Land Conflict

MEXICO CITY — Canada has become a major force in Latin America. It’s spent the last 30 years beefing up its portfolio with investments in mining, oil and natural gas.…

JAKARTA — Critics have questioned the Indonesian government’s priorities as it prepares to evict longtime residents of a small island to make way for a $25 billion development that includes…

TEKOA PINDÓ MIRIM, Brazil — “If we hadn’t come here, someone non-Indigenous would probably already have occupied this space,” says Neusa Poty. The 35-year-old Guarani Indigenous leader speaks in a…

PANAMA CITY — Panama has been gripped by mass protests against a government deal with Central America’s largest copper mine amid claims it sacrifices national sovereignty and will damage the…

Latin America is far and away the most dangerous place for people fighting to protect the environment. From activists and community leaders to journalists and politicians, standing up against deforestation,…

JAKARTA — U.S. food giant Kellogg’s is the latest major consumer brand to suspend its purchases of palm oil from Indonesian plantation giant Astra Agro Lestari, following reports of environmental…

Global food giant Cargill has been tied to the destruction of thousands of hectares of dry tropical forest, which were cleared in eastern Bolivia to make room for soy production.…

CHANGUINOLA, Panama — Long before the Naso peoples in the northern jungles of Panama won the fight for their land, before a king came from far away to lead them…

MONDULKIRI, Cambodia — In a rare win for conservationists and Cambodia’s Indigenous communities, the Ministry of Environment has opted to suspend a planned marble mining operation within a wildlife sanctuary…

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — A flurry of subdecrees released through the end of July and early August show that the Cambodian government has approved he addition of more than a…

The arrest of five environmental activists fighting water pollution and mining in El Salvador is drawing international criticism following questionable developments in court proceedings that suggest the case against them…

BOTUM SAKOR, Cambodia — Once Cambodia’s largest national park, Botum Sakor has shriveled under the gaze of tycoons, whose parcels of land have swallowed up more than 80% of the…

JAKARTA — Only a fifth of Indonesian palm oil companies are compliant with a requirement to allocate part of their land to smallholder farmers, according to official data. The government’s…

*Names have been changed to protect sources who said they feared reprisals from the authorities. BOTUM SAKOR, Cambodia — “We’ve filed complaints with four institutions now — the Ministry of…

The Amazon Rainforest is the largest in the world and a key player in regulating global water and carbon cycles. It also happens to be home to sophisticated criminal networks…

CENTRAL SULAWESI, Indonesia — Karolus Kolong, a 62-year-old villager on Indonesia’s Sulawesi island, has spent nearly two decades fighting to get his land back from palm oil giant Astra Agro…

Colombia has nearly 60 million hectares (147.5 million acres) of natural forest covering over half its territory, much of it in the Amazon basin. As a “megadiverse” country, possessing around…

JAKARTA — Reports of human rights violations continue to mount around a major tourism development on the Indonesian island of Lombok, two years since the United Nations first flagged problems…

The environmental issues facing Venezuela are serious and wide-ranging: illegal mining in the Amazon, national water shortages, mudslides and flooding exacerbated by climate change, the degradation of protected areas, oil…

Drug trafficking, logging, oil palm plantations, oil spills, highways, illegal fishing, expanding Mennonite communities — in the Peruvian Amazon, there’s no shortage of threats against Indigenous peoples or their lands.…

JAKARTA — Suryani grew up in a family of farmers on the island of Java in Indonesia. Her parents are members of a farmer’s union called SPP. The land they…

A recent chemical spill in a protected reserve in northern Nicaragua is raising concerns about the contamination of several river ecosystems and the public health fallout for thousands of Indigenous…

Officials are struggling to keep up with an increasing wave of deforestation in one of Guatemala’s largest protected areas, where squatters are clearing the rainforest to make room for settlements,…

MEXICO CITY — A major reform approved by congress last week is supposed to limit harmful practices by the mining industry and improve protections for the environment and Indigenous peoples.…

MEXICO CITY — Protecting the environment is no easy task. But in Mexico, it can often be deadly. The country is seeing a rise in violence against environmental defenders, who…

More than 60% of people in Central Africa have no access to electricity. An ambitious proposal aims to change that with a network of pipelines, refineries and gas-fired power plants…

JAKARTA — The Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN), the main advocacy group for Indigenous communities in Indonesia, has won a 2023 Skoll Award for Social Innovation. Since its…

MEXICO CITY — The sudden, unexpected construction of a hotel in the middle of a protected reserve in southern Mexico has surprised residents and left many conservationists scrambling to figure…

When Teresa Chang first saw the plot of land that now makes up the Amotape Dry Forest Private Conservation Area in the Tumbes municipality of northern Peru, she was horrified.…

Paraguay is considering opening up mining and natural gas drilling in one of its national parks in the Gran Chaco, despite widespread outcry that development could compromise the fragile savannah…