标签： South America

Tucked away in the far northern reaches of Brazil’s Amapá state, the small, remote border city of Oiapoque is already grappling with the uneven, disruptive early impacts of a projected oil-fueled economic boom, months after state-owned energy giant Petrobras launched exploratory offshore drilling along the Amazon rainforest coast. What was once a quiet community reliant on fishing, informal gold mining and cross-border trade with neighboring French Guiana has been upended by an unprecedented influx of thousands of job-seeking migrants, who have cleared large swathes of intact forest to build makeshift informal settlements while waiting for the employment opportunities they expect to emerge once full-scale oil production begins.

Local officials confirm that the rapid, unplanned population expansion has already overwhelmed the city’s limited, underfunded public infrastructure. Oiapoque city councilor Tiago Vieira Araújo reports that seven entirely new residential neighborhoods have sprung up across the city in just 12 months, with several carved out of pristine rainforest that stood undisturbed barely a year ago. Local residents have raised widespread complaints about overcrowded public schools, and the city’s only public hospital is currently operating at 100% capacity, unable to accommodate the sudden jump in population.

For Indigenous communities that have long called the region home, the drilling project and its aftermath have brought outright displacement and broken promises. Renata Lod, a representative of Oiapoque’s Indigenous council, harshly criticized Petrobras’ arrival in the region, noting that the company entered with robust political backing and marketed the project as a transformational development effort that would turn the remote city into a prosperous, Gulf-like economic hub overnight. “They promised we would go to sleep a small fishing town and wake up like Dubai,” she said. Instead, the region has faced chaotic unregulated growth and the illegal invasion of protected Indigenous territorial lands.

Still, for thousands of economic migrants, the prospect of stable, high-wage work in the new oil sector has outweighed concerns about environmental risk and uncertainty. Reginaldo Nunes Fonseca, one such migrant, relocated to Oiapoque from Brazil’s northeastern state of Maranhão just weeks after seeing a televised report that Petrobras had secured its exploration license. “I’m going there,” he recalled thinking, drawn by the promise of opportunity that has eluded many working-class people across Brazil’s poorer interior regions.

Beyond the immediate strain on urban services, the drilling project has sparked widespread alarm over potential long-term environmental harm to one of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems. Environmental advocacy groups warn that even a small offshore oil spill would cause irreversible damage to the region’s sensitive coastal wetlands and critical commercial fisheries, which support the livelihoods of thousands of local families. Indigenous leaders add that the project’s expansion threatens the survival of their traditional way of life and the intact forest lands that their communities have stewarded for centuries.

Brazilian federal prosecutors have already filed a formal request asking the country’s national environmental regulator to annul or suspend Petrobras’ exploration license, arguing that the company’s environmental impact assessments are incomplete and that it has hidden the full scope of potential harm the project could cause. As of early 2026, no court or regulatory ruling has been issued on the request.

Petrobras has pushed back against these criticisms, stating that it completed comprehensive oil spill modeling as part of its license application and has deployed a network of floating monitoring devices to track ocean currents in the drilling area since operations launched in October 2025. Even so, the company was fined 2.5 million reais (equivalent to roughly $470,500) by IBAMA, Brazil’s federal environmental enforcement agency, after a drilling fluid leak in January 2026 that forced a temporary halt to operations.

The situation unfolding in Oiapoque lays bare a central contradiction at the heart of Brazil’s current climate and energy policy under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Just last year, Brazil hosted the 30th UN Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Belém, where Lula and his negotiating team championed a global agreement to phase out fossil fuels, the leading driver of human-caused global climate change. Brazil has also joined dozens of other nations in committing to sharp cuts in greenhouse gas emissions over the coming decades.

Yet for many developing countries including Brazil, the tension between climate action and economic development remains unresolved. Many local residents in Oiapoque and across the Amazon region hold out hope that new oil revenues will lift local living standards and lift the region out of persistent poverty. The expansion of oil drilling into the Amazon basin, even in this offshore project, also raises significant questions about whether Lula will fulfill his high-profile campaign pledge to protect the Amazon rainforest from destructive extractive development, a key promise that helped power his return to the presidency in 2022.

