topic: Violence

topic: Violence

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Mongabay investigation spurs Brazil crackdown on illegal cattle in Amazon’s Arariboia territory
- An ongoing Brazilian government operation launched in February has removed between 1,000 and 2,000 illegal head of cattle from the Arariboia Indigenous Territory in the Amazon Rainforest.
- In June 2024, Mongabay published the results of a yearlong investigation, revealing that large portions of the Arariboia territory have been taken over for commercial cattle ranching, in violation of the Constitution; the project received funding and editorial support from the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network.
- “Your report is very similar to what we’re actually finding in the field. It showed an accurate reality and this helped us a lot in practical terms,” Marcos Kaingang, national secretary for Indigenous territorial rights at the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, told Mongabay in a video interview.
- The investigation also revealed details that authorities said they hadn’t been aware of, including the illegal shifting of the territory’s border markers, Kaingang said: “We brought it up as an important point in our discussions and we verified that the [markers] had in fact been changed.”

Photos: Colombia’s Indigenous Nasa push back against cultural loss to reconnect with nature
- Ofelia Opocué, a Nasa elder, was forced to leave her community in southwestern Colombia 23 years ago, and is now reviving her culture by creating an Indigenous governing body and bringing back the Saakhelu ritual.
- The ritual celebrates life and Mother Earth, uniting Nasa people displaced by Colombia’s decades-long violent conflict through dance, music and planting seeds.
- Ofelia and her family are among the more than 5 million internally displaced people in the country, many of whom are Indigenous people.
- Indigenous communities are particularly vulnerable to cultural loss following displacement, as their cultural and spiritual practices are intricately tied to their ancestral lands, researchers say.

Pirates of the Pacific terrorize artisanal fishers on the Peruvian coast
- For more than 15 years, artisanal fishers in the Tumbes region of northwestern Peru have been plagued by an evil that seems straight out of an adventure book: pirate attacks.
- But this is no fiction: more than 20 fishers have been killed in the past 21 years during pirate attacks.
- To date, no one has been tried or even arrested for these crimes.
- Although the police dismantled a pirate gang in 2018, the situation hasn’t improved significantly, and fishers are forced to pay protection fees to the pirates.

Ecuador must improve conditions for uncontacted Indigenous communities, human rights court rules
- The Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) ruled that Ecuador violated numerous rights of the Tagaeri and Taromenane Indigenous peoples and failed to protect them from violent attacks.
- The nomadic Tagaeri and Taromenane rely on hunting and gathering in the Amazon Rainforest, but the area has also been an attractive location for oil development and logging.
- The court ruled that Ecuador must expand protection zones where the uncontacted Indigenous communities live and improve monitoring of threats in those areas.

Global “Honors” for Environmental Journalism (cartoon)

Dom Philips, Bruno Periera, Mukesh Chandrakar, Chhoeung Chheng — these are just a few environmental journalists among many who have been killed while doing exactly that: environmental reporting. Mongabay’s own Gerald Flynn was recently barred from Cambodia on January 5th, 2025, despite having a valid visa and work permit. Flynn’s deportation appears to be retaliation […]
Mongabay series on illegal timber and cattle wins honorable mention in Brazil journalism prize

Blood Timber, a Mongabay series on illegal logging and cattle ranching in the eastern Brazilian Amazon, has received an honorable mention at the recent Banrisul ARI Journalism Award, a prize recognizing excellence in journalism in Brazil. The three-part series by journalist Karla Mendes revealed a correlation between environmental crimes and killings of Indigenous Guajajara people, […]
No justice in sight for World Bank project-affected communities in Liberia
- With one year delay, the International Finance Corporation has submitted its response to an investigation of human rights violations at a rubber project in Liberia to the World Bank’s board.
- While the case was pending, Socfin, the parent company of Salala Rubber Corporation, sold the plantation, creating uncertainty over its commitment to taking responsibility for failures identified by the IFC’s Compliance Advisor Ombudsman.
- Affected communities and civil society in Liberia say the IFC has watered down recommendations from its ombudsman and fear the change of ownership will prevent accountability.

NGOs raise concerns over Borneo pilot of ‘jurisdictional’ certification for palm oil
- A new report by a coalition of Indonesian environmental groups reiterates concerns over a long-running trial of “jurisdictional” certification conducted by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).
- The trial underway in Seruyan district, Central Kalimantan province, intends to apply the RSPO standards to the entire district, rather than the more costly, but more specific, vetting of individual plantations or corporate entities.
- A 2017 investigation by Mongabay and The Gecko Project documented how former Seruyan leader Darwan Ali blanketed the district in oil palm plantation concessions beginning in the mid-2000s, issuing licenses to many companies set up in the name of his relatives and cronies.
- Civil society researchers say they worry that a jurisdictional certificate for Seruyan could gloss over long-standing and ongoing land conflicts, and that the palm oil produced from such plantations could enter “green” supply chains.

Mongabay series on palm oil wins national journalism prize in Brazil

The Mongabay series “Palm Oil War,” published between 2021 to 2023, won second place in the text category of Brazil’s National Federal Prosecutor’s Journalism Prize, one of the nation’s most prestigious impact journalism awards. The announcement that Mongabay’s investigative journalist Karla Mendes had won the award was made during a live ceremony on Nov. 23 […]
‘Trump is a disease’, says Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa
- In addition to being a shaman, Davi Kopenawa is a shaman and a political leader active in denouncing the gold miners who illegally invaded the Yanomami Indigenous Land, in the Brazilian Amazon.
- The Yanomami, who inhabit Brazil’s largest Indigenous Land, still face a humanitarian and health crisis, worsened by the invasion of 70,000 illegal miners. Increased under the Jair Bolsonaro government, the invasion brought diseases and contaminated rivers with mercury.
- In this interview, Kopenawa criticizes the environmental and social impacts of administrations led by politicians such as Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump.

‘Five years and no justice’ as trial over Indigenous forest guardian’s killing faces delays
- Nov. 1 marked the five-year anniversary of the killing of Indigenous forest guardian Paulo Paulino Guajajara and the attempted killing of fellow guardian Laércio Guajajara in an alleged ambush by loggers in the Arariboia Indigenous Territory in the Brazilian Amazon; the suspects haven’t been tried yet.
- Between 1991 and 2023, 38 Indigenous Guajajara were killed in Arariboia; none of the perpetrators have been brought to trial.
- Paulo’s case will be a legal landmark as the first killing of an Indigenous leader to go before a federal jury; as Mongabay reported a year ago, the start of the trial was contingent on an anthropological report of the collective damages to the Indigenous community as a result of the crimes.
- However, the report has yet to be made, given several issues that delayed the trial, including the change of judge, the long time to choose the expert to prepare the report and get the expert’s quote, and the reluctance from the Federal Attorney General’s Office (AGU) to pay for the report.

The underreported killing of Colombia’s Indigenous land guardian, ‘The Wolf’ (Photos)
- Carlos Andrés Ascué Tumbo, a 30-year-old Indigenous land guardian and educator, was the 115th social leader killed in Colombia this year.
- He served as a member of the Kiwe Thegnas (or Indigenous Guard of Cauca) and protected the communities’ forests, land and youth from illegal armed groups and coca cultivation.
- The Indigenous territory and land surrounding it has become a hub for drug trafficking causing deforestation and land degradation.
- Mongabay spoke with members of Carlos’ family and community to gather more information on the underreported details of his life and killing.

In Colombia, guerrilla groups decide the fate of the Amazon
- One of Colombia’s biggest active FARC dissident groups is the Central Armed Command (EMC), controlling much of the Amazon rainforest in the departments of Guaviare, Meta and Caquetá.
- Some experts argue that there’s a direct correlation between the EMC’s actions and deforestation trends in the Amazon. Between 2022 and 2023, deforestation dropped by 51% when the group was cooperating with government peace talks.
- With those peace talks breaking down, deforestation is on the rise again. Critics are calling on the government to prioritize the environment in future negotiations.

Police murder Guarani man as Brazil struggles with Indigenous land demarcation
- Neri Ramos de Silva, a 23-year-old Guarani Kaiowá man, was shot in the back of the head by military police in the southwestern state of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, where the Ñande Ru Marangatu territory overlaps with private property.
- The violence has refocused attention on the country’s slow land demarcation process and the unsafe conditions it has created for Guarani and other Indigenous people.
- The Guarani Kaiowá have been trying to demarcate their land since the early 2000s but ran into delays because of the “time frame” law, which only allows reclamation for Indigenous communities who were physically present on land as of 1988, when the new constitution restored democracy.

Indigenous peoples won in court — but in practice, they face a different reality
- State implementation of international court rulings favoring Indigenous peoples and their access to land remain very low, lawyers say; in many cases, information on progress toward rulings is murky.
- Mongabay found that of the 57 rulings by the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights mentioned in a 2023 report, 52 of them had no update on implementation.
- States can be unwilling to implement rulings or can run into difficulties putting them into practice due to lack of resources, the need to create new laws or unexpected conflicts created when restituting land.
- Though complicated, international court systems are considered a lifeline for Indigenous communities that face land rights abuses, and better monitoring and enforcement mechanisms are needed to improve the system, advocates and Indigenous leaders say.

Report links killings to environmental crimes in Peru’s Amazon
- A new report from the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) says the Peruvian Amazon is experiencing a rise in murders against environmental defenders, most of which are related to illegal activities such as mining, logging and coca cultivation.
- Between 2010 and 2022, an estimated 29 environmental defenders were killed in the region.
- The frequency of killings has increased in recent years, with almost half taking place after 2020.
- Indigenous leaders and researchers said many of these killings remain unsolved while the state remains largely absent in protecting communities in these remote regions.

Why is violence against environmental defenders getting worse? Five things to know
- Global Witness’s latest annual report shows that at least 196 people were killed last year defending the environment, up from 177 killed in 2022.
- Latin America is still the most violent region for defenders, with 166 killed in 2023. But other regions have been showing worrying trends, as well.
- The report calls for better data collection and transparency, which could help identify who is being targeted with violence and how.

Peruvian logger loses FSC label after latest clash with isolated Mashco Piro
- The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) has suspended the certification of Maderera Canales Tahuamanu (MCT), a logging company whose concession borders Madre de Dios Territorial Reserve in the Peruvian Amazon.
- The company is accused of encroaching on the traditional territory of the Mashco Piro, an Indigenous group that lives in voluntary isolation and went viral after video captured the tribe on a beach.
- The suspension follows an incident in which at least two loggers were shot dead with arrows, one injured and several others are missing during a confrontation with the Mashco Piro.
- The FSC suspension takes effect Sept. 13 and will last eight months — a move Indigenous rights advocates say is welcome but short of the full cancelation they deem necessary to protect the isolated tribe.

In Vietnam, environmental defense is increasingly a crime
- In the past two years, six prominent environmental defenders have been imprisoned in Vietnam, sending a chill across civil society in the one-party state.
- In the past, activists in Vietnam were often charged with spreading anti-state propaganda. More recently, ambiguous tax laws have been used against environmental experts and advocates, and 2023 saw the use of a novel charge: misappropriation of state documents.
- Analysts say the moves against environment defenders are part of an effort to clamp down on civil society in general, and environmental activism in particular, due to fears that such movements could serve as an engine for broad-based organizing outside of party control.

Mexican fishing industry rep killed after denouncing illegal fishing
- Minerva Pérez Castro, the Baja California representative for the Mexican fishing industry’s main trade group, was killed in July after speaking out against the presence of organized crime in the fishing industry.
- Sophisticated organized crime groups have long participated in illegal fishing in northern Mexico, one of the most important producing areas for the country’s prominent fishing industry.
- The residences of several suspects have been searched, according to the Attorney General of the State of Baja California.

Environmental protests under attack: Interview with UN special rapporteur Michel Forst
- The repression that environmental activists using peaceful civil disobedience are facing in Europe is a major threat to democracy and human rights, according to U.N. special rapporteur Michel Forst.
- The 2016 Dakota Pipeline protests, led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, not only triggered a major crackdown but also a flood of anti-protest legislation in the U.S.
- Environmental defenders are increasingly stigmatized as criminals or terrorists in the public arena, which may lead to a spike in verbal and even physical violence.
- In Germany, laws of the past that were meant to deal with terrorist outfits such as the Rote Armee Fraktion were used to deal with the environmental group Letzte Generation (Last Generation).

Forced evictions suppress Maasai spirituality & sacred spaces in Tanzania
- In March, the Tanzanian government issued a new round of eviction notices impacting Maasai communities: The first one was issued in Simanjiro district for the expansion of Tarangire National Park while the second was issued to eight villages for the expansion of the Kilimanjaro International Airport.
- Maasai elders and spiritual leaders say they fear and disapprove of the Tanzanian government’s decision of eviction that has disrupted their spiritual connection with their ancestral lands with about 70 sacred sites impacted since 2009.
- Sacred spaces are the pieces of land, rivers, water sources, oreteti trees, mountains and places designated by their ancestors as areas to carry out specific rituals and ceremonies.
- So far, more than 20,000 Maasai have been evicted from their lands, with some resisting and claiming compensation is dissatisfactory.

Revealed: Illegal cattle ranching booms in Arariboia territory during deadly year for Indigenous Guajajara
- Commercial cattle ranching is banned on Indigenous territories in Brazil, but a year-long investigation reveals that large portions of the Arariboia Indigenous Territory have been used for ranching amid a record-high number of killings of the region’s Indigenous Guajajara people.
- A clear rise in environmental crimes became evident in the region during the middle of 2023, including an unlicensed airstrip and illegal deforestation on the banks of the Buriticupu River, which is key for Guajajara people’s livelihoods.
- With four Guajajara people killed and three others surviving attempts on their lives, 2023 marked the deadliest 12 months for Indigenous people in Arariboia in seven years, rivaling the number of killings in 2016, 2008 and 2007.
- The findings show a pattern of targeted killings of the Guajajara amid the expansion of illegal cattle ranching and logging in and around Arariboia: areas with the most violent incidents coincide with the tracked activities and with police operations aimed at curbing illegal logging.

UNESCO accused of supporting human rights abuses in African parks
- For years, human rights organizations have accused UNESCO of being either inattentive or complicit in the illegal evictions of communities and allegations of torture, rape and murder in several World Heritage Sites.
- These sites include biodiversity hotspots in Africa, including the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in Tanzania and the Odzala-Kokoua National Park in the Republic of Congo.
- Although UNESCO is not participating in these human rights abuses itself, organizations say, a few aspects of the agency’s policies and structure allow abuses to happen: lack of solid mechanisms to enforce human rights obligations, its requests for countries to control population growth in heritage sites and the agency’s internal politics.
- UNESCO strongly contests the statements made against the World Heritage Convention and Committee, which has made stronger human rights commitments, and says such multilateral institutions are in fact the best allies to defend human rights.

Narco activity takes heavy toll on Colombia’s protected forests, satellite data show
- Deforestation inside protected areas in central Colombia appears to be picking up pace this year, suggesting the steep drop-off from 2022-2023 was just a blip, according to satellite data.
- The most affected areas include Llanos del Yarí Yaguara II Indigenous Reserve, two national natural parks — Sierra de la Macarena and Tinigua — and the surrounding La Macarena Special Management Area.
- Threats to the region and its protected areas include agricultural expansion, along with the cultivation of illegal crops such as coca and marijuana, and illegal gold mining.
- The region’s protected areas are increasingly falling under the control of armed groups emboldened and funded by the drug industry, according to monitoring agencies and local residents interviewed by Mongabay.

Mongabay video screening at Chile’s Supreme Court expected to help landmark verdict in Brazil
- The recent screening of a Mongabay video before Chile’s Supreme Court has intensified international scrutiny of the killing of 26-year-old Indigenous leader Paulo Paulino Guajajara in Brazil 2019 — a case for which no one has yet gone on trial in Brazil.
- Alfredo Falcão, the Brazilian federal prosecutor leading the case, said he hopes the international exposure, part of a workshop for UNESCO’s World Press Freedom Day Conference in Santiago, will put pressure on the Brazilian judiciary to schedule a long-awaited federal jury trial.
- The trial of Paulo’s case is expected to set a legal landmark as the first killing of an Indigenous land defender to go before a federal jury; it was escalated to that level because it was considered an aggression against the entire Guajajara community and Indigenous culture.
- Prosecutors plan to use excerpts from the Mongabay video and accompanying articles in the trial, whose schedule remains undetermined pending an anthropological report on the impacts to the Guajajara people as a result of Paulo’s killing.

Rights groups call for greater public input in ASEAN environmental rights framework
- Civil society and Indigenous rights groups are calling for greater public participation and transparency in the drafting process of what they say could be a pivotal agreement to protect environmental rights and defenders in Southeast Asia.
- The Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) declaration on environmental rights was initially envisioned as a legally binding framework, but the scaling back of the level of commitment to a nonbinding declaration has raised concerns among observers.
- Groups are calling for an extension of the public consultation period, which lasted for only one month, and greater commitments to address key issues in the region, such as strengthening Indigenous rights, access to environmental information and justice, and clarifying mechanisms for resolving transboundary development impacts.
- If the treaty remains non-legally binding, its ultimate success will depend largely on the political will of each separate ASEAN state and on the continued efforts of civil society to hold their governments accountable.

Apologies aren’t enough, Indigenous people say of Brazil dictatorship’s crimes
- After the Brazilian state apologized for the crimes perpetrated during the military dictatorship, the Krenak and Guarani-Kaiowá Indigenous peoples are demanding the demarcation of their territories.
- The Krenak were tortured during the military regime, while the Guarani-Kaiowá were enslaved by farmers; both were forced from their lands.
- Violations also affected Indigenous peoples such as the Avá-Canoeiro, who were driven to the brink of extinction by years of persecution.

Forest officer’s killing highlights Bangladesh authorities’ waning power
- The recent killing of a forest officer by illegal quarriers in Bangladesh has raised questions about the effectiveness of law enforcement amid intensifying encroachment into protected forests.
- Sajjaduzzaman, 30, was struck by the quarriers’ truck after confronting them for digging up a hillside in the southern district of Cox’s Bazar.
- Attacks on forest officers by people illegally logging, quarrying, hunting or carrying out other forms of natural resource extraction are a long-running problem, with around 140 officers attacked over the past five years.
- Experts have called for a more coordinated approach from various government law enforcement agencies to support the Forest Department in keeping encroachers out of protected areas.

