The Kichwa people of Sarayaku, a remote community in Ecuador's Amazonian province of Pastaza, have brought suit against the Quito government before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica. The case charges that Ecuador signed a contract with Argentina's General Combustible Company (CGC) to explore and drill and drill for oil in an area known as Block 23, covering part of Sarayaku’s ancestral territory, in 1996. The indigenous community was not consulted, even though it was granted legal title to its lands in 1992. In 2002 and early 2003, the Ecuadoran armed forces occupied the lands in question as workers began seismic testing, at which time Sarayaku leaders were threatened and harassed for defending their territory, the suit charges.

Health workers in Colombia's remote southeast report that an outbreak of respiratory disease has struck one of the Amazon’s last nomadic tribes—whose numbers have already been decimated by flu and malaria. Around 35 members of the Nukak-Maku people, including nine children, have been admitted to the hospital at departmental capital San José del Guaviare. Local health director Héctor Muñoz told Colombia's RCN radio that the hospital is well over capacity, leaving some Nukak with only make-shift beds. Many members of the tribe have been living in a refugee camp on the outskirts of San José since being pushed out of their rainforest home by illegal armed groups and drug traffickers. Since they first emerged from the forest in 1988, more than half the tribe has been wiped out.

Aerial photos released by Brazil's indigenous affairs agency, FUNAI, June 22 reveal evidence of one of the world's last "uncontacted" tribes, in the Vale do Javari region of Amazonas state, near the Peruvian border. (See map.) The photos show four large communal thatched huts surrounded by crops of corn, bananas, peanuts and other subsistence foods. FUNAI director Aloysio Guapindaia said the agency, which took the photos in an overflight of the settlement, will work to keep the tribe isolated and safe from outside encroachment. The tribe is thought to belong to the Pano linguistic group, which straddles the borders of Brazil, Peru and Bolivia.

More than 5,000 agricultural workers blocked the Trans-Amazonian highway in the northern Brazilian state of Pará on June 15 and 16 to push demands for land, government aid and an end to violence against activists. They continued the action after one protester was run over and killed on June 15, but they agreed to open up the highway on June 16 as the result of an agreement for Presidency Minister Gilberto Carvalho and representatives of the Mining and Energy Ministry and the Agrarian Development Ministry to meet with them on June 20.

Quechua indigenous leaders in on the Peruvian side of the Pastaza river basin, which is divided between Peru and Ecuador, reached an accord with the government last week for a survey to be conducted of health and environmental impacts of oil development in the area, where indigenous peoples have been opposing leases by the Argentine company PlusPetrol. Aurelio Chino Dahua, president of the Quechua Indigenous Federation of Pastaza (FEDIQUEP), said the organizaiton would meet again on July 12 to work out details with the regional government of Loreto. (TruthOut, June 9; Erbol, June 1) Just days earlier, however, Ramiro Cazar, Ecuador's sub-secretary of Hydrocarbons (a division of the Natural Resources Ministry), announced that Quito and Lima are studying a joint project to export oil from the Ecuadoran side of the basin to the Pacific through Peru's pipeline from the northern Amazon over the Andes. Cazar said a "commission to evaluate the project" had been formed. (AP, May 24)

Residents in potentially impacted areas of Puno and Madre de Dios regions of the Peruvian Amazon agreed to call off their protest roadblocks when the government announced cancellation of the Inambari hydro-electric dam this week. But Puno congressman Yonhy Lescano charged that the announcement was a "trick" by the government to defuse the protest movement and buy time to move ahead with the project definitively. "There hasn't been any solution to this issue, the concession has not been cancelled; they have only put an end to the temporary concession that the company had, but the process will continue," he said. "Already they are preparing the definitive concession, although the people of Puno are against it, and are demanding its cancellation."

Following the issuance of Ministerial Resolution 264 by Peru's Ministy of Energy and Mines (MINEM) on June 14, suspending construction of the Inambari hydro-electric dam in the rainforest region of Madre de Dios, protesters called off their paro, or civil strike, in Macusani, capital of Carabaya province in the neighboring region of Puno. Macusani had been paralyzed since June 8 by protests demanding cancellation of the project, with traffic blocked on the newly paved Interoceanic Highway connecting the region to Brazil.

Officials in Peru this week denied claims by the UK-based Survival International that the government plans to abolish the Murunahua Territorial Reserve, created in 1997 to protect almost 1.2 million acres (482,000 hectares) of Amazon rainforest thought to be home to "uncontacted" bands of the Murunahua and other native peoples. “We have in no way even considered abolishing the Murunahua Reserve,” said José Carlos Vilcapoma, vice-minister for Interculturality, who administers the country’s indigenous affairs department, INDEPA, characterizing Survival's press release as "absolutely false.”