With a little help from his friends (Trump & Milei), Flávio Bolsonaro abandoned the 48 per cent of Brazilians who voted for him and fled to join his brother Eduardo in self-imposed exile in Miami. Not a good look!
Militarized drug policies risk deepening the violence facing Amazonian communities. Geographer Aiala Colares traces the connections between drug trafficking, environmental crime, and territorial control, arguing that the ‘war on drugs’ has historically produced more violence than concrete results. Writing in November 2025, he calls for security policies that protect traditional communities and the forest.
A Facebook advert for an Amazon farm led Subsolo journalist Ruan Martins to Ivanildo Canuto Soares, a convicted murderer with a history of drug trafficking who faked his own death. Mining records showed gold sales attributed to a permit area where satellite images revealed no visible signs of extraction. Martins follows the buyers and refiners into the supply chains reported by major international companies.
Subsolo journalist Ruan Martins spent six months tracking online adverts offering millions of hectares of forest in Brazil’s Amazon. He spoke to more than 100 brokers and checked property maps, identifying listings that overlapped Indigenous territories and protected areas, including Tenharim land. At the time of publication, Facebook was still hosting the kind of advert it had promised to block in 2021.
The editors hope that the collection of essays Unmaking to Make will be ‘a starting point and place of encounter’ for artistic responses to colonial legacy. Reviewer Harriet Gilbert Savage says, 'I hope that it elicits responses of agreement and resistance that are both practical and creative. I hope that they are unique and diverse and abundant.'
In July 2026, Honduran police evicted the Garifuna community of San Juan, Tela, from land protected by rulings of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. It was the first eviction under a new law promoting agribusiness.
Jan Rocha details some of the manouevres by Lula's opponents to prevent poorer people from voting. Yet people power frustrated the attempt, producing a clear result greeted by relief by governments around the world and some support from most Latin American countries except for Argentina.
Jan Rocha details some of the manouevres by Lula's opponents to prevent poorer people from voting. Yet people power frustrated the attempt, producing a result greeted by relief by governments around the world and some support from most Latin American countries except for Argentina.
LAB Partner, Sumaúma, based in Altamira, at the heart of the Amazon, posted this heart-felt newsletter to all their supporters, on 26 October, after results of the previous day’s presidential run-off election became clear: a solid victory for Lula, confounding the pessimistic predictions of many after he trailed Flávio Bolsonaro in the first round. You […]
The verdict of a federal court in Belo Horizonte, capital of Brazil's largest mining province, Minas Gerais, finally brought some justice to the victims of one of Brazil's worst mining disasters. In November 2015 a tailings dam at the Fundão iron ore mine near Mariana collapsed, killing 19 people and devastating downstream communities, farms and fisheries. A similar collapse at Brumadinho, three years later, killed 272 people. At last a court has found some of those directly involved at Mariana guilty, punished and fined one of the companies and sentenced three engineers to prison.
