On June 24, 2023, following enormous outcry from Peruvian civil society and international human rights groups, Peru’s Congress voted against a law that sought to eliminate the reserves for Indigenous People in Isolation and Initial Contact (PIACI) in a formidable demonstration of strength on the part of the Peruvian Indigenous movement.
Together, we launched a direct engagement campaign targeting the Governors’ Climate and Forests Task Force to demand that any members of its network stop receiving climate funding, since some members, like those in Peru, continue to actively promote initiatives that affect human and territorial rights, leading to increasing deforestation threats and going against the mission of the Task Force. The Task Force responded, but the threat remains, and we will be engaging further with its leadership.
Extractive actors are still pushing a package of virulently anti-environmental legislation through Peru’s Congress, which could put the Amazon at greater risk.
Right now, the Peruvian Congress is considering three bills that propose to modify the Forestry and Wildlife Law, and which according to experts would facilitate land trafficking by allowing the destruction of the forest for “agricultural purposes,” thus legalizing the main driver of deforestation in Peru.
Another legislative project, designed by the state-owned company PeruPetro, seeks to modify the Law of Natural Protected Areas to allow oil activity within these areas and specifically affecting 36 locations where there are currently legal barriers to drilling.
And of course, illegal mining is also playing its cards in Congress. In Peru, the industry wants to pass a “Small Scale Mining Law,” whose text eliminates incentives for illegal miners to formally register their mining activities. This law would halt progress in the industry, leaving improving mining practices up to the willingness of illegal miners, since the government would lose the necessary regulatory capacity to force them to comply with formal procedures.
Finally, in April of this year, legislators proposed a law creating a “National Infrastructure Authority.” The bill would empower the new “National Infrastructure Authority” to approve small road projects (the most common in the country) without environmental impact evaluations, which fails to consider that the construction of roads in the Amazon has been identified as a major cause of deforestation.
These worrisome legislative proposals are not mere coincidences in the current Peruvian political landscape. They are the result of a context in which corporate and illegal extractivism have found a unique opportunity to achieve their objectives. Taking advantage of a scenario in which more and more power is concentrated in Peru’s Congress, the lobbying arms of the oil industry and illegal economies are strategically attacking human and land rights.
It is essential that we recognize this pattern and be ready to mobilize in solidarity with the Peruvian Indigenous movement in the struggles to come over the next few months, including by preventing special interests in Congress from dismantling rights and by mobilizing resources into the hands of Indigenous people to resist within their territories.
