Bolivia

The Beni River in the Bolivian Amazon is under threat. While the government seeks to install mega-dams that would flood an area much larger than the capital, La Paz, mining and its concomitant mercury contamination continue to bring illness to these territories.

It is impossible to think about extraction without thinking about a vast network of accompanying infrastructure, and thus even greater deforestation and destruction.

The study, “Amazonía en la encrucijada” (“The Amazon at the Crossroads”), by the Amazon Geo-Referenced Socio-Environmental Information Network (RAISG, by its Portuguese acronym) presents an overview of the pressure caused by roads in Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Perú and Venezuela. According to the report, of the 136,000 kilometers of roads mapped in the region, at least 26,000 are in protected natural areas and indigenous territories. For example, in the Brazilian Amazon, the report states that most deforestation occurs in the vicinity of roads.

A team of journalists from five Latin American countries investigated how groups of timber traffickers manage to steal and process timber from the Amazon. An article from the newsportal Mongabay exposes how illegally-sourced timber from Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Colombia are incorporated into the international market with falsified official documents that are almost never verified.

Fires in the Amazon are occurring more frequently and with greater intensity. But who is really burning the forests?

How to make the sustainability of life the center of debate

REDD: A Collection of Conflicts, Contradictions and Lies presents summaries of reports from 24 REDD projects or programmes with a common characteristic: they all show a number of structural characteristics that undermine forest peoples' rights, or fail to address deforestation. As offset projects, they all fail to address the climate crisis because by definition, offset projects do not reduce overall emissions: emission reductions claimed in one place justify extra emissions elsewhere.

"They consider us the periphery of the periphery"

Photo: volunteerlatinamericablog.com. The spirit came in the form of a crow; it carried me up and said to me: “Look at Eami tonight. You can see many fires burning. They are the fires lit by your people, the Ayoreo, illuminating everything.” We continued to fly and the lights went out one by one. “This is the future of your people. The forest is growing dark because the Ayoreo do not live there anymore. Everything is turning to darkness.”

The 6th Pan-Amazon Social Forum was held on December 1 in Cobija, in Bolivia’s Amazon region, on the triple border between Peru, Brazil and Bolivia. “Under the protection of the rubber and chestnut trees, symbols of the Bolivian Amazon,” the Amazonian peoples launched a call for unity to transform the world.

On December 7 and 8, 2011, a meeting was held in the Amazonian city of Cobija, Bolivia, to assess the status of the rights of indigenous peoples living in isolation or in situations of extreme vulnerability in the Amazon and Gran Chaco regions, and to establish an action plan for the defence of their rights.