Latin America is home to some of the richest forest and marine ecosystems on earth. Spanning Central America, South America and the Caribbean islands, this region supports a third of the world's wildlife and comprises such natural wonders as the towering Andes range and the mighty Amazon and Orinoco rivers. Latin America's Amazon rainforest provides a sanctuary for thousands of rare animals, insects and plants and helps reduce global warming by absorbing carbon dioxide and producing oxygen.

Yet increasing foreign exploitation and escalating demand from consumers in the United States and other industrialized countries for forest and agricultural products, oil and minerals now threaten to destroy Latin America's extraordinary natural values. In recent decades, logging, mining and energy-related development, as well as the production of agricultural products for export, has taken a severe toll on many Latin American wildlands, claiming vast stretches of native forest and contaminating lakes, rivers and coastal waters from Mexico to southern Chile. This onslaught has had devastating impacts on the region's indigenous people, displacing villages, polluting drinking water and laying waste to the lands they depend on for survival.

Because businesses and consumers in North America are important drivers of this destruction, U.S.-based environmental groups including NRDC have been able to play major roles in a broad range of campaigns to protect the people, wildlife and natural landscapes of Latin America. Through partnerships with local environmentalists, indigenous groups and government officials, NRDC has worked to introduce stricter controls on illegal logging and overfishing; pressed governments to implement and enforce local laws and international accords; and helped ensure the inclusion of environmental protections in international trade agreements. NRDC activists have supported these efforts, bringing public pressure to bear on corporations and government officials that sanction environmentally destructive activities in the region.

Here are some details about Latin America's biggest environmental threats, and what environmentalists are doing about them.

Rampant illegal logging continues to devour the Amazon rainforest's native cultures and biologically rich habitat, particularly in Peru and Brazil. Peru's Tahuamanú Rainforest, for example -- home to endangered species such as the giant otter, the squirrel monkey and the macaw -- contains some of the last remaining concentrations of old-growth mahogany trees in Latin America. According to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, the Peruvian government is required to prove that mahogany is harvested legally and sustainably. Yet government officials have refused to abide by CITES or their own national forestry laws, and illegal loggers continue to plunder the country's mahogany forests, often trespassing on indigenous lands to cut trees.

Nearly all of the mahogany shipped out of Peru is logged illegally, and the United States consumes 80 percent of these exports. To help stem the flow of illicit timber into the United States, NRDC is pressing U.S. officials to stop accepting invalid export permits for Peruvian mahogany. NRDC is also campaigning to persuade major furniture retailers to avoid purchasing mahogany that comes from illegal or unsustainable sources.
 

Mining, Drilling and Hydropower Development

As global demand for minerals, oil and other products grows, North American multinational corporations are pouring billions of dollars into mining and energy-related projects that endanger sensitive Latin American regions. Due to insufficient and poorly enforced environmental laws in many areas of Central and South America, companies routinely discharge industrial waste into lakes, rivers and oceans, contaminating drinking water supplies and destroying important wildlife habitat and food sources.

To protect Latin American wildlands from industrialization, environmental activists in the United States frequently join forces with local partners and press corporate and government officials to cancel harmful development projects. Pressure from U.S. and Costa Rican activists helped persuade the Costa Rican government to reject an effort by two U.S. companies to drill for oil off the country's Talamanca coast -- which would have spelled disaster for local fisheries, marine animals and the area's fledgling ecotourism industry. International activists also helped drive the Brazilian government to block the U.S.-based Alcoa aluminum company from building a dam complex along the Araguaia River that would have destroyed the habitat of black saki monkeys and rare pink dolphins and displaced 7,000 people. NRDC is now pressing the Canadian company Noranda to cancel plans for a massive aluminum smelter in the Aysén region of Chilean Patagonia.
 

Over Fishing
 

As global fish stocks disappear due to overfishing and other damaging fishing practices, industrialized countries have increasingly turned to the developing world to satisfy their demand for seafood. In countries such as Chile and Mexico, massive seafood exports to the United States and elsewhere, coupled with weak local controls on fishing, are helping to promote fishing practices that endanger important marine ecosystems.

In the Upper Gulf of California, local fishermen are driving the vaquita marina, the world's smallest porpoise, to the brink of extinction by ensnaring it in their nets along with their intended catch. At the same time, a fleet of about 200 boats harvest shrimp in the Upper Gulf by scraping the sea floor with massive, weighted nets -- a practice called bottom trawling that wreaks havoc on the vaquitas' only habitat. In 2005, NRDC joined the fight that concerned Mexicans have carried on for years to protect the fragile marine life of the Upper Gulf. We are urging California-based Ocean Garden, the largest exporter of Mexican shrimp and an avowed supporter of environmentally sound fishing practices, to use its influence to help promote a sustainable fishing industry in the Upper Gulf.
 

The agricultural and cattle industries are leading contributors to deforestation in Central and South America, where natural forest cover is shrinking in every country. To make way for cash crops and livestock, farmers cut and burn large expanses of rich rainforest growth. Once cleared, these lands lose their nutrients after only a couple of years and are soon abandoned. The rate of deforestation is particularly severe in Brazil, where U.S. agricultural companies are sponsoring the large-scale conversion of rainforests into gigantic plantations to produce soybeans for European factory farms. In an effort to keep indigenous lands and wildlife habitat intact, Brazil's national and state governments have created parks, reserves, natural monuments and other protected areas. Yet, in many cases, officials have failed to prevent farmers and ranchers from laying claim these areas, putting countless bird, reptile, mammal and insect species at risk. NRDC is currently working with its partners in the region to keep massive soybean-based animal feed plantations -- and a new highway under construction -- from liquidating Brazil's Amazon frontier.