Desecrated Forest Part 2: Deforestation, invasions and the aggressive expansion of palm oil affect an indigenous community in Peru

An investigation by Enrique Vera for La Encerrona

Rudith's gaze wanders between two walls of trees that mark a narrow path, and she grows quiet as she points towards the jungle thicket.

 

"Behind that forest, everything is oil palm, you can't see the nature that was there before. We can't go in there anymore," she says, sighing.

 

 

The steep path along which she walks is not the most accessible way to reach that part of her community, Santa Clara de Uchunya, in Ucayali, where the oil palm plantations belonging to Ocho Sur P (one of the companies belonging to the US-financed Ocho Sur business group) begin. For this reason, the 45-year-old farmer suggests not to follow this route, which emerges from the quinilla trunks near her house, and to return. But also because she is afraid: she assures that illegal loggers operate at any time of the day, cutting down pieces of the forest that they will later sell to the company. The way in which the palm company intends to benefit, in the opinion of Rodith and the community members who now accompany her on the floorboards of her home, is through invaders and traffickers who stalk the territory which Santa Clara de Uchunya claim as their ancestral property.

The situation, however, is even more complicated. The Indigenous community Santa Clara de Uchunya has called upon the Regional Directorate of Agriculture of the Regional Government of Ucayali to title them 86,713 hectares, the total area used for hunting, gathering and cultivation since the arrival of the first Indigenous community members of the Shipibo-Konibo ethnic group in this area of the Peruvian Amazon. Of that territory, only 218 hectares were granted with a property title in 1975, and an additional 1,544 hectares in 2019

The rest of the area requested by the Shipibo community currently includes, along with the area covered by Ocho Sur P’s oil palm, part of the permanent production forest of Ucayali, large sectors of at least four forest concessions, and rural properties that were titled despite Santa Clara's current request. Official information from institutions such as OSINFOR, SERFOR and the Ministry of Agriculture confirm this. In addition, there are a series of neighbourhood councils that, as corroborated by La Encerrona in the field, were recognized without further verification by the District Municipality of Nueva Requena and today illegally exercise rights over the territory. In short, territorial overlaps that arose at the same time as the continuous rejection of the Indigenous community's request, and that now make the scenario even more complex in terms of formalising their ancestral lands.

According to a study carried out by the international organisation Forest Peoples Programme (FPP), the total area demanded by the Indigenous community (86,713 hectares) shows confirmed tree cover loss across 20,516 hectares, which occurred between 2001 and 2021. Forest Peoples Programme identified deforestation alerts for over 4,568 hectares of the Indigenous territory in 2022, bringing the total forest loss to 25,084 hectares. The figure includes almost 7,000 hectares of forest cleared for oil palm cultivation managed by Ocho Sur P, in the so-called Tibecocha estate, as well as various pockets of forest destruction that have been opened mainly during the last six years. In other words, the deforestation perpetrated in areas far from the oil palm plantations now exceeds the size of the land that was devastated to start the plantation.

 

"We are fighting for our right, otherwise who is going to do it? That company is advancing every day and is going to leave us with nothing," Rudith alleges.

 

But does she know that the territory they are requesting has been populated? - I ask her.

 

“I know that there are invasions which get what they ask for from the municipality, but not their names or where they are,” she answers with some trace of confusion.

 

Forest of crime

Santa Clara de Uchunya is a two-hour overland trip from the city of Pucallpa, capital of the Ucayali region. Some 380 Shipibo-Konibo people dedicated to fishing for consumption and subsistence agriculture inhabit the community. The Aguaytía River divides the only two areas, 218 and 1,544 hectares respectively, which were titled 44 years apart. The elementary school, the community centre and most of the houses made of leaves and sticks are in the smaller sector, on the left bank of the river. On the other, on the right side of the Aguaytía, the forest extends, which to the north is interrupted by the growing areas of deforestation and the oil palm plantations of Ocho Sur P. The house of the farmer Rudith and those of a few Shipibos are scattered among the trees in this sector, the most convulsed of the community. Also living here are the brothers Ivan and Huber Flores, two former community authorities committed to the defense of Santa Clara, although to reach their farms one must navigate a short stretch of the Aguaytía from the bank where the farmer says goodbye, and then advance on foot along another tangled path into the forest.