Alis Ramírez: A defender of the Colombian Amazon now living as a refugee in New Zealand
- Because of her opposition to mining, indiscriminate logging in forests and the social and environmental consequences of oil exploration, María Alis Ramírez was forced to abandon her farm in Caquetá, in southern Colombia, and move across the world.
- The various threats she received because of her work as an environmental defender forced her and her family to first move to New Zealand, where she arrived as a refugee in 2019.
- According to reports by human rights organization Global Witness, Colombia is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for environmental and land defenders.
- In New Zealand, she says she can live with a sense of tranquility that would be impossible in Colombia. Although Alis Ramírez is now safe, she has not stopped thinking about her country, the jungle and the river that was alongside her throughout her childhood.

World Bank’s IFC under fire over alleged abuses at Liberian plantation it funded
- An investigation into the International Finance Corporation’s handling of human rights abuses at a project it financed in Liberia, the Salala Rubber Corporation, is expected to severely incriminate the World Bank’s private lending arm.
- The World Bank’s Compliance Advisory Ombudsman investigated whether the IFC did enough to address allegations of gender-based violence, land grabbing and unfair compensation by its client, Socfin, between 2008 and 2020.
- It’s anticipated that the report will find the finance institution didn’t act to prevent Socfin from violating its legal obligations to local communities and protect the environment; this finding would follow closely on a damning report into similar failures to hold another IFC client, Bridge International Schools in Kenya, to account
- The IFC missed a February deadline to respond to the CAO report and submit an action plan; the delay comes as a new remedial action framework for the IFC is due to be finalized and released

Locals slam Zimbabwe for turning a blind eye to Chinese miner’s violations
- Mining workers and villagers near the Bikita Minerals lithium mine in Zimbabwe accuse the government and Chinese mining company Sinomine Resource Group of sidelining environmental and social standards in the scramble for lithium.
- After a series of displacements, spills, labor abuses, a death, and little action by authorities, locals and experts accuse the government of failing to enforce its own laws and letting bad mining practices run loose.
- According to industry experts, in theory, Chinese investments come with an increasingly robust set of ESG standards, but in practice these aren’t followed if host countries “shy away” from making such demands from their new partners.
- Zimbabwe, under economic stress, holds Africa’s largest lithium reserves and sees potential for an economic boost from mining the critical mineral, which represents the country’s fastest growing industry, with companies from China as the largest share of investors

Maydany Salcedo: the environmental defender who catches the ire of armed groups
- In southwestern Colombia, Maydany Salcedo, 49, faces constant threats to her life and that of her family due to her opposition to illegal activities of armed groups in the region.
- She founded Asimtracampic, an organization that works to ensure that no more coca (an addictive plant which cocaine is derived from) is planted in the region, and that deforestation does not increase.
- The organization opposes the expansion of the agricultural frontier in the Amazon, illicit crops, oil pollution, deforestation and all activities that pose a risk to the environment and territory.
- A victim of the constant violence in the region since she was raped by guerillas as a child, Salcedo is under 24/7 security protection. Despite these threats, she has not abandoned her dream of creating biological corridors for the vulnerable species that live in Piamonte, among which include the Caquetá titi monkey, which is endemic to the region.

African Parks vows to investigate allegations of abuse at Congolese park
- In late January, the Daily Mail published allegations that rangers working with African Parks at Odzala-Kokoua park in the Republic of Congo had beaten and raped Baka community members.
- In a statement, African Parks said it had hired the U.K.-based law firm Omnia Strategy to investigate the allegations, which were raised in a letter sent to a board member by the advocacy group Survival International last year.
- African Parks said it became aware of the allegations through that letter, but in 2022, a local civil society group in the Republic of Congo released a statement accusing rangers of committing “acts of torture.”

From murder to mining, threats abound in Colombian Amazon Indigenous reserves
- A reporting team has analyzed the impact of environmental crimes in 320 Indigenous reserves that are part of the Colombian Amazon biome. According to Global Forest Watch, more than 19,000 hectares (more than 47,000 acres) of tree cover were lost in 218 of these reserves in 2022.
- Illegal coca crops were also recorded in 88 reserves, with illegal mining-related impacts reported in at least 10 reserves.
- Illegal groups that exercise territorial control with weapons are threatening Indigenous governance and keeping inhabitants confined to their territories.

Grassroots efforts and an Emmy-winning film help Indigenous fight in Brazil
- The 2022 documentary “The Territory” won an Emmy award this January, shining a light on the Uru-eu-wau-wau Indigenous people and the invasions, conflicts and threats from land grabbers in their territory in the Brazilian Amazon from 2018 to 2021.
- After years of increasing invasions and deforestation in the protected area, experts say the situation has slowly improved in the past three years, and both Indigenous and government officials in the region “feel a little safer.”
- Grassroots surveillance efforts, increased visibility of the problems, and a more effective federal crackdown against invaders have helped tackle illegal land occupiers and allowed the Indigenous populations to take their land back.
- Despite the security improvements, however, the territory still struggles against invasions and deforestation within the region, experts say.

Jokowi’s land reform agenda stalls as conflicts nearly double, report shows
- Land conflicts in Indonesia have nearly doubled under President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo as his administration pursues an investor-first economic agenda that has sidelined local communities and the environment, a new report shows.
- There were 2,939 pending disputes affecting 1.75 million households in the nine years to date of the Jokowi administration, compared to 1,520 disputes involving 977,000 households during the 10 years of the previous administration.
- The report by the Consortium for Agrarian Reform (KPA) says the government has largely failed in its reform agenda, having previously promised to register community-owned lands and redistribute expired concessions back to communities.
- A key driver of land disputes are infrastructure projects that the Jokowi administration has designated as projects of “national strategic importance,” which gives the government eminent domain rights to evict entire communities.

Courage & calm despite attacks: Q&A with Colombian activist Yuly Velásquez
- For years, Colombia’s largest oil refinery, owned by the national oil company Ecopetrol, has discharged oil and toxic waste into water bodies, impacting fish and the livelihoods of fishers.
- Yuly Velásquez, a local fisher and president of an environmental organization, has spent years documenting water contamination and corruption linked to the refinery, and she faces consistent threats and attacks.
- According to a 2022 report by the NGO Global Witness, Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world for environmental and land defenders, with 60 murders that year.
- In this interview with Mongabay, she discusses the threats environmental defenders face in Colombia and what helps her stay resilient in the face of attacks.

Promise of full demarcation for isolated Amazon tribe rings hollow for some
- The 23-year struggle to declare a territory for the isolated Kawahiva people of the Brazilian Amazon could finally conclude this year after the government announced the closing stages of the demarcation process will begin soon.
- The physical demarcation will formally define the boundaries of the 412,000-hectare (1.02-million-acre) territory in Mato Grosso state, home to some 45-50 Kawahiva, which is a crucial step before a presidential declaration recognizing the Indigenous territory.
- However, some Indigenous experts remain skeptical the territory will ever be fully demarcated in the face of ever-present delays and structural problems within the Indigenous affairs agency.
- The territory sits within the “Arc of Deforestation” in the southern part of the Brazilian Amazon, which is slowly moving north as cattle ranchers, miners, loggers and soy growers clear forest for more land.

Shrinking civil space and persistent logging: 2023 in review in Southeast Asia
- Home to the third-largest expanse of tropical rainforest and some of the world’s fastest-growing economies, Southeast Asia has seen conservation wins and losses over the course of 2023.
- The year was characterized by a rising trend of repression against environmental and Indigenous defenders that cast a shadow of fear over the work of activists in many parts of the region.
- Logging pressure in remaining tracts of forest remained intense, and an El Niño climate pattern brought regional haze crises generated by forest fires and agricultural burning returned.
- But some progress was made on several fronts: Most notably, increasing understanding of the benefits and methods of ecosystem restoration underpinned local, national and regional efforts to bring back forests, mangroves and other crucial sanctuaries of biodiversity.

Reports allege abuses by Glencore in Peru and Colombia, and the banks funding them
- Mining giant Glencore continues to commit serious environmental and human rights violations in its mines in Peru and Colombia despite public promises to respect human rights and the environment, according to three news reports by advocacy organizations.
- The reports document cases of air and water pollution, extensive environmental damage, lack of consultation with communities, and restricting access to land.
- European banks and investors, including Groupe BPCE, HSBC, Abrdn and BNP Paribas, hold the largest investments in Glencore, pumping $44.2 billion into the company between 2016 and 2023.
- Glencore denies the allegations made against it and says it has continued to make progress on its climate targets and remains on track to meet its environmental and human rights commitments.

Violent evictions are latest ordeal for Kenya’s Ogiek seeking land rights
- On Nov. 2, a joint force of the police, the Kenya Forest Service and the Kenya Wildlife Service moved to evict 700 Ogiek households from the edges of the Maasai Mau Forest.
- But the African Court on Human and People’s Rights had in 2017 ordered the government to recognize the Ogiek claim to the forest, involve them in its management, and pay damages for earlier evictions.
- The government still hasn’t acted on the court’s rulings, instead accusing the Ogiek of responsibility for the destruction of as much as 2,800 hectares (7,000 acres) of forest.
- But the African Court found no evidence the Ogiek are responsible for this damage, and Ogiek leaders want collective titles to the forest to be formally granted, so the group’s members can live in peace on their ancestral land.

‘The police are watching’: In Mekong countries, eco defenders face rising risks
- Activists, journalists, environmental lawyers and others who raise attention for environmental issues in the Mekong region say they feel threatened by authoritarian governments.
- Environment defenders say they feel under surveillance and at risk both in their home countries and abroad.
- The risks they face include violence and arrests, as well as state-backed harassment such as asset freezes and smear campaigns.

Colombian Amazon park rangers face violence, threats by illegal armed groups
- In the last five years, at least 15 threats have been reported against the park rangers who guard the protected areas of the Colombian Amazon. Other issues include the transfer of personnel due to violence, the burning and looting of five control checkpoints and several deaths between 2008 and 2011.
- By overlapping data from the organization Indepaz about the presence of illegal armed groups and the locations of protected areas in the Colombian Amazon, it was determined that these groups are present in 35 of the 39 municipalities that include protected areas. In some cases, FARC dissidents ordered park rangers to leave and declared them “military objectives.”
- In four Amazonian protected areas, almost 2.5 tons of cocaine were seized between 2017 and 2022, after the signing of the peace agreement.

Safety of Peru’s land defenders in question after killing of Indigenous leader in the Amazon
- Quinto Inuma was killed on November 29 while traveling to the Santa Rosillo de Yanayacu community in Peru’s Amazon following a meeting of environmental defenders.
- For years, the Indigenous Kichwa leader had been receiving threats for his work trying to stop invasions, land trafficking, drug trafficking and illegal logging in his community, forcing him to rely on protection measures from the Ministry of Justice.
- After Inuma’s death, a group of 128 Indigenous communities released a statement appealing for justice and holding the Peruvian state reponsible for its inaction and ineffectivtieness in protecting the lives of human rights defenders in Indigenous territories. Several other Indigenous leaders who receive threats have requested protection measures from the state but have not gotten a response.
- According to an official in the Ministry of Justice, providing the Kichwa leader with protection measures was very complex because he lived in a high-risk area. The only thing that could be done, they said, is to provide permanent police protection, which wasn’t possible for the local police.

End of impunity for Indigenous killings in sight for Brazil’s Guajajara
- Indigenous forest guardian Paulo Paulino Guajajara was killed in November 2019 in an alleged ambush by illegal loggers in the Arariboia Indigenous Territory in Brazil’s Maranhão state.
- Mongabay’s Karla Mendes, who interviewed Paulo for a documentary film nine months before his death, returned to Arariboia in August 2023 to talk with his family and the other guardian who survived the attack, Laércio Guajajara, and shine a light on a case that still hasn’t gone to trial after four years.
- “If those invaders had managed to kill us both, me and Paulo, they were going to hide us in the forest. Who would find us? Nobody was ever going to find me or Paulo again in a forest of that size,” Laércio says of his will to warn the guardians about Paulo’s murder, even as he suffered four gunshot wounds.
- Justice may soon be on the horizon for the Guajajara people: Paulo’s case will be the first killing of an Indigenous defender that will go before a federal jury, likely in the first half of 2024, after a court in late October denied a motion by those accused to try the case in state court.

The trial that could change the fate of the Guajajara

ARARIBOIA INDIGENOUS TERRITORY, Brazil — In November 2019, Paulo Paulino Guajajara, a dedicated “Guardian of the Forest,” was tragically murdered in an ambush allegedly orchestrated by loggers in Brazil’s Maranhão state. As a member of the Indigenous Guajajara community in the Arariboia Territory, Paulo played a crucial role in protecting not only his people but also […]
‘We won’t give up’: DRC’s Front Line Defenders award winner Olivier Ndoole Bahemuke
- Olivier Ndoole Bahemuke, Africa winner of the 2023 Front Line Defenders Award, is an environmental lawyer and community activist.
- He has spent 15 years working in defense of communities in and around Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
- Because of his activism in a region dominated by armed conflict and the illicit exploitation of natural resources, including gold and coltan, his life has been threatened on numerous occasions and he currently lives in exile.
- Defending the environment is becoming increasingly dangerous: Nearly half of the 194 human rights defenders killed in 2022 were environmental defenders.

Kenyan government again evicts Ogiek communities from Mau Forest
- On Nov. 2, the Kenyan government began demolishing houses and evicting Indigenous Ogiek from the Maasai Mau Forest.
- The evictions are taking place despite a 2017 ruling by an African court of human rights that acknowledged the Ogiek’s claim to the forest as well as their traditional role in preserving it.
- Kenya Forest Service officials say they are acting against people who are living and farming in the forest illegally.

Indonesian police slammed after protester demanding rightful land is shot dead
- Indonesian police have reportedly shot dead one protester and injured two others in a flareup of yet another land dispute between communities and outside investors.
- Residents of the mostly Indigenous Dayak village of Bangkal in Central Kalimantan province have since Sept. 16 protested over palm oil company HMBP’s failure to allocate land to them as required by law.
- Police claim the protesters attacked security forces in the Oct. 7 clash, but video and witness accounts from the ground strongly suggest otherwise.
- Activists say the Bangkal case is emblematic of how the Indonesian government prioritizes commercial interests over those of communities, including using excessive force against protesters.

New online map tracks threats to uncontacted Indigenous peoples in Brazil’s Amazon
- Mobi, a new online interactive map, draws information from public databases, government statistics and field observations to paint a comprehensive picture of the threats that uncontacted Indigenous peoples face in the Brazilian Amazon.
- The exact location of uncontacted communities is deliberately displaced on the map to avoid any subsequent attacks against them from those who engage in illegal activity in or near their territories.
- The tool can help Indigenous agencies deploy more effective protective actions to fend off threats such as diseases and environmental destruction, which can wipe out vulnerable populations.
- Activists hope the platform will help create a vulnerability index that ranks uncontacted populations according to the severity of threats against them, which can promote stronger public policies.

10 years after land grab, local Nigerian farmers continue fight against palm oil producer
- A decade after transnational palm oil company Wilmar took control of a derelict oil palm plantation, local residents continue to fight for the farmlands, forests and rivers they use.
- The government leased land from several local communities in 1962, but abandoned it in the 1970s.
- In 2012, against the backdrop of a drive to expand Nigeria’s palm oil production, the land was transferred to Wilmar in a move bitterly resisted by local residents.
- Critics say expanding oil palm plantations are accelerating deforestation and local residents complain that Wilmar has encroached on their farms and wastewater from the plantation has contaminated watercourses.

Who were the 11 Philippines environmental defenders killed in 2022?
- The Philippines is now Asia’s deadliest country for land and environmental defenders, recording 281 deaths in the last decade, with roughly one-third linked to mining, according to Global Witness.
- Despite a decline in attacks from 29 in 2020 to 11 in 2022, advocates argue that the current administration has not sufficiently addressed human rights violations and continues to engage in “red-tagging” or labeling defenders as terrorists.
- In 2022, the killed defenders were deemed insurgents and died in “encounters” with state forces, yet their families and organizations argue they were civilian advocates for the environment, climate and farmers and Indigenous peoples’ rights.
- The Philippine Commission on Human Rights, an independent government body, considered red-tagging as “a systematic attack” on human rights defenders and urged the government to enact a law safeguarding them and their communities.

Video: Five Tembé Indigenous activists shot in Amazonian ‘palm oil war’
- In just 72 hours, five Indigenous people were wounded by gunfire in violent attacks in the past few days in a part of the Brazilian Amazon dubbed the “palm oil war” region, sparking outrage and claims for justice.
- This was the latest episode in a wave of escalating violence tied to land disputes between Indigenous communities and palm oil companies in the region, which Mongabay has consistently reported on over the past year.
- In this video, Mongabay showcases the Tembé Indigenous peoples’ outrage against increasing violence in the area as they protest for justice.

Indigenous activists demand justice after 5 shot in Amazonian ‘palm oil war’
- Between Aug. 4 and Aug. 7, security guards for a palm oil company allegedly shot and wounded five Tembé Indigenous people, in the latest flareup linked to a long-running land dispute.
- The incidents occurred in a part of the Amazonian state of Pará that’s been dubbed the “palm oil war” region, where Mongabay has over the past year documented the escalating tensions.
- Pará’s State Department of Public Security and Social Defense said the security guard identified as the mastermind of the initial shooting has been arrested, and inquiries to identify the other suspects are ongoing, along with increased security in the area.
- Palm oil company Brasil BioFuels S.A. (BBF) has denied the accusations, saying the Indigenous people had invaded part of its property and initiated the attack on its private security officers during an attempt to evict them.

Killing of U.S. biologist adds to rising violence against scientists in Mexico
- Gabriel Trujillo, a biologist from the U.S. with roots in Mexico, was shot and killed in the northeastern state of Sonora, Mexico, while collecting plant samples for his Ph.D. research.
- It’s the third fatal incident committed against researchers studying the environment in different parts of Mexico in recent years.
- Biologists from California and Sonora received threats just for looking for Trujillo, who was a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley.

