A Munduruku indigenous man was killed in a gunfight with Brazilian federal police at a remote Amazonian settlement, in a conflict over outlaw gold-mining in the area.
At a summit in Peru's southern Puno region, artisanal miners leader Tankar Rau Rau Amaru and Aymara campesino leader Walter Aduviri pledged unity against corporate designs.
The US Justice Department has frozen the assets of mineral companies owned by Peru’s Sánchez-Paredes family, finding that they are fronts for cocaine trafficking.
Peru’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of an indigenous rainforest community seeking to bar a road that illegal miners and timber cutters want to build through their territory.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights urged Venezuelan authorities “to conduct a thorough investigation” into claims of a massacre at a remote Yanomami setlement.
Venezuelan officials investigating the reported massacre of an isolated Yanomami community say they found no evidence of the attack—a claim dismissed by indigenous advocates.
Venezuelan authorities pledge to investigate breaking reports that outlaw miners comitted a “massacre” of an isolated Yanomami indigenous community on the Brazilian border.
After a new Shining Path attack left five soldiers dead in Peru’s jungle, anti-terrorism prosecutor Julio Galindo said the guerillas control illegal gold-mining operations.
Embera indigenous communities on Colombia’s Pacific coast came under bombardment by army helicopters, while an Awá community expelled illegal gold miners from their land.
Gilberto Valencia, a young Afro-Colombian cultural worker, became 2019's first casualty of political violence in Colombia, when a gunman opened fire on a New Years party he was attending in his village in Cauca region. As the death toll from around the country mounted over the following weeks, the UN Mission to Colombia warned President Iván Duque that he must address "the issue of the assassinations of social leaders and human rights defenders." Colombia's official rights watchdog, the Defensoría del Pueblo, acknowledges that there was an assassination on average every two days in the country last year—a total of 172, and a rise of more than 35% over 2017. (Photo via Caracol Radio)
Trump, the great enthusiast for dictators, suddenly develops a touching concern with democracy in Venezuela, grasping at the opportunity for long-sought regime change. Predictably overlooked in the world media's Manichean view of the crisis are voices of Venezuela's dissident left that takes a neither/nor position opposed to both the regime and the right-wing leadership of the opposition. Also unheard are voices of indigenous dissent and resistance. In an episode that received little coverage, December saw protests in the remote Orinoco Basin after a leader of the Pemón indigenous people was killed in a confrontation with elite Military Counterintelligence troops. The military operation was ostensibly aimed at clearing the region of illegal mining—while the Pemón themselves had been protesting the mining. The indigenous leaders view the militarization of the region as intended to make way for corporate exploitation under the Orinoco Mineral Arc plan. (Photo: EcoPolitica Venezuela)
Amid growing protests against the controversial Hidroituango dam on Colombia's Río Cauca, three opponents of the project were slain by unknown assailants—weeks before a tunnel in the complex collapsed due to a landslide, backing up water behind the dam to dangerous levels and causing cracks to emerge in its facade. Authorities now fear an imminent disaster, posing a grave threat to downstream communities. Several opponents of the project have been assassinated over the years of its construction, leading to demands for an investigation of possible paramilitary collusion by the dam's builders. (Photo via El Espectador)