The objective is to reach the border where the territory titled in the name of the community ends and where the enormous palm estate controlled by Ocho Sur P begins. A walk that for the Shipibo community members takes no less than two hours. The shadows provided by the shihuahuacos, quinillas and capironas escort Iván Flores through a wet and steep trail. The route crosses streams covered by undergrowth, dense thickets and, at times, areas bare of vegetation where the sun shines brightly and beats down. The largest is a 20-hectare wasteland, where hundreds of felled tree trunks crowd together due to an evident process of depredation.

 

"This was done with heavy machinery," says the leader of Santa Clara de Uchunya, Carlos Hoyos, under a roof of cloth and plastic sheets raised among the mounds of dead earth.

 

He recounts how this piece of ruined rainforest was part of the area corresponding to 17 possession certificates granted by the Regional Directorate of Agriculture of Ucayali, between 2014 and 2015, to land traffickers and people who did not even know the place. One of the documents was even in the name of a minor.

 

"Everything had already been deforested and parceled out. The community was never aware of it, then they managed to annul the documents because of the serious irregularities," the ex-apu of Santa Clara told La Encerrona. "But what we have been left with", he adds, "is this devastated and unproductive land, similar to those left by groups of invaders in order to pass or sell them on".

 

Almost halfway along the route, the foliage and the succession of lupuna trees with leafy crowns seem to have restored the community's forested landscape. However, former community leaders warn that a year ago there were two murders in the area where they are now advancing. And they attribute this directly to conflicts between land traffickers who come in to log.

 

"The company provides them with tools and whatever they need to take the land. And once they have it ready, they transfer it to them," they denounce.

 

Near this point, the former leaders recall, an Indigenous brigade found a group of invaders with several logs of bolaina next to the hut where they were spending the night. It was in August 2020, during an inspection carried out along the limits of Santa Clara de Uchunya. Leader Carlos Hoyos identifies a new deforestation hotspot along the way and explains that, in July 2018, while he was monitoring the damaged land, he was driven away with bullets. A year earlier, in December 2017, something similar happened: three shots deterred a community committee that had taken this route to the company to try to dialogue with its representatives. The current community treasurer, Luisa Mori, was in the delegation and remembers it like this: 

 

"They shot twice in the air and once at our bodies. To Mr. Mahua (Edinson Mahua, communicator of the Federation of Native Communities of Ucayali) the bullet grazed him here (pointing to his waist)," the 58-year-old leader told La Encerrona.

 

The wind carries the roars of the chainsaws from some surrounding area that Carlos Hoyos cannot pinpoint. The scene reminds him that shortly before the attack against the committee, at the end of 2017, he and other former communal authorities seized a chainsaw from two subjects who identified themselves as Ocho Sur personnel. It happened around this same dangerous strip of the Indigenous territory. This chain of events, among other similar cases, leave the Shipibo people in no doubt about the strategy that they claim the company is applying to extend its perimeter.

 

"It is a big lie when (Ocho Sur) says it is not deforesting. They are looking for people to do it, to parcel out the invaded lands, and to then process the titles in order to buy them from them," says the current secretary of Santa Clara de Uchunya, Ricardo Hoyos.

 

The attacks and threats that the leaders and former authorities of the community have linked to the company are recorded in complaints filed with the police and prosecutor's office, which the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) included in a pronouncement. In addition, the Government activated the Protection Mechanism for Human Rights Defenders for some of the community members who filed complaints. The IACHR interceded for the necessary measures to be taken in the face of the alleged aggressions and harassment.

