Latin American indigenous leaders and organisations urge President Maduro’s intervention to end the repression of the Yukpa and recognise their traditional lands

Over 70 activists and leaders of Latin America’s indigenous peoples movement have written to President Maduro of Venezuela urging his intervention to end the repression of the Yukpa people in the Sierra de Perija region. This began with the Yukpa’s violent eviction from their lands in the 1920s and has continued to this day in the form of repeated imprisonment and oppression of their leaders and even their assassination including that of Sabino Romero in March 2013. The organisations urge President Maduro’s intervention to end the militarisation of the area, initiate processes of peaceful dialogue and fully implement Venezuela’s constitutional commitment to recognise indigenous peoples’ ‘original rights over the lands they have traditionally and ancestrally used and occupied’.