Asunción, June 26 (teleSUR-RHC)-- The cattle company Itapoti is invading ancestral lands of indigenous peoples and seriously threatening their survival, denounced an environmental organization on Thursday.
 

“It has become urgent to implement effective measures that would totally and immediately paralyze the building of fences inside the Indigenous estate,” said the organization Gente, Ambiente y Territorio (GAT – People, Environment and Territory) in a statement, blaming the inaction of the country's justice.

In 1997, the statement reads, the invaded lands were property of the Ayoreo-Totobiegosode, an Indigenous community living in the Chaco, a vast expanse of dense, scrubby forest located on four different countries, while another part was property of the current government of Horacio Cartes in December 2014.

The Ayoreo territory is part of the very last virgin wood forest remaining in the Paraguayan side of the Chaco, representing a unique ecosystem in America, but deforestation is reaching dramatic levels in this region, near to the Brazilian border.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who will be visiting Washington next week, is expected to release a joint statement with U.S. President Barack Obama expressing both countries' commitment to the success of the United Nations Climate Change Conference to be held in Paris later this year. Brazil has managed to reduce deforestation sharply in the past 10 years; nevertheless almost 3,100 square miles of forests are still lost every year.