Element Africa: Ghanaian communities challenge mining regulation and Shell spills more oil in the Niger Delta
- Anger rises as Shell pipeline contaminates river and farms in southeastern Nigeria.
- Activists call for new mining legislation to be scrapped as Ghana’s government grants license to mine gold in a forest reserve.
- Also in Ghana, residents march in protest against a community mining scheme.
- Element Africa is Mongabay’s bi-weekly bulletin of brief stories from the extractives industry in Africa.

Climate of fear persists among Nepal’s eco defenders as threats rise
- Environmental human rights defenders in Nepal continue to fear for their safety and lives amid a lack of protection from the government, a new report shows.
- It found that despite rising threats to the environment, Nepal doesn’t have specific legislation to define who defenders are, their work, or the measures of protection they need.
- It also found that women defenders, in particular, were more likely to experience domestic violence and sexual assault because of their work, as well as excluded from decision-making processes and participation in public life.
- Some of the respondents in the study cited the January 2020 killing of Dilip Mahato, a critic of illegal sand mining in Dhanusha district: “People pay attention … only when they get killed.”

Alleged torturers roam free as Indonesia struggles to bring charges in palm oil slavery case
- Prosecutors in Indonesia have still not charged the majority of men implicated in a slave-labor scandal at a local official’s oil palm plantation.
- The New York Times reported that only 13 of some 60 men, including military and police officers, remain free despite dozens of victims and witnesses accusing them of human trafficking and torture.
- The official, Terbit Rencana Perangin-angin, was jailed last year in a bribery case but never charged in the human trafficking case for enslaving the victims under the guise of a drug rehabilitation program.
- Prosecutor said a reliance on local police investigators whose own colleagues had participated in the forced-labor scheme had impeded their work.

Element Africa: offshore oil threatens fisheries, gold mining topples homes and forests
- Mensin Gold’s mine at Bibiani threatens Ghanaian villagers’ health and homes.
- Fishers fear impacts of cross-border oil and gas exploration in waters shared by Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea.
- Illegal miners in a forest reserve in Ghana are brazenly shooting back at law enforcement agents.
- Element Africa is Mongabay’s bi-weekly bulletin of brief stories from the extractives industry in Africa.

Indigenous groups turn to Brazil’s highest court to stop police violence
- Brazil’s largest coalition of Indigenous groups has filed a motion with the country’s highest court in response to escalating police brutality against Indigenous peoples in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul.
- In the first seven months of 2022, 759 violent incidents with police were recorded, involving a total of 113,654 families and 33 killings in land-related conflicts in rural areas of the country, marking a 150% increase from the first six months of 2021.
- Most cases of violence are tied to disputes over non-demarcation lands; Indigenous peoples, attempting to reclaim their ancestral territory, often run into conflicts with landowners, such as farmers or developers, which end in forceful police interventions.
- The Indigenous coalition is requesting the installation of GPS equipment and recording systems on security officers’ uniforms and vehicles, as well as measures aimed to improve their training and public protocols to protect human rights.

Indigenous chief shot in head in Brazil’s ‘palm oil war’ region; crisis group launched
- On May 14, Indigenous chief Lúcio Tembé was shot by gunmen on an unpaved road in Brazil’s northern Pará state. This is the latest episode of violence in an area facing an outbreak of land conflicts between a major palm oil company and local communities, the so-called “palm oil war.”
- The Federal Public Ministry raised the possibility of the crime’s connection to conflicts with palm oil companies in the region and requested urgent measures of the Federal Police and Pará’s State Department of Public Security and Social Defense (Segup) in view of the intense level of conflict in the region “with concrete risks to the Indigenous peoples’ life and physical integrity.”
- A crisis committee to contain escalating conflicts in the region was announced on May 16; the crime is being investigated by the Federal Police and the Quatro Bocas municipal police station, urging that any relevant information be forwarded via the hotline 181 under guaranteed confidentiality.
- Some readers may find the images below disturbing, discretion is advised.

Latin America had the most attacks on environmental defenders in 2022, says report
- Almost half of the 401 murders of human rights defenders recorded in 2022 were against people involved in the defense of land and environment, according to the most recent report by the organization Front Line Defenders.
- Latin America is the region with the highest number of cases of recorded violence against defenders.
- The countries with the most cases are Colombia, Mexico, Brazil and Honduras.
- The violence against rights defenders has not only included murders, but also stigmatization, prosecution and constant threats to individuals and their families, said the report.

Cambodian activists commemorate 11th anniversary of Chut Wutty’s murder
- April 26, 2023, marks 11 years since Cambodian environmental activist Chut Wutty was gunned down, with no one ever facing justice for his death.
- Wutty was a frequent thorn in the side of Cambodia’s ruling elite, both in the government and in the security forces, for his repeated exposés of their role in illegal logging.
- In a vigil and march in Cambodia to commemorate his death, fellow activists demanded the Ministry of Justice reopen the investigation into Wutty’s killing.
- They also denounced the killings, arrests and prosecutions of environmental activists in recent years as a message from the government to stop.

Violence escalates in Amazonian communities’ land conflict with Brazil palm oil firm
- Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian communities in Brazil’s Pará state have accused the country’s top palm oil exporter, Brasil BioFuels S.A. (BBF), of violence during attempts to repossess in a disputed area in the Acará region on April 12 and 16.
- The company denies the accusations, saying it’s the community leaders who attacked its employees, holding 30 of them “in private captivity for three full days due to the blocking of the road.”
- The Federal Public Ministry in Pará said it’s investigating the action of armed militias and private security companies in the region, and possible crimes and irregularities by palm oil companies.
- The Public Defender’s Office questioned the legitimacy of the injunction used to justify the repossession as it was issued by a civil court instead of the due agrarian court; a hearing with an agrarian judge is scheduled for April 28.

Indigenous Maasai ask the United Nations to intervene on reported human rights abuses
- Maasai delegates at the United Nations conference on Indigenous people are calling on the forum to increase pressure on the Tanzanian government to address evictions, forced displacement and thousands of seized cattle in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and Loliondo.
- Land disputes at both sites have been grinding on for years after the government revealed plans to lease the land to a UAE-based company to create a wildlife corridor for trophy hunting and elite tourism.
- Last year, the dispute reached a boiling point when Tanzanian police officers and authorities shot and beat dozens of Maasai villagers who protested the demarcation of their ancestral land. One Maasai man and one police officer have been killed.
- At the United Nations forum, a Tanzanian government representative rejected accusations brought against it, pointing to a recent court ruling in its favor and a visit by an African human rights commission.

Indigenous leader assassinated amid conflict over oil that divided community
- In February, Eduardo Mendúa, an Indigenous leader representing opposition to oil operations in his community, was killed by hitmen after suffering from 12 gunshot wounds.
- Mongabay looks into Eduardo Mendúa’s life and the oil conflict against the Ecuadorian state-owned oil company Petroecuador EP that divided his community and escalated into his murder.
- David Q., a member of the community faction in favor of oil operations, has been charged with allegedly co-perpetrating the crime by transporting the assassins to the scene.
- The incident worsens the fragile relationship between the Confederation of Indigenous Nations of Ecuador (CONAIE) and President Guillermo Lasso, with the former accusing the government and oil company of amplifying the community conflict.

Rainforest reporting: Journalists discuss the challenges & dangers of Amazonia
- We speak with journalists who have known and reported on Amazonia for years, and who also know the violence in the region like the back of their hands.
- Repórter Brasil’s Daniel Camargos speaks about how he adapted his way of working after the deaths of journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous specialist Bruno Pereira.
- Combat journalist Lúcio Flávio Pinto shares good memories of his extensive trajectory reporting directly from Amazonia.
- Finally, photojournalist Michael Dantas and Talita Bedinelli from Sumaúma tell of their coverage and experiences with the Yanomami people.

Indigenous Pataxó demand land demarcation amid rising violence and murders
- The Pataxó Indigenous people in southern Bahia state are experiencing a renewed wave of violence and orders to leave their communities after they began reoccupying part of their traditional lands last summer.
- They are looking to see if and how the new administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva can curb violence, mitigate land conflicts and demarcate their lands while standing up to powerful economic interests in the region, as state and local authorities are connected to the recent murders and violence.
- Without formal demarcation, agribusiness, ranching, eucalyptus and real estate development continue to encroach on their lands, which are in a legal limbo.
- The new Ministry of Indigenous Peoples has created a crisis desk to help deal with the escalating violence after two more Indigenous youth were killed in early 2023, but the Pataxó leaders say little has changed and they live in a state of constant threats and tension.

‘Impact assessments need a shake-up’: Q&A with Georgine Kengne & Morgan Hauptfleisch
- Environmental and social impact assessments as they’re implemented in development projects across Africa need a “shake-up” to ensure they’re fit for purpose, experts say.
- Georgine Kengne, from the WoMin African Alliance, says the ideal ESIA process would be one in which “the government and the mining company are not just colluding to make profits.”
- Morgan Hauptfleisch, a professor of nature conservation in Namibia, says the fundamental problem is that ESIAs and other safeguards can simply be ignored with little consequence other than fines that the companies just budget for anyway.
- Mongabay spoke with both Kengne and Hauptfleisch about ESIAs, community participation, and the underused tool that is the strategic environmental assessment (SEA).

Colombia, Ecuador announce alert system to protect Indigenous Awá from armed groups
- Colombia and Ecuador are implementing a system designed to alert about risks of violence against residents who live near the border, many of whom are Awá Indigenous people.
- Since last August, thousands of Awá have been forcibly displaced or suffered threats, intimidation, torture or forced recruitment by organized crime groups participating in drug trafficking and illegal mining.
- Many Awá live in extremely biodiverse areas that serve as corridors to other parts of the Amazon. But they’ve struggled to protect their ancestral land.

Element Africa: Claims of mining encroachment in DRC and broken promises in SA
- Activists say Canada-registered miner Alphamin Bisie has been operating outside its concession in the DRC’s North Kivu province, and encroaching into community forests.
- Police in South Africa have arrested seven activists protesting against Anglo American Platinum for what they say is the mining giant’s failure to report back on its social and work commitments to the mining-affected community.
- Element Africa is Mongabay’s bi-weekly bulletin rounding up brief stories from the commodities industry in Africa.

‘You don’t kill people to protect forests’: New Thai parks chief raises alarm
- After playing a key role in an anti-corruption sting operation that toppled the head of Thailand’s department of parks and wildlife, senior forest officer Chaiwat Limlikit-aksorn was promoted to head of Thailand’s office of national parks.
- Human rights activists say the appointment raises serious concerns, citing a string of abuses that occurred while Chaiwat was head of Kaeng Krachan National Park.
- Cases against Chaiwat during this period include two murder charges and a corruption investigation.
- Chaiwat’s tenure in his new post will likely be short: He faces mandatory retirement in less than two years, as well as a reopened murder case and an ongoing corruption investigation.

Saving Masungi, a last green corridor of the Philippines: Q&A with Ann Dumaliang
- The Masungi Georeserve is an important geological region about 30 miles from Manila, within a watershed and conservation area that is home to more than 400 species of flora and fauna, several of which are rare and threatened.
- Ann Dumaliang is a co-founder of the foundation that manages conservation and geotourism in the reserve, which is threatened by illegal quarrying, logging and development.
- Masungi’s rangers have faced violent attacks in recent months, but Dumaliang, her family and colleagues are working with numerous organizations and individuals to reforest and preserve the area.

Illegal mines and “floating towns” on the Puré River leave uncontacted Indigenous peoples at risk
- The Yurí-Passé are at risk of coming into contact with illegal miners and drug traffickers, which violates their right and deliberate decision to live in isolation from the Western world.
- According to one study, mercury levels in the blood of communities living along the Caquetá river and its tributaries, such as the Puré River, are much higher than the average.
- Although the Puré River area is located in a protected area, mining activity has increased following a number of threats made against park rangers and an arson attack on a cabin belonging to Colombia’s Natural National Parks authority (PNN) by FARC dissidents. Despite military operations, mining activities continue, with dozens of dredgers thought to be operating on the river.

‘We lost the biggest ally’: Nelly Marubo on her friend Bruno Pereira’s legacy
- In June 2022, Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips were brutally murdered in the Brazilian Amazon. Mongabay interviewed Nelly Marubo, friend and colleague of Pereira, giving us a sense of who Pereira was from an Indigenous point of view and how he was perceived by the Indigenous people in the area where he was killed.
- Nelly says Pereira first learned from the Marubo and other Indigenous groups how they were patrolling their Indigenous territories; then he introduced modern technologies to help them in their work.
- Nelly rejects the idea that Indigenous experts like Bruno were leading Indigenous groups into conflict with the outside world; rather, he was responding to the urgent needs of the Marubo and other groups across Brazil.
- For her, Pereira has left a strong legacy among the Indigenous Marubo youth.

Murders of 2 Pataxó leaders prompt Ministry of Indigenous Peoples to launch crisis office
- On Jan. 17, 17-year-old Nawir Brito de Jesus and 25-year-old Samuel Cristiano do Amor Divino were shot dead in Brazil’s northeastern Bahia state, according to the state’s civil police.
- The crimes reportedly occurred when the two Indigenous leaders were returning to a resettlement farm, located within the limits of the Barra Velha Indigenous Territory, an area recognized in 2008 as being traditionally occupied by the Pataxó people but has since awaited its full demarcation.
- The newly created Ministry of Indigenous Peoples is setting up a crisis office to monitor land conflicts in the region with the Ministry of Justice and other authorities “to guarantee the rigorous investigation and punishment of the criminals, besides, of course, the protection of the Pataxó people.”
- Violence against Indigenous people this year is not isolated to Bahia. On Jan. 9, two Indigenous Guajajara were shot in the head in northeastern Maranhão state, near Maranwi village, close to the town of Arame, as confirmed by the state’s civil police.

Violence in Brazil’s Amazon are also crimes against humanity, lawyers tell international court
- Three organizations, including Greenpeace Brazil, filed a case with the International Criminal Court (ICC) pressing for the investigation into a network of politicians, law enforcement and business executives they suspect are responsible for systematic attacks against land defenders.
- They documented over 400 murders, 500 attempted murders, 2,200 death threats, 2,000 assaults and 80 cases of torture that occurred between 2011 and 2022.
- Former Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro is one suspect in these crimes, yet the organizations say the attacks are part of a larger system operating in Brazil, and will likely continue even when he’s out of office.
- If the criminal court choses to go forward with this case, it will be the first time they investigate crimes against humanity committed in the context of environmental destruction.

At a rubber plantation in Liberia, history repeats in a fight over land
- Last year, Mongabay visited the Salala Rubber Corporation in Liberia, which has been accused of sexually abusing women working on its plantation and grabbing community land.
- Salala is owned by Socfin, the French-Belgian agribusiness giant that operates rubber and palm oil plantations across West and Central Africa.
- In 2008, Salala received a $10 million loan from the International Finance Corporation, which advocates say was used to clear community land.
- In 2019, 22 communities in and around Salala’s plantation filed a formal complaint with the IFC, but the investigation has dragged on for years.

For Indigenous Brazilians, capital attack was ‘scenario of war’ akin to deforestation
- The morning after protesters attacked government buildings in Brazil’s capital, Mongabay spoke with Indigenous Congresswoman Célia Xakriabá, who compared the act of vandalism to forest destruction: “This is this scenario of war when you deforest.”
- * Célia Xakriabá had just returned from seeing the damage to the National Congress building: “When they [the rioters] were there also in the Green Room, it made me remember that it is this scenario of war when the repossession takes place in the [Indigenous] territory.”
- One of the immediate effects of the attack was the temporary suspension of the official inauguration of longtime activist Sonia Guajajara as Brazil’s first minister of Indigenous peoples and Anielle Franco as minister for racial equality.
- The two women were finally sworn in on Jan. 11 at the Presidential Palace, despite the missing glass on the walls, the destroyed gallery of photos of former presidents, and a swath of destruction throughout the building. “[This] is the most legitimate symbol of this secular Black and Indigenous resistance in Brazil!” Sonia Guajajara said.

Murdered Belize environmentalist helped boost marine conservation through technology
- Jon Ramnarace, who worked on protected area patrol and marine conservation technology, was shot and killed alongside his brother David in Belmopan on December 31.
- The main suspect, police corporal Elmer Nah, was taken into custody in January and charged with two counts of murder and attempted murder, deadly means of harm and dangerous harm.
- Ramnarace dedicated his life to protecting land and marine habitats in Central America, most recently in the Turneffe Atoll off the Belizean coast.

Brazilian archbishop is threatened for defending Indigenous peoples — even during Mass
- Dom Roque Paloschi, president of the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI) and archbishop of Porto Velho in the state of Roraima, Brazil, has been under attack because he denounced Indigenous people’s rights violations.
- It has always been risky to live in Amazonia and defend social-environmental issues, but Paloschi says the situation has worsened greatly in the last four years — the period that coincides with Jair Bolsonaro’s administration.
- In 2021, 355 attacks against Indigenous people were reported in Brazil — the most since 2013, according to a CIMI report.

Video: In Brazil’s Amazon, Quilombolas fight major palm oil firm for access to cemeteries
- Areas along the Acará River in northern Pará state are at the center of a six-year legal battle where Quilombolas — descendants of Afro-Brazilian runaway slaves — accuse Agropalma, the country’s second-largest palm oil exporter, of land-grabbing over their ancestral lands, including cemeteries, as revealed by Mongabay’s yearlong investigation.
- One of these areas is Our Lady of Battle Cemetery, where Mongabay witnessed in November 2021 Quilombolas celebrating the Day of the Dead for the first time in decades. They say access to the area was hampered since it became Agropalma’s “legal reserve” — the proportion of land that the Brazilian legislation obliges a private property owner to maintain in its natural state — in the 1980s.
- In this video, Mongabay exhibits what is called a “historic moment” and firsthand footage and interviews with Quilombolas going to this cemetery for the first time. This video also has impressive images of palm trees just a few steps from the graves at Livramento Cemetery, completely surrounded by Agropalma’s crops. Quilombolas accuse Agropalma of destroying three-quarters of its area to make way for its plantations; the company denies.
- “To support future lawsuits,” prosecutors in Pará state have cited the Mongabay investigation in their procedures looking into the conflicts between Quilombola communities seeking recognition of their territory and areas occupied by Agropalma.

