By Emily Gregg, edited by Mike Gatehouse.LAB has put together this twelfth 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 truly comprehensive survey. Figures for infections and mortality, summarised in the table at the […]
From the football pitch perched precariously on a hillside in Penha, you can see thousands of small brick homes stretching to the mountains in the distance. But the pitch doesn’t just offer the best view of the favela complex, it’s at the heart of efforts to help young people not just survive but thrive during […]
On October 29, 2019, the indigenous governor of the Tacueyó Reserve, Cristina Bautista, was attacked and killed in the Cauca region of Colombia by members of the Estructura Dagoberto Ramos, a dissident FARC group which wished to extend its control over the communities that she led. She died, along with four members of an indigenous […]
By Emily Gregg, edited by Mike Gatehouse. LAB has put together this eleventh 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 truly comprehensive survey. Figures for infections and mortality, summarised in the table at […]
8 July 2020. In Colombia, children from the Chocó Robotics Club located in one of the remotest, poorest, and most violence-scarred departments, have used their resources to create plastic masks for medical staff working in the underfunded hospitals that lack basic tools to confront the coronavirus. People are used to facing problems alone in this […]
Mineração Rio do Norte (MRN) arrived in the Trombetas River basin in the 1970s with plans to mine bauxite on a gigantic scale. Today, MRN is the fourth largest producer of bauxite in the world, providing the valuable aluminum ore to nations and manufacturers around the planet. On arriving in the Amazon, MRN immediately annexed […]
In recent weeks, Ecuador has accelerated its plan to reopen the economy by loosening guidelines on provincial travel and other social activities. ‘We are going to reopen the beaches’ was one of the first signals indicating the easing of social guidelines by María Paula Romo, Ecuador’s Interior Minister and head of the National Committee for […]
The Yanomami Park covers 37,000 square miles in the Brazilian Amazon on the Venezuelan border; it is inhabited by 27,000 Yanomami. Soaring gold prices have resulted in a massive ongoing invasion of the indigenous territory by gold miners who are well supported with monetary backing, heavy equipment and aircraft. On 3 July, a federal judge […]
Closure of the border with Bolivia in response to covid-19 has exposed a legal vacuum in Argentina surrounding the consumption, importation and cultivation of coca leaves in the country’s northern provinces. Coca leaves have been used for millennia by indigenous groups in the area, as well as in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, for medicinal and […]
Mineração Rio do Norte (MRN), the world’s fourth largest bauxite producer, encroached on riverine communities beside the Trombetas River in the Brazilian Amazon in the 1970s. Over the years, MRN became notorious for its contamination of local waters with bauxite mining waste, residents say. To resolve that problem, the company built 26 tailings dams. The […]