Main image: Aerial photo of agricultural land near Ipiales, Colombia. Photo by Luis Eduardo Bernal M. 2009.
Darío Acevedo, president of CNMH. Photo: CNMH.
In February 2019, Darío Acevedo was appointed president of Colombia's National Center for Historic Memory (CNMH) whose objective is to discover...
The main concern of the government is to re-open the economy, and get the pipelines going again after lockdown, but they do not care about the wellbeing of our communities, who have no food, no water and no access to the cities to buy supplies.Helena Gualinga
Ecuador, like its neighbour Brazil,...
This important article was originally published in Spanish in August 2019 (read the original here). Cristina Flores has translated it for LAB as a contribution to our ongoing project Voices of Latin America, represented by our book of that name, and the ongoing website which continues the work of the book.
This June 5th, World Environment Day, we're releasing "Amazonia in Five Minutes." We're excited to present, on this important date, the first episode of a weekly podcast, "Amazonia in Five Minutes," presented by Jessica Carey-Webb. The podcast highlights publications from Amazonia Latitude's magazine as well as cultural tips, in a dynamic and melodic format, to the tune...
COVID-19 kills the elderly, those with underlying health conditions, the poor and vulnerable. It is now doing so in the Brazilian Amazon where the virus killed nine Munduruku indigenous elders in just a few days. Forest people elders are typically leaders and keepers of culture, so their loss is especially destabilizing.Officially, 218 indigenous people had died of...
By Emily Gregg, edited by Mike Gatehouse, with additional material from Peru & Haiti Support Groups UK and LAB correspondents in the region.LAB has put together this eighth overview of the spread of coronavirus across the region and the reaction of governments, politicians and local communities. With our limited resources we could not hope to provide a...
This article was first published by Mongabay on 27 May. You can read the original here.In April an official from IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency was violently assaulted by loggers and needed hospital treatment in Pará state. The incident was caught on video.The IBAMA operation was targeting illegal deforestation carried out by land grabbers, wishing to convert large...
This article was edited by LAB. The authors’ original text (in Portuguese) can be found here.
The authors argue that the acceleration of Amazonian deforestation and environmental degradation —powered by successive blows from Bolsonaro’s government to neuter environmental protection policies — in a region where public healthcare is at best precarious, has amplified the...
By Emily Gregg, edited by Mike Gatehouse, with additional material from Peru & Haiti Support Groups UK and LAB correspondents in the region.LAB has put together this seventh overview of the spread of coronavirus across the region and the reaction of governments, politicians and local communities. With our limited resources we could not hope to provide a...
The Boa Vista Quilombo in Oriximiná, Pará state, is like many Brazilian quilombola communities. Quilombolas are Afro-Brazilian runaway slave descendants, and point to centuries of inequality and neglect by the government. Quilombos often lack running water, basic sanitation and health services.In the 1970s, Mineração Rio do Norte (MRN) annexed much of Boa Vista’s land and established the...