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Read and download original statement in Spanish

This article was first published in Spanish by Servindi.org.

In October 2023, the Corporate Provincial Criminal Prosecutor's Office of Campo Verde issued a formal accusation against the company Ocho Sur P S.A.C. for the commission of the crime of aggravated usurpation to the detriment of the community of Santa Clara de Uchunya, case number 00102-2022-90-2406-JR-PE-01.

At a press conference held by the Indigenous movement of the Shipibo-Konibo people, several testimonies were presented about the struggle of Indigenous communities in Ucayali against the abuses of the company Ocho Sur and its campaign to

Leading Amazonian Indigenous Peoples organisations AIDESEP, ORAU, FECONAU, together with the community of Santa Clara de Uchunya, issued the following open letter in response to public remarks made on social media by the United States of America Ambassador to Peru, Lisa Kenna, following her visit to oil palm plantations operated by the Ocho Sur group on 29 March 2023.

STATEMENT BY THE INDIGENOUS COMMUNITY OF SANTA CLARA DE UCHUNYA Gathered in Yarinacocha, at 16:00 hours, members of the Indigenous community Santa Clara de Uchunya, with the presence of representatives of the Federation of Native Communities of Ucayali (FECONAU), the Regional Or

On 13 December, representatives and community members of the Santa Clara de Uchunya community, accompanied by their representative indigenous organisations, reaffirmed their struggle against the territorial dispossession they have suffered since several years by the company Plantaciones de Pucallpa, whose plantations are now operated by Grupo Ocho Sur.

This week, Peruvian and international organisations filed a complaint before the OECD in the Netherlands, which calls for Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC) to be held accountable for contributing to negative impacts on the environment, human rights and corruption through its sourcing of palm oil from the Ucayali region in the Peruvian Amazon.  

This week more than fifty Indigenous and human rights organisations and dozens of individuals from across Peru and internationally issued a statement condemning attempts by the Peruvian National Police and the Ocho Sur palm oil group to criminalise human rights defender Linda Vigo for her work to defend Indigenous peoples’ rights in the Ucayali region of the Peruvian Amazon.

Between 24 and 25 October 2022, members of the Shipibo-Konibo Indigenous community of Santa Clara de Uchunya met in Yarinacocha to reflect on their efforts past and present to defend their ancestral territory against agribusiness-led land trafficking and deforestation and oil palm expansion in the Ucayali region of the Peruvian Amazon. They issued the following agreement and made additional statements during a press conference with regional media.

On 16 May 2022, 13 Indigenous organisations from across the Peruvian Amazon, including local and regional federations from Ucayali, and national Indigenous Peoples organisation AIDESEP, issued the following statement, in which they declared their ancestral territories in emergency for 120 days in light of increasing pressur

Investigations link palm oil produced on the dispossessed lands of Amazonian community Santa Clara de Uchunya with Dutch agricultural commodity trader Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC).  

The RSPO has upheld that Peruvian palm oil miller OLPESA must not buy or process palm from deforested Indigenous lands, which were converted to a plantation which the RSPO condemned in 2016. However, its decision fails to dispel the spectre of human rights violations and large-scale deforestation from agroindustrial supply chains given the limited scope of the RSPO’s own standards.

The Shipibo community of Santa Clara de Uchunya, at the centre of an international campaign demanding the restitution of their ancestral lands in the Peruvian Amazon, has secured a major victory. Today, Peru’s environmental regulator ordered the palm oil company operating on their lands to halt operations and pay a multi-million dollar fine for environmental damages.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has granted precautionary measures to the indigenous Shipibo-Konibo community Santa Clara de Uchunya and to  the Federation of Native Communities of Ucayali, in the Peruvian Amazon.

In June 2020, a medical team was dispatched to Ocho Sur P’s oil palm plantation in the Peruvian Amazon to test workers for COVID-19. This action followed warnings about poor health and safety practices by this oil palm giant. Of those tested, 90% tested positive, embroiling the company in a series of administrative and criminal proceedings, this time for public health offences and forced labour.

Ocho Sur, a company dedicated to the production of oil palm in the region of Ucayali, has been working during the COVID-19 pandemic exposing the local population to the disease. Indigenous and human rights organisations have formally denounced this actions - just one of the many violations that the company has been systematically committing.

This week, Norges Bank Investment Management, the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, divested all its holdings in Peru’s largest consumer goods company after it was revealed that the company was acquiring palm oil from a plantation linked to serious violations of indigenous peoples land rights and deforestation.

On the 25 September 2019, two leaders of the Shipibo-Konibo indigenous people explained to the magistrates of Peru’s Constitutional Court why the community of Santa Clara de Uchunya were suing the Regional Government of Ucayali and its agricultural agency.

The indigenous community of Santa Clara de Uchunya has called upon major Scandinavian banks to use their influence as shareholders to insist that Alicorp removes Ocho Sur P from its palm oil supply chain.