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…
When it comes to environmental destruction in Brazil, the world’s focus tends to be on the deforestation and burning of the Amazon. Yet the Cerrado, the second-largest Brazilian biome, at…
Brasília National Forest is a Paris-sized oasis of green surrounded on three sides by concrete satellite cities that serve Brazil’s capital city. Extensive trails and expanses of forest make it…
Communities in the Intag Valley of Ecuador have won a significant legal victory after a court ruled to halt copper mining in one of the world’s most biodiverse forests. The…
PRADO, Bahia — Eliane de Oliveira Conceição heard the roar of gunfire before she could see who was firing. In the early hours of daylight, she could make out three…
In 2007, an NGO began linking up forest fragments in Brazil’s most at-risk biome. Today, Saving Nature has forest corridor projects underway on three continents. Part three of a three-part Mongabay mini-series on island habitat restoration.
Canadian mining company Aura Minerals plans to establish a major gold extraction project in Brazil’s Tocantins state without hearing the Quilombola (slave descendant) community that will be affected by the operations, thus violating their right to free, prior and informed consultation.
A Mongabay investigation into land-grabbing in the Brazilian Amazon has led to the suspension of the sustainability certificate of the country's second top palm oil exporter, as shown in email correspondence…
In the first half of the 20th century, Mennonite communities fled Europe for South America and, over the intervening decades, established large colonies in Latin American countries such as Mexico,…
Illegal deforestation, wildcat mining, drug trafficking, and lethal violence: Name your scourge and the Amazon Basin seldom disappoints. But as an unusual compact between police officers, prosecutors, environmental protectors, and…
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.…
Ancient forest fires seem to have played a role in enhancing resistance to drought in the Amazon, a recent study suggests. The research, published in Frontiers in Forests and Global…
