Sue Branford

As the coronavirus spreads around the globe, with more than 300 known cases already in Brazil, and members of Pres. Jair Bolsonaro’s staff infected, an evangelical Christian organization has purchased a helicopter with plans to contact and convert isolated indigenous groups in the remote Western Amazon.Ethnos360, formerly known as the New Tribes Mission, is...

In 2013, during the building of the Teles Pires dam in the Brazilian Amazon, the Teles Pires Hydroelectric Company (CHTP) dynamited Karobixexe (Seven Rapids), a sacred site of the Munduruku, Apiaká and Kayabi peoples. Located just outside an Indigenous reserve, it received no government protection. Also during construction, the firm removed funeral urns from a sacred site without...

by Sue Branford & Thais Borges President Michel Temer issued a presidential decree in 2017 to open up the vast 4.6 million hectare (17,800 square mile) RENCA preserve in the northern Amazon to mining. Meeting with a firestorm of criticism he abandoned the effort. Sources now say the Bolsonaro administration is poised to quietly revive plans to open...

In May, I gave a talk at Harvard University on the Amazon and creating futures and I closed it by saying that hope, like despair, is a luxury we can no longer afford. Given our overheating planet, there’s no time for lamentations or melancholy. We need to act, even without hope. After my talk, a well-known Brazilian businessman made...

by Sue Branford & Thais Borges The Bolsonaro administration has launched policies that undermine IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency, and ICMBio (The Chico Mendes Institute) which protects the nation’s federal conservation units, by effectively dismantling environmental law enforcement and allowing deforestation to proceed unchecked. Fines imposed for illegal deforestation between Jan. 1 and May 15 this year were down 34 percent from...

by Sue Branford & Thais Borges The Amazon has seen three 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...

by Sue Branford & Mauricio Torres New Minister of Mines and Energy Admiral Bento Albuquerque announced on 4 March that he plans to permit mining on indigenous lands in Brazil, including within the Amazon. He also said that he intends to allow mining right up to Brazil’s borders, abolishing the current ban along a 150-kilometer (93-mile)-wide swath...

P oll after poll this week has shown support for the ex-army captain, Jair Bolsonaro, is growing, while the number backing Fernando Haddad, from the Workers’ Party (PT), after his initial spectacular surge in ratings, remains stationary. This is in spite of – or probably because of – Jair Bolsonaro’s absence from TV debates, as he recovers from an assassination...

Updated 23 June, to reflect latest legal decision. In his prison cell, every morning at 7 o’clock, Lula hears hundreds of supporters camped nearby shout Good Morning Lula. At night they shout Boa Noite.  It is a way of demonstrating to him, and to the world, that, even though he is locked away in a prison cell at the...

  Tens of thousands of Nicaraguans marched through the streets of the capital Managua and other cities at the end of April. The demonstrations were in answer to a call from the Catholic Church to press for Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista government to enter into dialogue over controversial reforms to the social security system that led to protests earlier in the month...