SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
To donate by check, phone, or other method, see our More Ways to Give page.
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
"The invaders and their main business partners—loggers and meatpacking companies—make the profits their own while passing on to society the costs of environmental damage," notes one of numerous lawsuits.
A Brazilian judge on Thursday ordered two slaughterhouses and three ranchers to pay $764,000 in combined penalties for trading cattle raised in a protected area of the Amazon rainforest.
The decision by Judge Inês Moreira da Costa in Rondônia—the most severely deforested state in the Brazilian Amazon—came in response to a flurry of lawsuits filed by green groups seeking millions of dollars in damages from defendants including Distriboi and Frigon, two meat processing firms accused of trading cattle in the Jaci-Parana protected zone.
"When a slaughterhouse, whether by negligence or intent, buys and resells products from invaded and illegally deforested reserves, it is clear that it is directly benefiting from these illegal activities," the plaintiffs' complaint states. "In such cases, there is an undeniable connection between the company's actions and the environmental damage caused by the illegal exploitation."
The slaughterhouses and ranchers are but two of numerous parties being sued, including other ranchers and JBS, the Brazilian meat giant that bills itself as the world's largest protein producer.
According to The Associated Press—whose reporting on the cattle trading documents prompted the lawsuits:
Brazilian law forbids commercial cattle inside a protected area, yet some 210,000 head are being grazed inside Jaci-Parana, according to the state animal division. With almost 80% of its forest destroyed, it ranks as the most ravaged conservation unit in the Brazilian Amazon. A court filing pegs damages in the reserve at some $1 billion.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuits are seeking to put a price on the destruction of old-growth rainforest, asserting that "the invaders and their main business partners—loggers and meatpacking companies—make the profits their own while passing on to society the costs of environmental damage."
The Amazon rainforest is one of the world's most biodiverse ecosystems and is a crucial carbon sink, meaning it absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The world lost around 3.7 million hectares of primary tropical forests last year—a rate of approximately 10 soccer fields per minute, according to data from the University of Maryland's Global Land Analysis and Discover laboratory. While this marked a 9% reduction in deforestation compared with 2022, the overall deforestation rate is roughly the same as in 2019 and 2021. Felling trees released 2.4 metric gigatons of climate pollution into the atmosphere in 2023, or almost half of all annual U.S. emissions from burning fossil fuels.
In Brazil, the government of leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has taken steps to combat deforestation, resulting in a more than one-third reduction in forest loss. Progress in reversing the rampant forest destruction wrought by the previous far-right administration of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro—who was nicknamed "Captain Chainsaw"—were partially offset by a 43% spike in deforestation in the Cerrado region last year.
Earlier this year, Marcel Gomes—a Brazilian journalist who worked with colleagues at Repórter Brasil to coordinate "a complex, international campaign that directly linked beef from JBS... to illegal deforestation"—was one of seven winners of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize.
"It's not just Ecuador it's affecting," said one woman leading the fight against gas flaring, "it's the atmosphere of the entire world."
More than three years after a court ruling that left a group of young women hopeful that their legal action had helped "restore nature" for future generations in Ecuador, a report by Amnesty International on Monday found that gas flaring that the Provincial Court of Justice of SucumbÃos had ordered to be eliminated has actually continued—threatening public health and a just energy transition.
In its report, titled The Amazon Is Burning! The Future Is Burning!, Amnesty found the Ecuadorian government and public and private oil companies have avoided "any concrete and ambitious steps to remove the flares," instead taking measures that will allow them to "maintain oil production at all costs."
Following a legal action brought by nine women and girls from SucumbÃos and Orellana, supported by the Union of People Affected by Texaco's Oil Operations (UDAPT), the court ruled in January 2021 that Ecuador had ignored the rights that the plantiffs had to live in a healthy environment, and ordered that gas flares be shut down with officials prioritizing the removal of flares near population centers.
The flares burn natural gas, a byproduct of oil extraction—long a top industry in Ecuador—and the air pollution it causes has been linked to health problems including cancer.
A 2017 study by ClÃnica Ambiental found higher incidences of cancer among people who lived near oil facilities and gas flares in the Ecuadorian Amazon. A lawyer representing the women and girls and UDAPT also said two years of research had found 251 cases of cancer in SucumbÃos and Orellana, with women accounting for 71% of them.
As Amnesty noted, gas flaring is also linked to the emission of super pollutants like methane, which is around 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in terms of its global heating potential.
Complying with the 2021 ruling in the case against the Ecuadorian Ministry of Energy and Non-Renewable Natural Resources and the Ministry of Environment and Water is a matter of "climate, environmental, and racial justice," said Ana Piquer, Americas director at Amnesty.
