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Sacred Headwaters Indigenous alliance works to save the Amazon [1]

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Date: 2025-01

YURIMAGUAS, Alto Amazonas, Peru — Our boat sets sail early in the morning. The plan is to travel down the Huallaga River, reach the Marañón, then sail north along the Santiago River towards the border with Ecuador. But after a precarious start in shallow waters, one of the boat’s engines is broken by a powerful blow, possibly by a log or a rock underwater. The rivers in this region of northwestern Peru are running dry as the Amazon Basin experiences its most severe drought in decades.

On board are two Indigenous leaders, Uyunkar Domingo Peas Nampichkai of the Achuar people from Ecuador and Wrays Pérez Ramírez of the Wampís Nation from Peru. They are the current president and vice president of the Sacred Headwaters Alliance, respectively, and are on their way to visit communities of the Kandozi and Kichwa Indigenous peoples after participating in the alliance’s General Assembly in the north Peruvian city of Tarapoto, in the department of San Martin.

The Sacred Headwaters Alliance, a collaboration of Indigenous peoples and civil society organisations from Ecuador and Peru, seeks to permanently protect more than 86.5 million acres across the two countries. It’s an area in the Amazon home to 600,000 people of more than 30 nationalities and Indigenous peoples historically united by the rivers that interconnect their territories and their lives.

“Our concept is Amazonia – a living being, which has a spiritual connection with the Indigenous world,” Nampichkai says. “Either we unite in the face of the climate crisis’ formidable challenge that is ruining our world and the entire planet, or we expire.”

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Both Nampichkai and Pérez Ramírez have lived in the intact forest, inhabiting the same bioregion and sharing the same Jíbaro ethnolinguistic family (that includes the Achuar-Shiwiar, Awajún and Wampís languages). They know they face devastating threats in the vast transboundary territory that defines the Sacred Headwaters’ action area, especially from oil, mining and logging activities, infrastructure megaprojects and drug trafficking causing deforestation.

The Amazon Basin has also been widely affected by record wildfires – more than 55.3 million acres burned between January and September 2024 in Brazil alone – as well as extreme heat and drought, all of which has affected evaporation. This has pushed almost all major rivers in the Amazon, which are vital for Indigenous communities’ livelihoods, to their lowest-ever levels.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/ecuador-peru-indigenous-save-amazon-climate-crisis-sacred-headwaters-drought-wildfires/

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