With as much as 80% of Brazil under a blanket of smoke from historic wild fires, face masks last used during the coronavirus pandemic are coming out again.
South America’s biggest country has for weeks been choking on pollution along with much of the rest of the continent battling extreme drought and record fires.
Millions of hectares of forest and farmland have burnt in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay and Peru.
The Amazon basin, usually one of the wettest places on Earth, is experiencing its worst fires in nearly two decades.
Neighboring Bolivia on Monday declared a national disaster due to forest fires affecting most of its Santa Cruz department, where authorities said 7.2 million hectares have burned since last week.