• For decades the Papua region in Indonesia has remained the country’s least-understood, least-developed and most-impoverished area, amid a lack of transparency fueled by a strong security presence.
• Activists hope their new website, Mata Papua, or Eye of Papua, will fill the information void with reports, data and maps about indigenous welfare and the proliferation of mines, logging leases and plantations in one of the world’s last great spans of tropical forest.

“We will fast for as long as we have to,” say protesting farmers who face displacement, even as the Kaleshwaram irrigation project has already received environmental clearance.

Ranga Reddy woke up at 5 am on December 1o, 2017, bathed in cold water and dressed in a white veshti and shirt. He had a busy day ahead.

The Peruvian government has a clear development agenda for its Amazon rainforest regions. Oil extraction is already happening on a large scale.

In the fight for land and to protect the environment, communities around the world are struggling against governments, companies and criminal gangs

MUMBAI, Feb 6 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Last week's killing of Cambodian forest defenders, and the recent shooting of Indonesian farmers, show the increasing involvement of state forces in quelling dissent against agribusiness, campaigners said.

UN indigenous rights chief urges Chile to stop using the country's anti-terrorism law to prosecute the Mapuche people

BOGOTA, Jan 11 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Latin America is trampling on indigenous rights and jailing ever more campaigners to stifle opposition to big business taking over ancestral lands, according to a United Nations expert.

• The Mercosur trade bloc (Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay) and the European Union are expected to conclude trade negotiations and put finishing touches on a trade agreement by the end of this year.
• That pact will include landmark indigenous human rights clauses meant to protect indigenous groups from violence, land theft and other civil rights violations.

The conflict in Argentina between the indigenous Mapuche community and the national government has claimed another victim: Rafael Nahuel, an indigenous 22-year-old who was killed while resisting a raid by government forces on indigenous activists in the province of Río Negro.

New group could help put pressure on Brazilian government to protect rights of Indigenous Peoples

We all know the first and most basic lesson of economics: incentives matter. This is surely why, as a new investigation by The Guardian has revealed, fires in the favelas of Sao Paolo are happening where land values are greater.

Members of the Brazilian indigenous Guaraní community took part in peaceful protests against privatisation of state parks. Their demonstrations were also calling attention to their dire living conditions. For instance, Guarani living in São Paulo are confined to two tiny villages the size of four football pitches. Land is a vital part of the Guaraní culture and tradition, however their current condition means that they are slowly losing touch with their cultural past by not being able to utilise their land for fishing, gathering and planting.

BOGOTA, Nov 28 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Indigenous groups in Paraguay, battling to protect their ancestral lands from expanding agriculture and cattle ranching, launched the first online map of their territory on Tuesday.

Paraguay’s beef and soy export industries are the main drivers of deforestation in the fast-growing South American nation, often coming into conflict with some 120,000 indigenous people, the World Resources Institute (WRI), a think tank, said.