Deep in Brazil’s northern Amazon state of Amapá, along the remote border with French Guiana, the small riverside city of Oiapoque is undergoing a chaotic transformation sparked by a single prospect: offshore oil development. One recent rainy morning, Reginaldo Nunes Fonseca leaned against the porch rail of a friend’s makeshift wooden home in Nova Conquista — a new settlement carved out of pristine old-growth rainforest just 12 months prior — smoking a cigarette as heavy rains washed over the muddy, cleared plots. The downpour kept him from continuing work on his own small house or picking up casual day labor for other new arrivals, but the rain is far from the only barrier to the prosperity he traveled hundreds of miles to find.

Like thousands of migrants who have flooded into Oiapoque over the past 18 months, Fonseca chased a promise of economic boom that arrived after Brazil’s state-owned energy giant Petrobras secured federal environmental approval last year for exploratory drilling in the Equatorial Margin, a vast offshore basin roughly 112 miles off Amapá’s coast near the mouth of the Amazon River. After seeing a televised report on the licensing last January, the unemployed father left his home in Brazil’s drought-prone northeastern state of Maranhão, drawn by the expectation of a growing city and abundant job openings. “I thought, well, that’s good — the city is going to grow, there will be a lot of job opportunities,” he explained. “So I started calling friends and said: ‘I’m going there because here I’m unemployed and not doing anything.’”

Amapá has long ranked among Brazil’s poorest and most isolated states, cut off from the rest of the country by a lack of major road connections and surrounded by rivers and the Atlantic. Oiapoque’s pre-oil economy depended on small-scale fishing, rampant unregulated gold mining, and cross-border shoppers from French Guiana, who trade stable euros for local goods. But the promise of oil wealth has sparked unbridled optimism even as it triggers unplanned, strainful growth in a city already crippled by inadequate public infrastructure.

This oil rush lays bare a defining dilemma for resource-rich developing nations across the globe: how can countries cut greenhouse gas emissions to slow catastrophic climate change, when untapped fossil fuel reserves represent the fastest path to lifting impoverished regions out of systemic poverty? It also puts President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s landmark environmental pledges to the test. Since taking office, Lula has made halting Amazon deforestation a core policy priority, even hosting the United Nations COP30 climate summit in Brazil last year. Still, during a 2023 visit to Amapá, the president framed oil exploration as a matter of regional justice: “We don’t want to pollute a single millimeter of water, but no one can stop us from lifting Amapá out of poverty if there is oil here.”

Exploratory drilling at the offshore site launched in October 2023, and is projected to wrap up after five months. If substantial commercial oil reserves are discovered, full extraction would require additional layers of federal permitting, a process that can stretch on for months or even years. For now, Oiapoque’s formal role in the operation is limited: the city serves only as a helicopter base for offshore crews, while all administrative operations are centered in Belém, the major Amazonian port nearly 1,000 miles away in neighboring Pará state.

Even with massive uncertainty hanging over future extraction and Oiapoque’s small formal role in current operations, speculative fever has already remade the city’s landscape. Official 2022 census data put Oiapoque’s population at just 27,482, but no updated count has been conducted to track the recent inflow. Oiapoque city councilor Tiago Vieira Araújo, who raised public concerns during a March 10 community meeting where Petrobras presented its operational plans to local leaders, estimates that “in the past 18 months, Oiapoque has seen significant population growth.” That growth has already spawned seven new informal neighborhoods — including Nova Conquista — and brought a wave of overlapping social problems with it.

Brazil’s national geography and statistics institute IBGE data underscores the city’s pre-existing infrastructure crisis: less than 2% of all households have access to adequate sewage systems, and just 0.2% of city streets meet formal construction standards. Conditions in the new settlements, known locally as “invasões” or invasions, are far worse. New arrivals have cleared swathes of public rainforest to stake informal claims to land, erecting simple shacks with just a kitchen, bed and rudimentary outdoor bathroom out of rough-cut lumber. Fresh tree stumps dot the muddy ground between makeshift plots. “We know it’s not right to clear the forest. Everyone knows it’s wrong,” Fonseca acknowledged. “But space is limited.”

For local boosters like Yuri Alesi, a 34-year-old land rights lawyer and former city councilman running for vice mayor in an April special election, the oil boom could turn Oiapoque into an “Amazonian Dubai” modeled after the Gulf state’s oil-fueled transformation. “Dubai is in the middle of a desert, an unlikely place to grow,” Alesi argued. “The industry that drove its development was oil.”

