This is Part 4 of a four-part series on Indigenous land rights in Ecuador. Read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. Twenty months after a landmark court ruling in…
This is Part 3 of a four-part series on Indigenous land rights in Ecuador. Read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 4. A landmark land title in an Amazon protected…
This is Part 2 of a four-part series on Indigenous land rights in Ecuador. Read Part 1, Part 3 and Part 4. In Ecuador’s Amazon, the use of agreements with…
This is Part 1 of a four-part series on Indigenous land rights in Ecuador. Read Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4. In Ecuador, a 2023 court decision that recognizes…
A vital Amazonian superfood suddenly vanishes, leaving thousands of Indigenous and extractivist families reeling.
Rubber tapping in the forest was once the main Amazonian economic activity, and now an Indigenous group is bringing it back.
As oil companies push for drilling on the Amazon coast, an underwater war silences the ocean’s most vocal creatures.
In early February, in downtown Bogotá, Colombia, Luis Alfredo Acosta recited a line in a book from memory: “I am from the rainforest because I smell like the rainforest; I…
At the world’s first global congress of Indigenous peoples and local communities from forest basins, representatives began preparations to increase direct finance to community forest conservation — especially in the…
Mongabay published a five-part series delving into Brazil’s ongoing operation to evict illegal gold miners from Munduruku Indigenous territories, deep in the Amazon Rainforest. While there has been some disruption…
“The journalist should not be part of the story.” Jonathan Watts, British journalist based in Brazil, recalls the words of fellow British journalist Dom Phillips and the challenges they posed…
The EIA is an integral (high-profile) component of regulatory process that has evolved over the last couple of decades to extend ‘upstream’ into the planning process and ‘downstream’ into the…
Before 1988, Brazil had no contingency plans for unexpected encounters with Indigenous peoples living in isolation. If government officials, developers or explorers accidentally stumbled upon a camp, the protocol was…
In the center of the village is a soccer field. Around it, in nicely painted wood, are the main community buildings of the roughly 1,000 Kapohn Indigenous people who live…
Grassroots organizations are settling new areas in the Brazilian Amazon amid disappointment that President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been slow to jump-start the stalled land reform agenda.
This is part four of a series on the operation to evict illegal gold miners from Munduruku Indigenous territories. Read part one, part two and part three and part five.…
This story is published through the Indigenous News Alliance. For the last week, Indigenous leaders from around the world have converged in New York for the United Nations Permanent Forum on…
This is the second of three interviews with Indigenous representatives at the United Nations about the latest issues in their country's Amazon forests. Read the interview about the Peruvian Amazon…
This is the first of three interviews with Indigenous representatives at the United Nations about the latest issues in their country's Amazon forests. Read the interview about the Colombian Amazon…
In the heart of the Colombian Amazon, the towering mountains of the Serranía del Chiribiquete harbor secrets including South America’s oldest rock art. The remote site was off-limits and poorly…
A Mongabay investigation that revealed an illegal cattle boom amid a record-high number of killings of Indigenous Guajajara has been cited by Brazilian authorities to remove thousands of head of cattle from the Arariboia Indigenous Territory in the Amazon Rainforest.
One unusual characteristic of Latin American nations is their proclivity to adopt new constitutions that reflect periodic swings in political philosophies. These documents are notable for their length and the…
When markets fail to manage the supply of and demand for goods and services, the outcome is referred to as ‘market failure’. There are multiple causes for market failure, but…
"They're curious about us, and we're curious about them." That’s how Daniel Cangussu describes the recent interaction with a small Indigenous group that had just contacted non-Indigenous society in the…
Journalist Alex Cuadros’s latest book, “When We Sold God’s Eye: Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon” tells the story of how an Indigenous group in Brazil was forced to reckon with Western culture.
A wide range of sustainability, health and environmental programs in the Amazon Rainforest are at stake after the U.S. government announced a 90-day pause on all foreign aid funding, including…
In December 2024, Ecuador completed a debt-for-nature swap to support Amazon conservation through the creation of the Amazon Biocorridor. While this provides economic relief, Amazonian leaders contend they were not…
Unprecedented images of uncontacted Indigenous people in Brazil’s Massaco Indigenous Territory, in the Amazon region, have prompted a push for greater enforcement to protect the land of these vulnerable populations.
Rodrigo Agostinho, head of IBAMA, Brazil's federal environmental agency, for two years now, spoke with Mongabay about the progress of his agency and the challenges it faces in protecting the country's biomes after four years of regression under former president Jair Bolsonaro.
According to the Brazilian Federal Police, Bruno Heller is one of Amazon's largest deforesters and relied on legal and technical advice, including a fake contract, bribing police officers, and near-real-time monitoring of deforestation work through satellite imagery, investigators said.
The private sector is the largest single promoter of conventional development. Its lobbying organizations tend to be well-funded and staffed with competent individuals grounded in the analytical abilities of traditional…
The constituency for the conservation of the Pan Amazon is broad-based and diverse. Academics and civil society organizations have been successful in framing conservation of the Amazon as an issue…