The long road to depredation

Ocho Sur P's nearly 7,000 hectares of oil palm are sectioned into gigantic contiguous rectangles. Each contains hundreds of palms in rows growing up to 40 meters. Ex-apu Hoyos notes that four rows of palms transgress the titled area of the community, but he does not have an exact estimate in metres. Regarding the location of Santa Clara de Uchunya, this is the beginning of the Tibecocha estate, where in addition to the palm plantations, there is also the processing plant of the Ocho Sur group, operated by one of its companies: Servicios Agrarios de Pucallpa. The crude palm oil processing plant is less than two kilometres from Santa Clara; however, there was never a process of prior consultation with the community for its installation, which took place in March 2020. Tanker trucks loaded with crude oil leave the plant for the Lima region, from where the product is exported to various countries around the world (see previous report).

In Santa Clara de Uchunya no one knew of the existence of the so-called Tibecocha estate until 2015, when a corruption scandal involving former employees of the Regional Directorate of Agriculture of Ucayali was made public. According to investigations by the Public Prosecutor's Office, former regional officials formed a criminal organization that granted 222 certificates of possession to farmers from outside of the Indigenous community, within the 86,713 hectares that the community claims as theirs. The farmers, gathered in the Las Palmeras de Tibecocha Producers Association, then registered the plots in the Public Registry and sold them to Plantaciones de Pucallpa, one of the companies that the Czech-American Dennis Melka had founded in Peru to initiate an aggressive expansion of agro-industrial crops. Without prior soil studies or environmental authorisation, between 2010 and 2015, Plantaciones de Pucallpa deforested approximately 7,000 hectares, where it planted oil palm. The community denounced the destruction of the forest and the Ministry of Agriculture ordered Plantaciones de Pucallpa to halt its activities. In 2016, Melka's company went into liquidation and, following a public auction, the Ocho Sur Group, through Ocho Sur P, took over the management of the palm plantations in what was by then known as the Tibecocha estate.

 

"Overnight we found out about that estate. The company had already cut down without mercy or permission what was our source of livelihood, what our parents left us," Efer Silvano, another former leader of the Shipibo people, told La Encerrona.

 

In the public prosecutor's file labelled 'Pucallpa Case', the First Corporate Prosecutor's Office against Organized Crime has included Dennis Melka and 30 other people under investigation, including executives of the bankrupt company set up by the Czech-American and former regional officials, as well as Plantaciones de Pucallpa and Ocho Sur P. A situation that the Ocho Sur group rejects, as it claims that it has nothing to do with the events that occurred before it took control of the plantations.

For the prosecutor, however, it is the same company with a new corporate name. The community has been pushing the process for eight years, but at the beginning of 2022 they suffered perhaps their worst setback: the Constitutional Tribunal, Peru's highest judicial body, rejected an injunction action in which Santa Clara asked for the annulment of the 222 possession certificates emitted over part of their traditional lands. According to the denunciation of community leaders and ex-authorities, the modality applied by Melka is similar to the one that Ocho Sur P promotes in the areas where there is deforestation, at the hands of land traffickers, "to convert them into palm fields". 

 

"And the neighbourhood councils that are in our ancestral territory are offered a support program to plant palm. The intention is that these invaders then sell the palm to the company," adds ex-apu Efer Silvano.

 

Linda Vigo, the human rights lawyer in charge of the defense of Santa Clara de Uchunya, reaffirms that just as the company seeks to expand through invaders in the community's titled forest, it also promotes and supports the formation of neighbourhood councils or housing associations so that they can plant palm. She is the one who has filed most of the complaints against the withdrawal of the Shipibo people.

