The Mercury Goes In Chinese, the Gold Comes Out Chinese: How Much China Really Helps Amazon Illegal Mining

The Mercury Goes In Chinese, the Gold Comes Out Chinese: How Much China Really Helps Amazon Illegal Mining

by | Sep 11, 2026 | China, Chancay & Amazon Corridors, Geopolitics, Gold Mining & Garimpo, Investigation, Mercury Contamination, Mining and Mineral Extraction, Pan-Amazon

Ask “how much do the Chinese help illegal mining in the Amazon,” and the honest answer is not a single number. Chinese actors almost never run the mines and almost never carry the guns. What they do, across the Guianas, Bolivia, Brazil and Venezuela, is...

Chancay, the Corridors, and the Mercury: How Peru’s Amazon Is Wired Into a Trade System Built for Speed

by | Sep 11, 2026 | China, Chancay & Amazon Corridors, Gold Mining & Garimpo, Illegal Roads and Infrastructure, Investigation, Mercury Contamination, Mining and Mineral Extraction, Peru

The Chinese-funded Chancay megaport is not a mine, and it does not cut a road into the rainforest. Its relevance to the Amazon is subtler and, in its way, larger: it changes the speed, volume and opacity with which commodities move between remote extraction zones and...

Half a Million Hectares, Formalized: What Colombia’s Amazon Land Titling Does, and What It Cannot Do Alone

by | Sep 11, 2026 | Colombia, Deforestation, Gold Mining & Garimpo, Indigenous Sovereignty, Investigation, Land & Territorial Rights, Oil and Gas Pressure

In late January 2026, Colombia’s National Land Agency (Agencia Nacional de Tierras, ANT) announced that it had formalized 521,492 hectares of the Colombian Amazon as Indigenous resguardos, across five departments: Amazonas, Putumayo, Caquetá, Guaviare and...
The Gold of Abandonment and the Nukak: How Guainía’s Mining Frontier Presses on a People Already Facing Extinction

The Gold of Abandonment and the Nukak: How Guainía’s Mining Frontier Presses on a People Already Facing Extinction

by | Aug 15, 2026 | Colombian Amazon Focus, Deforestation, Gold Mining & Garimpo, Illegal Roads and Infrastructure, Indigenous Sovereignty, Indigenous Territories and Rights, Investigation, Mercury Contamination

A Nukak camp on cleared ground in the Colombian Amazon, May 2026. Photograph by CAJ Staff Photographer. In this reportJump to a sectionWhat the reporting shows in GuainíaThe people the article does not mentionWhere the frontier meets the Nukak: a corridor through...
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