After five deforestation alerts buzzed on his mobile phone, Saúl set off on a journey of more than a day, looking to confirm his suspicions.
Saúl, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, belongs to the Indigenous Shipibo people, who have been trained in methods of monitoring the forests near the Sierra del Divisor National Park, a highly biodiverse mountain range on the Peru-Brazil border. On that day, this past August, he left his home to make the trek to the Indigenous Saasa community, located in a patch of forest that few others reach.
Saasa, in the Ucayali department of eastern Peru, is located at the headwaters of the Utuquinía River, a tributary of the larger Ucayali. Inhabited by just 80 people of the Awajún ethnic group, it is the closest Indigenous community to the national park.
Responding to alerts and geo-referenced information obtained through real-time forest monitoring platform Global Forest Watch, Saúl sailed down the Utuquinía River twelve hours from his village and walked through a long stretch of thick forest to reach the area of the alert around Saasa.
“I dodged dangerous terrain until I was in a place where I could launch a drone,” he recalls, noting that the deforestation alert – and coca plantations – were on the border of Saasa and a hamlet named Siete de Julio, as well as in other neighbouring non-Indigenous settlements.
The chief of Saasa, Iván Agkuash, tells Dialogue Earth that coca – the plant whose leaves are used to make cocaine – is being planted in the area. He estimates that more than 10 hectares of primary forest have been razed and replaced by coca fields close to the community’s territory.
“The coca plantations have not yet reached the community, but we are vigilant,” adds Agkuash, who says he is concerned about the vulnerability of the buffer zone for conservation that is demarcated around the Sierra del Divisor park. Saasa has become a transit point for drug trafficking, but the community has so far chosen to avoid confrontation, the Indigenous leader says.
Passage of drugs
As Saúl observed during his visits into this troubled part of the Amazon, the route of the mochileros, or “backpackers” – people who transport drugs for criminal organisations in Brazil – begins in various Brazilian border towns and continues on to the headwaters of the Abujao River in Ucayali. It then traverses the villages of Aguas Negras and Mazaray, in the Abujao River basin, before crossing part of the Sierra del Divisor National Park and exiting at the Utuquinía River.
“They pass Saasa through the Utuquinía River, even shooting into the air [to intimidate residents], and in this way they reach Siete de Julio and the other neighbouring non-Indigenous hamlets,” Saúl explains. They follow the same route back to Brazil after collecting drug packages, he adds.
A similar situation has been observed in the Indigenous community of San Mateo, also in the buffer zone of Sierra del Divisor. According to forest monitors from the international NGO Global Conservation, which works to protect endangered wilderness areas like the national park, much of the depredation and coca cultivation in San Mateo extends along the banks of the Abujao River. Because of the risk, the monitors, who have asked to remain anonymous for their safety, tell Dialogue Earth that they have not been able to establish how much deforestation there has been in the area, but estimate it is no less than 50 hectares.
Another point of attention is in the Guapries Peasant Community, which is made up of three hamlets. In the last patrol that the community’s leader, Laiver Vásquez, carried out with forest guards, he says that he detected at least 15 hectares of coca plantations in an area located just 500 metres from the national park. Since August, the community has logged 14 deforestation alerts. Saúl says members of the Guapries and Saasa communities will be trained by Global Conservation in the use of technologies to conserve their forests.
Few solutions
The latest report published in June by Peru’s National Commission for Development and Life without Drugs (Devida), the agency that leads the fight against drugs, states that of the 92,784 hectares of coca that were detected in the country in 2023, 351 hectares are in the park’s buffer zone. While the report indicates that no coca cultivation has been recorded within the protected area, there is pressure in the adjacent areas of the buffer zone.
In 2023, Ucayali saw 27,340 hectares of deforestation, and in the first two months of 2024, forest loss in the department reached 673 hectares, according to the most recent analysis by the Regional Forestry and Wildlife Management Unit of Ucayali. Of that, 203 hectares, or just under a third, are within Indigenous communities. This marks a nearly 800% increase compared to the same period in 2023, where only 23 hectares of deforestation was recorded in Ucayali’s Indigenous communities.
The manager of the regional office, Franz Tang, declared during the presentation of the report that one of the causes for the levels of deforestation reported in the department is illicit crops, and that the problem demands an urgent multi-sectoral intervention by the state.
Forest monitors from Global Conservation say that the NGO seeks to create a protection belt for the natural area through forest control and surveillance. To do this, they are trying to consolidate and coordinate work with all the surrounding communities.
