Crossing the Rivers of Resistance

Crossing the Rivers of Resistance is an ongoing project about the uncontacted indigenous peoples of the Peruvian Amazon who resist for their survival in the face of a colonialist political campaign that denies their human rights. The proposed bill threatens to corrupt their natural reserves in favor of extractive companies and endangers their very lives.

Peru has one of the world's largest concentrations of isolated indigenous peoples -also called PIACI- with a population of over 7,000 people. While it was long believed that the surviving Incas established their last refuge in the rainforest, the truth is that the Amazon native population fled from the first colonizers as early as 1535 and later during the rubber boom and slavery in 1879, to take refuge in the depths of the forest and maintain intact their cultural expressions rooted in biodiversity. The forests occupied by these nomads have record-levels of carbon and biodiversity and concentrate headwaters feeding the entire Amazon.

Their struggle to defend their right to life and their right to territory is historic yet fragile. Since 2023, a new bill promoted by extreme right-wing parliamentarians seeks to deny their existence, delegitimize their right to their territory and open their pristine reserves to exploit their resources in favor of gas, oil and timber extraction, which would even give access to unprecedented illegal activities. This discourse comes from a colonialist legacy that continues to gain power in the country.

The FENAMAD (Indigenous Federation protecting the PIACI’s human rights) has registered numerous non-consensual contacts between legal or illegal loggers with isolated populations, most of them resulting in violent confrontations. Most recently, in August 2022, an employee of the logging company Canales Tahuamanu died as a result of arrows shot by the uncontacted people in self defense. In addition, they also have an increasing record of consensual contacts initiated by the PIACI who by crossing the Las Piedras and Tahuamanu rivers, approach the settled communities to ask for food such as cassava and bananas. According to the federation, this could indicate that the invasion of their territories threatens their food sovereignty.

It is essential to raise national and international public awareness of these threats against vulnerable isolated populations, to stop the new bill and to ensure compliance with the legal protections upheld by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that recognizes their human rights and their freedom to remain in isolation. As such, to reinforce the protection of the last nomadic populations resisting neo-colonialism.