One police officer was killed and three were wounded while on patrol to verify reports of illegal mining in the Tambopata National Reserve in Peru’s southeastern Madre de Dios region. Eight officers from the police’s Environmental Protection Office and a representative of the National Protected Areas Service were ambushed in broad daylight on Sept. 22 near the Interoceanic Highway by a group of eight to 10 gunmen, officials said. Interior Minister Carlos Basombrío blamed illegal miners for the attack. Alluvial gold mining has destroyed some 70,000 hectares (270 square miles) of forest in the highly biodiverse Madre de Dios region, according to recent studies. The government has been trying for months to evict miners from Tambopata, which is a popular nature tourism destination. The brazen afternoon attack marked an escalation of violence in a region that already had a high murder rate in its gold fields. It may have been...
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A 12-year-old girl died this month in the northeast Argentine province of Corrientes after she ate a mandarin orange she had found on the ground while walking past the entrance to a farm that grows the fruit. Authorities said an autopsy revealed that the cause of death was poisoning from carbofuran, a toxic pesticide. Carbofuran, sold under the name Furadan, has been banned in Corrientes since 2012 for use in fruit and vegetable cultivation, but can be sprayed under certain restrictions on other crops, including cereals and rice. Experts say the distinction is often lost on farmers or ignored by them, a problem that is exacerbated by a general lack of regulatory enforcement when it comes to agrochemicals. The Sept. 9 tragedy occurred in Mburucuyá, a fruit- and vegetable-producing department some 900 kilometers (560 miles) north of Buenos Aires. The victim, Rocío Pared, shared the mandarin with...
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Plans by the four-month-old administration of Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno to poll voters on key issues have rekindled conservationists’ hopes to halt oil operations in a portion of Yasuní National Park, an Amazon rainforest swath known internationally for its extraordinary biodiversity. YASunidos, a youth-led umbrella group of those opposed to oil development in Yasuní, collected signatures in 2014 to demand a referendum on oil extraction in a concession area partly underling the park. But in May of that year the National Electoral Council of Ecuador rejected the petition, claiming that more than half of the 757,623 signatures gathered by the group were invalid. The controversial ruling left YASunidos well short of the 584,000 signatures—representing 5% of registered voters—needed to request a referendum. Since then YASunidos has repeatedly charged that the rejection of its petition was the unwarranted result of pressure on the electoral council from...
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Six farmers were brutally murdered Sept. 1 in an area adjoining a large oil palm plantation in the Peruvian Amazon region of Ucayali, in a case observers say is probably related to land trafficking. The victims belonged to an association of farmers who had been working small plots of land in a forested area for more than a decade, according to local sources. The area is officially classified as “permanent production forest,” which means it should be used only for forestry concessions. The suspected killers were members of a competing association that was trying to evict those farmers and take over their land, according to Robert Guimaraes, president of the Federation of Native Communities of Ucayali (Feconau), which represents indigenous communities in the area. The land that is the focus of the conflicting claims is also inside an area claimed by the indigenous community of Santa Clara de Uchunya. Community...
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