Latin America Bureau

LAB partner Latino Life, is 25 years old this year, and its London festival, Latino Life in the Park, is 10. A Latina-run organization and platform, it is a wonderful resource for the UK’s thriving Latin American communities, and the rapidly growing and ever more diverse audiences who are inspired by the liveliness and optimism of Latin American culture, especially its music.

A new and timely LAB book by anthropologist and environmental rights researcher Jan Schulz, will examine the importance of The Rights of Nature in the battle to defend Indigenous territories in Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru. It explains the origins of this concept, its profound challenge to the ‘resources to be exploited by humans’ approach to nature, and documents the ways it is being used today with growing success by Indigenous and other rural communities.

In the second of her Amazon on the Brink blogs, LAB author and editor Sue Branford looks at the climate science and relays the warning from veteran climatologist James Hanson about the dangers of a ‘super El Niño’, and the consequences for the rainforest. Fires, often set deliberately, are now a greater danger than deforestation.

In the first of a new series of blogs, LAB author and editor Sue Branford returns to the subject closest to her heart: the survival of the Amazon rainforest and the communities and peoples that live there – a matter of crucial importance not only for themselves, for Brazil and the other countries of the Amazon basin, but for the planet and the climatic and ecosystems on which human life depends.

At London Climate Action Week, Indigenous women, especially from Latin America, featured prominently as leaders of their communities and territories Fany Kuiru, a Colombian lawyer, leads COICA, the multinational Coordinadora de Organizaciones Indígenas de la Cuenca Amazónica. Founded in 1984, COICA provides courses, technical support and help in accessing funding, while emphasizing both the transmission of Indigenous knowledge and the bringing of women leaders onto the international stage.

A million Mexican supporters gathered to cheer their national team as it progressed to the knock-out stage of the World Cup, due to play England on 5 July. The country’s 130,000 disappeared people will not be present. Yet the tide of hope aroused by football offers a way to defeat violence and despair. England are set once again to play in the Azteca Stadium.

A lot has happened in the region – and the world – since we last wrote to you. A week ago, we woke to the terrible news that Venezuela had been rocked by two earthquakes, killing over 2,000 people, injuring many more and leaving tens of thousands missing. A tragedy in its own right, it comes on the back of political turmoil following Trump’s illegal abduction of Nicolás Maduro, and the unclear position of interim president Delcy Rodríguez.

In April 2026, weeks before Colombians first went to the polls, Jenny Pearce and Juan David Velasco published ¿Quién manda en Colombia? Élites, poder y nación (Bogotá: Media Pluma), an exhaustive study of who holds power in Colombia. Drawing on an original database of elites from 1991 to 2022, it finds that wealth, political influence and social status rest with some 932 individuals from 119 families: about 0.002 per cent of a nation of more than 51 million. Then Colombians voted again.

This article was first published on 26 August 2025 by LAB partner Amazônia Latitude and translated for LAB by Stanton Geyer. You can read the original, in Portuguese, here. Fishing communities are demanding recognition of ‘marétorios’ and meaningful participation in decisions over Brazil’s jurisdictional waters (‘Amazônia Azul’) amid the expansion of Marine Spatial Planning and offshore wind energy. Brazil has one of the largest maritime territories in the world.

This article first appeared on Sumaúma one 24 April 2026. It was translated from the Portuguese for LAB by Theodora Bradford. You can real the original here. In the area divided up after the slaughter of workers by the Pará Military Police, families cultivate the land and the memory of the victims, while those responsible continue to enjoy impunity in a state where, in the last 45 years, over a thousand people have been murdered in the countryside.