By Tom Phillips and Fabiano Maisonnave 30 April 2020 MANAUS (The Guardian) – Day and night, the dead are delivered into the tawny Amazonian earth – the latest victims of a devastating pandemic now reaching deep into the heart of the Brazilian rainforest. On Sunday 140 bodies were laid to rest in Manaus, the jungle-flanked capital of […]
2 April 2020 (BBC News) – A member of a protected tribe in the Amazon has been killed by gunmen, authorities in the Brazilian state of Maranhao say. The body of Zezico Guajajara, of the Guajajara tribe, was found near his village on Tuesday. He had been shot. The former teacher was a supporter of […]
By Joe Parkin Daniels 23 March 2020 BOGOTÁ (The Guardian) – Death squads in Colombia are taking advantage of coronavirus lockdowns to murder rural activists, local NGOs have warned. When cities across the country introduced local quarantine measures last week, three social leaders were killed, and as the country prepares to impose a national lockdown […]
By Nina Lakhani 25 February 2020 MEXICO CITY (The Guardian) – A Costa Rican indigenous defender has been killed by an armed mob while trying to reclaim ancestral land – the latest in a spate of violence targeting native communities in Central America’s safest country. Yehry Rivera, 45, from the Brörán community in Térraba, was […]
By Taran Volckhausen 14 February 2020 (Mongabay) – An illegal armed group connected to land grabbers killed four members of the indigenous Mayangna people, left two injured and burned 16 houses in northern Nicaragua on 29 January 2020, according to the UN Human Rights Office. The UN Human Rights Office condemned the Nicaraguan government for allowing […]
By Nina Lakhani 17 February 2020 (The Guardian) – An indigenous leader leading his people’s effort to reclaim ancestral land in Costa Rica has been wounded in a gun attack – the latest in a spate of targeted violence which has gone unpunished by authorities. Mainor Ortiz Delgado, 29, a leader of the Bribri indigenous […]
3 February 2020 (BBC News) – A second activist campaigning for the conservation of monarch butterflies and the woods in which they hibernate has been found dead in Mexico. Raúl Hernández worked as a tour guide at a butterfly sanctuary in Michoacán state. His body, which bore signs of beatings and a head injury, was […]
By Ricardo Moraes 18 January 2020 XINGU INDIGENOUS PARK, Brazil (Reuters) – Leaders of native tribes in Brazil issued a rallying call to protect the Amazon rainforest and its indigenous people from what they called the “genocide, ethnocide and ecocide” planned by the country’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. A manifesto signed on Friday at the […]
8 January 2020 (AFP) – Snipers took to helicopters in Australia on Wednesday to begin a mass cull of up to 10,000 camels as drought drives big herds of the feral animals to search for water closer to remote towns, endangering indigenous communities. Local officials in South Australia state said “extremely large” herds have been […]
By Matt Rivers, Lily Lee, and Yong Xiong 2 January 2020 BEIJING (CNN) – Uyghur poet Aziz Isa Elkun fled China’s far western Xinjiang region nearly 30 years ago. He’s not welcome in the country. He can’t even phone his mother. She said it was better if he didn’t, because every time he did, police […]
