On a recent afternoon in Bogotá, something remarkable happened: 400 people showed up to spend their day talking about environmental journalism. They were journalists, Indigenous communicators, students, and scientists, and they came because Mongabay Latam asked them to.
Mongabay Latam is a Spanish-language environmental news service that began publishing in 2016. For a decade, it has built something unusual: a newsroom run by editors who live in the region, working with reporters who understand the places they cover. Last month, to mark ten years of that work, the team hosted PUMA FEST — a day of talks, workshops, and conversation organized with Fundación Gabo ahead of the 14th Gabo Festival.
Around 700 people registered to attend. Four hundred came in person, filling every seat. Ten talks and six workshops covered topics from satellite analysis to cross-border collaboration. Outside the meeting rooms, conversations kept going. Participants arrived hungry for deeper reporting methods and new ways of working together across countries.
That enthusiasm did not appear overnight. It grew from years of steady work. Mongabay Latam now has more than 90 media partnerships with national newspapers, regional publications, and independent outlets across Latin America. Stories appear far beyond the organization's own platforms because the team chooses to work with other newsrooms rather than keep distribution to itself.
Among those gathered at PUMA FEST were members of the Puma Network — Journalists United for the Environment — which Mongabay Latam established in 2025 to support reporters collaborating across borders. Also present were 25 Indigenous journalists from Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia who have taken part in a training program led by the team over the past two years. That program teaches skills in investigations, data reporting, multimedia production, and satellite analysis.
The team also put on a show. During the Gabo Festival, they staged Los Vuelos de la Muerte at Bogotá's Gimnasio Moderno theater. The performance grew out of Mongabay Latam's award-winning investigation into clandestine airstrips used by drug traffickers in the Peruvian Amazon. The original reporting used satellite imagery, artificial intelligence, drone footage, official records, and more than 60 interviews. Onstage, it became theater centered on the experiences of Indigenous communities living with the consequences of the drug economy. Bogotá's Canal Capital broadcast it live.
What Mongabay Latam has built over ten years is more than a news service. It is a network of reporters, editors, Indigenous communicators, and partner outlets working together to cover one of the most ecologically important — and most threatened — regions on Earth. And judging by the response at PUMA FEST, that network is only getting stronger.