Video: Stolen Quilombola cemeteries in the Amazon, and the probe that revealed it all
- Palm oil is a ubiquitous ingredient in products ranging from chocolate to cookies to lipstick, but its production in a corner of the Brazilian Amazon may be linked to a land grab from traditional communities, including cemeteries, a year-long investigation by Mongabay’s Karla Mendes has revealed.
- Prosecutors in Pará state have cited the Mongabay investigation in their procedures looking into the conflicts between Quilombola communities seeking recognition of their territory and areas occupied by Agropalma, the country’s second-largest palm oil exporter.
- In November 2021, Mendes went to Pará’s Alto Acará region to investigate these land-grabbing claims, and shares her reporting journey in this behind-the-scenes video, including witnessing a historical Day of the Dead celebration at a cemetery that the Quilombolas say they were locked out of by Agropalma.
- Mendes also witnessed another cemetery hemmed in by Agropalma’s oil palms, where Quilombolas accuse the company of planting the trees over the graves of their loved ones, and investigated other palm oil-linked issues reported by local communities, including water pollution and the threat of displacement from the paving of a trucking road.

Major Brazil palm oil exporter accused of fraud, land-grabbing over Quilombola cemeteries
- Agropalma, the only Brazilian company with the sustainability certificate issued by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), is accused of a wide range of land-grabbing allegations in Pará state.
- The claims allege that more than half of the 107,000 hectares (264,000 acres) registered by Agropalma was derived from fraudulent land titles and even the creation of a fake land registration bureau, which is at the center of a legal battle led by state prosecutors and public defenders.
- Quilombola communities say that part of the area occupied by Agropalma overlaps with their ancestral land, including two cemeteries visited by Mongabay. In one of them, residents claim that just one-quarter of the cemetery remains and that the company planted palm trees on top of the graves, which the company denies.
- There are also other financial interests in the land at stake, researchers say, pointing to the company’s moves into bauxite mining and the sale of carbon credits in the areas subject to litigation, further intensifying the disputes.

‘Panic’ sets in as armed groups occupy, deforest Colombian national park
- Once covering an expanse of more than 2,140 square kilometers (826 square miles) of the Colombian Amazon Rainforest, Tinigua National Natural Park has lost 29% of its forests over the past 20 years; the majority of this loss has occurred since 2018.
- Satellite data and monitoring suggest forest loss has kept a quick pace in 2022.
- Authorities say illegal cattle ranching, coca growing and land-grabbing are driving deforestation in the park, much of it reportedly done at the hands of armed groups affiliated with FARC dissident factions.
- Local communities have also reportedly been threatened by these groups.

Indigenous communities in Peru ‘living in fear’ due to deforestation, drug trafficking
- Between 2021 and 2021 the territory of the Indigenous Kakataibo community of Puerto Nuevo lost 15% of its tree cover.
- Satellite data suggest forest loss in the community territory may have accelerated in 2022.
- Residents say outsiders are invading the territory and clearing forest to grow coca crops for the production of cocaine.
- The presence of armed groups is deterring government intervention.

In South Africa, a community says no after a coal miner said go
- A South African court has ordered one of the country’s largest coal mines to redo an environmental impact assessment for expanding its footprint by nearly 18 square kilometers (7 square miles).
- The court agreed with residents of Somkhele who said that the pre-2016 public participation process to expand the mine — and extend its productive life — was seriously flawed.
- Communities around the mine are deeply divided; the traditional authority and some residents support its extension and the jobs and income this would provide, while others stand firm against the destruction of their homes and way of life.
- The new EIA process is allowing community members to raise a range of concerns about the mine’s social and environmental impacts.

‘I have anger every day’: South African villagers on the mine in their midst
- Rural families removed from their homes in Somkhele, in northern KwaZulu-Natal province, to make way for a giant coal mine are suffering from collective trauma, a new report has found.
- A psychologist evaluated members of 26 of the 220 families displaced and found alarming levels of clinical depression and suicidal feelings.
- He found they had been traumatized by witnessing the exhumation of family graveyards as well as the loss of both income and cultural space provided by cattle encosures.
- The report, commissioned by a law firm representing opponents of the mine, recommends that the mine rehabilitate polluted land and water resources and make greater financial compensation available to allow families who wish to leave to reestablish themselves elsewhere.

Indigenous community in Peru losing forests to timber, drug, land trafficking
- The Indigenous community of Santa Rosillo de Yanayacu, located in northern Peru, has been facing illegal timber, drug and land trafficking for the past several years.
- Satellite data and imagery suggest deforestation associated with these incursions has increased in 2022.
- The community lacks a communal land title to their territorial forests; experts say this is opening the door to setters who are using threats to bar regional authorities from intervening.
- Santa Rosillo de Yanayacu is one of a number of Indigenous communities in the region contending with deforestation from outsiders.

In Brazil’s soy belt, Indigenous people face attacks over land rights
- In Brazil’s Mato Grosso do Sul state, Guarani-Kaiowá Indigenous people seeking to reclaim their ancestral lands have been subjected to threats and violence by farmers and security forces, according to Indigenous residents and rights activists.
- In June, tensions escalated in the Guapo’y Mirim Tujury community when a military police operation to evict the Guarani-Kaiowá from part of a farm they were occupying left one Indigenous resident dead and injured at least nine other residents, including children, according to advocates.
- The incident was the latest in a decades-long struggle for land rights and demarcation, which has led to the deaths of 608 Guarani-Kaiowá people in Mato Grosso do Sul between 2003 and 2021.
- The violence has continued since the Guapo’y Mirim Tujury operation: in July and September, two Guarani-Kaiowá leaders were killed in the region, with Indigenous residents blaming farming interests for the deaths.

Attorney keeps alive legacy of murdered Pará activists, despite death threats
- Ten years after the murder of community leaders Zé Claudio da Silva and Maria do Espírito Santo, attorney Claudelice dos Santos formally created an institute named after her brother and sister-in-law to support families at risk because of their social-environmental activism in Amazonia.
- Santos earned a law degree in order to fight for the issues that have become life-and-death matters for activists in southeastern Pará. In this historically violent region, Zé Claudio and Maria were fighting against the illegal activities of farm owners, loggers and land-grabbers inside the rainforest.
- Known for defending standing forests, land reform and extractive community rights, the couple had received innumerous threats before they were murdered for their activism.
- Eleven years later, the attorney still receives threats for defending this legacy and seeking justice: The two perpetrators of the crime are in prison but the man convicted of hiring them remains free.

Element Africa: Mines take their toll on nature and communities
- Civil society groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo are demanding the revocation of the license for a Chinese-owned gold miner operating inside a wildlife reserve that’s also home to nomadic Indigenous groups.
- Up to 90% of mines in South Africa aren’t publishing their social commitments to the communities in which they operate, in violation of the law, activists say.
- A major Nigerian conglomerate that was granted a major concession for industrial developments in 2012 has still not compensated displaced residents, it was revealed after the company announced it’s abandoning the project.
- Element Africa is Mongabay’s bi-weekly bulletin rounding up brief stories from the commodities industry in Africa.

How an Indigenous family under siege became a symbol of resistance in the Amazon
- Neidinha, Almir and Txai Suruí are leading the fight against invaders destroying two of the most threatened Indigenous territories in the Brazilian state of Rondônia: the Sete de Setembro and Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau reserves.
- Indigenous territories in Rôndonia have been the target of a recent wave of illegal activities such as land invasions, illegal mining and illegal logging, while their defenders have been threatened and even killed.
- The violence faced by defenders of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau Indigenous Territory has been captured in the documentary “The Territory” (“O Território”), released in Europe and the U.S. in August and in Brazil in September, in which part of the production team was made up of local Indigenous leaders.

First-ever regional court case involving rights of uncontacted peoples awaits verdict
- The Inter-American Court of Human rights, one of three regional human rights tribunals, is evaluating the first-ever case concerning the rights of Indigenous communities in voluntary isolation, also known as uncontacted tribes.
- At the base of Ecuador’s case are three massacres against the Tagaeri and Taromenane people, which occurred in 2003, 2006, and 2013. Some members of the Waorani nation have been accused of perpetrating at least two of these massacres.
- Logging and extraction in the forest put pressure on the rainforest and resources, increasing violent conflict between communities, say the lawyers representing the uncontacted peoples. The outcome of the case could set a major legal precedent for other communities in voluntary isolation across the Amazon.
- The state insists that it has done what it could to support human rights in the region and that the oil industry nor the state is a cause of violent attacks between communities.

In Brazil, a heavily fined firm is also accused of waging a ‘palm oil war’ on communities
- Escalating violence triggered by land disputes between Indigenous and traditional communities and palm oil companies has intensified in recent months in the Brazilian region that accounts for most of the country’s palm oil production.
- On Sept. 24, community leaders reported the killing of a non-Indigenous person and wounding of two Turiwara Indigenous men and a non-Indigenous by gunfire in the municipality of Acará, in Pará state. The following morning, Sept. 25, the cultural house of an Indigenous village was burned.
- Federal authorities say they’re investigating these and previous instances of violence that have intensified in the region.
- A database compiled by the journalism alliance Tras las huellas de la palma (Following the palm prints) reveals that only 44 fines were imposed against palm oil producers in the country, of which only three were paid. Most of the fines were for deforestation and pollution.

Mangrove restorers in Haiti bet on resilience amid rising violence
- Haiti is one of the most deforested countries in the world today, with its mangroves in particular now dotting just 30% of its coastline, much of it in thin, fragmented pockets.
- The main threat to the mangroves is the cutting of the trees to produce charcoal, an important fuel for cooking in a country where only a quarter of the population has access to electricity.
- Several mangrove restoration projects have been initiated over the years, and many abandoned due to waning community interest, natural disasters, or poor planning.
- More recently, rising rates of violence have prevented restoration teams from going to the field and coordinating with one another, but some are hopeful that communities remain receptive to mangrove restoration despite all the other hardships they’re experiencing.

Haiti: An island nation whose environmental troubles only begin with water
- As Haiti plunges into the worst social unrest the nation has seen in years, shortages abound. One of these is water. But in Haiti, water scarcity has deeper roots, that connect to virtually every other aspect of the environment. Haiti’s ecosystems today, say some, are under stress due to regional and global transgressions of the nine planetary boundaries.
- The planetary boundary framework originated in 2009 to define required limits on human activities to prevent collapse of vital Earth operating systems. They include biodiversity loss, freshwater, air pollution, climate change, high phosphorus and nitrogen levels, ocean acidity, land use changes, ozone layer decay, and contamination by human-made chemicals.
- Scientists defining the global freshwater boundary warn that tampering with the water cycle can affect the other boundaries. Haiti, as a small isolated island nation, suggests a laboratory case-study of these many interconnections, and offers a graphic example of the grim results for humanity and wildlife when freshwater systems are deeply compromised.
- Haiti today is plagued by an extreme socioeconomic and environmental crisis. As it fights climate change, freshwater problems, deforestation and pollution, it may also be viewed as a bleak bellwether for other nations as our planetary crisis deepens. But scientists warn that research on applying planetary boundary criteria on a regional level remains limited.

New oil refinery ‘a huge disaster’ for Nigerian forest reserve
- Stubbs Creek Forest Reserve comprises nearly 300 square kilometers (116 square miles) in southern Nigeria, and is home to threatened wildlife and economically valuable tree species.
- Despite its official protected status as a forest reserve, much of Stubbs Creek Forest Reserve’s tree cover has been lost due to human activities like logging and farming.
- Area residents say the construction of this new refinery has exacerbated deforestation in Stubbs Creek Forest Reserve, and a government official calls the development of the reserve “a huge disaster for the forest.”
- Residents are also concerned that the refinery will exacerbate conflicts between Local Government Areas.

Indigenous Brazilians demand justice as 4 killed in escalating violence
- Two Indigenous Guajajara men were killed on Sept. 3 in Brazil’s Maranhão state and a 14-year-old Guajajara boy shot and hospitalized, Indigenous leaders and rights groups say.
- The day after, a 14-year-old Indigenous Pataxó boy was also allegedly gunned down and a 16-year-old shot and wounded as they sought to retake a farm that had reportedly been established illegally within their territory in Bahia state.
- On Sept. 11, another Indigenous Guajajara was murdered in Maranhão. In the past 20 years, more than 50 Guajajara individuals have been killed in the state, with none of the alleged perpetrators ever going on trial, advocates say.
- Indigenous groups and advocacy organizations are demanding justice for these and earlier killings, and have raised concerns about escalating violence against native peoples throughout the country.

Illegal fishing, worker abuse claims leave a bad taste for Bumble Bee Seafood
- A new report published by Greenpeace East Asia has found that Bumble Bee Seafoods and its parent company, Fong Chun Formosa Fishery Company (FCF) of Taiwan, are sourcing seafood from vessels involved in human rights abuses as well as illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing practices.
- It found that 13 vessels supplying seafood to Bumble Bee violated Taiwanese fishery regulations, and were even on the Taiwan Fisheries Agency’s (TFA) list of vessels involved in IUU fishing, and that many supply vessels were involved in issues of forced labor and human trafficking.
- Both Bumble Bee and FCF have sustainability and corporate social responsibility policies in place.

‘Brazilians aren’t familiar with the Amazon’: Q&A with Ângela Mendes
- Environmental activist Ângela Mendes coordinates the Chico Mendes Committee as part of her efforts to keep alive the memory and legacy of her father, a leader of the rubber tapper community and environmental resistance.
- In an interview with Mongabay Brasil, Ângela Mendes talks about the role of social networks as a fundamental instrument for resistance in the 21st century.
- She also reflects on the culture of impunity that allowed the masterminds of her father’s murder to evade justice, and which she says persists in Brazil today.
- But she also holds out hope for change, noting that Brazilians are largely concerned about the environment, but that they need to channel this concern into concrete actions, including in the national elections coming up in October.

Crimes against the Amazon reverberate across Brazil, analysis shows
- Crimes associated with illegal logging, mining and other illicit activities in the Brazilian Amazon are being felt in 24 of Brazil’s 27 states, a new report shows.
- Records of more than 300 Federal Police operations between 2016 and 2021 show that crimes such as tax evasion, money laundering, corruption and wildlife trafficking are reverberating far beyond the rainforest.
- Deforestation is at the center of the criminal economy in the Amazon, driving four main illegal activities: logging, mining, occupation of public lands, and environmental violations associated with agriculture.
- Nearly half of the police operations investigated crimes that occurred in protected areas in the Amazon, including 37 Indigenous territories.

Venezuelan Amazon deforestation expands due to lawlessness, mining, fires: Reports
- Multiple recent reports show that deforestation has greatly increased in Venezuela’s Amazonian states of Bolívar and Amazonas, largely due to illegal mining, expanded agriculture and fires.
- Venezuelan protected areas have been especially hard hit, with illegal incursions and major deforestation occurring inside Caura, Canaima and Yapacana national parks.
- Soaring deforestation rates are blamed partly on Colombian guerrillas operating illegally within Venezuela’s borders, an invasion that one report alleges has been supported by the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
- Forest loss has been well confirmed via satellite, while ground truthing has been obtained via firsthand accounts.

Brazil miner sees Indigenous land as ripe for exploration if protections expire
- Mining company Oxycer has filed five applications to prospect for gold in the Piripkura Indigenous Territory, in anticipation of restrictions being lifted this October.
- The territory is home to two of the last three surviving Piripkura individuals, who live in voluntary isolation and already face threats from invasions of their territory by illegal loggers and cattle ranchers.
- Mining in Indigenous territories is currently illegal in Brazil, which is why the Federal Public Ministry is pursuing lawsuits to scupper mining requests being filed with the National Mining Agency (ANM).
- However, the ANM continues to accept and register these applications for what’s clearly an illegal activity, though it’s unclear if the agency has approved any of them yet.

As their land and water turns saline, Kenyan communities take on salt firms
- Between 1977 and the 1990s, the Kenyan government allocated thousands of hectares of land to salt mining companies along the country’s north coast.
- People had been living on that land for generations, despite its being officially gazetted as public land by the government.
- Following the allocation of land, local people have complained of harassment and violent evictions by the salt companies, as well as soil and waters rendered too salty to farm, drink, or fish.
- In 2020 groups representing these communities filed a lawsuit against the companies and government that consolidates many complaints and aims to provide recourse for loss of land and livelihoods and damage to the environment. The case is due before a judge in October.

Violence persists in Amazon region where Pereira and Phillips were killed
- Armed illegal gold miners on July 15 threatened government rangers near the site where British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira were killed in June.
- Days after the threats, federal prosecutors charged three men in the killing of Phillips and Pereira, but activists and lawmakers say the investigation needs to be expanded to identify the possible involvement of criminal organizations.
- Activists say threats against government officials, including Pereira, have happened for decades, but that the situation has grown dire under President Jair Bolsonaro.
- The government’s weakening of environmental agencies and Bolsonaro’s anti-Indigenous rhetoric have created a sense of impunity, emboldening criminals in the Amazon to retaliate against activists and environmentalists who expose their illicit activities, experts say.

Organized crime drives violence and deforestation in the Amazon, study shows
- Increasing rates of both deforestation and violence in the Brazilian Amazon are being driven by sprawling national and transnational criminal networks, a study shows.
- Experts say criminal organizations engaged in activities ranging from illegal logging to drug trafficking often threaten and attack environmentalists, Indigenous people, and enforcement agents who attempt to stop them.
- In 2020, the Brazilian Amazon had the highest murder rate in Brazil, at 29.6 homicides per 100,000 habitants, compared to the national average of 23.9, with the highest rates corresponding to municipalities suffering the most deforestation.
- Experts say the current government’s systematic dismantling of environmental protections and enforcement agencies has emboldened these criminal organizations, which have now become “well connected, well established and very strong.”

