As part of the continental reflection on “the new faces of poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean”, CLAR Magazine (No. 1, 2026) publishes an in-depth article by the Indigenous religious sister Elis Ribeiro dos Santos, which focuses on an urgent reality: the simultaneous cry of the Earth and the Amazonian peoples.
Drawing on her experience as an indigenous woman of the Mura people and a religious sister living in the urban Amazon, the author offers an embodied perspective on the socio-environmental crisis facing the region. Her reflection reveals how poverty in the Amazon can no longer be understood solely in material terms, but rather as a comprehensive rupture affecting territories, cultures, spiritualities, and ways of life.
The Amazon thus appears as a territory of profound contradictions: a source of biodiversity unique on the planet, but also a scene of exploitation, forced displacement, and structural inequalities. In urban peripheries—such as Manaus—uprooted Indigenous peoples, migrant communities, and vulnerable families converge, shaping new faces of exclusion and resistance.
In this context, the author emphasizes that “when the Earth is wounded, so are the peoples”, drawing on the perspective of integral ecology proposed by Pope Francis in Laudato Si’. The environmental crisis and the social crisis, far from being separate, constitute a single, complex socio-environmental crisis.
In the face of this reality, the presence of women in consecrated religious life emerges powerfully as a sign of closeness, resistance, and hope. In indigenous communities, riverbanks, and urban peripheries, many religious women continue to walk alongside the people, sharing their struggles and accompanying processes of community organization, defense of the territory, and care for our Common Home.
Experiences such as the Casa Amazónica de Francisco y Clara in Manaus show that the peripheries are also spaces of creativity, spirituality, and the rebuilding of the social fabric. There, women and young people strengthen community processes inspired by integral ecology and new forms of solidarity-based economy.
The article also resonates with the insights of the Synod for the Amazon and the apostolic exhortation *Querida Amazonía*, which call on the Church to listen deeply to the cries of the Amazonian peoples and to exercise its prophetic role in defense of life.
Amid socio-environmental conflicts—marked by the advance of extractivism, mining, and deforestation—indigenous peoples continue to be protagonists in the defense of their territories. Their resistance, rooted in a worldview of interdependence between humanity and nature, offers fundamental keys to rethinking the future of the planet.
In light of this reality, consecrated religious life is called to renew its commitment: to stand alongside the peoples, to denounce the structures that generate death, and to proclaim, through concrete actions, that another way of inhabiting the world is possible.
The Amazon, as the Latin American ecclesial horizon reminds us, is not merely a geographical territory, but a true theological space where God continues to speak through the life, resistance, and hope of its peoples.