Geologists estimate the full Equatorial Margin, stretching from the Suriname border down to Brazil’s northeastern coast, holds as much as 10 billion barrels of untapped oil and gas, worth an estimated $719.7 billion at current market prices. Alesi projects that oil royalties alone could generate roughly $19 million per month for Oiapoque — a sum equal to the city’s entire annual GDP, per Brazilian government data.

The Amazon basin plays an irreplaceable role in regulating the global climate, as its dense forests store massive volumes of carbon that would otherwise enter the atmosphere as greenhouse gases. Amapá has long been one of the basin’s best-protected regions: roughly 82% of the state remains covered in old-growth forest, according to MapBiomas, a non-profit that tracks Amazon land use. Its isolation has shielded it from the large-scale deforestation that has ravaged the southern Amazon for cattle ranching and soy cultivation.

But history offers a cautionary tale for Oiapoque’s would-be transformation. Forty years of oil and gas exploration in Coari, another Amazonian city, has failed to lift its population out of poverty: a 2023 study by public policy non-profit Agenda Pública found 72% of Coari residents live in extreme poverty. Closer to home, Amapá has already seen repeated cycles of resource boom and bust linked to mining. Forty-six-year-old Selma Soares experienced that whiplash firsthand: she moved from Maranhão to the Amapá mining town of Pedra Branca in 2008, lured by an iron ore boom that drew thousands of workers. She opened a small grocery store, only to see the industry collapse after a 2013 port accident killed six workers and halted production. When new owners suspended operations permanently, the local economy collapsed. “People who had shopped with us for years struggled to eat,” Soares recalled. Last year, she heard rumors of Oiapoque’s new boom, moved her family to the city, and opened a small grocery on the outskirts — joining hundreds of other former mining boom refugees waiting for oil to deliver the prosperity mining never did.

Today, the city’s mood is a tangled mix of fevered hope and simmering anxiety. At the river border with French Guiana, small port boats display green-and-yellow stickers emblazoned with a slogan pushed by local politicians: “Oil yes! Development yes!” But just a 20-minute boat ride away, members of the Indigenous Galibi Kali’na community, whose ancestral territory spans this stretch of the Amazon coast, say they have already paid a price for the promise of oil.

Renata Lod, a representative of Oiapoque’s Indigenous council, says Petrobras sold a fairy tale of overnight transformation to local leaders: “Petrobras arrived with strong political backing, promising progress as if we would go to sleep one way and wake up like Dubai.” The reality, she says, is “completely disorganized population growth, invasions of Indigenous lands.” Lod notes that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous residents already face overcrowded public schools, and the city’s only hospital is already operating over full capacity. Most alarming is the risk of an offshore oil spill: the region’s coastal Indigenous territories are made up of fragile flooded wetlands, where oil contamination is nearly impossible to fully clean up. “Most Indigenous lands are flooded wetlands. How do you clean a wetland? Once oil enters the rivers, there is no way to remove it,” Lod said. An oil spill could quickly spread pollutants across the region’s coasts and rivers, destroying fishing grounds and mangrove ecosystems that the community depends on for survival.

Petrobras has defended its operations, saying it conducted detailed spill risk modeling to secure its environmental license, and has deployed monitoring devices to track ocean currents since drilling began. Still, the company already faced a penalty for a safety incident: in January 2024, a leak of drilling fluid forced a temporary halt to operations, leading federal environmental regulator IBAMA to fine Petrobras roughly $470,500.

For Araújo, the city councilman, local residents already see Petrobras as a silver bullet for Oiapoque’s generations of poverty. “But even a remedy has side effects,” he noted. “And we’re already experiencing the side effects before seeing any of the benefits.”

Environmental and Indigenous organizations have already filed lawsuits against the federal government and Petrobras to halt exploration, arguing that the licensing process failed to require proper consultation with traditional communities, underestimated spill risks, and ignored the full long-term climate impact of extracting new fossil fuel reserves. Federal prosecutors have also asked IBAMA to annul or suspend the environmental license, saying Petrobras’ environmental impact studies are incomplete and the company has hidden the full scope of potential harm. No ruling has been issued on the challenges yet, leaving Oiapoque’s future hanging in the balance.

In a significant development in the bilateral fight against transnational drug trafficking, the U.S. Department of Justice has confirmed that Érick Valencia Salazar, one of the founding leaders of Mexico’s infamous Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), has entered a guilty plea to federal drug trafficking charges. Known widely by his cartel alias “El 85”, Valencia Salazar’s legal process marks one of the highest-profile convictions in recent years against the leadership of the hemisphere’s most powerful drug trafficking organization.

