A temporary cross marks the spot where Gabriel Filho was murdered in 2010. The case has yet to come to trial against the alleged murderer, large landowner, and claimant of the property on which the Gabriel Filho community was built. Image Thomas Bauer. This is the first in a series by journalist Ann Sophie Gross who travelled to the Brazilian states of Tocantins and Maranho in Legal Amazonia in May for Mongabay to assess the impacts of agribusiness on the regions environment and people. GABRIEL FILHO: Tocantins, Brazil: In April of this year, 19 families were ordered to vacate the homes theyd lived in for more than a decade, and also forced to leave behind their croplands and livestock. Compounding the sense of injustice residents felt, the man driving their eviction is accused of murdering a community member in 2010. Shortly after that murder, the families decided to name their community Gabriel Filho, after the deceased, to emblazon the tragedy on their collective identity, and to remember. Today, Gabriel Filhos hundred exiled residents are in legal limbo, living in improvised shacks  tarps hung on wooden poles. Theyre banned by a court ruling from returning to their community to tend their fields and care for their animals. We cant even go back to our home to get our things, to collect our crops. If we go back well be sent to prison, said Eulina de Silva Sousa, a 40 year-old mother forcibly removed from her home by the police on

PUNO REGION, Peru Life isnt tranquil here anymore. Not long ago, my neighbor came running, frightened. [She said] a group of drug traffickers came to her house, put a gun to her mouth, and told her: If you keep complaining in the assemblies, youre going to be as cold as he is. The he is Jos Ccamapaza , a social and economic justice campesino leader from Colorado, a Peruvian village located next to Bahuaja-Sonene National Park. In December, he was found dead in his truck, a gunshot wound to his head. His death was seen by some as score-settling for his challenges to regional powers. Angelina*, who agreed to speak with Mongabay Latam without her name being revealed, remembers that Ccamapaza always spoke out about problems in the area. Sometimes you just have to speak very softly if you want to keep living, Angelina said, her whispers blending in with the sound of intense rain falling on her coffee plants in Putina Punco, in the mountainous rainforests of the Puno Region. From the two hectares where Angelina manages her coffee crops with her husband Moiss*, one can see the Bolivian rainforest, some of which is contained by Madidi National Park. The border between Peru and Bolivia is marked by the Tambopata River. Slightly closer, and within Peruvian territory, is Bahuaja-Sonene National Park. Its a natural protected area of 1.1 million hectares (over 2.7 million acres) that covers the rainforests of the Puno Region and some of the forests of the

JAKARTA Environmental officials have warned of the potentially catastrophic impact of a planned gold mine in a conservation zone in eastern Indonesia, amid mixed signals from the district chief responsible for approving the project. The proposed mine would cover 233 square kilometers (90 square miles), an area four times the size of Manhattan, in Wondama Bay district in West Papua province. Eighty five percent of the district, though, sits within Cenderawasih Bay National Park, while parts of it also overlap onto or border the Wondiwoi Mountains Nature Reserve both protected areas. The planned site also straddles the ancestral lands of three indigenous groups: the Kuri Wamesa, the Rasiei and the Naikere The company applying for the mining permit, PT Abisha Bumi Persada (ABP), is based some 3,000 kilometers (1,860 miles) west, in the city of Bandung on the island of Java. It reportedly plans to operate for 15 years, and expects to mine 800,000 tons of ore per year, yielding 200 kilograms (440 pounds) of gold annually. A company in Indonesia plans to mine for gold in Wondama Bay district in West Papua province, with the proposed site marked by the red pin. Much of the district falls within Cenderawasih Bay National Park, a protected area. Image by Google Maps. Ben Saroy, head of the agency that manages Cenderawasih Bay National Park, warned that establishing a large-scale gold mine like ABP has proposed could damage the wider conservation area. Among his top concerns, he said, was the waste