The Indigenous communities of Nuevo Saposoa and Patria Nueva were part of a pilot forest monitoring project run by the NGO, in which groups of community members serving as eco-guards received training in the use of drones, GPS and analysis of satellite images. The training enabled them to collect statistics to produce reports about the state of their forests and, thus, for their situation to be considered by the authorities. The monitors report that Nuevo Saposoa, for example, reduced deforestation to zero in 2022, after reaching a peak of more than 15,000 hectares of deforestation in 2016.
“In the last three years, we have not had any deforestation alerts [in Nuevo Saposoa] nor in Patria Nueva due to forest monitoring, surveillance by the Indigenous guards and patrolling by the authorities,” says a community eco-guard, who requested anonymity.
No laws, no protection
Despite the inroads made on decreasing deforestation in Ucayali’s villages, in Peru, the care of forests and Indigenous territories remains a dangerous task for which there is no guaranteed protection.
In October 2020, the Peruvian Congress rejected the ratification of the Escazú Agreement, an international treaty that promotes the right to environmental information, justice and decision-making in Latin American and Caribbean countries.
The agreement also provides for the protection of human rights defenders in environmental matters. This is especially pertinent in Peru, where over 35 Indigenous defenders have been murdered for protecting their territories in the last decade, according to the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Jungle (Aidesep). The updated Aidesep database, seen by Dialogue Earth, shows that nearly a third of the crimes (10) took place in Ucayali.
Miguel Guimaraes, vice-president of Aidesep, says that without the ratified agreement, the voices and proposals of Peruvian Indigenous peoples will always be left in a vacuum in regional environmental forums.
“When we arrive at decision-making bodies, we are not even considered, and everything goes to the archive,” he tells Dialogue Earth. This was the case at the third Conference of the Parties to the Escazú Agreement (COP3), held in Chile in April, where, Guimaraes says, he felt that suggestions to make visible the need for protection of Indigenous defenders were not taken on board. “Peru has not ratified the Escazú agreement. This is the reason why we do not have a voice that can carry our demands,” he adds.
At the end of COP3, Guimaraes was informed of an attack on his home. His belongings were looted, and the words “He will not live” were spray-painted on the surrounding fence.
Guimares, an Indigenous leader, says the prosecutor’s investigations into the threat have not progressed. He says he has made long journeys to give his statement to the prosecutor, but that he has yet to receive answers about who was responsible for the attack.
When we arrive at decision-making bodies, Indigenous peoples are not even considered, and everything goes to the archiveMiguel Guimaraes, vice-president of Aidesep
Despite the setbacks that the non-ratification of Escazú is said to have brought for Peru’s Indigenous communities, there may still be opportunities for legislative change. Katherine Sánchez, coordinator of the Biodiversity and Indigenous Peoples Programme of the Peruvian Society of Environmental Law (SPDA), identified the Action Plan on Environmental Defenders – part of article nine of the Escazú Agreement that was approved at COP3 – as a tool to understand how risk prevention and protection measures are progressing in other countries.
The plan provides for an exchange of information and outlines how the ratifying countries have dealt with experiences of risky situations affecting defenders, enabling the identification of common standards and generation of an international protection strategy for discussion in future meetings. Sánchez notes that this will make it possible to attack the structural or root causes of the dangers faced by defenders.
“Non-ratifying countries, such as Peru, are invited to learn what those countries that continue with Escazú are doing, learn from the processes and participate in the strategy. Afterwards, [all countries] will decide whether to improve its regulations or apply different mechanisms,” she explains.
By December 2023, three legislative proposals had been presented in congress, aiming to bring about the first law protecting human rights defenders in Peru. The result was the issuing of three different opinions on the proposals, which were considered during the evaluation of the bills, a stage before they are taken on for debate in the plenary of congress. Two proposals are intended to protect only people who protect environmental rights, while the other targets human rights defenders and promotes their protection and access to justice, required due to their activities in risky situations. “The congress asked that there be an agreement and that only one opinion be issued,” Sánchez notes. “For strictly procedural reasons, we cannot move forward.”
For now, the only tool available to Peru’s Indigenous leaders is the Protection Mechanism for Human Rights Defenders. Sánchez notes that this instrument is only designed to deal with emergencies, and does not resolve fundamental problems or include obligations for the state as a whole: “It only binds the eight ministries that have signed the document,” she says. The ratification of Escazú would mean the mechanism has a constitutional norm, or binding principle, which would entail obligations for the state to legally comply with the protection of the environment and its defenders. But in Peru, for now, this remains out of reach.
