Actor and environmental activist Leonardo DiCaprio has come out in defense of the Pehuenche frog (Alsodes pehuenche), an amphibian listed as critically endangered, amid concerns that the Los Cóndores-Río Diamante power transmission project in Chile’s Maule region could threaten the species’ survival.

In an Instagram post on Sunday, in which he tagged the Chilean Herpetological Network and shared photographs of the frog and its habitat, the Titanic star warned that fewer than 1,000 individuals remain. He said Chile could approve “ a catastrophic plan to destroy the heart of their only known habitat.”

DiCaprio stressed, however, that his appeal is not aimed at halting the project altogether. “Conservationists are not asking for the transmission project to be stopped,” he wrote, but rather for it to be built in a location that would not expose the species to greater risk.

The project referenced by DiCaprio, developed by Enel Generación Chile, involves the construction of a 500-kilovolt power transmission line designed to interconnect the energy grids of Chile and Argentina. On the Chilean side alone, the plan calls for a 26.6-kilometer overhead transmission line and 72 high-voltage towers, infrastructure that would cut directly through the habitat of the Pehuenche frog.

A key milestone for the project had been scheduled for Monday, when the Environmental Assessment Commission (COEVA) was due to rule on a report by the Environmental Assessment Service (SEA) recommending its approval. However, following DiCaprio’s message, the session was suspended. No public explanation has been given for the postponement, nor has a new date been announced, Claudio Azat, director of the One Health Institute and co-chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) amphibian specialist group, told EL PAÍS.

The Chilean government of José Antonio Kast responded to the actor’s comments. Environment Minister Francisca Toledo told Radio ADN that DiCaprio’s message referred to a project that remains under environmental review and therefore declined to comment on its merits while the process is ongoing. Instead, she defended Chile’s environmental institutions, saying: “Chile has a robust environmental framework in which all the evidence is examined and weighed as part of environmental assessments.”

The Pehuenche frog exists nowhere else in the world except the high Andes of Chile and Argentina. The person who helped bring the species’ plight to the attention of Re:wild, the conservation organization co-founded by DiCaprio, was Chilean biologist Claudio Azat.

“It is a little-known species. It was described by science about three or four decades ago,” Azat explained. “We know it has a very restricted distribution and that its main threat is the international highway that connects the Chilean city of Talca with Malargüe in Argentina.”

This amphibian is distinguished by the fact that, during the breeding season, males develop patches of gelatinous spines on their chests and fingers. They are also known as “Popeye frogs” after the famous cartoon character because their forearms become enlarged, allowing them to hold onto females during mating.

The species was classified as critically endangered in 2018 and has yet to recover from that status. “It is a species found only in the Alto Maule region, in the Pehuenche Valley, inhabiting small streams and wetlands fed by snowmelt and glaciers high in the central Andes, at elevations above 2,000 meters [6,500 feet],” Azat explained. “Its population numbers around 1,000 individuals.”

The conservationist acknowledges that, although campaigners had been raising concerns about the frog’s plight for years, the visibility generated by DiCaprio’s message has provided a decisive boost. “This is the second time he has supported a species in Chile. In 2019, he posted about the campaign to save the Loa frog, which was very positive because it changed the situation for that species,” Azat concluded.

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Two injections a year. That’s all it takes to protect against HIV with lenacapavir, a revolutionary drug hailed as potentially the beginning of the end of the epidemic, but its rollout has been slow. It has efficacy close to 100% and is already being distributed in small quantities in nine priority African countries. In middle-income countries such as those in Latin America it has not yet arrived, despite the fact that their residents took part in the clinical trials. The international HIV/AIDS conference held in Rio de Janeiro a few days ago was marked by protests against the pharmaceutical company that developed the drug and which, for now, holds the global monopoly: the U.S. firm Gilead Sciences.

