Indigenous Affairs 3-4/08: Peruvian Amazon Indigenous organizations: Challenges and achievements

Organisation is a sine qua non for the existence of any society and, over the course of history, highly organised movements have emerged in the Peruvian Amazon to face up to invaders. Indigenous peoples’ organisations as we know them today, however, i.e., permanent structures with the overall aim of defending the rights of the people they represent, are a relatively recent phenomenon. In the case of Peru, the oldest references to an organisational structure that could be termed modern, in the sense that it was more or less based on structures that are not typical of indigenous societies, is offered by Casanto, an Ashaninka from Perené who published an article on the subject (Casanto 1986). He notes that in Tsotanni (Perené River), in 1959, around 120 indigenous delegates met to discuss the issue of their lands, then occupied by the Peruvian Corporation (a British company that had received 500,000 hectares from the State at the end of the 19th century) and by Andean settlers, impromptu immigrants that had settled there in large numbers, largely from the start of the 20th century onwards. Thus was born the Asociación de Nativos Campas del Perené, an association that managed to reach an agreement with the settlers’ committee in order to form a strategic alliance in opposition to the greater enemy: the Peruvian Corporation. The outcome of these initiatives is unknown, and there is no information as to how far their aims were achieved. But the seeds had been sown, seeds that were to shoot at the end of the 1970s, as we shall see further on.