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.
More than 5,000 agricultural workers blocked the Trans-Amazonian highway in the northern Brazilian state of Pará to push demands for land, government aid and an end to violence against activists.
Quechua indigenous leaders won an accord from Peru’s government to study the impacts of oil leasing in the Pastaza river basin—while on the Ecuadoran side of the basin, local residents held angry protests over hydro development plans.
Skeptical community activists in Peru’s conflicted Puno region charge that the government’s official cancellation of the giant Inambari hydro-electric dam is a “trick” to defuse protests and buy time to move ahead with the project.
Protesters called off their roadblocks in the Peruvian province of Carabaya as the government announced a suspension of the Inambari hydro-compex—after the project’s contractor expressed concerns about regional unrest.
Officials in Peru this week denied claims by UK-based Survival International that the government plans to abolish the Murunahua Territorial Reserve, created in 1997 to protect “uncontacted” bands of the Murunahua and other native peoples.
The survival of the “uncontacted” tribe whose images caused a worldwide sensation in February is in jeopardy, after the Peruvian government announced plans to abolish the reserve that protects their territory.