"The Ecuadorian state must put an end to the routine burning of gas in flares, a practice that is today endangering the Amazon, the world and the future of the children who will inherit the planet," said Piquer.
Amnesty verified that at least 52 gas flare sites are within three miles of population centers, continuing to put local communities at risk despite the provincial court's ruling.
In a video posted to social media by Amnesty, Evelyn Mora, one of the plaintiffs in the case, said the global community will ultimately be affected by Ecuador's refusal to comply with the 2021 ruling.
"It's not just Ecuador it's affecting," she said of the oil industries' continued use of gas flares, "it's the atmosphere of the entire world."
Amnesty emphasized that state-owned and private companies in countries including Ecuador, Brazil, Venezuela, and the United States use routine flaring during oil extraction as a cost-cutting measure in marginalized and low-income areas known as "sacrifice zones."
"By eliminating gas flares and committing to a transition to a fossil fuel-free economy, Ecuador can become a standard bearer for climate and environmental justice for the sake of the planet, now and in the future," said Piquer. "Oil 'wealth' has never reached the Ecuadorian Amazon; rather, the region is a large oil sacrifice zone where children, including the girls and young women in the gas flares case, are one of the most vulnerable population groups."
The group's report calls on the Ecuadorian government to take steps including:
Piquer credited "the courageous girls and young women plaintiffs in the gas flares case" with showing the global community "that children and young people around the world are urgently demanding climate, racial, and gender justice, as well as radical changes for human rights and nature."
"This is a humanitarian disaster in the making—it's absolutely vital that the loggers are thrown out, and the Mashco-Piro's territory is properly protected at last," said the director of Survival International.
A leading rights group on Tuesday called for loggers to be "thrown out" of a remote part of the Peruvian Amazon following recent sightings of people belonging to what is believed to be the world's largest uncontacted Indigenous tribe.
London-based Survival International published video and photos of dozens of Mashco-Piro people taken near the village of Monte Salvado in southeastern Peru near the Brazilian border. The group said that in recent days, more than 50 Mashco-Piro have appeared near the village, which is inhabited by the related Yine people. A group of 17 Mashco-Piro were also recently sighted near the neighboring village of Puerto Nuevo.
Several logging companies are operating within just a few miles of where the Mascho-Piro were spotted. One company operating inside Mashco-Piro territory, Canalaes Tahuamanu, has laid more than 120 miles of road there to facilitate timber extraction. The company is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council as a sustainable and ethical operator, even though it is known to be felling trees inside Mashco-Piro territory. Survival International is calling on the FSC to withdraw its certification.
"This is a humanitarian disaster in the making—it's absolutely vital that the loggers are thrown out, and the Mashco-Piro's territory is properly protected at last," Survival International director Caroline Pearce said in a statement Tuesday. "The FSC must cancel its certification of Canales Tahuamanu immediately—failure to do so will make a mockery of the entire certification system."
Alfredo Vargas Pio, president of the local Indigenous group Native Federation of the RÃo Madre and its Tributaries, called the new photographs "irrefutable evidence that many Mashco-Piro live in this area, which the government has not only failed to protect, but sold off to logging companies."
"The logging workers could bring in new diseases which would wipe out the Mashco-Piro, and there's also a risk of violence on either side," he added, "so it's very important that the territorial rights of the Mashco-Piro are recognized and protected in law."
In 2014, Peruvian authorities evacuated residents from Monte Salvado by boat after around 200 Mashco-Piro armed with bows and arrows raided the village, killing livestock and pets and taking food and tools. In 2022, Mashco-Piro members killed 21-year-old Peruvian logger Gean del Aguila and wounded another man with arrows as they fished on the Tahuamanu River.
In the 1890s most Mashco-Piro were either enslaved or exterminated by private mercenaries hired by self-described Peruvian "Rubber King" Carlos Fitzcarrald—immortalized in the 1982 Werner Herzog film Fitzcarraldo. Surviving Mashco-Piro fled deeper into the Amazon and avoided contact with most outsiders. They fiercely defended their territory from intruders. However, in recent decades, loggers have penetrated and exploited Mascho-Piro lands.
There are believed to be more than 750 Mascho-Piro living in Peru. They sometimes cross the border into Brazil.
"They flee from loggers on the Peruvian side. At this time of the year they appear on the beaches to take tracajá eggs," Rosa Padilha of the Indigenous Missionary Council in the Brazilian state of Acre told The Guardian, referring to a species of Amazon turtle.
"That's when we find their footprints on the sand. They leave behind a lot of turtle shells," Padilha added. "They are a people with no peace, restless, because they are always on the run."
Around 15 other uncontacted Indigenous tribes with as many as 15,000 members are believed to remain in the Peruvian Amazon. It is illegal to make contact with such peoples for fear they would contract common human illnesses that could be fatal to unexposed populations without immunity.