enormous importance as guardians" of the Amazon.
Invasions of indigenous reserves continue to escalate in the Brazilian Amazon amid the rapid spread of COVID-19 throughout the country, exposing how indigenous people are vulnerable to increased violence and infection amid a reduction in environmental oversight.
A court in Brazil has granted the Kinja indigenous people an unprecedented right of reply to racist invective, in a move that legal experts say could be a game changer against rising discrimination by President Jair Bolsonaro’s government.
Local authorities and indigenous communities in Indonesia’s Papua region have imposed a sweeping lockdown to minimize the spread of the novel coronavirus. The region, which comprises the provinces of West…
Zezico Rodrigues Guajarara, a teacher from the Arariboia indigenous reserve in Maranhão state, was found shot dead on March 31. He is the fifth Guajarara leader to be killed since November in the lawless frontier region dominated by powerful landowners and logging mafias.
A 20-year-old Kokama indigenous woman in northern Amazonas state tested positive for COVID-19, the first case among indigenous people in Brazil. Experts fear the spread of the pandemic and its effects for native people, calling for urgent action from the government.
Christian fundamentalist Andrew Tonkin is allegedly planning to contact and convert isolated Brazilian Amazon indigenous people, according to Marubo and Mayoruna indigenous leaders.
In a city known for the color grey because of skyscrapers and high pollution levels, the green of Jaraguá State Park’s famed Jaraguá Peak provides a welcome respite. Situated in…
A supposed COVID-19 test for a possibly infected Marubo indigenous man in Atalaia do Norte — gateway to the vast Javari Valley Indigenous Territory — was never analyzed; so results remain unknown.
Indigenous activists have blasted Jair Bolsonaro’s ineffectual coronavirus response, as leaders cancel annual mass indigenous protest in Brasília; fear grows of virus spread to reserves.
Ethnos360 missionaries have purchased a helicopter as part of a plan to contact and convert isolated Amazon indigenous groups, putting them at grave risk of deadly infectious disease.
Attacks on indigenous Kaiowá communities in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul at the start of the year have highlighted a long-running campaign of persecution and growing violence against the group.
The murder of Sister Dorothy in 2005, and resulting international outrage, helped curb violence in Brazil for a time, but crimes against landless peasants and activists are on the rise.
Nearly 4,000 requests have been submitted for mining-related activities on 31 indigenous reserves and 17 protected areas in Brazil, according to recently obtained data from the nongovernmental Socio-Environmental Institute (ISA) and the National Mining Agency.
The construction of the controversial Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in the Brazilian Amazon is the narrative engine that drives Sequestrada, the first full-length film by U.S. cinematographer and sociologist Sabrina McCormick.
‘Multinationals have cut the veins of our mother Earth,’ warned Pope Francis, urging conservation of the rapidly vanishing Amazon — but the world’s media barely took notice.
Legislation would open indigenous reserves in Amazon and across Brazil to commercial mining, oil and gas exploration, ranching, agribusiness, new dams and tourism.
In an exclusive interview with Mongabay, Marcelino Guedes, a researcher at Brazil’s Amapá Federal University, talks about how important the management of traditional knowledge is for strengthening the forest economy in Brazil to overcome the paradigm that sees standing forest as an enemy of development.
Data obtained via the Access to Information Act reveals that Vale has 236 applications registered with the National Mining Agency for mineral exploration in Brazil’s Amazon Basin. Many of them are applications for research, the first step to obtaining authorization for mineral exploration.
The new council headed by nation’s VP who is a retired general will oversee all ministries ‘involved in the protection, defense and development… of the Amazon.’
One year after a tailings dam collapsed in Brazil’s southwestern state of Minas Gerais, killing 259 people and unleashing a tsunami of toxic mud, affected indigenous inhabitants are still struggling to relocate away from the polluted waters of the Paraopeba River.
Indigenous group entered Brazilian museum and retrieved sacred funeral urns that courts said were rightly theirs, but which dam construction firm and authorities kept from them.
Joenia Wapichana is the first indigenous woman to be elected a federal representative in Brazil. Last year, she submitted a bill to Congress proposing that funds collected from fines for environmental infractions committed on indigenous lands be returned to native peoples.
Amazon mega-dam was built with 11,233 MW capacity, but has fallen far short, even as deforestation and drought make the goal more remote. The US$9.5 billion dam may never be profitable.
Three indigenous men in Amazonas state, and two peasant farmers in Maranhão, have been killed so far this month in violence experts say is spurred by Pres. Bolsonaro’s policies.
