Atossa Soltani

Columnist

Founder and former Executive Director of Amazon Watch, Atossa is the Hillary Institute of International Leadership’s 2013 Hillary Laureate and serves as the chair of the board of trustees of The Christensen Fund, board member of Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs, advisor to the Peruvian organisation, The Arkana Alliance, and advisor to the InterAmerican Clean Energy Institute. Before founding Amazon Watch in 1996, Atossa directed campaigns at the Rainforest Action Network to end logging in endangered ecosystems.

She is currently President of the Board of Directors for Amazon Watch and has been a member since 1997. Amazon Watch is a nonprofit organisation founded in 1996 to protect the rainforest and advance the rights of indigenous peoples in the Amazon Basin. It partners with indigenous and environmental organisations in campaigns for human rights, corporate accountability and the preservation of the Amazon’s ecological systems.

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Colombia’s U’wa tribe, two decades of resistance to oil exploitation in the Amazon

In late November of 2016, on the eve of the signing of the peace agreement in Colombia aimed at ending the five-decade civil war, I had the honour of visiting the U’wa people, a deeply spiritual indigenous nation in northeastern Colombia near the border with Venezuela. It was the first time in the nearly twenty