Valencia Salazar’s path to a U.S. courtroom has been years in the making. He was first taken into Mexican custody in 2012, only to be released five years later—an outcome that drew widespread criticism of systemic corruption within Mexican law enforcement at the time. He remained at large until 2022, when Mexican military forces tracked and arrested him in the cartel’s home stronghold of Jalisco. In February 2025, he was part of a major extradition of 29 accused Mexican drug kingpins transferred to U.S. authorities to face trial.

According to statements from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Valencia Salazar played an instrumental role in transforming CJNG from a splinter criminal group into one of the world’s most violent narcotics enterprises. Officials say the cartel under his early leadership adopted violence as a core business strategy: eliminating rival groups to seize territorial control across Mexico while smuggling massive volumes of illicit narcotics into American communities across the border. “He helped build CJNG into a ruthless organisation that uses violence as a business model – murdering for control in Mexico while flooding the United States with poison”, the DEA said in its official statement.

Valencia Salazar changed his initial plea of not guilty to plead guilty to a single count of conspiracy to distribute five kilograms or more of cocaine into the United States. U.S. federal law mandates a minimum 10-year prison sentence for this offense, and his formal sentencing hearing is scheduled for July 31 this year.

The conviction comes amid a period of heightened tension and coordinated action against CJNG, which is currently the most powerful criminal organization operating in Mexico. The cartel made global headlines just months earlier when a wave of coordinated violence erupted across 20 Mexican states following reports that CJNG’s supreme leader, Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, commonly known as “El Mencho”, had died from injuries sustained during his capture by Mexican security forces.

Last year, the Trump administration formally designated CJNG as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), a rare classification for a transnational criminal group that signaled the U.S. government’s intent to ramp up pressure on cartel networks. In justifying the designation, the administration argued that CJNG’s activities pose a grave threat not just to the safety of American citizens and the security of U.S. borders, but also to the political and social stability of the entire Western Hemisphere. The Trump administration has repeatedly put diplomatic pressure on Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to increase resources and operations against cartel groups based on Mexican territory. For her part, Sheinbaum has framed the capture and subsequent death of “El Mencho” as clear evidence of the Mexican armed forces’ unwavering commitment to rooting out the country’s most notorious drug trafficking figures.

This latest guilty plea represents a major milestone in the long-running, binational effort to dismantle CJNG’s leadership structure, though security analysts warn that the cartel remains largely operational across Mexico and continues to control significant portions of the cross-border drug trade into the U.S.

A massive cross-agency search operation is ongoing in the Abaco Islands of the Bahamas after an American tourist disappeared overboard from a small recreational dinghy over the weekend, local law enforcement confirmed.

The missing person has been identified as Lynette Hooker, a resident of Michigan, who was on a holiday in the Caribbean island nation alongside her husband, also a United States citizen. According to official statements from the Royal Bahamas Police Force, the incident unfolded around 7:30 p.m. local time Saturday, when the couple set out from Hope Town bound for Elbow Cay aboard an 8-foot hard-bottom dinghy. Hooker’s husband told first responders that his wife fell from the bouncing vessel when it hit uneven water, and was quickly pulled out to open sea by strong local currents. Critically, the woman took the dinghy’s engine keys with her when she fell overboard, leaving her husband stranded without power to navigate or pursue.

Without functioning propulsion, the husband was forced to paddle the unpowered small boat to shore, a journey that took more than eight hours. He only reached the Marsh Harbour Boat Yard around 4 a.m. local time Sunday, where he immediately alerted on-site staff, who in turn contacted Bahamian law enforcement to launch the search. Hope Town Volunteer Fire and Rescue Chief Troy Pritchard confirmed to CBS News, the BBC’s U.S. news partner, that the woman was ejected violently from the small craft, a common hazard in choppy coastal waters around the island chain.

In an official social media statement, the Royal Bahamas Police Force announced it had launched a full investigation into the disappearance, and that multiple partner agencies had joined the search effort. Alongside Bahamian national police and the Royal Bahamas Defence Force, U.S. diplomatic and law enforcement counterparts as well as local volunteer rescue groups are contributing assets and personnel to the operation, police confirmed.

