BR-319: The Tipping-Point Road, and Brazil’s 2025 Fight Over Paving the Heart of the Amazon

by | Sep 11, 2026 | Brazil, Deforestation, Geopolitics, Illegal Roads and Infrastructure, Indigenous Territories and Rights, Investigation

If BR-230 is the road that opened the Amazon, BR-319 is the road that could finish the job. Scientists call it the “tipping-point road”: the one stretch of highway that would connect Brazil’s southern arc of deforestation to the still-largely-intact...

BR-230: The Trans-Amazonian Highway, the Deforestation It Opened, and the Munduruku Blocking It

by | Sep 11, 2026 | Brazil, Deforestation, Geopolitics, Illegal Roads and Infrastructure, Indigenous Territories and Rights, Investigation, Trade, Infrastructure & Commodity Signals

Before the Chinese-backed railways and the Chancay megaport, there was a road. The Trans-Amazonian Highway, BR-230, was the original attempt to open the Brazilian Amazon to the outside economy, and more than half a century later it remains the clearest case study of...

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...
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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