Resistance and Risk in the Peruvian Amazon

Oil Palm Plantations Threaten Rights and Rainforests

The dusty dirt road to Santa Clara de Uchunya, in the Ucayali region of the Peruvian Amazon, offers a vision of what the world's largest rainforest might become. Mile after mile, you pass cattle pastures and oil palm plantations on what used to be virgin rainforest. Driving in, you are almost run off the road by hulking dump trucks full of clumps of the African oil palm tree, to be processed into palm oil. Approaching the community, you observe vast areas recently bulldozed flat, leaving nothing but dirt with tracks of heavy machinery. From the perspective of the Shipibo indigenous people, native to this region, this portends a dystopian future.

Last October, I made this journey as part of a delegation organized by our friends at Rainforest Foundation US. The visit was facilitated by Shipibo leader Robert Guimaraes, with whom I had worked in years prior when he was the vice-president of AIDESEP, Peru's largest indigenous federation. We spent a day visiting the community to get a firsthand sense of their predicament. Community leaders told us about industrial-scale deforestation of their ancestral rainforests and their David-vs-Goliath fight against international investors over who would have legal control of the land.

Unfortunately, many of those same leaders – Robert included – are facing serious risks for speaking up.