Few Options Left for Local Communities Opposing Ecuador’s Largest Copper Mine
The Mirador copper mine has pitted locals against the government and a Chinese mining company they say failed to consult them and forcibly evicted them, writes Ning Hui.
The Mirador copper mine has pitted locals against the government and a Chinese mining company they say failed to consult them and forcibly evicted them, writes Ning Hui.
After just two months, local protests and legal action brought operations at Ecuador's Rio Blanco mine to a halt. But the saga is far from over.
The leader of Sarayaku, a Kichwa town in Ecuador, has fought oil companies that want to break into their territory for more than twenty years. For her struggle, she has been tried, slandered, and threatened with death. Who is afraid of Patricia Gualinga?
The group represents a new tactic in abortion-rights activism, which skirts legal restrictions and the often risky surgical procedures that defined clandestine abortions in the past.
For decades, Ecuador considered abortion a private matter. Now, a Nation investigation shows, women who terminate—or lose—pregnancies are facing prosecution and prison time.
Forged documents, cloned trucks, and bribes are some of the methods used by the illegal loggers in Ecuador’s Morona Santiago province to extract timber from the rainforest which the Shuar nation struggle to protect. Government mining concessions to their land have led to evictions and leaders being sued for protesting.
When the Ecuadorean government opened the Via Auca, a new highway leading to oilfields deep in the rainforest, hordes of would be colonists poured along it looking for El Dorado. Most failed, but the Huaorani people have managed to defend their territory against invaders.
Esmeraldas was once known as Equador's greenest province. Now indigenous and afrodescendent communities struggle to survive as loggers and palm oil producers invade the rainforest around them.
Between 2014 and 2016, more than 100,000 Cubans entered the United States on foot. This is the story of three Cubans who made a clandestine voyage from Quito, Ecuador, to El Paso, Texas.
In La Victoria, Ecuador, alternatives to lead glazing of tiles and painting bowls with gasoline in La Victoria are not perfect, but their intentions—healthy children—are great.
An impoverished Ecuadorian community thrived in the 1990s making roof tiles—but their children paid a horrific price.
Philip Fearnside, a biologist who studies the relationship between human activities, such as agriculture, and the protection of tropical forests, says that soy production threatens the Amazon forest.