The incident comes nearly 13 months after the U.S. State Department issued a public travel advisory explicitly warning U.S. travelers of deadly boating risks across the Bahamas. The March 2025 advisory noted that the island nation does not tightly regulate recreational boating activity, a gap in oversight that has already led to multiple preventable injuries and fatalities for visitors in recent years.

In the heart of Brazil’s capital Brasilia, thousands of Indigenous representatives from 200 distinct communities across the nation gathered this Tuesday for the 22nd iteration of the Free Land Encampment, the country’s largest annual Indigenous mobilization. Marching along the Esplanade of the Ministries toward Three Powers Square — the central district housing Brazil’s presidential palace, Congress, and Supreme Court — demonstrators came together to push back against the encroachment of corporate agribusiness, logging, and mining projects on their constitutionally protected ancestral territories.

Organized under this year’s theme “Our future is not for sale, and the answer is us,” the gathering coincides with a rising tide of land-related violence and tension across Brazil, including ongoing violent disputes targeting the Pataxo people in Bahia state and widespread unrest in the Amazon basin over the past several months. An estimated 7,000 attendees began arriving in Brasilia over the weekend, setting up camp in an open-air cultural space and holding preliminary assemblies to align their shared demands ahead of the main march. When Indigenous leaders asked the assembled crowd whether they were satisfied with the federal government’s progress on demarcating Indigenous land, and with the actions of Congress and the Supreme Court, every question drew a resounding chorus of “no.”

The march also places direct pressure on President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a leftist leader who campaigned on a platform of strengthening Indigenous land rights and environmental protection after four years of rollbacks under his predecessor, but has drawn sharp criticism for moving forward with oil exploration and other resource extraction projects that contradict those core promises. With Lula widely expected to run for re-election this October, Indigenous leaders say they are demanding a seat at the table for policy decisions that shape the future of their communities.

“Congress, the Supreme Court, and the president make decisions about our lives without ever hearing our voices,” explained Alessandra Korap, a Munduruku Indigenous leader and 2023 Goldman Environmental Prize winner, as she joined the march. “They often consult one or a handful of Indigenous people and claim we all agree to a new waterway, a railroad, or a mining project. When we stand united like this, no one can speak for us — we are here to deliver our own message.”

The mobilization follows a string of recent actions across the Amazon that have yielded mixed results for Indigenous communities. In February, thousands of protesters including Korap held 33 days of demonstrations outside a Cargill facility in Para state, successfully pushing Lula to revoke a decree that would have allowed private concessions for Amazonian waterways. Just weeks earlier, however, a federal court approved licensing for a massive Canadian-led gold mining project operated by Belo Sun in Para, prompting months of continuous Indigenous-led protests in the state capital of Altamira.

As demonstrators marched on Tuesday, dressed in traditional headdresses and cultural body paint and chanting unified calls for land sovereignty, movement leaders emphasized that even with incremental gains under the Lula administration, Indigenous rights remain under growing threat from agribusiness, mining, and energy interests that dominate national politics. Dinamam Tuxá, executive coordinator of the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil, noted that Brazil’s current political and economic context demands sustained, unified action from Indigenous communities. “Lawmakers have already advanced multiple bills that would weaken constitutional protections for our lands and reinterpret long-standing land rights to open more territories to extraction,” Tuxá explained. “With global demand for oil, gas, and critical minerals rising, these economic interests are putting unprecedented pressure on our territories.”

The contradiction at the heart of Lula’s policy agenda remains a central point of tension for the movement. Lula was invited to attend the Free Land Encampment, but had not confirmed his attendance as of Monday afternoon. While members of his administration, including Indigenous Peoples Minister Eloy Terena, have confirmed they will participate in policy hearings during the week-long gathering, Lula has continued to argue that economic development and environmental conservation can coexist, even as he approves new extraction projects opposed by Indigenous and environmental groups.

Recent judicial action has added new urgency to the movement’s demands. In February, Supreme Court Justice Flávio Dino ordered Congress to pass formal legislation regulating mining activity on Indigenous territories within two years. In his ruling, Dino acknowledged that illegal mining is already widespread on Indigenous lands, carried out with pervasive violence and disregard for environmental protections, and affirmed that the Cinta Larga people, whose territory spans the Amazonian states of Mato Grosso and Rondonia, retain the right to conduct mining on their own land if they comply with environmental rules and secure broad community approval. Under current Brazilian law, all mining and mineral exploration on Indigenous territory requires congressional approval in addition to community consultation.