The Ocho Sur group claims that it has not increased its agricultural frontier since it began managing the crops inherited from Plantaciones de Pucallpa in 2016. Also, it has ruled out any intervention outside the area of its crops. However, the company controls the access to a road that has extensions to the neighborhood councils that are unduly located within the ancestral area that Santa Clara seeks to title and, at the same time, over large sectors of the permanent production forest (BPP) of Ucayali. Leaders of these neighborhood boards told La Encerrona that they were set up as settlements between 2014 and 2016. The analysis prepared by Forest Peoples Programme indicates that from 2016, precisely, there was an exponential increase in deforestation in the claimed space of traditional use of the Shipibo people: it went from 755.1 hectares of indiscriminate logging in that year to 2,753 hectares during 2021, and recorded deforestation alerts over 4,568 hectares in the course of 2022. The international organization concludes that this is the highest period of forest depredation there, with total deforestation currently exceeding 25,000 hectares.

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Settlements within ancestral territory

Some Shipibo community members only know by hearsay about the neighbourhood councils that have been formed within the area that they seek to title in the name of Santa Clara de Uchunya. Others say that they bumped into the nearest one while monitoring their ancestral boundaries, after a four-hour walk from the beginning of the oil palm plantations near the community. But the direct route to these settlements is not that way, but after crossing the main entrance to the Tibecocha estate, which is guarded by Ocho Sur P personnel. That is, several kilometres south of the Indigenous community.

To cross the guard post on the way to the neighbourhood councils, residents and visitors must follow the road where the tanker trucks enter the processing plant to collect the crude oil that will be taken to Lima (see previous report). This issue, however it may seem, is not so simple: the company, in coordination with the residents, establishes an order for access, which may change according to the circumstances. Until the middle of 2022, as La Encerrona verified in the field, access by people from outside the settlements was allowed on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. After that, and so far in 2023, the guards only let in visitors who have been registered by an inhabitant of the neighbourhood councils. For this purpose, there is a register at the checkpoint, according to one of the residents.

 

"The road is private, the company built it. Now, for security reasons, they have made this decision," he adds.

 

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La Encerrona managed to pass the Tibecocha estate guard post and travel for 50 minutes along the winding road that borders the palm plantations of Ocho Sur P. Then, by means of a wide trail, the only transport line that runs along that route arrives at the first settlement: Santa Anita de Bimboya. There are 13 hectares of jungle located at the border between the Ucayali and Loreto regions, which is marked by the Otorongo stream. The leader Bernith Tananta says that four years ago the 29 people who live in Santa Anita de Bimboya were located on the other side of the ravine, in the town of Tiruntán (Loreto). There, as part of the Asociación Civil Agroforestal del Otorongo, the justice of the peace in charge granted them possession certificates. But with the arrival of a palm company of similar proportions to those of Ocho Sur, Tananta explains, they had to cross the Otorongo stream and settle in Ucayali, near the Bimboya stream. Hence the name with which they began to call the place, since 2018. In December 2020, the Municipality of Nueva Requena recognized Santa Anita de Bimboya as a neighbourhood council.

 

"On the other side they knocked down our houses and burned our plots. Scared, we left and formed a small village here," says Bernith, sitting in the bodega that she has begun to set up.

 

The houses in Santa Anita de Bimboya are distant from each other and, for the most part, are separated by fruit trees and patches of forest. William Marín, president of this neighborhood council, maintains that the 29 settlers found out that the territory where they are was claimed by Santa Clara de Uchunya when they had already settled in Ucayali.

 

"But so far no indigenous representative has come, nor have we been denounced," he says.

 

The main problem in Santa Anita is not the overlap with the traditionally used area of the Shipibo community, as they are barely aware of the ongoing efforts to have it titled. What really worries them is the small number of settlers they have to achieve their categorization as a hamlet (the minimum requirement is 100).