Climate change amplifies the risk of conflict, study from Africa shows
- New research shows that climate change can amplify the risk of conflict by as much as four to five times in a 550-kilometer (340-mile) radius, with rising temperatures and extreme rainfall acting as triggers.
- Many countries most vulnerable to climate impacts are beset by armed conflicts, such as Somalia, which is grappling with widespread drought amid a decades-long civil war; the research suggests the country is trapped in a vicious cycle of worsening climatic disasters and conflict.
- Both too little rain and too much rain are triggers for conflict, the research finds: persistent rainfall failures increase instability over a broader geographic region while extreme rainfall increases the likelihood of confrontations over a smaller area and for a shorter time, the analysis suggests.
- The research underscores the importance of tackling climate change impacts and conflict mitigation together because misguided climate adaptation strategies can intensify existing tensions.

Indigenous advocates sense a legal landmark as a guardian’s killing heads to trial
- For the first time in Brazil, the killing of an Indigenous land defender is expected to be tried before a federal jury — escalated to that level because of what prosecutors say was an aggression against the entire Guajajara Indigenous community and Indigenous culture.
- Paulo Paulino Guajajara, 26, was killed in an alleged ambush by illegal loggers in the Arariboia Indigenous Territory in November 2019; two people have been indicted to stand trial in the case.
- The impending trial stands out amid a general culture of impunity that has allowed violence against Indigenous individuals and the theft of their land — including the killings of more than 50 Guajajara individuals in the past 20 years — to go unpunished.
- It could also set an important legal precedent for trying those responsible for the recent killings of British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian Indigenous rights defender Bruno Pereira.

Amazon rainforest activist under threat in Brazil plans to flee his home
- Erasmo Theofilo, an agroecologist, founded a farmers’ cooperative in one of the most hostile corners of the Amazon to defend landless and poor rural workers and promote sustainable farming practices.
- He has been the target of death threats, ambushes and attempts on his life for his work in the municipality of Anapu, in Pará state, where U.S.-born nun Dorothy Stang was killed for her activism in 2005.
- Since President Jair Bolsonaro took office at the start of 2019, land conflicts and deforestation in the Amazon have surged, with a recent report showing that Pará is the most dangerous for land rights defenders.
- Theofilo told Mongabay he believes he will never be safe in Anapu again, even if the land conflicts are resolved, and is planning to leave for good with his family.

Swiss pledge to stop illegal gold imports from Brazil Indigenous reserves
- Switzerland imported 24.5 tonnes of gold in 2021, at least a fifth of which came from Brazilian Amazon states. Evidence indicates most of it is mined illegally on Indigenous lands. Illicit mining operations have resulted in major Amazon deforestation, widespread mercury poisoning and soaring violence.
- With the Brazilian government of Jair Bolsonaro unresponsive to the escalating crisis, an independent delegation of Indigenous people along with others travelled to Switzerland in May to plead with major gold refiners to end the importation of illicit Brazilian gold.
- This week, the refiners published a statement pledging to remove illegal gold mined within Brazilian Indigenous reserves from their supply chains. If the initiative is fully followed, experts say it could be a game changer that could undermine the, until now, lucrative illegal gold trade.
- Canada, the world’s biggest importer of gold from the Brazilian Amazon, has made no such agreement.

In Brazil, an Indigenous land defender’s unsolved killing is the deadly norm
- Two years after the death of Indigenous land defender Ari Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau in Brazil’s Amazonian state of Rondônia, questions about who killed him and why remain unanswered.
- Perpetrators of crimes against environmental activists are rarely brought to justice in the country, with a government report showing zero convictions for the 35 people killed in incidents of rural violence in 2021 — about a third of them in Rondônia.
- Indigenous groups and environmental activists in Rondônia say they fear for their lives as the criminal gangs that covet the Amazon’s rich resources act with impunity in threatening defenders and invading protected lands.
- Activists and experts point to a combination of the government’s anti-Indigenous rhetoric and the undermining of environmental agencies as helping incite the current surge of invasions and violence against land defenders in Rondônia and the wider Brazilian Amazon.

Deaths of Phillips and Pereira shine light on a region of the Amazon beset by violence
- Brazilian police reported on June 15 that they had found the bodies believed to be those of Brazilian Indigenous defender Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips deep in the western Amazon.
- The bodies were found not far from where the pair disappeared on June 5, in the Vale do Javari region, considered the most violent region of Brazil, where criminal groups vie to seize land occupied by Indigenous and traditional communities.
- Similar conflicts occur all over the Amazon, with some land grabbers admitting that they will, if necessary, use violent methods to achieve their goals.
- The Brazilian Senate has launched an investigation into the disappearance of Pereira and Phillips, but observers say it’s unlikely to deliver the far-reaching change required to tackle the violence.

Maasai protesters shot, beaten as Tanzania moves forward with wildlife game reserve
- Tanzanian police officers and authorities have shot and beaten about 31 Maasai villagers, including children, during early June protests over the demarcation of ancestral land for a trophy hunting and safari game reserve. One Maasai man and one police officer have been killed.
- At least 700 Maasai villagers from Tanzania’s Loliondo division of Ngorongoro have fled across the border to Kenya, seeking humanitarian and medical aid.
- According to government spokesperson, Gerson Msigwa, authorities were sent to demarcate the land, not pursue evictions. The government will take legal action against people who interfere with the demarcation process or incite hostility between pastoralists and security forces, he says.
- Human rights groups say the Tanzanian government and authorities are violating a 2018 East African Court of Justice (EACJ) injunction on the land dispute by intimidating, harassing and attacking villagers.

A look at violence and conflict over Indigenous lands in nine Latin American countries
- Indigenous people make up a third of the total number of environmental defenders killed across the globe, despite being a total of 4% of the world’s population, according to a report by Global Witness. The most critical situation is in Colombia, where 117 Indigenous people have been murdered between 2012 and 2020.
- Conflicts over extractive industries and territorial invasions are a major cause of violence against Indigenous communities. Between 2017 and 2021, there were 2,109 cases of communities affected by extractive industries and their associated activities in Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras.
- Mongabay Latam interviewed 12 Indigenous leaders from nine countries across Latin America and spoke to them about the threats they face and the murders occurring in the region.

Razing of Indigenous hamlet highlights Nepal’s conservation challenge
- On March 27, Nepali authorities evicted about 100 members of the Indigenous Chepang community living in Chitwan National Park and set fire to their huts.
- They allege the community members are encroaching on national park land, famous for its rhinos and tigers, and building new settlements despite warnings and resettlement plans rolled out by the government.
- However, community members say that only providing shelter, and not land for subsistence farming and their traditional livelihoods, does not solve the community’s problems.
- Stringent policing of parks like Chitwan has been credited with helping Nepal boost its populations of iconic species like rhinos and tigers, but has come at the expense of the Indigenous communities who once occupied those areas.

More than half of activists killed in 2021 were land, environment defenders
- An analysis by Front Line Defenders and the Human Rights Defenders Memorial recorded at least 358 murders of human rights activists globally in 2021.
- Of that total, nearly 60% were land, environment or Indigenous rights defenders.
- The countries with the highest death tolls were Colombia, Mexico and Brazil.
- Advocates say the figure is likely far higher, as attacks on land and environment defenders in Africa often go unreported.

In Benin, the line between conservation and counterinsurgency blurs
- On Feb. 8-10, a series of roadside bombings in northern Benin’s W National Park killed seven employees of the conservation group African Parks, including four rangers and a French anti-poaching trainer.
- The attack is suspected to have been carried out by Islamist militants based in the forests of neighboring Burkina Faso, raising fears that violence in the Sahel is spilling over into Benin, with the country’s national parks as its front line.
- Over the border in Burkina Faso, militants have targeted forestry and conservation officials, hoping to capitalize on local discontent over park restrictions and gain new recruits.
- According to some researchers, African Parks has been thrust into the uneasy role of border security and “counter-terrorism” in northern Benin.

DRC’s cacao boom leaves a bitter aftertaste for Congo Basin forest
- The DRC’s Tshopo province lost a record-breaking area of intact forests to fires in 2021, a trend researchers say is driven by agricultural expansion, as displaced people from the violence-ravaged eastern DRC move into the province.
- There’s been an increase in clearing of forests to cultivate food crops and cash crops like cacao beans, used to make cocoa for chocolate.
- Around 70% of the world’s supply of cacao beans is produced in West African countries, with Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon the biggest producers, where its cultivation has also accelerated deforestation.
- “You are aware of what has happened in West Africa in countries like Ivory Coast and Ghana,” Germain Batsi, a DRC agroforestry expert, told Mongabay. “I am afraid such scenarios will be reproduced here, something we would regret afterwards.”

Mau Forest rehabilitation still overshadowed by forced evictions
- More than 50,000 people have been forcefully evicted from Kenya’s ecologically important Mau Forest in the past decade.
- With few options to relocate, evicted smallholders and others continue to enter the forest in search of grazing and fuel.
- The Kenya Water Tower Agency has built electrified fencing, but encroachers have torn sections of this down.
- Enlisting evictees to create tree nurseries and support for alternative livelihoods points the way to more constructive approaches.

Attack on environmental lawyer’s home alarms DRC rights defenders
- Armed men, including two dressed in police uniform, attacked the home of Congolese lawyer Timothée Mbuya earlier this month and told family members they were sent to kill him.
- Mbuya is also facing a defamation lawsuit after publishing a report alleging encroachment of a protected area by a farm owned by former DRC president Joseph Kabila.
- Campaigners say both the lawsuit and the violent assault on the lawyer’s home fit a pattern of harassment of environment and human rights activists in the country.

Josefina Tunki: ‘If we have to die in defense of the land, we have to die’
- Josefina Tunki, the first woman to preside over the Shuar Arutam People (PSHA), an Indigenous association in Ecuador, faces death threats due to her opposition to mining on Indigenous lands.
- The Ecuadoran government has granted 165 concessions to mining companies — for copper, gold and molybdenum — that covers 56% of PSHA territory in the Condor mountain range in southeastern Ecuador.
- Tunki’s election as president of the PSHA has revealed structural sexism, but it has also shown hope to a generation that sees women like her in positions of power.
- This report is part of a journalistic collaboration between Mongabay Latam and La Barra Espaciadora (The Space Bar).

In Colombia, threatened women of the Wayuú community continue to fight rampant mining
- The Wayuú Women’s Force, founded in 2006, is an Indigenous organization that denounces the coal mining that has dammed and contaminated rivers, leaving much of La Guajira without water.
- Members of the organization have received death threats but continue to train women to stand up for their human rights.
- In addition to their work in La Guajira, the Wayuú women are developing ways of holding companies all over the world accountable for their negative environmental impact.

Allegations of displacement, violence beleaguer Kenyan conservancy NGO
- The California-based Oakland Institute published a report on Nov. 16 alleging that the Kenya-based nonprofit Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT) keeps pastoralists and their herds off of their ancestral grazing areas.
- The institute’s research relied on petitions, court cases and in-person interviews with community members in northern Kenya, with report lead author Anuradha Mittal alleging that NRT’s model of “fortress conservation” exacerbates interethnic tensions and prioritizes the desires of wealthy tourists over the needs of the Indigenous population.
- Tom Lalampaa, NRT’s CEO, denies all allegations that the organization keeps communities from accessing rangeland or that it has played any role in violence in the region.
- Lalampaa said membership with NRT provides innumerable benefits to community-led conservancies, which retain their legal claim to the land and decide on how their rangelands are managed.

At a ‘certified’ palm oil plantation in Nigeria, soldiers and conflict over land
- The Okomu Oil Palm Company is majority-owned by Socfin, a French-Belgian multinational that operates plantations across West and Central Africa.
- Okomu’s concession lies inside a forest reserve that was gazetted by British colonial authorities in 1912 and that was once among the most pristine rainforests in Nigeria, home to forest elephants, leopards and chimpanzees.
- For more than a decade, Okomu has been in conflict with some of the communities inside its concession over land ownership and usage rights in the reserve.
- In early 2020, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) certified Okomu’s main estate after an audit by the consultancy firm SCS; campaigners say the firm failed to perform adequate due diligence and that Okomu’s certification is an example of the RSPO’s shortcomings.

Legal challenge to South Africa mine expansion looks to set new landmark
- In 2016, South Africa’s minister of minerals and energy granted one of the country’s largest anthracite coal mines the right to expand and resettle 143 families.
- The decision was challenged by a local organization that filed an application against the minister, the Department of Minerals and Energy, the mining company, and others.
- If the case is won, it would be a landmark for communities affected by mining activities across the country, as the government, traditional authorities and unions have shown support for the mine.

Struggle endures for Philippine community pitted against gold miner
- Australian-Canadian mining firm OceanaGold was recently granted a renewal of its permit to mine gold and copper in the northern Philippines.
- The mine has faced years of opposition from area residents, mostly Indigenous people, who say it has scarred their land and threatens the water systems they depend on.
- In 2019, when the company’s previous mining permit expired, protesters mounted barricades to block activity at the mine.
- This year, restrictions put in place to curb the spread of COVID-19 have hampered their ability to organize.

In Peru’s Amazon, deforestation and crime sweep through Indigenous communities
- Mongabay Latam investigated the territorial security of Indigenous communities in five regions of the Peruvian Amazon: Loreto, Ucayali, Pasco, Huánuco, and Madre de Dios.
- A geospatial analysis of deforestation, illegal mining, and illicit coca crops in these five regions shows that 1,247 Indigenous communities have been affected.
- The study also revealed that 647 self-identified Indigenous communities in these five regions do not have official recognition from regional authorities to certify their existence and therefore obtain legal title to the land.

Philippine wetland oil riches untouched by war now up for grabs in peacetime
- At 288,000 hectares (712,000 acres), Liguasan Marsh in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao is the country’s largest and most intact wetland, a haven for birds and a source of livelihood for the 100,000 families who live there.
- The marsh was a hotspot during the decades of conflict between the Philippine government and the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF); it also has known oil and gas reserves.
- With a peace deal forged and the establishment of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao in 2019, the new regional government is seeking investors to develop the marsh’s oil and gas reserves.
- Some fear this extractive activity will damage the marsh’s ecosystem and exacerbate land conflict in an area where land tenure is already complex and contested.

Bolsonaro evades genocide blame amid Indigenous deaths by invaders, COVID-19
- A Senate inquiry has opted not to call for genocide charges against President Jair Bolsonaro over his failure to sufficiently protect Brazil’s Indigenous population from the COVID-19 pandemic and the escalating illegal invasions of their reserves.
- The final report nevertheless accuses Bolsonaro of crimes against humanity, saying he took advantage of the pandemic to harm traditional communities.
- The Senate’s backtrack on the genocide call comes a week after two Indigenous children in the Yanomami reserve were killed in an accident involving illegal mining machinery.
- The Yanomami, like other Indigenous reserves across Brazil, has faced a rising influx of invaders under Bolsonaro’s watch, which prosecutors attribute in part to the president’s anti-Indigenous rhetoric and support for illegal mining inside these territories.

For Brazil’s persecuted Krenak people, justice arrives half a century later
- A federal court has condemned Brazil’s federal government, the Minas Gerais state government and the country’s Indigenous affairs agency, Funai, for human rights violations against the Krenak Indigenous people committed under the military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985.
- Decades of reports, witness statements and evidence show torture, beatings, solitary confinement and forced labor were commonplace in the Krenak Reformatory and Guarani Farm, considered concentration camps by the Federal Public Ministry.
- Speaking Indigenous languages, drinking alcohol, and resisting land invasions by farmers were among the supposed infractions to justify the arbitrary imprisonment of Indigenous individuals deemed rebels by the regime.
- The court has ordered the federal government to organize an official ceremony for a public apology with national coverage, as well as deliver reparations.

Labor rights violations at Brazil coffee farm linked to Starbucks, Nespresso
- Workers at Cooxupé, the world’s largest coffee cooperative, had up to 30% of their wages deducted to pay for the use of portable harvesting machines that their employers should have provided for free.
- The violation occurred on the Pedreira farm in Minas Gerais state, which is owned by the family of the Cooxupé president, Carlos Augusto Rodrigues de Melo.
- Cooxupé, which sells coffee to major international brands such as Nespresso and Starbucks, nearly doubled its profit in 2020 to $61 million, on revenue of $1 billion.
- In 2020, 140 workers were rescued from slave-labor-like conditions at coffee plantations in Brazil, all of them in Minas Gerais state, according to labor inspectors.

Rich countries may be buying illegal gold that’s driving Amazon destruction
- Nearly a third of Brazil’s gold production in 2019 and 2020 was potentially illegal or outright illegal, a new report shows.
- The findings suggest that institutional buyers in rich countries — Canada, the U.K. and Switzerland bought 72% of Brazil’s gold exports — are contributing to the violence, deforestation and pollution associated with illegal mining.
- The report used satellite imagery to show how illegal gold mined in Indigenous reserves was laundered by being reported as having come from legitimate mining concessions; the value of this illegal gold in 2019 and 2020 exceeded $229 million, the report calculates.
- Prosecutors have filed two lawsuits based on the findings: One seeks the suspension of financial institutions identified as buyers of illegal gold in northern Pará state, while the second aims to suspend all permits to mine, sell and export gold from the southwest region of Pará.

An Ecuadoran town that survived illegal miners now faces a licensed operator
- The town of La Merced de Buenos Aires, in Ecuador, gained notoriety when it was invaded by illegal miners in 2017; for almost two years, the area was plagued by violence, prostitution and drug addiction.
- Authorities evicted the miners in 2019, but now the land may become home to legal mining operations, which many residents emphatically oppose.
- More than 300 people spent over a month blocking the path of the machinery, trucks and employees of Hanrine Ecuadorian Exploration and Mining S.A.
- The Ombudsman’s Office warns that confrontations will arise and has called on local, regional and national authorities to take immediate action.