But legal and environmental advocates warn that a Congress dominated by agribusiness and pro-extraction lawmakers will almost certainly draft legislation that undermines Indigenous sovereignty. Renata Vieira, a lawyer with the non-profit Instituto Socioambiental, called the push to open Indigenous territories to formal mining one of the most severe threats facing Indigenous communities in modern Brazil. “Any legislation coming out of this current Congress will be deeply harmful to Indigenous rights,” Vieira said.

Beyond the immediate fight for Indigenous sovereignty, the protection of Indigenous territories is widely recognized by climate scientists as one of the most effective strategies to curb Amazon deforestation. The Amazon, the world’s largest tropical rainforest, acts as a critical global carbon sink that regulates global climate patterns, and researchers warn that continued large-scale forest loss could accelerate dangerous levels of global warming. Data from 2022 collected by MapBiomas, a network of non-profit land-use tracking organizations, underscores the impact of Indigenous stewardship: over 30 years, Indigenous territories lost just 1% of their native vegetation, compared to a 20% loss on private land across Brazil.

After 12 years of drawn-out legal challenges, a 72-year-old Chilean woman accused of grave human rights abuses under former dictator Augusto Pinochet has failed to block her extradition from Australia, clearing the way for her to face trial for crimes committed nearly half a century ago.

Adriana Rivas, who has lived in Australia’s Sydney suburb of Bondi since 1978 where she worked as a domestic cleaner and nanny, has long denied involvement in the enforced disappearance and torture of seven left-wing dissidents during Pinochet’s 1973 to 1990 military rule. Before resettling in Australia, Rivas served as the personal secretary to Manuel Contreras, the head of Pinochet’s notoriously brutal secret police force, the National Intelligence Directorate, widely known by its Spanish acronym DINA.

Human rights campaigners and relatives of the regime’s victims have spent decades pushing for Rivas to face justice. DINA was created immediately after Pinochet seized power in a 1973 military coup specifically to hunt down and eliminate political opponents of the new dictatorship. Over its years of operation, the agency carried out thousands of abductions, extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and systematic acts of torture, before being replaced by another equally violent military intelligence unit, the CNI.

Chilean authorities first took Rivas into custody when she returned to her home country for a visit in 2006, but she was released on bail and returned to Australia before proceedings could advance. The Chilean government formally filed an extradition request with Australian officials in 2014, alleging that Rivas was an active DINA operative who directly participated in the 1976 abduction of Víctor Díaz, secretary-general of the Chilean Communist Party, and six other party members. Among the seven missing victims was 29-year-old Reinalda del Carmen Pereira Plaza, who was pregnant at the time of her abduction. All seven are widely presumed to have been killed while in DINA custody, and Chilean extradition documents accuse Rivas of serving as a guard and taking on operational roles during the detainees’ capture. Multiple witnesses interviewed for a documentary have labeled Rivas one of DINA’s most brutal torturers and a key member of the Lautaro Brigade, an elite hit squad tasked with eliminating the leadership of Chile’s underground communist movement. The documentary was directed by Rivas’ own niece, Lissette Orozco, who spent five years investigating her aunt’s past, and the film premiered at the 2017 Berlin International Film Festival.

Rivas has consistently rejected all accusations of wrongdoing. In a 2013 interview with Australian public broadcaster SBS, she described her time working for DINA as “the best of my life,” and when asked about the widespread torture carried out by the agency, she claimed that “they had to break the people – it has happened all over the world, not only in Chile.”

On Monday, an Australian federal judge rejected all arguments from Rivas’ legal team that the extradition request was legally invalid, bringing an end to the latest phase of her legal fight. According to local Australian media reports, Rivas still has the option to launch an appeal against the ruling before the full Federal Court, though it remains unclear whether she will be able to meet the legal requirements to proceed with an appeal.

If Rivas does not launch a successful appeal, she will be deported back to Chile to stand trial on charges of aggravated kidnapping. Lawyers representing the families of the seven victims said relatives were overcome with joy by Monday’s ruling. The case comes amid a decades-long global push to hold surviving perpetrators of Pinochet-era human rights abuses accountable. Under Pinochet’s rule, official records confirm more than 40,000 people were subjected to political persecution, and close to 3,000 people were killed or forcibly disappeared.