In the villages of Tabatinga, Amazonas, Ticuna midwives work
according to ancestral traditions, honing their skills generation after
generation. However, they remain unrecognised by the state.
Translated for LAB by Tom Gatehouse. You can read the original (in Portuguese) here. This is the first in what we hope will be a series of articles by LAB...
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...
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...
While the media focused in 2019 on Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s incendiary remarks, or on the Amazon fires, he has quietly instituted new policies likely to aid land grabbers and do great harm to Amazon forests, indigenous and traditional peoples. “Death by 1,000 Cuts” parts 1 and 2 reviews those policies.Executive decree...
In 2013, Potássio do Brasil, a subsidiary of the Canadian merchant bank, Forbes & Manhattan, began drilling exploratory wells for a giant potassium mine — a highly profitable venture that would allow transport of potash along the Amazon and Madeira rivers. Potash is a vital fertilizer for Brazil’s rapidly growing soy agribusiness...
Potássio do Brasil, a mining company; Autazes municipal authorities; the federal and Amazonas state governments; and large-scale soy growers all want one thing: to open a potash mine in the town of Autazes that would supply soy producers with Brazilian fertilizer, so as not to buy and pay for imported potash. All stand...
Bem viver, the good life, is possible -- LAB Newsletter December 2019
Distributing medicinal plants to houses in Cabelo Seco.
This has been an extraordinary year, with many setbacks but some remarkable signs of hope. To celebrate the latter, we report on our partner project Rios de Encontro, in Marabá,...
At the end of their European tour of Belgium, Germany, Austria and Poland, performance troupe AfroRaiz return to their home city of Marabá, Pará, at the confluence of the Amazon rivers Itacaiúnas and Tocantins.
Based in the poor neighbourhood of Cabelo Seco, AfroRaiz are part of Rios de Encontro (Rivers of Meeting), a community...
On 15 December the journalist, Ricardo Kotscho, who works in São Paulo, received an SOS from his friend, Eliane Brum, a well-known and much-loved journalist, who lives in Altamira in the heart of the Amazon. Eliane has published a series of scathing attacks on President Jair Bolsonaro and his government, most of them...
In addition to our website, LAB’s Facebook page
provides a daily stream of summaries and links to articles published elsewhere.
In this newsletter we have done away with our ‘Read more…’ rubric – the links
to LAB and other articles appear as hyperlinks in the text.
A wave of protest sweeps the continent