Indigenous Brazilians fear surge in violence as ‘land-grab bill’ nears passage
- Brazil’s lower house of Congress has approved a controversial bill that could help legalize claims by land grabbers occupying public forests and Indigenous territories awaiting demarcation.
- The bill, approved last week and now headed to the Senate for a vote, is likely to further embolden invaders, activists say; Indigenous groups say they fear that violence on Indigenous territories without full federal protection will escalate in the coming months.
- The roughly 800 Indigenous territories still awaiting full demarcation are especially vulnerable as the bill could also make it more difficult for Indigenous communities to achieve full recognition of their ancestral lands, activists say.
- The legislation in question is just one of a slew of state and federal bills threatening Indigenous rights, which in turn are part of a wider pattern of attacks and violence on Indigenous lands throughout the country.

333 people rescued from slavery in Brazil mines since 2008, exclusive report shows
- A breakthrough report has mapped out all the raids carried out to rescue people working in slave-labor conditions in mines across Brazil since 2008.
- A total of 333 workers were rescued in 31 raids; Pará, in the Amazon, is the state with the most raids.
- Gold mines were the most common among the mines raided; in recent years their owners have expanded their criminal networks and tried to evade inspection.
- Bureaucracy and a waning pool of inspectors has hampered efforts to ramp up the frequency of raids, officials say.

Brazil prosecutors seek ban on all gold mining in hard-hit Amazonian region
- Gold mining activities may be suspended in the southwest of Pará state, in the Brazilian Amazon, if authorities fail to implement measures to increase control and traceability over the country’s gold mining industry.
- That’s the main request of a lawsuit filed this week by the Federal Public Ministry based on a new study pointing to the municipalities of southwest Pará as being responsible for 85% of cases of gold laundering in Brazil in 2019 and 2020.
- The study, by researchers from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), also concluded that almost 30% of the 174 metric tons of gold sold in Brazil in the last two years was associated with some kind of irregularity, amounting to 9.1 billion reais ($1.8 billion) of potentially illegal gold — a value more than three times the Ministry of Environment’s 2020 budget.
- Experts say Brazilian law leaves the door open to gold laundering, by permitting miners to self-declare the origin of their gold and not requiring any verification; the process remains manual, with no electronic invoices to control the gold trade in the country.

Killings, invasions escalate in fight for land in Brazil’s Maranhão state
- Violence has escalated in Brazil’s northeastern state of Maranhão, where rights groups have recorded a spate of land conflicts targeting Indigenous people and rural workers.
- A rural worker was killed on July 11 in the municipality of Codó after having relocated in 2019 to seek refuge from death threats related to land conflicts in the interior of the state, according to Catholic Church-affiliated Pastoral Land Commission (CPT).
- In an unrelated case, land grabbers invaded the Indigenous territory of the Indigenous Akroá Gamella group in the municipality of Codó, the Indigenist Missionary Council (CIMI) said.
- Maranhão has a history of impunity surrounding crimes against Indigenous people, according to a recent report that notes that most killings of Indigenous people there between 2003 and 2019 remain unresolved and are directly related to land conflicts.

Environmental defenders in Ecuador aren’t safe, new report shows
- A new report by Ecuador’s Alliance for Human Rights examines abuses against environmental rights defenders over the past 10 years, and finds 449 defenders subjected to intimidation, threats, harassment, persecution, and assassination.
- The report concludes that not only has the Ecuadoran state failed to protect rights defenders, but it has also been directly responsible for some of the abuses, like the concerning number of persecutions and prosecutions of rights defenders.
- Three environmental rights defenders have been murdered in Ecuador over the past 10 years — Andres Durazno, Freddy Taish and José Tendetza — with no one brought to justice for the crimes.

Former dam executive found guilty in the killing of Berta Cáceres
- The alleged ringleader of the 2016 killing of environmental and Indigenous rights activist Berta Cáceres was convicted of murder by a Honduran court on Monday.
- Roberto David Castillo Mejía, the ex-head of the dam company Desa, was found guilty of participating in the assassination of Cáceres. The court decision was unanimous.
- Cáceres was gunned down in her home on March 2, 2016 at the age of 44 after leading opposition to the Agua Zarca dam on the Rio Galcarque, a river that holds spiritual significance for the Lenca people.
- Cáceres was recognized for her activism in 2015 when she won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize.

Exhibition showcases Claudia Andujar’s half-century fight for the Yanomami
- Swiss-born Claudia Andujar fled Europe as a child at the end of World War II, and spent much of her later life in Brazil, becoming a celebrated photographer.
- In her adopted homeland, she found a strong affinity with the Yanomami Indigenous people, for whom she was an advocate for the establishment of their own territory — something that came to pass in 1992 as Brazil prepared to host the Rio Earth Summit.
- Now aged 90, Andujar remains deeply concerned for the people with whom she says she “totally identified,” noting that the present threat of illegal mining in Indigenous territories is doing far more harm than the government-driven road projects of the 1970s.
- Andujar’s years of work and life with the Yanomami are now chronicled in a major photo exhibition at London’s Barbican Centre through Aug. 29.

In Brazil’s most Indigenous city, prejudice and diversity go hand in hand
- São Gabriel da Cachoeira, in northern Amazonas state, is recognized as Brazil’s most Indigenous municipality: an estimated 90% of its population is Indigenous, accounting for both its urban and rural areas; the urban area alone is 58% self-declared Indigenous.
- Spread across an area the size of Cuba, São Gabriel da Cachoeira has a history marked by the arrival of Brazilian military forces in 1760 and subsequently Catholic and Protestant missionaries, organized Indigenous social movements, as well as national and international NGOs focused on defending the environment and the Indigenous peoples.
- According to the census, there are 32 indigenous ethnic groups in São Gabriel da Cachoeira, many of them unknown in the rest of the country, such as the Koripako, Baniwa, Baré, Wanano, Piratapuya, Tukano, and Dãw people.
- The municipality is the only one in the country with four official languages, in addition to Portuguese: Baniwa, Tukano, Nheengatu and Yanomami. But despite its cultural and ethnic diversity, there are frequent reports of discrimination against Indigenous people.

Deforestation spikes in Virunga National Park, DRC
- Satellite data has detected several dramatic spikes in deforestation activity in Virunga National Park in 2021.
- Virunga National Park is situated in the northeastern portion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), right over its border with Uganda.
- Virunga is home to many endangered species and subspecies, including mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei).
- The park’s major threats include logging for charcoal production and clearing for agriculture, both of which are driven by poverty.

Illegal miners block Indigenous leaders headed to protests in Brazil’s capital
- Illegal gold miners slashed the tires of a bus and threatened to set it on fire in a bid to block leaders in the Munduruku Indigenous Reserve from traveling to Brazil’s capital to attend planned protests this week, Indigenous groups and authorities say.
- Indigenous leaders had to be escorted by police as they tried to reach the capital and take part in protests against invasions of their lands and violence against their people, advocates say.
- The attacks come weeks after miners fired shots and set houses ablaze in the Munduruku reserve, fueling worries about more violence against Indigenous people after federal authorities retreated from the area.
- Federal prosecutors and Indigenous groups have called for firmer measures against the illegal miners and permanent protection for the Munduruku Indigenous people.

Paid in Blood: Standing up to private interests often turns deadly in Brazil
- In 2017, police officers killed 10 rural workers in Pau D’Arco, Pará, Brazil. On January 26, 2021, a survivor—Fernando dos Santos Araújo—was found shot in his home.
- His story reveals a frightening pattern in Brazil where standing up to private interests often turns deadly.
- The land remains in dispute, but the workers argue it has cost them enough already. They’ve paid in blood.

Land conflicts in Brazil break record under Bolsonaro
- Land conflicts in Brazil broke a record in 2020 for the second year running, reaching 1,576 cases — the highest since 1985, according to the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT).
- Activists have identified government actions as the main driver for the increase in conflicts over land, labor and water, citing cuts to environmental and social initiatives and rhetoric favoring land grabbers and illegal miners.
- Conflicts involving Indigenous peoples accounted for more than 40% of the total; Indigenous people also made up seven of the 18 victims of murders linked to land conflicts recorded by CPT last year.
- Attacks on Indigenous reserves have escalated in recent weeks, with illegal gold miners attacking the homes of Indigenous leaders on May 26 in the Munduruku reserve in the Amazon, prompting state authorities to demand a continuous presence of security forces in the region.

Illegal miners fire shots, burn homes in Munduruku Indigenous Reserve
- Illegal gold miners set fire to homes of several Indigenous leaders in the Munduruku Indigenous Reserve in the Brazilian Amazon this week, before attempting to destroy police equipment used to expel outsiders, authorities and activists say.
- Indigenous groups say the attack was in retaliation to police operations aimed at expelling illegal gold miners from the Munduruku reserve, which is supposed to be under federal protection.
- The Munduruku people have been battling invasions for decades but miners have grown bolder amid expectations that the federal government may legalize wildcat mining on Indigenous lands; police forces withdrew from the region following the attacks, leaving Indigenous people vulnerable to further violence, federal prosecutors say.
- The attacks in the Munduruku reserve follow a wave of violence in the Yanomami reserve, where 700 hectares (1,730 acres) of land have been degradaded since January, according to a recent aerial survey, setting the stage for a new record for deforestation in the reserve.

Indigenous in Brasília: The fight for rights in Brazil’s power base
- Since its founding in 1960, Brasília has drawn Indigenous leaders and activists looking to bring their grievances and requests to the country’s center of power.
- Some, like Beto Marubo, who successfully pushed for health supplies and support for his Amazonian community during the COVID-19 pandemic, say they have better chances of achieving their goals by being in the capital.
- Another prominent figure is Joenia Wapichana, the first Indigenous woman elected to Congress, who has made it her mission to thwart the anti-Indigenous agenda of President Jair Bolsonaro.
- But many of the Indigenous people who live there say it doesn’t feel like home, with frequent incidents of prejudice and violence; Īrémirí Tukano, who has a degree in events and is now studying tourism, says he’s only passing through to learn the knowledge of the non-Indigenous and take it back to his people.

In the Honduran Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, an illegal road for cattle and drugs
- Multiple sources, backed by satellite data, say an illegal road is being cut through the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve in Honduras, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- Sources say the road will facilitate land invasions into the biosphere and is likely to be used as a drug-trafficking route.
- The road has created divisions between Indigenous groups, with the Bakinasta Miskito denouncing its presence and demanding the government step in to halt it.
- Despite knowing about the road for more than a year, the Honduran government has not taken definitive action to enforce the law.

Indigenous in Salvador: A struggle for identity in Brazil’s first capital
- The city of Salvador in Brazil’s Bahia state was one of the first established by European colonizers 500 years ago, built where settlements of Indigenous people already existed.
- Today, the predominantly Afro-Brazilian city is home to an Indigenous minority of around 7,500, many of whom are enrolled in the local university under the Indigenous quota system.
- They say they continue to face prejudice from others, who question why they wear modern clothes and use smartphones and don’t look like the pictures in history books.
- Over centuries of suffering from colonization and enslavement, Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian communities here have forged something of a cultural alliance in an effort to keep their respective traditions alive.

Indigenous in São Paulo: Erased by a colonial education curriculum
- São Paulo, the biggest city in the western hemisphere, is home to two Indigenous reserves with vastly differing fates.
- The Jaraguá reserve is the smallest in Brazil, hemmed in by a controversial property development and highways that commemorate colonizers who enslaved and massacred the Indigenous population.
- On the much larger Tenondé Porã reserve, residents grow their own food and speak their own language.
- Despite these differences, Indigenous people in São Paulo, whether in the reserves or in the city, face the common problems of discrimination, an education system that refuses to acknowledge their presence, and the continued glorification of genocidal colonizers.

Gas fields and jihad: Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado becomes a resource-rich war zone
- In the early 2010s, the fossil fuel industry discovered Africa’s largest natural gas deposits off the remote northern coastline of Mozambique.
- The discovery led to a massive wave of investment — and almost immediately, a corruption scandal involving Credit Suisse.
- The development of the gas field and LNG plant has been criticized for evicting locals and destroying livelihoods, while failing to deliver on promises of jobs and welfare.
- In late March, the town of Palma near the oil facility came under attack from a jihadist group, and on Monday French energy giant Total declared force majeure on its operations.

Brazilian Cerrado savanna: Wildcat miners descend on Indigenous reserve
- The Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous reserve in Brazil’s Roraima state covers 1.75 million hectares (4.32 million acres) along the nation’s border with Venezuela and Guyana. It is home to 26,705 Indigenous people.
- The territory has been under pressure from invaders for decades, even after being demarcated in 2005. But illegal incursions are reaching a new peak now, with an estimated 2,000 to 5,000 gold miners operating in the reserve.
- Incendiary speeches by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro have emboldened the miners, say experts, while attempts to crackdown on wildcat mining in the Yanomami Territory in the Amazon rainforest may have pushed illegal miners operating there into the Cerrado savanna where most of Raposa Serra do Sol is located.
- The illicit miners are causing deforestation and contamination of the Cotinga River and other waterways with sediment and toxic mining waste, including mercury used to process gold. They’re also putting Indigenous people at risk from Covid-19, violence, and social ills including alcohol abuse and prostitution.

Landmark decision: Brazil Supreme Court sides with Indigenous land rights
- Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court (STF) has unanimously accepted an appeal by the Guarani Kaiowá Indigenous people and agreed to review the process around a past case that cancelled the demarcation of their Indigenous territory.
- The Guarani Kaiowá’s decades-long fight for land rights to their ancestral territory, the Guyraroká land in Mato Grosso do Sul state, had been suspended by a 2014 ruling halting the territory’s demarcation process.
- The STF’s decision to review the process in the 2014 case, which hadn’t allowed for Indigenous consultation, is seen by analysts as a victory for Indigenous groups in Brazil, and as a setback for President Jair Bolsonaro who has declared his opposition to any Indigenous demarcation occurring during his administration.
- In a related upcoming case, the STF is expected to rule on the “marco temporal,” which requires that Indigenous people have been living on claimed lands in 1988 in order to establish a legal territory. But litigators have argued that date is unfairly arbitrary, as many Indigenous groups were forced off ancestral lands by then.

‘We are made invisible’: Brazil’s Indigenous on prejudice in the city
- Contrary to popular belief, Brazil’s Indigenous people aren’t confined to the Amazon Rainforest, with more than a third of them, or about 315,000 individuals, living in urban areas.
- Over the past year, we dived into the census and related databases to produce unique maps and infographics showing not only how the Indigenous residents are distributed in six cities and in Brazil overall, but also showcasing their access to education, sewage and other amenities, and their ethnic diversity.
- Access to higher education is a milestone: the number of Indigenous people enrolled in universities jumped from 10,000 to about 81,000 between 2010 and 2019, giving them a higher college education rate than the general population.
- This data-driven reporting project received funding support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting’s data journalism and property rights grant.

Intimidation of Brazil’s enviro scientists, academics, officials on upswing
- Increasingly, Brazilian environmental researchers, academics and officials appear to be coming under fire for their scientific work or views, sometimes from the Jair Bolsonaro government, but also from anonymous Bolsonaro supporters.
- Researchers and academics have come under attack for their scientific work on agrochemicals, deforestation and other topics, as well as for their socio-environmental views. Attacks have taken the form of anonymous insults and death threats, gag orders, equipment thefts, and even attempted kidnapping.
- A range of intimidation is being experienced by officials, including firings and threats of retaliation for institutional criticism at IBAMA, Brazil’s environment agency, ICMBio, the Chico Mendes Institute of Biodiversity Conservation overseeing Brazil’s national parks, and FUNAI, the Indigenous affairs agency.
- “Whose interests benefit from the denial of the data on deforestation… from criminalizing the action of NGOs and environmentalists? What we are witnessing is a coordinated action to make it easier for agribusiness to advance into Indigenous territories and standing forest,” says one critic.

Guarani Indigenous men brutalized in Brazilian ‘expansion of violence’
- In the 1960s and 70s, the Guarani Kaiowá Indigenous group was expelled from its ancestral lands in Mato Grosso do Sul state by the Brazilian military dictatorship to expand the country’s agricultural frontier. Today, their traditional Indigenous homeland is occupied by large farms, whose owners refuse to return the property.
- A federal Supreme Court decision resulted in an order to allow the return of the Guarani Kaiowá to their former homeland where they now await the official demarcation of their territory to be approved by the federal government — an approval that still hasn’t come after the passage of ten years.
- The land dispute and standoff between the ranchers and the Guarani Kaiowá has repeatedly flared into violence over the years. In 2011, Indigenous leader Nízio Gomes was murdered in the Guaiviry community area by armed thugs.
- Violence flared yet again in Guaiviry last week when three Guarani Kaiowá men were assaulted, they say, by gunmen from the large Querência Farm. The Guarani Kaiowá say that intimidation of their community members has seriously escalated under the Jair Bolsonaro administration, which has shown hostility toward Indigenous rights.

The Kalunga digitally map traditional lands to save Cerrado way of life
- The Kalunga represents a grouping of 39 traditional quilombola communities — the descendants of runaway slaves — living on a territory covering 262,000 hectares (647,000 acres) in Goiás state in central Brazil, within the Cerrado savanna biome.
- This territory has been under heavy assault by illegal invaders, including small-scale wildcat gold miners, and large-scale mining operations, as well as land grabbers who have destroyed native vegetation to grow soy and other agribusiness crops.
- To defend their lands, the Kalunga received a grant from the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF), supported by Agence Française de Développement, Conservation International, EU, the Global Environment Facility, Japan and the World Bank. With their funding, the Kalunga georeferenced the territory, pinpointing homes, crops, soils, 879 springs, and vital natural resources.
- In February 2020, the U.N. Environment Programme and World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) recognized the Kalunga Historical and Cultural Heritage Site as the first TICCA (Territories and Areas Conserved by Indigenous and Local Communities) in Brazil, making it what UNEP-WCMC calls a “Territory for Life.”

‘Hungry’ palm oil, pulpwood firms behind Indonesia land-grab spike: Report
- Land conflicts in Indonesia escalated in 2020, with palm oil and pulpwood companies taking advantage of movement restrictions to expand aggressively, according to a new report.
- These disputes have historically waned during times of economic downturn, but last year’s increase was driven by “land-hungry” companies, according to the NGO Consortium for Agrarian Reform (KPA).
- Most of the conflicts involved palm oil and pulpwood companies, while infrastructure developments backed by the government were also a major contributor.