Ten kilometres away, on an extension of the road that goes to Santa Anita de Bimboya, always on the boundary between Ucayali and Loreto, is Valle del Bimboya. The president of this settlement, Aroldo Portocarrero, comments to La Encerrona that some 50 families coming from various parts of the Peruvian rainforest live and grow rice and corn among the 5,322 hectares where they are positioned, since 2014. Of the total area, 4,322 hectares are titled in the name of the company Bioamazon, according to public records, and the other 1,000 hectares correspond to an area of the permanent production forest of Ucayali. Portocarrero recounts that Bioamazon acquired the land in 2010 and signed a contract with the Ministry of Agriculture to do a soil feasibility study and work palm plantations.

 

"But they did nothing. Now we are moving forward with the procedures to annul that title," he says.

 

As for the sector of the permanent production forest that they occupy, the settlement leader specifies that they only found deforestation there and that they used these lands to make their farms.

Valle del Bimboya and, consequently, all of the overlaps it contains are over the ancestral territory that Santa Clara de Uchunya is requesting. The issue of the Indigenous land claim does not seem to be a priority in the interests of the residents of Valle del Bimboya. For Aroldo Portocarrero, the Indigenous community will not receive the extension of 86,713 hectares because it would cover almost all of the permanent production forest. The attention of the settlement’s leaders is focused more on the dispute they have with Bioamazon. Despite the tangle of disputes, on 6 February 2020, the District Municipality of Nueva Requena recognised Valle del Bimboya as a neighborhood council, according to the official resolution to which La Encerrona had access. Previously, according to Portocarrero, State agencies even provided the place with a school and solar panels.

About fourteen kilometres separate Valle del Bimboya from Belén de Judá, a neighbourhood council recognised by the District Municipality of Nueva Requena in 2021, and which was established as a settlement over 8,000 hectares. This is how Rosa Ramírez Matencio, former president of the sector, describes it for this report, whose situation is very similar to that of the neighbouring settlements. Ramírez is clear that part of the 8,000 hectares that Belén de Judá covers is within the permanent production forest of Ucayali. In 5,000 hectares of the total area, she says, there are more than 40 farmers dedicated to growing corn, yucca, bananas and cattle. The other 3,000 hectares are on part of the land belonging to Bioamazon and Biopower, companies established to plant and process oil palm, but which are not active in the area. The former leader points out that, although there are residents of Belén de Judá and crops in the 3,000 hectares titled to Bioamazon and Biopower, they have not yet been able to consolidate those areas as their own. And just as in Valle del Bimboya, Belén de Judá and the overlapping areas it contains are also in the ancestral space that Santa Clara de Uchunya seeks to title in its name.

 

The former leader of the Shipibo people, Carlos Hoyos, says that there are nine more neighbourhood councils positioned among the 86,713 hectares: "Unión Ucayali and Nuevo Israel, for example, and also people from the Nuevo Edén hamlet," he mentions.

 

Even though there are large forest concessions in the area required by Santa Clara, the analysis carried out by Forest Peoples Programme shows that deforestation in the areas where the neighbourhood councils have settled is more related to the activities of settlers than to large-scale commercial logging.

Proof of illegality

In order for a neighbourhood or social organisation to be recognised or registered with a local government, in accordance with official regulations, it must present a founding certificate, a list of members, a list of its board of directors and a plan of the area to which it corresponds. The resolution issued by the district municipality, however, does not give the organisation any property rights over the land, but only recognises its existence in the area. In the case of the settlements that have been established within the traditionally used lands claimed by Santa Clara de Uchunya, the inhabitants formed neighbourhood councils even through the Public Registry and went to the District Municipality of Nueva Requena for recognition as this type of neighbourhood organization (“junta vecinal”). The Office of Social Development was the office that received the requests and prepared a technical report for each case. Each document was then passed to the Municipal Management and the Legal Advice Management, which sealed the recognition resolutions together with the former district mayor Gilder Pinedo.

This was corroborated by La Encerrona after reviewing six resolutions to which it had access. None of them contain the coordinates of the places to which the requesting settlements belong. The circuit followed by the approved requests was also described for this report by the administrator Iris Castillo, who was in charge of the Sub-Management of Social Development of the District Municipality of Nueva Requena until the end of December. In this office, a wooden building far from the main headquarters of the municipality, Castillo admits as a mistake that there is no verification of the zones where the neighbourhood councils requesting recognition correspond to.

