Starlink, a division of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, has almost 4,000 low-orbit satellites across the skies, connecting people in remote corners of the Amazon. The lightweight, high-speed internet system has also proved a new and valuable tool for Brazil’s illegal miners.

Armed government officials with Brazil’s justice, Indigenous, and environment ministries pressed illegal gold miners out of Yanomami Indigenous territory Wednesday, citing widespread river contamination, famine, and disease they have brought to one of the most isolated groups in the world.

January has proved that Bolsonaro’s defeat last year was far from a game over for the far-right. We also look at the genocidal policies against the Yanomami people of the Amazon, who are dying of treatable diseases and starvation due to illegal mining on their lands.

A wrap-up of this week’s most important and interesting Latino news and views from around the world and the across the internet.

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Yaritza, Mireya, Shirley, and Otilia travel the country searching for the bodies of those who were disappeared during the civil war.

Leading presidential candidate Gustavo Petro announced Wednesday that the Black environmentalist lawyer Francia Márquez will serve as his running mate in May’s presidential elections. Márquez is the first Black woman to run in presidential elections in Colombia’s history.

Truckers in the north of Chile on Friday set up roadblocks to protest insecurity they attribute to undocumented migration in the region.

Reporter David González M. follows one Haitian migrant, his family, and others from as far away as Pakistan as they prepare to make the deadly journey through the Colombia-Panama border region.

BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) — Hundreds of Indigenous people gathered outside Brazil’s Congress on Wednesday to push for rejection of a bill that could loosen protections for their lands—a proposal that has already prompted clashes with police.

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Colombia has failed to protect human rights activists in its remote communities, resulting in hundreds of slayings since the government reached a peace deal with the country’s biggest rebel movement in 2016, an international monitoring group said Wednesday.

From illegal mining and logging to destructive dams to land grabbers to a federal government that often ignores their concerns outright, the Munduruku along the Tapajós River are under attack on all fronts.

According to the Institute for Peace and Development Studies (Indepaz), 287 social leaders have been killed so far in 2020.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The U.N. envoy for Colombia said Tuesday that former combatants are now making face masks to respond to the new coronavirus pandemic, but COVID-19 hasn’t stopped violence against social leaders, human rights defenders and ex-fighters despite a nationwide stay-at-home order.

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis refused Wednesday to approve the ordination of married men to address a shortage of priests in the Amazon, sidestepping a fraught issue that has dominated debate in the Catholic Church and even involved retired Pope Benedict XVI.

According to an investigation, reports of the illegal eavesdropping operations were directly handed off to senior politicians of the president’s Democratic Center party.

MADRE DE DIOS, Peru (AP) — Destruction of the forests can be swift. Regrowth is much, much slower.

The deal would prevent asylum seekers traveling through Central America from entering the United States.

BOGOTÁ, Colombia (AP) — Colombia’s president compared Nicolás Maduro to Serbian war criminal Slobodan Milosevic as he goes on a diplomatic offensive to corral the Venezuelan socialist, warning that he would be making a “stupid” mistake if he were to attack his U.S.-backed neighbor.

The concern for the protection of the Amazon seems to have reached a new zenith.

Despite the official ceasefire peace agreement signed by the government and FARC leaders in 2016 after 50 years of civil war, criminal armed groups have re-ignited the violence in areas previously occupied by FARC.

Mexican estimates suggest that each month the Sinaloa cartel trades two tons of cocaine and 10,000 tons of marijuana plus heroine, methamphetamine and other drugs.