Six rangers killed in deadly militia attack in DRC’s Virunga National Park
- The incident is the latest in a series of deadly attacks against rangers working inside the park.
- The Congolese agency that supervises ranger operations said the attack was likely carried out by members of a local militia.
- Land pressures and instability in eastern DRC have increasingly brought rangers from Virunga into conflict with armed groups in the region.

Brazilian woman threatened by Amazon loggers wins global human rights award
- Rural community leader Osvalinda Alves Pereira is the first Brazilian to receive the Edelstam Prize, a Swedish award given to human rights defenders. She was honored this November for her brave stand against illegal loggers and for her defense of the Amazon agrarian reform community of Areia in Pará state.
- Illegal loggers there have repeatedly threatened Osvalinda and her husband with violence, forcing them out of their community and into urban safe houses. Now the couple has returned to their rural home; threats to Osvalinda and her community have resumed since she received the Edelstam Prize.
- Illegal deforestation, especially the illegal export of rare and valuable Amazon woods, has been strongly aided by the deregulatory policies of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, according to critics, who also say that the president’s incendiary rhetoric is emboldening illegal loggers and others to violence.
- Still threatened by logging militias in Amazonia, Osvalinda received the award just a week after President Bolsonaro in a speech tried to shift responsibility for the policing of Amazon illegal deforestation away from Brazil and onto its foreign trading partners who are importing timber from the South American nation.

The Amazon’s Yanomami utterly abandoned by Brazilian authorities: Report
- A new report highlights the escalating existential crisis among the 30,000 Indigenous people living in the Yanomami Territory, covering 9,664,975 hectares (37,317 square miles) in northern Brazil. Data shows that the Yanomami reserve is in the top ten areas now most prone to illegal deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon.
- The report accuses Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazilian government of abandoning the Yanomami to the invasion of their territory by tens-of-thousands of illegal miners. While the administration has launched sporadic operations to stop these incursions, the miners return as soon as police leave the reserve.
- Bolsonaro is also accused of having done little to combat COVID-19 or provide basic healthcare. As a result, pandemic case numbers have grown by 250% in the last three months, now possibly infecting 10,000 Yanomami and Ye’kwana, about a third of the reserve’s entire population, with deaths recorded among adults and children.
- “Children, young people and the generations to come deserve to live healthy lives in their forest home. Their futures should not be cut off by the actions of a genocidal administration,” says the report compiled by the Yanomami and Ye’kwana and a network of academics. Brazil’s Health Ministry denied the charge of negligence.

2020 fires endangering uncontacted Amazon Indigenous groups
- Amazon fires this year are seriously threatening Indigenous territories in which isolated uncontacted Indigenous groups make their homes. Brazil has an estimated 100+ isolated Indigenous groups living within its borders, more than any other Amazonian nation.
- Particularly threatened by fires in 2020 are the isolated Ãwa people who live on Bananal Island in Tocantins state; the uncontacted Awá inhabiting the Arariboia Indigenous Reserve in Maranhão state; and uncontacted groups in the Uru Eu Wau Wau Indigenous territory in Rondônia and Ituna Itatá Indigenous territory in Pará, the Brazilian state with the highest deforestation and land conflicts rates.
- All of these Indigenous territories are under intense pressure from land grabbers, illegal loggers and ranchers, with many of this year’s fires thought to have been set intentionally as a means of converting protected rainforest to pasture and cropland.
- Meanwhile, the Jair Bolsonaro government has hobbled IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency, defunding it and preventing it from fighting fires, causing one critic to accuse the administration of having “waged war against Indigenous peoples” and of “an ongoing genocide.”

Indigenous best Amazon stewards, but only when property rights assured: Study
- New research provides statistical evidence confirming the claim by Indigenous peoples that that they are the more effective Amazon forest guardians in Brazil — but only if and when full property rights over their territories are recognized, and fully protected, by civil authorities in a process called homologation.
- Researchers looked at 245 Indigenous territories, homologated between 1982 and 2016. They concluded that Indigenous people were only able to curb deforestation effectively within their ancestral territories after homologation had been completed, endowing full property rights.
- However, since the study was completed, the Temer and Bolsonaro governments have backpedaled on Indigenous land rights, failing to protect homologated reserves. Also, the homologation process has come to a standstill, failing its legal responsibility to recognize collective ownership pledged by Brazil’s Constitution.
- In another study, researchers suggest that a key to saving the Amazon involves reframing our view of it, giving up the old view of it as an untrammeled Eden assaulted by modern exploitation, and instead seeing it as a forest long influenced by humanity; now we need only restore balance to achieve sustainability.

Understaffed and under threat: Paraguay’s park rangers pay the ultimate price
- Protected areas in eastern Paraguay are beset by illegal marijuana cultivation and logging. Government interventions have had limited success, with clearing resuming shortly after agents leave an area.
- Park rangers tasked with monitoring the country’s reserves and parks say they routinely encounter hostile criminal groups when on patrol. These encounters can take a violent turn – several rangers have been murdered over the past decade while patrolling protected areas for illegal activity.
- According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the ideal number of park rangers is one for every 1,000 hectares. However, in Paraguay, there is just one park ranger for more than 38,000 hectares.
- Rangers say they need more resources and support to do their job safely and effectively.

No choice: Why communities in Paraguay are cutting down forests to survive
- Illegal deforestation for marijuana cultivation is a growing problem for eastern Paraguay’s protected areas.
- Sources say much of the clearing is done by indigenous community members and small farmers who are beset by poverty and have no other options.
- A joint project between the Paraguayan government and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations seeks to provide more opportunities for rural communities, but has been stymied by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Goldminers overrun Amazon indigenous lands as COVID-19 surges
- Reports filed by NGOs including the Socioenvironmental Institute (ISA) and Greenpeace Brazil say that a major invasion of indigenous reserves and conservation units is underway, prompted by miners well backed with expensive equipment supplied by wealthy elites.
- Miners are emboldened, say the NGOs, by the inflammatory anti-indigenous and anti-environmental rhetoric of the Jair Bolsonaro administration which has sent a clear signal so far, that it has no major plans of stopping the invasions or penalizing the perpetrators.
- Through June of this year, deforestation by mining within conserved areas represented 67.9% of total tree loss in Legal Amazonia. From January to June, illegal mining destroyed 2,230 hectares (5,510 acres) of forest inside conservation units (UCs) and 1,016 hectares (2,510 acres) inside indigenous territories (TIs).
- The miners’ onslaught also poses a serious COVID-19 threat. The virus has so far infected at least 14,647 indigenous people and caused 269 deaths on indigenous lands. Meanwhile, Bolsonaro is pressing for passage of legislation authorizing mining on indigenous lands; presently the bill is stalled in the house of deputies.

2019 was the deadliest year ever for environmental activists, watchdog group says
- In a new report, the watchdog group says that at least 212 environment and land defenders were killed across the world in 2019.
- The deadliest countries were Colombia and the Philippines, with 64 and 43 killings respectively.
- Despite making up only 5% of the world’s population, representatives of Indigenous communities accounted for 40% of those killed.
- Killings related to agribusiness jumped by 60%, to 34 in 2019 – researchers say as consumption of commodities like beef and palm oil increases, so too will deadly conflict over land.

Protected areas in Paraguay hit hard by illegal marijuana farming
- Agriculture has deforested much of eastern Paraguay’s Upper Parana Atlantic Forest, an endangered ecoregion of which less 10% remains today.
- More recently, illegal marijuana cultivation has become a driving force of deforestation in the region. Even protected areas are not immune from destruction, with satellite data and drone footage confirming large swaths of protected primary forest have been cleared for marijuana cropland over the past year. Sources say timber and charcoal are also being produced as by-products of clearing for marijuana and are illegally transported out of protected areas.
- Four protected areas have been particularly affected: Mbaracayú Reserve, San Rafael National Park/Proposed National Reserve, Morombí Reserve and Caazapá National Park.
- Forest rangers working in the protected areas say there aren’t enough enforcement staff to combat the illegal encroachment.

Life as an Amazon activist: ‘I don’t want to be the next Dorothy Stang’
- Socio-environmental activists are an endangered species in the Brazilian Amazon, with regularly occurring assassination-style killings like those of activists Chico Mendes in 1988 and Sister Dorothy Stang in 2005 creating an ongoing climate of fear.
- According to human rights watchdog Global Witness, Brazil in 2017 was the world’s most dangerous country for environmental acivists: 57 out of 201 deaths worldwide occurred in Brazil. Intimidation and murder of activists continues into the present.
- Activist Juma Xipaya saw the village she grew up in fundamentally changed by the building of the Belo Monte mega-dam. When she later exposed corruption and incompetence she faced death threats and now lives perpetually on guard.
- In recent years, Xipaya has been repeatedly pursued by a white pickup driven by two armed thugs, but police fail to respond to her pleas for help. The men eventually made an attempt on her life — a close call that almost killed her and her children.

Brazilian court orders 20,000 gold miners removed from Yanomami Park
- The Yanomami Park covers 37,000 square miles in the Brazilian Amazon on the Venezuelan border; it is inhabited by 27,000 Yanomami. Soaring gold prices have resulted in a massive ongoing invasion of the indigenous territory by gold miners who are well supported with monetary backing, heavy equipment and aircraft.
- On 3 July, a federal judge issued an emergency ruling ordering the Jair Bolsonaro administration to come up with an immediate plan to stop the spread of the pandemic to Yanomami Park, a plan which must include the removal of all 20,000 invading miners within ten days. Brazil’s Vice President pledges to back the plan.
- That eviction must stay in effect until the danger to the Yanomami of the pandemic passes. There have so far been five Yanomami deaths due to the disease and 168 confirmed cases. More are expected.
- The invasion has also resulted in violent clashes between miners and indigenous people. In mid-June two Yanomami were killed in a conflict, evoking fears of a replay of retaliatory violence that occurred in the 1990s. In response to the current crisis, the Yanomami have launched their “Miners Out, Covid Out” campaign.

Illegal farms on indigenous lands get whitewashed under Bolsonaro administration
- An exclusive study shows that 114 properties have been certified inside indigenous territories awaiting demarcation in the Brazilian Amazon, spurred in large part by a recent statute that leaves these reserves unprotected from such illegal land grabs.
- The certified lands span more than 250,000 hectares (620,000 acres) inside indigenous territories, some of them authorized before FUNAI, the agency for indigenous affairs, issued the statute allowing registry on unratified lands.
- Landowners have already registered claims for more than 2,000 private properties in indigenous areas inside the Amazon, including areas that are home to isolated peoples.
- Indigenous groups, civil society organizations, the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office and state prosecutors have denounced the statute and are challenging it in various courts.

In Philippines’ Palawan, top cop linked to assault on environmental officer
- Police on the Philippine island of Palawan reportedly assaulted and arrested government environmental officials trying to serve a vacate notice to settlers occupying a mangrove area.
- Environmental lawyers and conservation officials have condemned the incident, led by Marion Balonglong, the chief of police of Puerto Princesa, the provincial capital, calling it “yet another blow to our environmental enforcement.”
- Cutting down mangroves is prohibited under Philippine laws, and in recent years environmental defenders have come under deadly attacks from suspected illegal loggers; this incident marks the first time they’ve been confronted by the police.
- Suspected illegal loggers killed a village patrol officer in 2017, and a forest ranger in 2019; in May this year, suspected loggers shot and wounded a ranger in a national park.

A bid to legitimize invasions of Brazil’s indigenous lands faces a court challenge
- In April, Brazil’s indigenous affairs agency FUNAI authorized the registration and sale of land on unratified or unregistered indigenous territories, potentially affecting 237 reserves in 24 states.
- Regulation No. 9, as it’s known, affects at least 9.8 million hectares (24 million acres), rendering an area the size of Iceland open to real estate transactions.
- Amazonas is the state with the most threatened reserves — a total of 30 in the sights of land grabbers, landed estate owners, and oil and gas companies — followed by Mato Grosso do Sul, where indigenous communities already live in dire conditions of extreme poverty, hunger and violence.
- FUNAI’s regulation has already withstood a court challenge on a technicality, but now faces a new bid for annulment by the state attorney general of Mato Grosso, who calls it a dereliction of FUNAI’s own mission.

Contentious Guatemala nickel mine ‘ignores coronavirus lockdown’
- A nickel mine in Guatemala is at the center of fresh allegations of misconduct after it was alleged to have endangered local residents by operating throughout the coronavirus pandemic, despite a government order to close and its license being suspended last year.
- The mine’s operator, Switzerland-based Solway Investment Group, has denied it is breaking the rules, saying it has been given special permission by ministers to continue operations.
- The Fenix mine has sparked numerous social conflicts in El Estor going back to the 1960s. Dozens of locals have been arbitrarily detained and at least three killed since 2004.
- Several legal cases against activists are currently in the courts, as well as complaints against the company lodged by supporters. But the Covid-19 outbreak has also impacted Guatemala’s justice system, meaning a resolution to the cases may be further delayed.

Papuan farmer dies after alleged police assault at palm oil company
- An indigenous Papuan farmer, Marius Betera, has died after allegedly being assaulted by a police officer when complaining about a palm oil company bulldozing his banana plot.
- Police at the district level have arrested the officer, but police at the provincial level deny he did anything wrong, claiming that Marius died of a heart attack and that an autopsy showed no signs of bruising.
- Activists have demanded an independent investigation into the case, noting that the alleged assailant, Melkianus Yowei, was last year transferred from his post after assaulting an elderly indigenous woman.
- The palm oil company, PT Tunas Sawa Erma (TSE), is a subsidiary of the Korindo Group, which has a track record of violating traditional and human rights in the Indonesian provinces of Papua and North Maluku.

Gender-based violence shakes communities in the wake of forest loss
- Women in the province of East New Britain in Papua New Guinea say they have faced increasing domestic violence, along with issues like teenage pregnancy and drug abuse, in their communities as logging and oil palm plantations have moved in.
- Traditionally, women have been the stewards of the land and passed it down to their children, but they say they’ve felt sidelined in discussions about this type of land “development.”
- Experts say that the loss of forest for large-scale agriculture and extractive industries goes hand in hand with violence against women globally, linked with the colonial and patriarchal paradigms associated with these uses of the land.
- In Papua New Guinea and elsewhere, women are working to protect themselves, their families and their forests from these changes.

Brazil opens 38,000 square miles of indigenous lands to outsiders
- FUNAI, Brazil’s indigenous agency, has reversed a long-standing policy with a new instruction paving the way for the legitimization of outsider land claims made within indigenous territories which are still in the process of gaining official recognition.
- Brazil’s 1988 Constitution guarantees indigenous land rights on ancestral lands, but the government has delayed the process for decades. The new policy opens 237 as yet unrecognized indigenous areas, covering 37,830 square miles, an area the size of the U.S. state of Indiana — much of it still covered in rainforest.
- Critics of the Jair Bolsonaro government say that the new instruction will create legal cover for landgrabbers, ranchers, soy growers, loggers, and other outsiders to invade indigenous ancestral lands, claim permanent title to the property and exploit land vital to indigenous survival.
- The policy, say analysts, seems destined to result in close contact and clashes between outsiders and indigenous people, and is especially a threat to isolated indigenous groups, many who currently live within un-demarcated ancestral lands. There is also a high risk of indigenous infection with COVID-19.

Calls for justice after latest murder of indigenous Guajajara leader in Brazil
- Zezico Rodrigues Guajarara, a teacher from the Arariboia indigenous reserve in northeastern Maranhão state, was found shot dead on March 31. The motive for the killing remains unknown.
- He is the fifth Guajajara indigenous leader to be slain since November in the lawless frontier region dominated by powerful landowners and logging mafias.
- Indigenous leader Olímpio Iwyramu Guajajara, who is himself under state protection following an earlier killing of a prominent community member, told Mongabay he felt “particularly vulnerable in our territory.”
- Zezico had long reportedly received death threats from both indigenous and non-indigenous people involved with illegal logging. The federal police have been called in to investigate the murder.

Brazil drastically reduces controls over suspicious Amazon timber exports
- Forest degradation nearly doubled in the Brazilian Amazon last year, rising from 4,946 square kilometers in 2018, to 9,167 square kilometers in 2019. Experts say this is likely due to soaring illegal timber harvesting and export under President Jair Bolsonaro.
- To facilitate illegal harvesting of rare and valuable timber, like that of the Ipê tree, whose wood can sell for up to $2,500 per cubic meter at Brazilian export terminals, Bolsonaro’s environment officials have reversed regulations that formerly outlawed suspicious timber shipments, making most such exports legal.
- Experts say that the relaxation of illegal export regulations not only protects the criminal syndicates cutting the trees in Amazonia, but also shields exporter Brazil, and importers in the EU, UK, US and elsewhere, preventing them from being accused of causing Amazon deforestation via their supply chains.
- Activists fear overturned timber export regulations will embolden illegal loggers, who will escalate invasions onto indigenous and traditional lands, as well as within conservation units. More than 300 people were assassinated over the past decade as the result of land and natural resource conflicts in the Brazilian Amazon.

On anniversary of nun’s murder Amazon land rights activists at high risk
- Fifteen years ago this month, land rights activist and Catholic nun Dorothy Stang, “Sister Dorothy,” was brutally assassinated in Anapu municipality, Pará state, Brazil. While her death caused a loud international public outcry, and resulted in Brazil cracking down on such violence, those corrections didn’t last.
- Less than 5% of the more than 550 killings that have occurred since Stang’s murder having gone to court, according to data collected by Brazil’s Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) and analyzed by Mongabay. In Pará, the state where Stang was murdered, just 6 of more than 190 land conflict murders have been judged in court.
- Experts say the majority of such killings are plotted by land grabbers and powerful land owners trying to intimidate peasant farmers seeking land reform, or trying to protect their small land holdings. Local corruption in government, law enforcement and in the courts leads to few prosecutions.
- Analysts fear President Jair Bolsonaro’s polices will worsen the problem. In December, he issued executive order MP 910, which critics say effectively legalizes land grabbing. The decree, supposedly benefiting smallholders, provides a pardon for past large-scale land grabbers and could embolden land grabbing in future.

