May 31, 2023
Brazil’s lower house of Congress approved legislation on Tuesday that will have major negative implications for the territorial rights of Indigenous peoples. The legislation allows the government to seize land from Indigenous communities if it deems their cultural traits have changed. It also places an unreasonable time limit and cut off date on claims that will undermine large areas of Indigenous territorial claims.
December 8, 2021
Deep in the Amazon rainforest, the world's largest area containing isolated and uncontacted tribes is under increasing threat from illegal logging and gold mining, advancing coca plantations and drug trafficking violence, a new report warns.
An undetermined number of indigenous people that could number several thousand inhabit a vast swathe of forest twice the size of Ireland that overlaps the Brazil-Peru border.
Their longhouses in jungle clearings have been spotted from planes but encounters with outsiders or clashes with invaders are anecdotal.
In the most comprehensive study to date of the so-called Javari-Tapiche corridor, to be published on Thursday in Lima, a Peruvian indigenous organization says the world's largest number of uncontacted people are in danger.
March 1, 2021
The government of Brazil is considering a bill that would open Indigenous territories to gold mining and mining by the oil and gas industries. This would threaten both the Amazon rainforest and the people that live there.
Over 6,000 Kayapó from 56 communities recently voiced their opposition to the bill: “We do not agree with individual statements made by Kayapó relatives in favor of gold mining,” their declaration reads. Although some leaders have succumbed to pressure to support the bill, the Kayapó people as a whole stand firmly against it.
