"People used to live there," said Joana Gomes da Silva, pointing to the cluster of skeletal trunks and branches. "It was a very pretty house. It's underwater now."

Although slavery as an institution no longer exists, forms of forced labor persist in the country.

With the miners came violence and diseases like malaria, to which the relatively isolated Indians had no resistance. In one village, no one survived. In others, as many as one-third of the villagers succumbed, some to disease and others to malnutrition.

According to Catholic relief agencies, indigenous families, such as the Warao, have been forced to flee to Venezuala from Brazil, because of environmental and economic hardships.

A year after Pope Francis urged Colombians to build unity and a nation for all after more than half a century of conflict, the country's Catholic Church continues to play a key role in the quest for reconciliation.

On a Sunday night in early July, four men -- two of them indigenous -- were brutally murdered in Assis, a tiny Brazilian town on the border with Peru.

Peruvian president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski resigned amid accusations of corruption.

Spiraling inflation, a shortage of necessities such as food and medicine, and high crime rates have driven hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans to seek better opportunities in other countries. 

Catholic leaders respond forcefully to reports that an indigenous group was massacred to make way for illegal gold mining in the Amazon, casting blame on the Brazilian government.

Allegations of abuse were described in a new book, "Mitad Monjes, Mitad Soldados" ("Half Monks, Half Priests"), by Pedro Salinas, a former member of Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, who interviewed about 30 other former members.