Amazon Watch

Amazon Watch protects the Amazon rainforest and supports the region's indigenous peoples in defending their rights and opposing industrial projects such as oil and gas drilling.

Why do we exist?

Amazon Watch was founded to help support indigenous peoples and protect the Amazon rainforest from the depredations of extractive industries, particularly the oil and gas industry, which have caused some of the worst deforestation and toxic contamination in the Amazon basin.

We occupy a unique niche in the environmental movement because of our two-pronged strategy:

1. In the U.S. we seek to influence the policies of companies, such as Chevron, and public sector financiers, such as the Inter-American Development Bank, encouraging them to adopt more responsible and sustainable practices that respect both the environment and human rights.
2. In the Amazon, we help empower indigenous communities to defend their rights and their ancestral lands through legal, media and organizational training, and through solidarity campaigns.

At Amazon Watch, our work has global significance. The deforestation of the Amazon, which we seek to stop, is a significant source of global warming emissions. Scientists tell us that the Amazon plays a critical role in regulating rainfall and driving weather around the planet (see this recent article in the London Independent).  

We also believe that human rights are a universal issue and indigenous and local communities who depend on the forest for their physical and cultural survival are the only ones who should decide whether and how “development” takes place on their territories.

What have you accomplished?

For the last decade, Amazon Watch has been at the forefront of the battle to stop the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and the associated human rights abuses of indigenous communities. Victories in which we have been involved include the 2002 withdrawal of Occidental Petroleum from the ancestral lands of the U’wa people of Colombia, and the 2003 decision by the U.S. Export-Import Bank to reject a $213 million loan request for the Camisea natural gas project in the Peruvian Amazon. We have converted these and other concrete victories in the rainforest into real improvements in the policies and practices of these global institutions. 

Another good example of Amazon Watch’s work is the campaign we are currently leading in support of a landmark, class-action lawsuit against Chevron in Ecuador following the company’s deliberate dumping of 30 times more crude oil than the Exxon Valdez spill into an inhabited area of the Ecuadorian rainforest. A judgment is expected in the case during 2007. Without Amazon Watch’s support, it is possible that the 30,000 impoverished plaintiffs, including many indigenous communities, might have seen the lawsuit closed down prematurely as a result of Chevron’s improper pressure on the U.S. and Ecuadorian authorities. 

Over the past decade, Amazon Watch has provided valuable training, camera and computer equipment, and other forms of capacity-building to more than a dozen indigenous organizations whose legal territories span more than 20 million acres of pristine rainforests.

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