Carnival dancers took the biggest stage in Rio de Janeiro on Sunday night with their faces painted red in a traditional Indigenous manner, while percussionists had “Miners out” written across the skins of their drums.

Amazon rainforest nation leaders met Tuesday for the first time in 14 years to find common ground on fuelling economic development while protecting an ecosystem vital to the battle against climate change.

Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has granted official recognition of nearly 800 square miles of Indigenous lands, most of it in the Amazon, in a move that seeks to safeguard critical rainforest from the unchecked exploitation that marked his predecessor's administration.

Brazilian federal agents aboard three helicopters descended on an illegal mining site on Tuesday in the Amazon rainforest. They were met with gunfire, and the shooters escaped, leaving behind an increasingly familiar find for authorities: Starlink internet units.

Shaking a traditional rattle, Brazil’s incoming head of Indigenous affairs recently walked through every corner of the agency’s headquarters — even its coffee room — as she invoked help from ancestors during a ritual cleansing.

In most democracies, citizens go to the polls. But in Brazil’s sparsely populated Amazon region, the polls often go to the voters.

Environmental criminals in the Brazilian Amazon destroyed public rainforests equal the size of El Salvador over the past six years, yet the Federal Police — the Brazilian version of the FBI — carried out only seven operations aimed at this massive loss, according to a new study.

Satellite images taken between January and June show 4,000 square kilometres of forest destroyed — four times the size of New York City.

A new United Nations-backed report says that overexploitation, climate change, pollution and deforestation are pushing one million species towards extinction.

It was dusk on April 14 when Francisco Kuruaya heard a boat approaching along the river near his village in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. He assumed it was the regular delivery boat bringing gasoline for generators and outboard motors to remote settlements like his. Instead, what Kuruaya found was a barge dredging his people’s pristine river in search of gold.