In January of 2011, twenty-three residents of a Paraguayan settlement surrounded by large-scale soybean fields suffered symptoms of poisoning. The first to fall ill, a 26-year-old man named Rubén Portillo, was not sent to the hospital for three days and—when he finally was—died on the way. The others became sick in the ensuing days, but were immediately sent to the hospital and eventually recovered. Samples taken from the well that supplied the settlement’s drinking water was found to contain Aldrin and Lindane, two agrochemicals targeted for elimination under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants and banned under Paraguayan law. But the discovery did not prompt prosecutions, nor even an investigation of whether Aldrin and Lindane had been used on the nearby soy fields. This month the United Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) weighed in on the case, issuing what experts are calling a...
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Latin Americans accounted for over half of the activists murdered worldwide defending environmental and land rights in 2018, according to “Enemies of the State?”—a report released July 30 by Global Witness, a London-based nonprofit. Overall, such killings globally dropped 21% last year—to 164 from 207 in 2017—mainly because substantially fewer were documented in Brazil, the report said. Of last year’s victims, 83 were Latin Americans. “Latin America has consistently ranked as the worst-affected continent since Global Witness began publishing data on killings in 2012,” the report said. “Latin America has been the world’s most lethal continent for environmental and land rights defenders because of its high homicide rate, its entrenched corruption, its marginalization of indigenous peoples and its strong culture of human rights activism which puts such advocates in the line of fire,” Alice Harrison, a senior campaigner with Global Witness, said in an interview...
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Mexico’s biggest mining company is facing fines and the possible suspension of operations at a number of its sites following a July 9 sulfuric-acid spill at a marine terminal it owns on the Sea of Cortez. Grupo México, as the mining, infrastructure and transportation giant is known, spilled three cubic meters (3,000 liters) of sulfuric acid at its terminal in Guaymas, a city on the Sea of Cortez in the northwestern state of Sonora. It was the company’s fourth significant chemical spill in Sonora since 2014, and its 22nd environmental accident in the country in the last 20 years, according to Mexico’s Environment and Natural Resources Secretariat (Semarnat). “Not only was there a spill of enormous consequences, but the agreement this industrial group has made to reduce environmental damage has not been upheld,” Semarnat Secretary Víctor Toledo said in a July 16 press conference. “It is an unacceptable situation...
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Monitored forest wildlife populations have shrunk by an average 53% worldwide since 1970, with the greatest declines occurring in tropical woodlands including the Amazon rainforest, according to a report released this month by the international environmental group WWF. The “Below the Canopy” report, issued Aug. 13, highlights a multitude of threats that forest-dwelling species face and the crisis this produces. It traced population trends of 268 species of forest vertebrates on all continents but Antarctica—mammals, reptiles, amphibians and birds—during 1970-2014. Some 75% of the data came from tropical forests. The study showed that reptiles and amphibians, and to a lesser extent mammals, suffered the steepest population losses, especially in the tropics. Habitat loss and degradation, mostly caused by human activities, accounted for 59% of the threats to forests and forest species. Exploitation, mainly hunting and poaching, was responsible for 17%, climate change for 13%, invasive species for 8%, and...
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