Standard & Poor’s raised its outlook on Bolivia, citing new investment in the mining sector—as unprecedented forest fires ravage the country’s Amazon basin, and violence is feared as peasant colonists bar the progress of an indigenous march on La Paz.
Two Shipibo indigenous communites in the Peruvian Amazon have broken off negotiations with Maple Gas Corporation over the health and environmental impacts of six oil spills on their territory over the past three years.
The administration of Ollanta Humala has imposed a two-yea deadline for the Camisea consortium to find new gas reserves to meet its export obligations, saying all gas from existing fields will be used to meet domestic demand.
Guerilla attacks on oil operations in Colombia have been escalating since President Juan Manuel Santos threatened to expel those companies that do not halt payment of protection money to the guerilla army.
Peru’s Congress unanimously approved a new law that guarantees indigenous peoples’ right to free, prior and informed consent to any projects affecting them and their lands. President Ollanta Humala has 15 days to sign the bill into law.
Indigenous people in the eastern lowlands of Bolivia are preparing to set out on the long overland march to La Paz to protest plans for a trans-oceanic highway to be built through their rainforest lands with the backing of the Brazilian government.
Brazil’s indigenous agency FUNAI has launched an emergency investigation after a guard post at a reserve for isolated indigenous peoples in the rainforest of Acre state was overrun by heavily armed men thought to be drug traffickers.
Days before a new administration in Lima is to take power, Peru’s indigenous affairs agency proposed new regulations to allow oil exploitation within rainforest reserves established to protect indigenous groups in “voluntary isolation.”
Some 180 hectares of rainforest in the Amazon have been defoliated using a potent mix of herbicides sprayed by airplane, according to IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental law enforcement agency.
The Kichwa people of Sarayaku, a remote community in Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest, have brought suit against the Quito government before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights over oil contracts on their traditional lands.
Health workers in Colombia’s remote southeast report an outbreak of respiratory disease in the Nukak-Maku, one of the Amazon’s last nomadic tribes—whose numbers have already been decimated by flu, malaria and political violence.
Aerial photos released by Brazil’s indigenous affairs agency reveal evidence of one of the world’s last “uncontacted” tribes, in the Vale do Javari region of the Amazon. FUNAI warns that illegal timber operations threaten the tribe’s survival.