 

"They simply have to bring their plans, nothing else," he says.

 

In this way, the overlapping of settlements in the permanent production forest of Ucayali and the ancestral territory of Santa Clara de Uchunya began to be endorsed by the Sub-management of Social Development of the municipality of Nueva Requena. And despite the fact that the recognition does not grant them rights over the land, the neighbourhood councils extended houses, crops and received support from that municipality in terms of infrastructure and roads.

 

"The municipality does not recognise the land (of the neighbourhood councils), but only as a legal entity, and does not indicate where they are located. So what legality can they have?" says lawyer Linda Vigo.

 

In addition, Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization, ratified by the Peruvian State in 1993, establishes that ancestral possession of a territory is equivalent to property title. Thus, it protects the cultural and spiritual relationship between the people and their environment. A situation that, in the case of Santa Clara, has not occurred.

Santa Clara de Uchunya is going through a schism these days. Since May 2022, the apu is Wilson Barbarán, whom part of the community and his own board of directors reject for having taken the position after an extraordinary assembly for which an electoral committee was not formed nor was there a call to the population. The fact, which occurred on 17 January 2022, is narrated in a precautionary request filed by the community leadership at that time. Lawyer Vigo argues that with Barbarán, the palm company has had considerable access, through donations, to several families within the community who are not originally from there and that this way it conditions them. On the other side, there are the community members represented by the leaders and former authorities who are leading the defence of Santa Clara. An important step for this front of struggle was a precautionary measure, issued by a court in October, which establishes the continuity in functions of the board of directors led by Hoyos. Nothing has taken effect so far. Barbarán continues as apu, and Ocho Sur has more and more access to the people.

Ongoing processes

The Regional Government of Ucayali, through the Directorate of Land Management of the Regional Environmental Authority, is the entity that can categorise a settlement as a hamlet and, thus, determine the demarcation of the territory that really belongs to it. This is provided that the settlement or its applicant neighbourhood council complies with the requirements contained in the Demarcation and Territorial Organization Law (Law 27795): more than 150 inhabitants, a communal building and a functioning school, not overlapping with private properties, native communities and forest concessions.

The Ucayali Regional Government reported for this investigation that none of the sectors recognised as neighbourhood councils that overlap with Santa Clara de Uchunya's traditional lands have been categorised as hamlets or have applications in process to do so. Consequently, the residents of the settlements whose leaders spoke with La Encerrona do not have possession certificates for the lands they occupy.

The leaders of Santa Anita de Bimboya and Nuevo Eden, for example, indicate that proof of ownership is one of the requirements for accessing Ocho Sur's Strategic Alliance and Production Program (PAPE). On its website, the business group notes that through PAPE it finances small neighbouring farmers to work up to 10 hectares of oil palm on their agricultural land. This is the program to which Efer Silvano, ex-apu of Santa Clara de Uchunya, refers when he comments on one of the company's supposed ways to expand. The fact is that at least in Santa Anita de Bimboya and Nuevo Eden, places where La Encerrona arrived, there were efforts to join the PAPE but, according to their neighbourhood leaders, not having the documents in order for the land they occupy was the main impediment for the inhabitants.

 

"Because we don't have the possession certificate, we can't access State projects either," Jairo Coronel, former secretary of records of Nuevo Eden, a sector whose case shows another complicated scenario for Santa Clara de Uchunya.

