The Guardian | "A victory for life.” That was the triumphal message from Indigenous campaigners in the Brazilian Amazon this week after they staved off a threat to the Tapajós River by occupying a grain terminal operated by Cargill, the biggest privately owned company in the United States.
AFP | Hundreds of Indigenous people have been protesting in northern Brazil for two weeks outside the port terminal of U.S. agribusiness giant Cargill, angered over the dredging and development of Amazonian rivers for grain exports.
Associated Press | Hundreds of Indigenous people have been protesting for almost a week at a Cargill facility in Brazil against a decree allowing the federal government to consider private concessions for waterways.
El País | If history offers any lesson, it is this: every time the Amazon has been militarized in the name of order, the forest lost, its peoples lost, and democracy lost. Repeating that path is not a solution.
Newsweek | The path forward is simple and urgent. Governments must declare the Amazon and Indigenous territories no-go zones for fossil fuels.
Associated Press | “We have to continue defending the future, and we need more and more people to join this cause.”
AFP | “We are not going to allow it, because this is our home, our river, our forest.”
Democracy Now! | The Brazilian government said, "We’re going to put a hold on Ferrogrão. We’re not going forward on this soy railway for Cargill and ADM and Bunge and all these multinational corporations to feed animals, not people. We’re not going forward with this without people’s consent.”
Open Global Rights | Belém can be remembered as a turning point – when the world stopped treating the Amazon as a victim and began dismantling the criminal economies driving its collapse.
El País | What is at stake is not only Ecuador’s Amazon. A just energy transition must begin from the principle of shared but differentiated responsibility.
Folha de S.Paulo | “We will not allow the interests of large corporations, such as Cargill and Bunge, to destroy our rivers and forests."
O Globo | Ferrogrão is the backbone of a corridor that transforms the Amazon into a commodity export route and condemns Brazil to a subservient role.
Associated Press | “The Amazon is not for sale. We will defend our territories because we have not been consulted – this is our home."
O Globo | On the eve of COP30, Raoni is also skeptical about the environmental meeting to be held in Belém.
Associated Press | “Consuming oil from the Amazon is incompatible with climate leadership. As the world’s fourth-largest economy, California is sending a powerful market signal by examining its crude footprint and role in Amazon destruction.”
Associated Press | “There is no solution to any of the threats the Amazon is facing without its communities.”
El País | Without coordinated action and meaningful inclusion of local voices, the region faces escalating violence and irreversible damage to one of the world’s most critical ecosystems.
Associated Press | “We are seeing a sweeping package of regressive reforms that are rolling back environmental protections, Indigenous rights guarantees, and threatening basic civil liberties like the freedom of speech and assembly,"
Folha de S.Paulo | "Soy farming will increase a lot. When it rains, the pesticides flow into the river. We have no wells to rely on. There’s nowhere to run, and all our children get sick."
Associated Press | Indigenous leaders say the incident highlights the growing risks faced by land defenders and the government’s failure to uphold its promises.
Associated Press | “Being here with our brothers and sisters, with the local communities also fighting – in the end, we feel that the struggle is the same.”
Associated Press | “Local communities and their allies will remain alert to this zombie project which has been killed multiple times but always attempts to return from the dead.”
Voragine | Pablo Panduro was killed on March 28, 2022 during an army operation in which 11 people were killed, and which was carried out against the Border Command, a FARC dissident group that controls most of Putumayo.
El País | On March 28, 2022, the Military Forces of Colombia carried out an operation by air, water and land. Eleven people died, four were wounded and around 350 were displaced.
Financial Times | “This debt crisis drives Petroperú’s renewed plans to expedite new domestic oil production in highly contested reserves.”
Mongabay | Raphael Hoetmer, director of Amazon Watch's Western Amazon Program, spoke with Mongabay Latam about the advance of mining in the Amazonian territory of Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela.
The Sacramento Bee | To address the root cause of these interconnected crises, we must unite our calls to keep oil in the ground, from California to the Amazon.
Associated Press | “Trump 2.0 will offer Amazonian governments a permission structure to ignore or walk back climate commitments, precisely at the moment when protection of the rainforest demands greater ambition and regional coordination.”
Infobae | An oil spill resulting from an underwater terminal of Petroperú’s Talara Refinery has spread to four beaches in Lobitos on the northern coast of Peru, affecting approximately 10,000 cubic meters of the sea.
More than a decade after Avatar brought global attention to the destruction of Indigenous lands, Amazon Watch has released a new short video narrated by Oona Chaplin and featuring director James Cameron, legendary Chief Raoni Metuktire, and Goldman Prize winner Alessandra Korap Munduruku.
