Amazon Watch

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The Amazon Is Not a Resource Reserve: It Is a Territory of Life

This week, Indigenous peoples and communities from the nine countries of the Amazon Basin are gathering at the Pan-Amazonian Social Forum in Puyo, Ecuador. The gathering is considering how to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels.

El País | We know another kind of wealth. It is in our rivers, in the animals and plants, in the knowledge passed down by our elders, and in the relationships that allow the world as we know it to continue to exist.

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The False Security of the Amazonian Triple Border and the Challenge for the New Governments

Right-wing governments aligned with trends of militarization and heavy-handed policies are taking office in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. But war rhetoric and spectacle actions contribute little and put local populations' rights at risk.

El País | We are facing a scenario where extractive activities and illicit economies converge with highly adaptive armed actors and with states that are weak, absent, corrupt, or violent against their own populations. The recipe is dangerous.

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Amazon Watch is building on more than three decades of radical and effective solidarity with Indigenous peoples across the Amazon Basin.

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The Amazon Does Not Need New Wars

U.S. security strategy revives a past the region is trying to overcome

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.

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“It’s Not Safe to Live Here.”

Colombia is deadliest country for environmental defenders

Associated Press | “We have to continue defending the future, and we need more and more people to join this cause.”

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The Fight Against Climate Change Is Also a Fight Against Organized Crime

Belém COP cannot succeed without taking decisive action

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.

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Ecuador and Oil: A Challenge for Democracy and the Amazon

Since the adoption of the Paris Agreement, more than 930,000 square kilometers have been opened for oil and gas exploration in Latin America and the Caribbean, an area larger than Venezuela

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.

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Ferrogrão Is a Shortcut to Collapse

The railway is being sold as a logistical solution, but in practice it means more deforestation, land invasions, and poison

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.

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California Lawmakers Seek to Curb Oil Imports from Amazon

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.”

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When Criminals Rule the Amazon Jungle and Time Runs Out

The crisis of public security, environmental crime, and human rights must be on the agenda of the Summit of Amazonian Countries

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.

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Amazonian Communities in Peru Rejoice as Plan for Oil Drilling on Ancestral Land Stalls

Peru’s state-run oil company failed to attract any bids to develop an oil field that overlaps ancestral territories of several Indigenous groups

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.”

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The Wisdom That Panduro Took With Him

Three years after the army perpetrated the Alto Remanso massacre, in which several civilians were killed, a community that almost disappeared is trying to recover from the absence of the leader who healed them and taught them their language

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.