 

Jairo Coronel says that in August 1989, the then Provincial Subprefecture of Coronel Portillo recognised Nuevo Eden as a hamlet in an area adjacent to the 86,713 hectares of traditional lands of Santa Clara de Uchunya. It was an area of more than 40,000 hectares inhabited by members of the Israelite Mission of the New Universal Pact, who had obtained a property title for only 3,000 hectares. Some time later, the Israelite congregation abandoned the land, explains Coronel, but more than 500 families from Huánuco, Junín and Amazonas have been populating it. The municipal agent of Nuevo Eden, Ezequiel Alarcón, adds that groups of invaders have also been taking over part of the hamlet and even expanding beyond the boundary markers. For him, that would be the reason why the ex-apu Carlos Hoyos indicates that inhabitants of Nuevo Eden have also positioned themselves in the ancestral territory of Santa Clara, because the hamlet and the community have "an agreement of respect".

The more than 40,000 hectares of Nuevo Eden, including the 3,000 hectares with property titles, are within the 4,089,926 hectares that were established as a permanent production forest area for the Ucayali region in 2002.

 

"That is why the State considers us invaders. They don't want to give us proof of possession because we are within the BPP [permanent production forest]," says Jairo Coronel.

 

Between 2018 and 2019, the Ministry of Agriculture approved guidelines for the resizing of permanent production forests (BPPs). Here it contemplated the exclusion of areas with pre-existing rights to the establishment of BPPs. The National Forestry and Wildlife Service (SERFOR) informed La Encerrona that the exclusion process refers to places where there are no longer forest resources, but rather built houses or what it calls "populated areas". Thus, the delimitation of forest zones and the identification of currently populated areas are part of a work called Forest Zoning, which is developed by the regional governments. The operational coordinator of the Ucayali Regional Government's Forestry Zoning Office, David Moreno, tells this report that his work is focused on determining the forest zones for harvesting, conservation or special treatment. As for populated areas, he explains, his office is only taking into account those that have official documentation, that is, those that have been categorised as hamlets.

Along these lines, Moreno specifies that within the Ucayali region there are 1,193 populated areas officially categorised as hamlets. Of these, he says, more than 60 are located in the permanent production forest. The operational coordinator points out that there are also between 200 and 300 settlements that are totally informal or without any type of categorisation. For this reason, when he searches in the Forest Zoning system for names such as Valle del Bimboya, Nuevo Israel or Belén de Judá, which were only recognised as neighbourhood councils after the establishment of the BPPs, they do not appear.

 

"They do not appear, but they exist. These types of places are evident in the satellite images," says the specialist.

 

The only place superimposed on the permanent production forest and, according to what was analysed for this research, on the ancestral territory of Santa Clara de Uchunya, which appears in the system operated by David Moreno, is Nuevo Eden, because it has an old categorisation as a hamlet.

 

"This one has been accounted for. It is within the BPP, but it will enter the exclusion process", he points out.

 

On the other hand, Werner Angulo, president of the National Convention of Peruvian Agriculture (CONVEAGRO) in Ucayali, a platform that follows the agrarian problems in that region, says that there are also settlements in the permanent production forest that are not categorised as hamlets, but that whose urban areas meet the requirements: a functioning school or health centre, more than 100 inhabitants and basic services. In the case of Nueva Requena, Angulo mentions, among others, Valle del Bimboya, Nuevo Israel and Belén de Judá. The intention, he notes, is that they will also be part of the exclusion process in the resizing of the permanent production forest of Ucayali.

 

"They have already left their files with the Regional Front of Agricultural Producers and Environment of the Ucayali Region (FREPAMARU) to be sent to the technical team in charge of the Forestry Zoning," says the president of CONVEAGRO Ucayali. In fact, one of the complementary provisions on the subject, issued by the Ministry of Agriculture in 2019, points out that in areas without categorisation "the resizing proceeds only once and ex officio."

 

 

"An injustice is committed with many settlements and plot holders who are within the permanent production forests. The State cannot invest there and this has generated a delay in the agrarian sector in Ucayali," added Angulo.

 

Ezequiel Alarcón, municipal agent of Nuevo Edén, maintains, on the other hand, that the neighbourhood councils supported by CONVEAGRO and FREPAMARU formed these organisations to invade and operate in the permanent production forest. One of them, he refers, is Nuevo Israel, a former annex of Nuevo Eden, which was separated by land traffickers and taken eight kilometres into the BPP.