For Ecuador’s eco agenda, 2019 was a year of setbacks and pushbacks
- Unrest over environmental issues was at the fore of October’s national strike in Ecuador precipitated by economic difficulties, with strong opposition to the expansion of resource extraction.
- The country experienced a mixed 2019 on the environmental front, with indigenous groups winning court rulings to oppose large extraction projects on their land.
- There were also setbacks, however, including lack of compliance on a 2018 referendum to make greater room for uncontacted tribes in Yasuní National Park; persistent criminalization of indigenous activists and environmental defenders; and massive budget cuts for environmental agencies.

For Colombia, 2019 was a year of environmental discontent
- On Nov. 21, 2019, widespread national strikes began to break out in Colombia and have continued on and off since then.
- The protests include public demands over matters like austerity measures and working toward a robust domestic environmental agenda.
- Among the most intense issues for Colombia in 2019 were deforestation, the murders of social, environmental, and indigenous leaders, the debate over fracking, the increase in extractive activities, and restrictions on citizen participation in deciding the latter.

Five murdered in 2020 Brazilian Amazon land conflicts, adding to 2019 surge
- Already this month, three Miranha indigenous people have been murdered in Coari municipality, an oil and gas rich town on the Amazon River in Amazonas state, while two peasant farmers have been murdered in Maranhão state, on the Amazonian frontier — all five men are believed to have died due to land disputes.
- This month’s violence builds on a spike in rural murders and intimidation in the Amazon and across Brazil seen in 2019, which many analysts say is being catalyzed by the inflammatory rhetoric of President Jair Bolsonaro, along with administration policies undermining protections for indigenous and traditional peoples.
- A major concern, say analysts, is that Bolsonaro’s new policies, including an executive decree (MP 910) issued late in 2019, providing a sweeping amnesty to past land grabbers; and a proposed bill that would open indigenous lands to mining, could result in a further surge in land conflicts and violence this year.

‘Guardian of the Forest’ ambushed and murdered in Brazilian Amazon
- Paulo Paulino Guajajara, a 26-years-old indigenous Guajajara leader was killed on Friday in an Amazon rainforest ambush allegedly by loggers in the Araribóia Indigenous Reserve, one of the country’s most threatened indigenous territories, which is located in Brazil’s Maranhão state.
- Paulo was a member of “Guardians of the Forest,” a group of 120 indigenous Guajajara who risk their lives fighting illegal logging in the Araribóia reserve. The Guardians also protect the uncontacted Awá Guajá hunter-gatherers — one of the most at risk indigenous groups on the planet.
- Indigenous leader Laércio Guajajara, also a Guardian, was hit by gunfire too, but was able to escape and was later taken to a hospital, said indigenous chief Olímpio Iwyramu Guajajara, the Guardians’ leader. All three Guardians have reportedly been threatened by loggers recently.
- Federal Police and Maranhão state police are investigating the attack, which also reportedly resulted in a logger being killed; Paulo’s body was buried on Sunday. The killing is the most recent in a rising tide of violence against indigenous activists since Jair Bolsonaro took power in January.

3 massacres in 12 days: Rural violence escalates in Brazilian Amazon
- The Amazon has seen 3 probable massacres in 12 days — likely a record for the region — as violence has exploded in areas of heavy deforestation where the building of large dams has brought a capital infusion, sent land prices soaring, and invited land speculation by land grabbers, loggers and ranchers.
- A Brazilian landless movement peasant leader and a leading dam activist are among those killed. The attacks have been concentrated in areas centered around the Belo Monte mega-dam; in the Madeira basin near the Jirau dam; and near the Tucuruí dam on the Tocantins River in Pará state.
- Investigations are ongoing, but early reports are that at least 9 people are dead, with some witnesses saying more have been killed, especially rural landless peasant workers. Before becoming president, Jair Bolsonaro expressed strong hostility against the landless peasant movement (Movimento dos Sem Terra, or MST).
- The Bolsonaro Administration has yet to condemn or comment significantly on the recent wave of killings. As of this article’s publication, the international community has taken little notice of the spike in violence.

Suspected totoaba poachers shot by authorities in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez
- Three suspected totoaba poachers were reportedly shot yesterday by Mexican marines following a confrontation over illegal gillnets that had been confiscated.
- According to local news outlet Fronteras, the governor of the Mexican state of Baja California, Francisco Vega, has confirmed that three people were injured in a shootout between suspected poachers and Mexican marines early Thursday morning in San Felipe, a small fishing town on the coast of the Sea of Cortez.
- Gillnets are a piece of fishing tackle that have been banned in the Sea of Cortez because vaquita, a small porpoise considered the most endangered mammal on the planet, become entangled in them and drown. It is believed there are only 10 vaquita left in the Sea of Cortez, also known as the Upper Gulf of California, the vaquita’s only known range.

Leading Amazon dam rights activist, spouse and friend murdered in Brazil
- Dilma Ferreira Silva, long time regional coordinator of the Movement of People Affected by Dams (MAB) in the Tucuruí region of Pará state, was brutally murdered last Friday at her home, along with her husband, Claudionor Costa da Silva, and Hilton Lopes, a friend.
- Silva was one of 32,000 people displaced during the construction of the Tucuruí mega-dam. The internationally recognized activist has in recent years been pushing the Brazilian government to adopt legislation establishing the rights of those displaced by dams, providing them with compensation; the government has so far done little to create such laws.
- The killers of public officials, environmentalists, landless movement and indigenous activists in the Amazon are rarely found or brought to justice. However, in this case, Civil Police have arrested a large landowner, farmer and businessman, Fernando Ferreira Rosa Filho, known as Fernando Shalom.
- While the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and deputies in the Brazilian Congress, have condemned the killing of dam activist Silva, her husband and friend, the Bolsonaro administration has failed to issue a statement of any kind.

As Brazilian agribusiness booms, family farms feed the nation
- Brazil’s “Agricultural Miracle” credits industrial agribusiness with pulling the nation out of a recent economic tailspin, and contributing 23.5 percent to GDP in 2017. But that miracle relied on a steeply tilted playing field, with government heavily subsidizing elite entrepreneurs.
- As a result, Brazilian agro-industrialists own 800,000 farms which occupy 75.7 percent of the nation’s agricultural land, with 62 percent of total agricultural output. Further defining the inequity, the top 1.5 percent of rural landowners occupy 53 percent of all agricultural land.
- In contrast, there are 4.4 million family farms in Brazil, making up 85 percent of all agricultural operations in the country. The family farm sector produces 70 percent of food consumed in the country, but does so using under 25 percent of Brazil’s agricultural land.
- Farm aid inequity favoring large-scale industrial agribusiness over family farms has deepened since 2016 under Michel Temer, and is expected to deepen further under Jair Bolsonaro. Experts say that policies favoring family farms could bolster national food security.

COP24: Will they stay or will they go? Brazil’s threat to leave Paris
- In October, Brazil elected far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency. During the campaign, he threatened to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, implement extreme environmental deregulation policies, and introduce mining into Amazon indigenous reserves, while also using incendiary language which may be inciting violence in remote rural areas.
- Just days before his election, Bolsonaro contradicted his past utterances, saying he won’t withdraw from the Paris accord. At COP24, the Brazilian delegation has fielded questions from concerned attendees, but it appears that no one there knows with certainty what the volatile leader will do once in office. He begins his presidency on the first of the year.
- Even if Bolsonaro doesn’t pull out of Paris, his plans to develop the Amazon, removing most regulatory impediments to mining and agribusiness, could have huge ramifications for the global climate. The Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest, stores massive amounts of carbon. Deforestation rates are already going up there, and likely to grow under Bolsonaro.
- Some in Brazil hope that environmental and economic realities will prevent Bolsonaro from fully implementing his plans. Escalating deforestation is already reducing Amazon rainfall, putting aquifers and agribusiness at risk. Agricultural producers also fear global consumer perceptions of Brazil as being anti-environmental could lead to a backlash and boycotts.

7 convicted of killing Honduran indigenous activist Berta Cáceres
- A Honduran court has convicted seven men of the murder of indigenous rights activist Berta Cáceres in 2016.
- Until her death on March 2, 2016, Cáceres had been leading a fierce campaign against the Agua Zarca dam, a project of the Honduran company DESA, in western Honduras. The hydropower project threatened to displace thousands of people from the Lenca indigenous community.
- Nine people have been arrested in connection with Cáceres’s murder to date. Seven men were found guilty in the latest verdict and one defendant was acquitted.
- David Castillo Mejía, the executive president of DESA who was charged with being the mastermind of the murder in March this year, will face a separate trial.

‘No one is helping us’: Venezuelan conservation crippled by crisis
- Many conservationists have fled Venezuela since an economic crisis began in 2014.
- Those who have chosen to remain behind complain of a lack of funding and resources, and say they feel abandoned by the international community.
- Despite incredible difficulties, some conservationists are still able to take action, including rediscovering a long-lost bird.

Landless movement leader assassinated in Brazilian Amazon
- Landless movement leader Aluisio Sampaio, known as Alenquer, was murdered last Thursday in his home in Castelo de Sonhos in Pará state – an area that has become increasingly violent as land grabbers take over, clear forest, and sell the land for high profits to cattle ranchers.
- When Mongabay interviewed Alenquer late in 2016, he was helping defend the land rights of a peasant settlement along the BR-163 highway. At the time, he had been receiving death threats, and wore a bullet-proof vest provided to him by the government. The peasant settlement was later visited by armed gunman.
- Following that confrontation, Alenquer published a Youtube video accusing two prominent local citizens of threatening to kill him. Authorities have so far arrested two suspects in relation to Alenquer’s murder, while another man was killed in a police shootout on Saturday. The police investigation is on going.
- Alenquer’s murder comes as Brazil sees an uptick in violence that some analysts tie to the strong showing on 7 October of Brazilian far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, projected to win a 28 October runoff. Bolsonaro, a law-and-order candidate, has made inflammatory statements regarding violence.

Kenya: Indigenous Ogiek face eviction from their ancestral forest… again
- The Ogiek, traditional hunter-gatherers, have been subject to violent evictions from their ancestral homeland in the Mau Forest Complex of western Kenya since the beginning of British colonial rule.
- The Kenyan government says the evictions are necessary to protect the Mau Forest Complex, an important water catchment.
- In 2017, after more than 20 years of legal wrangling, the Ogiek won a landmark victory when an international court ruled that the Kenyan government had violated the Ogiek’s right to their ancestral land by evicting them.
- However, there are signs that the Kenyan government may be backing down from its pledge to abide by the court’s decision. Activists are warning of “an imminent plan” by the government to evict Ogiek from parts of the forest.

Amid ongoing evictions, Kenya’s Sengwer make plans to save their ancestral forest
- In one of Kenya’s biggest watersheds, the Sengwer indigenous community has struggled to obtain land rights for the forest it has called home for generations.
- The government has been forcefully evicting the Sengwer from Embobut Forest to pave the way for conservation projects funded by international donors.
- The Sengwer, hunter-gatherers, believe that they can protect the forest while living in it better than the government can, using traditional knowledge passed down from their ancestors.
- They have developed a plan to do so, even as another round of evictions looms.

Criminalization and violence increasingly used to silence indigenous protest, according to UN report
- Indigenous peoples are facing criminalization and violence the world over, tactics employed by private businesses and governments seeking to use indigenous lands for their own gain through economic development projects, according to a report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council on August 27.
- UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Victoria Tauli-Corpuz said she has seen firsthand a sharp rise in instances of physical violence and legal prosecution against indigenous peoples in countries like Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Kenya, Mexico, Peru, and the Philippines since her appointment as Special Rapporteur in 2014.
- The Special Rapporteur identifies lack of official recognition of indigenous peoples’ land rights as one of the root causes of violence, sometimes even leading to indigenous communities being treated as trespassers on their own traditional territories.

Death foretold? A courageous Amazon peasant couple resists illegal loggers
- The Terra do Meio (Land in the Middle) is a continuous mosaic of protected areas, 20 indigenous territories and 10 conservation units covering 28 million hectares in the heart of the Amazon and intended as a buffer against illegal deforestation and land theft. As big as Colorado, it represents one of the world’s largest areas of conserved tropical rainforest.
- Today, this vast conserved area in Pará state is under great pressure from organized crime and illegal loggers, with the Riozinho do Anfrísio Extractivist Reserve one of the most assaulted by illicit timber harvesters in all of Amazonia. The Areia settlement, created by the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INCRA) in 1988, lies adjacent to the reserve.
- Areia’s residents have suffered for decades from threats of violence and murder from the illegal loggers, with many locals abandoning their land or giving in to the criminals. Organic farmers Osvalinda Maria Marcelino Pereira and Daniel Pereira have resisted, holding onto their plot, with Osvalinda founding the Association of the Women of Areia.
- Hounded by hired gunmen and threatened with death, the two have become isolated and are now seeking outside support for their cause. Federal agencies have offered little help, and there are allegations that the illegal loggers are being shielded from prosecution. Similarly desperate situations are occurring among peasant farmers across Amazonia.

Brazil ignored U.N. letters warning of land defender threats, record killings
- United Nations rapporteurs sent two letters to the Temer administration in 2017. The first warned of threats to human rights activists in Minas Gerais state. The second condemned the record number of environmental and land defender killings in Pará state last year. Brazil ignored both letters.
- The State Public Ministry (MPE), the independent public prosecutor’s office in Minas Gerais, had requested the inclusion of six laborers and their families in the Protection Program of Human Rights Defenders, of the Secretariat of Rights of the Presidency in May, 2017.
- The laborers say they were threatened by representatives of Anglo American Iron Ore Brazil S.A., a subsidiary of London-based Anglo American, a global mining company. In March Anglo American Brazil reported a mineral duct rupture which contaminated the Santo Antônio and Casca rivers, and riverside communities.
- 908 murders of environmentalists and land defenders occurred in 35 countries between 2002 and 2013. Of those, 448, almost half, happened in Brazil. In 2018 so far, at least 12 Brazilian social activists and politicians have been slain — twice as many as compared to the same period in 2017.

Honduras arrests alleged mastermind of Berta Cáceres’s murder
- On March 2 Honduran authorities arrested a hydroelectric company executive they say orchestrated the murder of indigenous activist Berta Cáceres two years ago.
- David Castillo Mejía is executive president of Desarrollos Energéticos SA (DESA), the company building the Agua Zarca dam in western Honduras to which Cáceres had led a formidable opposition.
- Eight others arrested so far in the murder case include a DESA manager and several former members of the military. Among them are the four accused gunmen.

Honduran politicians, US aid implicated in killings of environmentalists
- An investigation by NGO Global Witness finds Honduras has one of the one of the world’s highest levels of violence against environmental activists, with more than 120 killed since 2010.
- Investigators say government corruption surrounding development projects like dams, mines, and oil palm plantations are largely to blame.
- Their report also highlights international finance institutions as playing a role in conflicts surrounding hydroelectric projects, as well as U.S. aid to Honduran military and police forces, which have been implicated in numerous human rights violations in the country.

Violence against indigenous people high, as land conflicts heat up
- There were 137 killings of indigenous people in Brazil in 2015, with the state of Mato Grosso do Sul recording the highest number (25 for the year), said a major report released in September by the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI).
- Much of the violence is due to land conflicts exacerbated by the government’s failure to demarcate indigenous lands, resulting in conflicts between large-scale farmers and indigenous people. There are 96 indigenous lands in Brazil, but only four have been demarcated and approved so far. Another 68 are classified with the status of “no action” according to CIMI.
- A high number of indigenous people also took their own lives, with 87 registered cases of suicide in 2015 by indigenous people. Again, Mato Grosso do Sul led the list with 45 cases.
- Data showed that the infant mortality rate is nearly twice as high among Brazil’s indigenous groups (26.35 deaths per thousand live births) as compared to the national average (13.82 per thousand live births).

Endangered Environmentalists

Green groups under threat from governments and corporate actors: As climate change, pollution, and habitat destruction worsen across the globe, environmental groups are responding by ratcheting up the pressure on governments and corporations to act. Many governments have responded by increasing restrictions on environmental NGOs, including revoking charity status, increasing sentences for protestors, and passing […]
Forest rangers killed in Cambodia while patrolling for illegal loggers
- Sieng Darong, a Forestry Administration ranger, and Sab Yoh, a police officer, were shot and killed while patrolling a protected forest in Cambodia on Saturday morning.
- Lor Chann, a local coordinator for Cambodian human rights group Adhoc, said the attack was carried out by illegal loggers in retaliation against forestry administration officials who are cracking down on the illegal timber trade.
- Darong and Yoh were executed just a few hours after confiscating chainsaws from an illegal logging site.

Police investigate villager’s murder in pulp and paper concession

An acacia plantation that was burned in Riau by villagers seeking to establish an oil palm plantation. Photos by Rhett A. Butler. Indonesian police are investigating the brutal killing of a villager in Jambi at the hands of security guards contracted by Wira Karya Sakti (WKS), a plantation company owned by forestry giant Asia Pulp […]
Tribal violence comes naturally to chimpanzees

It all went to hell when Jane Goodall started handing out bananas. Within a few years, the previously peaceful chimpanzees she was studying split into two warring tribes. Gangs of males from the larger faction systematically slaughtered their former tribemates. All over the bananas. Or so the argument goes. The idea that feeding the chimps […]
53 indigenous activists on trial for police-protester massacre in Peru

In the summer of 2009, on a highway in Peru known as Devil’s Curve: everything went wrong. For months, indigenous groups had protested new laws by then President Alan Garcia opening up the Amazon to deregulated logging, fossil fuels, and other extractive industries as a part of free trade agreements with the U.S. But the […]
Chinese luxury furniture linked to murder, near extinction

Intricately carved, meticulously designed, and costing hundreds of thousands of dollars: this is “hongmu,” or Chinese luxury furniture reflecting the elite styles of the Ming and Qing dynasties. But while the red-colored furniture may be aesthetically beautiful, it comes with a blood price. The hongmu craze—which is booming among China’s newly wealthy—is linked to murder, […]

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