As Covid-19 reaches into remote regions of Peru, indigenous and environmental organizations are urging the Peruvian Congress to modify a 2006 law designed to protect the country’s most isolated indigenous groups. Specifically, they want lawmakers to approve a pending measure to put reserves inhabited by semi-nomadic groups that shun contact with outsiders off limits to extractive activities such as logging, oil production and mining. The current law, passed in 2006, prohibits unauthorized entry into those areas, but allows the extraction of natural resources in them if it is deemed “of public necessity by the state.” The measure to close that loophole was approved in May by the congressional committee responsible for issues related to indigenous people and the environment, but pressure from industry, particularly oil and gas companies, have kept it from coming up for debate in Congress. Calls for the measure’s passage come as cases of Covid...
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Twelve federal prosecutors filed a civil lawsuit this month accusing Brazilian Environment Minister Ricardo Salles of administrative impropriety and calling for his removal from office for “countless measures he adopted…to weaken environmental protections, especially in the area of enforcement." The suit, filed July 6 in Brasília federal court, also demanded that Salles be fined an amount to be determined by the court; prohibited from doing business with the government; and barred for five years from voting, holding elective office or serving in appointed government posts. All 12 of the plaintiffs are federal prosecutors who perform an environmental watchdog role in different regions of the country. They say that since taking office along with right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro in January 2019, Salles has promoted “the dismantling of environmental policies to favor interests that have no relation to the post he occupies.” His efforts, they charge, have run “completely counter...
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Latin Americans accounted for 70% of the record number of activists murdered worldwide defending environmental and land rights in 2019, according to “Defending Tomorrow,” a report released July 29 by Global Witness, a London-based nonprofit. The region registered 148 of the 212 murders of environmental and land-rights defenders worldwide, a 78% increase over 2018, when Latin America accounted for 83 such killings. Last year’s worldwide total of 212 was 29% greater than the 164 killed the previous year. The 2019 totals for the region and the world were higher due in no small part to the activist murders in Colombia, where 64 were killed compared to 25 in 2018. Not surprisingly, Colombia topped the 2019 list, accounting for 30% of the total number of defenders killed worldwide last year. Half of the activist murders documented in Colombia involved indigenous people, who only make up 4.4% of the country’s...
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Responding to sheep ranchers’ complaints, the government of the southern Argentine province of Santa Cruz has banned the creation of any new protected areas for a year and signaled the measure might be extended for an additional year. Provincial officials say the ban—approved by the Santa Cruz legislature last November and implemented in January—is needed in order to allow the drafting of a “strategic development plan” for the Patagonian province’s rural lands. The measure applies not only to local protected-area projects, but also to federal ones, since the Argentine constitution explicitly gives provincial governments authority over natural resource decisions. Miguel O’Byrne, leader of the province’s main agricultural producers’ association, says ranchers want a land-use policy review because they worry large-scale conservation purchases aimed at habitat restoration are destroying a longtime mainstay of the Santa Cruz economy. O’Byrne cites the late U.S. apparel entrepreneur Douglas Tompkins...
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