Amazon Watch

Amazon Watch is a nonprofit organization founded in 1996 to protect the rainforest and advance the rights of Indigenous peoples in the Amazon Basin. They partner with Indigenous and environmental organizations in campaigns for human rights, corporate accountability and the preservation of the Amazon’s ecological systems.

Their work is focused on three main priorities: resisting the destruction of the Amazon by challenging disastrous development projects that threaten Indigenous peoples and their ancestral territories; supporting and promoting Indigenous-led alternative solutions to climate change, natural resource extraction, and industrial development; joining with the climate justice movement to address the fact that the most vulnerable – especially Indigenous people and people of color – bear the brunt of environmental destruction, corporate greed, and climate change and are often excluded from top-down solutions.

Leila Salazar-López, Executive Director

Leila (she/ella/ela) is a mother; proud Chicana-Latina woman; and passionate defender of Mother Earth, the Amazon, Indigenous rights and climate justice. Since 2015 she has served as the Executive Director of Amazon Watch, leading the organization in its work to protect and defend the bio-cultural and climate integrity of the Amazon rainforest by advancing Indigenous peoples’ rights, territories, and solutions.

For 20+ years Leila has worked to defend the world’s rainforests, human rights, and climate through grassroots organizing and international advocacy campaigns at Amazon Watch, Rainforest Action Network and Global Exchange.

She serves on the Governing Council of the Amazon Emergency Fund, is a Greenpeace Voting Member and a Global Fund for Women Advisor for Latin America. In April 2019, she was acknowledged in Make it Better Media’s “17 Bay Area Environmentalists Making a Difference.” She is a 1998 graduate of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Leila lives in San Francisco, CA with her husband and two young daughters.