Posts Tagged "madre de dios"

Brutal deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon [Featured]

Brutal deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon [Featured]

Forests are converted into deserts due to the advance of informal mining that illegally extracts gold. Regular buying and selling of mercury is demanded by locals, who use it for the extraction of the precious metal.

November 17, 2009 | Nature, News

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Land grabs by technicality in the Amazon

Land grabs by technicality in the Amazon

Indigenous Amazonians risk loosing their ancestral lands by way of a Government slight-of-hand which grants concessions and exploration rights to wealthy foreign energy companies.
One of these, US oil company Hunt Oil, which has been granted rights to one of the world’s last untouched areas of cloud forest with unsurpassed levels of bio-diversity, is now demonstrating how this [...]

October 28, 2009 | News, Opinion

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Quest for the lost city of Paititi

Quest for the lost city of Paititi

The legend of Paititi refers to a lost city in the Amazon rainforest, said to be founded as a refuge from the Spanish by surviving Incas. During colonial times it was sought out by dozens of explorers eager to conquer it’s people to retrieve it’s gold.

November 12, 2007 | Opinion

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Petroglyphs of Pusharo

Petroglyphs of Pusharo

In his article for the Athena Review, Deyermenjian tells us, “I first encountered petroglyphs in 1984 while my party of highland campesinos and Peruvian adventurers was traversing the Cordillera de Paucartambo, the easternmost range of the high Andes to the northeast of Cusco. We were at an altitude of 13,500 feet when we found ourselves astride a rockhang covered with bas- relief images of llamas and walking humans. All the human figures on the rock were heading in one direction, northeast, toward the tropical forests This site is named Demarcación, whose meaning would doubtless have been understood by Incan peoples of old passing this way”.

November 10, 2007 | Archaeology, Opinion

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Suffering of uncontacted Amazon tribes

Suffering of uncontacted Amazon tribes

The Amazon Rainforest is full of isolated indigenous peoples. They exist in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Brasil, Bolivia, Paraguay and Peru. For President of PetroPeru Daniel Saba speaking of this is like speaking of the Loch Ness monster. Faced with protests from organized native groups, who point out the dangers for uncontacted and isolated tribes of selling off huge areas of Peru’s Amazon, he declared in April of this year “no one has seen them, so what uncontacted people are they talking about?” Surely Saba is not so unbelieving now, after the publication of photos taken from the air on the 18th of September by a group of belonging to the Zoological Society of Frankfurt and the National Institute of National Recourses of Peru, showing some 20 isolated and previously unknown villages along the Los Piedras River.

October 25, 2007 | News, Opinion

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Say goodbye to Eden

Say goodbye to Eden

The following article has been translated by me from an insert of the newspaper El Comercio, regarding the sale to oil companies of a large part of the most biodiverse place on earth, the Amazon rainforest of Madre de Dios in southern Peru.

October 24, 2007 | News, Opinion

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