Two indigenous groups in the Amazon have taken radical action to reduce illegal logging, tying up loggers, torching their trucks and tractors, and kicking them off the reserves. As a result, such logging has sharply declined in these territories.
The Mashco-Piro of Peru have turned up repeatedly along river banks in the Madre de Dios region, begging for food from boat travelers. Their brazen appearances with bows and arrows have sown panic in some remote settlements, and they have ransacked others — making off with pans, clothing, machetes, even the occasional rifle, which they do not know how to use.
"Ecuador - together with other countries with Amazonian land -- has a chance to practice the teachings of integral ecology," Pope Francis said at a meeting with social organizations in the South American nation.
Native to parts of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela, the cacay nut was long used by indigenous people to treat wounds and light lamps. As those uses faded, trees that reached 40 meters (130 feet) high became appealing targets for loggers. That's begun to change with the renewed appeal of natural oils as beauty treatments.
BRASÍLIA – Deforestation in Brazil's storied Amazon basin region skyrocketed more than 450 percent in October from a year earlier, a nongovernmental group warned Monday.
As many as 40,000 illegal miners — mostly poor, Quechua-speaking laborers from Peru's Andean highlands — have invaded some of the most pristine and biologically rich sections of ancient forest in the Amazon basin. In just a few years, they have laid waste to more than 120,000 acres, leaving behind Amazonian deserts of pestilent orange craters that bleed into the rivers when it rains.
Outside the building, protesters mounted a demonstration decrying the administration's perceived bullying tactics toward opposition parties and anti-gay comments made by the president.
