South America News

Engineers and realtors from southern Pará take advantage of their knowledge to abet land grabbers.

SANTA CATARINA, BRASIL — A serene orange hue cuts across the horizon with the first rays of sunlight as dawn breaks in the mountainous countryside of Brazil’s second-most southerly state,…

Six grassroots environmental activists received the Goldman Environmental Prize on April 24. Known as the "Green Nobel Prize," the Goldman Prize honors environmental activists from the six continental regions. The…

The Comau, Reñihue and Reloncaví fjords, located in southern Chile’s Los Lagos region, are one-of-a-kind natural laboratories that host diverse species of crustaceans, sea anemones, sea cucumbers, polychaetes and corals.…

When asked if he had a message for the world, Júnior Hekurari Yanomami was emphatic: “Don’t buy Brazilian gold.” Júnior, 36, from the Surucucu community on Brazil’s largest and most…

For Indigenous women in the Amazon, the wetland of Lake Tarapoto is a living classroom. The women consider it not just a home for the fish they rely on to…

Las Chinchillas National Reserve is located in the hills of the Coquimbo region, in the province of Choapa, where more than a decade-long drought has turned the earth yellow. The…

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — With boundless ocean views to one side and urban sprawl to the other, the Sugarloaf has long been one of Rio de Janeiro’s most iconic…

On July 18, 2021, a camera trap in the Alto del Nudo region of Colombia captured a pack of free-ranging dogs wandering along a remote forest trail. The next day, an Andean…

The South American nation of Guyana, whose economy traditionally has relied on tourism, agriculture, and fishing, has begun business with oil giant ExxonMobil to make a massive offshore oil drilling…

If increasing global warming and deforestation were to transform Amazonia into an irreversibly degraded dry savanna, what could happen to the approximately 300 species of mammals that live there? These…

This article was published in a collaboration between Mongabay Latam and La Barra Espaciadora de Ecuador. “We’ve been resisting oil operations in this territory since they tried to begin them six…

Farmer and agronomist Roberto Rodríguez first taught the farmers of Lejanías they weren’t poor. Once they learned this critical lesson, they relied on themselves, their neighbors and nature to thrive sustainably.

Jacobo, a Mennonite farmer who preferred only his fist name be used, had just begun to explain why he left Belize to settle in the Peruvian town of Tiruntá when…

Some of the world’s largest banks and financial institutions are helping to finance beef companies linked to the destruction of the Paraguayan Gran Chaco, according to a report published by…

A court in Ecuador ordered oil companies to stop the hazardous practice of burning natural gas at extraction sites because it was a major driver of cancer and other illnesses…

Paul Van Damme and Fortuna Vargas Mejía met 28 years ago in Puerto Villarroel, a village in the Bolivian department of Cochabamba. Van Damme was a Belgian marine biologist who…

SÃO PAULO—A new study published in Nature estimates that forests in Indigenous lands in Brazil’s Amazon have the potential to absorb over 7,000 tons of noxious fumes from forest fires…

SANTA ELENA DE UAIRÉN, Venezuela — Standing at the brink of a man-made canyon, Jhonny Pereira, a Brazilian-born mining boss, looks down at a dozen gold miners as they plough…

After four years of environmental destruction, Brazil has reached a crossroads that will determine the fate of its biomes and its role in the global climate crisis. In its first…

*This report was carried out as part of a journalistic partnership between Mongabay Latam and La Barra Espaciadora de Ecuador. On Aug. 10, 2009, in the community of Los Reyes, Sandra…

PORTO VELHO, Brazil — Cruising north in a speedboat along the Madeira River, the signs of Brazil’s illegal gold mining boom are everywhere: mounds of sand extracted from the riverbed…

Standing beside the Andean condor on Chile’s coat of arms is the huemul deer. The species, whose habitat stretches from central Chile all the way south to the tip of…

PERUÍBE, Brazil — On Oct. 2, 2020, Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court overruled the marco temporal cutoff criteria for demarcating Indigenous lands, and upheld the 2016 homologation of the Piaçaguera Indigenous…

A carbon credit program in a prominent national park in Peru appears to have failed at preventing significant deforestation, raising questions about whether officials in charge of the program inflated…

Silky sharks are one of the most widely sold species in the international fin trade. A Mongabay Latam investigation revealed that in 2021 shark fin exports from Ecuador tripled compared…

Journalists in Brazil have a saying, an expression penned by Brazilian poet Gonçalves Dias: “Boys, I saw it!” It’s popular among anyone going to the field to make reports, interview…

With the slogan “Invest in Klabin and build a sustainable future” and a long list of awards for its commitment to preserving the environment, Brazilian pulp and paper manufacturer Klabin…

In the middle of an increasingly arid landscape, where Chile’s Atacama Desert, the driest in the world, keeps expanding southward, a small forest less than a third the size of…

Life goes at its own pace in the town of Chihuahua, where the modern mixes with Mennonite traditions. To one side, horse-drawn carts pull up at a plot of land…