“Tested in Brazil, denied to Brazilians,” “They use our bodies and then deny us access,” read some of the protesters’ signs on the opening day of the event. Countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and Peru have been left out of access to the generic version of the drug, even though experts and organizations such as Doctors Without Borders (MSF) say lenacapavir could be produced for as little as $40 a year worldwide. In the United States, Gilead Sciences sells it for $28,000 per patient, including the two annual doses.

A year ago, the Global Fund and The United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) reached an agreement with Gilead to supply this pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to two million people in low- and middle-income countries through 2028. Jared Baeten, the company’s vice president, said at a press conference at the Rio event that agreements have been signed with six generic drug manufacturers to supply 120 countries, and that 600,000 people are expected to be on treatment before the end of the year.

In April, the Global Fund announced it would expand its agreement to benefit three million people. That would allow lenacapavir introduction to be extended to 12 additional countries, including the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Honduras. Although deployment has not yet begun, the Global Fund expects these three Latin American and Caribbean countries to receive initial batches before the end of the year and to begin distribution soon after. “We have been encouraging all countries that will receive lenacapavir to introduce it through a phased, operationally realistic approach, aligned with each country’s level of readiness, service delivery capacity, and available financing,” the organization told this newspaper by email.

However, activists and the UN say access to lenacapavir remains insufficient. “How can Latin America continue to be excluded from licenses for life-saving medicines?” Winnie Byanyima, executive director of the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, denounced at the conference. In her view, it is entirely feasible to eliminate HIV as a global public health threat before 2030, but it all depends “on political choices.”

How can Latin America continue to be excluded from licenses for life-saving medicines?

Winnie Byanyima, executive director of the Joint UN Program on HIV/AIDS

Pressure for lenacapavir to reach all of Latin America is not only an ethical issue — a moral obligation to compensate those who lent their bodies to science — but also a practical one. In Latin America, 2.6 million people live with HIV and, in 2025, there were 28,000 deaths related to the disease. While the global trend has been a decline in cases, the opposite has happened in Latin America: between 2010 and 2024 cases increased by 13%. In Brazil, the region’s most populous country, they rose by 25%, according to the Ministry of Health.

A quarter of new HIV infections occur in the countries excluded from current agreements to produce generics.

That is why, during the conference, activists stepped up pressure for Brazil to take the lead. “Gilead came here empty-handed, with empty words […] we want Brazil to lead and to be an example for everyone, to break the monopoly,” said Asia Russell, director of the organization Health GAP.

Brazil’s role right now could be pivotal, both because of its geopolitical weight and its size (more than 210 million inhabitants), and because it prides itself on having a universal public health system that, despite its shortcomings, is the largest in the world and excludes no Brazilian — nor foreigners. Brazil has a long record of success against the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In December last year, the World Health Organization certified the country for eliminating vertical transmission of HIV, from mother to child.

Health Minister Alexandre Padilha said this week that Brazil was willing to pay up to 19 times more for lenacapavir than the price offered to economically similar countries such as Indonesia or Thailand, but the company did not accept the proposal.

“Innovation without access is injustice. We look to these new injectable drug technologies with great hope […] but we demand that they be available, especially to national health systems, at reasonable, not astronomical, prices. We will not drain resources funded by taxpayers to benefit a single company,” the minister said at the start of the conference.

Innovation without access is injustice. We look to these new injectable drug technologies with great hope […] but we demand that they be available, especially to national health systems, at reasonable, not astronomical, prices

Alexandre Padilha, Brazilian Health Minister

In that context, calls are growing for Brazil to take decisive action and break the patent. Legally, the country could resort to compulsory licensing in situations deemed to be of public interest, as it did in 2007 with the antiretroviral efavirenz from the U.S. laboratory Merck. The price fell by 70%.

That option does not seem to be on the table, especially with Brazil in a more strained relationship than ever with the United States, cornered by tariffs and sanctions that last year affected the health minister himself. During the conference, the minister preferred not to speak about that more radical possibility and implied he still trusts in negotiations with Gilead. Pending arrival of the revolutionary lenacapavir, Brazil announced it will, for now, incorporate cabotegravir into public health care; it is also injectable but requires one injection every two months.

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