On April 17, members of Brazil’s Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) commemorated the 10th anniversary of the day in 1996 when Military Police (PM) agents fired at some 1,500 MST members who were marching on the PA-150 highway in… Read moreBrazil: landless mark massacre
Seventy-six members of the Nukak-Makú, the last nomadic indigenous group in Colombia, including 27 children, arrived March 6 at the town of San José de Guaviare, on the edge of the Amazon rainforest. They arrived naked, exhausted and frightened, fleeing… Read moreEthnic cleansing in Colombian Amazon
On Dec. 24 a hired killer shot to death Kaiowa Guarani indigenous leader Dorvalino Rocha at his community’s makeshift roadside encampment in Antonio Joao municipality, in Brazil’s Mato Grosso do Sul state. The killer shot Rocha in the chest after… Read moreBrazil: Guarani leader murdered
On Nov. 16, Brazilian landless workers Vanderlei Macena Cruz and Mauro Gomes Duarte, residents of Accampamento Renascer (Rebirth Encampment), were assassinated while riding a motorcycle to work near Gleba Gama, in the Nova Guarita region of Brazil’s Mato Grosso state…. Read moreParamilitary terror in Brazil
A group of some 3,000 indigenous people gathering to mark the official opening of a new reserve are trapped in the remote village of Maturca, Roraima state, after its bridge burned down. Authorities say settlers opposed to the creation of… Read moreArson traps indigenous gathering in Brazilian Amazon
An important victory is reported from the Brazilian Amazon, which has been the scene of recent violence linked to struggles for control of land and resources. From the BBC, April 15: President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has signed a… Read moreVictory in Amazon indigenous struggle
Dionisio Ribeiro Filho, 59, was shot in the head at the entrance to the Tingua forest reserve, just outside Rio de Janeiro, after he defended it from poachers and illegal palm tree cutters. His death followed the Feb. 12 killing… Read moreAnother forest defender killed in Brazil
In the global outcry over the slaying of US nun Dorothy Stang, a local crusader for the Amazon rainforest and its threatened peasants and Indians, Brazil’s President Luis Inacio da Silva signed a decree Feb. 17 creating two vast protected… Read moreAmazon militarized in wake of assassination
In a case being compared to that of Chico Mendes, the Amazon defender killed in 1988, US missionary Sister Dorothy Stang was shot dead by unknown assailants at a remote jungle settlement near Anapu in the Brazilian state of Para… Read moreForest defender assassinated in Amazon
