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...
The Amazon Is Closer to Breaking Than You Think, and That Is Everyone’s Problem

The Amazon Is Closer to Breaking Than You Think, and That Is Everyone’s Problem

by | Sep 11, 2026 | Analysis, Deforestation, Indigenous Territories and Rights, Mercury Contamination, Mining and Mineral Extraction, Pan-Amazon

You do not live in the Amazon. You may never see it. And its collapse would still reach into your life, through the price of your food, the stability of your climate, and the speed at which the planet you depend on becomes harder to live on. The developments now...

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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