The Shipibo Konibo Xetebo people moving towards self-government through consolidation of their Indigenous Guard

The meeting included an exchange of songs and stories anchored in the cosmovision of the Shipibo Konibo Xetebo people, a variety of reflections based on the current legal diagnoses of the communities and the problems they face, the fundamental role of women in the guards, the forms of community self-management to sustain territorial struggles, and a review of how the guards were developed internally, their challenges and strengths, serving as inputs for those communities with recently formed guards.

There was also a space for the presentation of the book "The Amazonian Indigenous Guards. Experiments in self-protection on the road to the autonomy of Indigenous peoples in the Peruvian Amazon", by Jacopo Tosi, associate researcher at IDL, which generated a rich exchange of comments among the attendees.

The guards were also visited by part of the structure of the Amazonian Indigenous movement, such as the Federation of Native Communities of the Ucayali River and Tributaries (FECONAU) and the Regional Organisation AIDESEP Ucayali (ORAU), where they articulated strategies of struggle.

Finally, after a wide-ranging debate, they agreed on the Declaration of Santa Clara de Yarinacocha, expressing the following:

• Renew the commitment to the construction of autonomy and self-determination of the Shipibo Konibo Xetebo people in their 176 communities.
• To ratify the adhesion to the Regional Indigenous Guard Organisation to provide concrete territorial security in the communities in the absence of the presence of the Peruvian State.
• Express solidarity with the struggle of the communities against the exclusionary conservation model in Peru imposed by SERNANP and mechanisms of dispossession such as the Lake Imiría Regional Conservation Area.
• Express solidarity with the emblematic struggles of the Caimito and Paohyan communities, who are fighting the invasion of the Mennonite religious colony with the acquiescence of the regional authorities.
• Demand that the regional agrarian authorities of Loreto and Ucayali stop violating the territorial rights of the communities through the granting of certificates of possession within Indigenous territories, as well as closing the territorial legal tenure gap facing the communities.
• Demand that the National Police and other State authorities and programmes help to stop the expansion of illegal activities affecting the territories of the Shipibo Konibo Xetebo people.
• Demand that the Ministry of the Environment play a more supervisory and punitive role in the face of the boom in projects for the commercialisation of carbon credits from communal forests that are affecting Indigenous rights.
• Demand that the Peruvian State recognise and respect the Regional Indigenous Guard Organisation within the framework of Indigenous autonomy and self-determination.
• Express solidarity with other mechanisms of territorial self-protection that are re-emerging in the Peruvian Amazon, as in the case of the Kakataibo and Asháninka peoples.