 

"Now they are there with municipal recognition," Alarcón stresses.

 

Nuevo Israel is another of the neighbourhood councils that the community members of Santa Clara de Uchunya claim as invaders of their traditional lands.

La Encerrona asked SERFOR if the populated areas that are excluded from the permanent production forest will thus obtain any legality even though they are not categorized by the Regional Environmental Authority's Land Management Directorate. The State agency responded that, since they are not forest lands, the fate of these areas is outside of its jurisdiction and in the hands of the competent authority. Thus, the settlements or neighbourhood councils settled on the ancestral territory requested by Santa Clara de Uchunya will not acquire immediate formality even if they are excluded from the permanent production forest of Ucayali, where they also overlap. And as for the extension requests that an Indigenous community has, in this case Santa Clara de Uchunya, SERFOR stressed that the procedure is still in charge of the corresponding office (Regional Directorate of Agriculture of Ucayali), since the forest zoning "does not limit or prevent the development of these processes".

At the same time, the Peruvian Congress is debating a bill that modifies the Forestry and Wildlife Law (Law 29763). In one of its complementary provisions, the initiative establishes the suspension of forest zoning as a requirement for the granting of enabling titles (permits for the sustainable use of forest resources) for forests. In another, it proposes that titled lands or lands with proof of possession where agricultural and livestock activities are carried out, and which are located in areas without forest cover, be exempted from the requirement of land classification or change of land use. In other words, the permit issued by the Ministry of Agriculture is required if prior studies have been carried out to determine whether the land is suitable for agriculture.

Authorities and environmental experts have pointed out that the issuance of enabling titles is an open letter for uncontrolled deforestation. And that the exclusion of the change of land use will give legality to companies and landowners that were not authorized to carry out deforestation and start cultivating in the Amazon. César Ipenza, a lawyer specializing in environmental matters, believes that the bill would particularly benefit companies with prosecutor’s investigations underway for having deforested without proper authorization.

 

"Even if this law is repealed, the benefit will be for the companies, and a situation of impunity will remain," the specialist remarks.

 

To date, Ocho Sur P and Ocho Sur U operate without having obtained permission to change land use. The First Corporate Prosecutor's Office against Organised Crime maintains that none of the companies of the Ocho Sur group will be able to obtain the authorisation. The requirement has been pending since the years when Plantaciones de Pucallpa and Plantaciones de Ucayali devastated almost 12,000 hectares of forest in order to expand their oil palm plantations. In other words, there were no studies that concluded that the forested land was suitable for agriculture, and the Ministry of Agriculture did not give environmental authorisation to begin planting. The Ocho Sur group assured last year that it has had its environmental management instruments in process since 2016, but that it had not obtained results. However, a recent report by the Controller General's Office revealed that, in December 2019, the Regional Forestry and Wildlife Authority of Ucayali granted Ocho Sur P and Ocho Sur U permission for the change of land use in the Tibecocha and Zanja Seca estates, despite the fact that on two previous occasions the same office had denied the company's request. The Comptroller's Office emphasises that the authorisation is aggravated by the fact that both estates have forestry aptitude and legal prohibition to change land use for agricultural purposes.

 

"In the past we have had companies that obtained the approval of some instruments. However, when faced with the evidence of corruption and tremendous offences committed by officials, they said that these documents never existed or that they had been falsified. A strategy that shows that everything is perfectly set up", declares lawyer César Ipenza.

 

In the midst of all the tangle of disputes, uncertain processes and aggressive palm expansion, Santa Clara de Uchunya's attempt to title their entire ancestral territory has become a struggle without truce or end.

La Encerrona requested an interview with the Ocho Sur group and sent a questionnaire to the company for its disclaimer, but at the time of publication we had not received a response.