This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center Rainforest Reporting Grant.

YURIMAGUAS, Alto Amazonas, Peru — The boat sets sail early in the morning. The plan is to travel down the Huallaga River, reach the Marañón, then head north and sail up the Santiago River toward the border with Ecuador. But after a precarious start in shallow waters, a powerful blow, possibly by a log or a rock underwater, breaks one of the boats’ engines. In this region of northwestern Peru, the river is running dry; but so are many of the waters across the Amazon Basin, which is experiencing its most severe drought in decades.

On board are two Indigenous leaders, Uyunkar Domingo Peas Nampichkai of the Achuar people from Ecuador and Wrays Pérez Ramírez of the Wampís Nation from Peru. They are on their way to visit communities of the Kandozi and Kichwa Indigenous peoples, after participating in the General Assembly of Members of the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Alliance in Tarapoto, in the department of San Martin. The collaboration of Indigenous peoples and civil society organisations from the two countries seeks to permanently protect more than 35 million hectares (86.5 million acres) across the two countries, an area in the Amazon home to 600,000 people of more than 30 nationalities and Indigenous peoples historically united by the rivers that interconnect their territories and their lives.

“Our concept is: Amazonia — a living being, which has a spiritual connection with the Indigenous world,” Nampichkai says. “Either we unite in the face of the climate crisis’ formidable challenge that is ruining our world and the entire planet, or we expire.”

Both Nampichkai and Pérez Ramírez have lived in the intact forest, inhabiting the same bioregion and sharing the same Jíbaro ethnolinguistic family (that includes the Achuar-Shiwiar, Awajún and Wampís languages). They know that they face devastating threats in the vast transboundary territory that defines the Sacred Headwaters’ action area, especially from oil, mining and logging activities, infrastructure megaprojects and drug trafficking causing deforestation.

The Amazon Basin has also been widely affected by record wildfires (with more than 22.4 million hectares (55.3 million acres) scorched between January and September 2024 in Brazil alone), extreme heat and drought, which have affected evaporation. This has pushed almost all major rivers in the Amazon, vital for Indigenous communities’ livelihoods, to their lowest-ever levels.

The two leaders, currently president and vice president of the Sacred Headwaters Alliance, respectively, came together a few years ago and formed a deep brotherhood. “The connection was magical,” Nampichkai says. ” With Wrays, we bonded immediately, since for us the forest is a green sheet, a science laboratory of our ancestors. And that concept aligns us, gives us the energy to fight together.”  Pérez Ramírez adds, “Domingo is supportive. He learned a lot from his grandparents, and he talks about looking to the past to build the future. He is a dreamer who believes that we have to recover our Amazon through a great alliance before it degrades for good.”

In the Wampís-Awajún culture, the election of leaders, traditionally only necessary in case of conflict, is done in recognition that, through the ritual use of sacred plants, the leader has received a vision. Experiencing that vision provides authority to assume a spiritual and political mandate amid the community, a role called Pamuk by the Wampís.

In the Achuar culture, the process of acquiring leadership is similar. Nampichkai recounts his own visionary experience: “When I took these sacred plants, a very big light came from the sky and passed through the center of my body, and it showed me a huge tree and said to me, ‘Look at this tree, how hurt it is! It has spots, hollows. If you want to stop this, you have to create consciousness. You have to start now!’ I am fulfilling my mission”, Nampichkai says.

The Kandozi community is running out of water

With the engine damaged, the expedition barely makes it to Lagunas, in the department of Loreto.  The next day, they rent a new barge and make the arduous journey up the river to reach San Lorenzo, continuing on the Pastaza River and arriving at Lake Rimachi, one of the largest lakes in the Amazon, where the Kandozi Indigenous people live.

The lake, which has an area of about 300 hectares (740 acres), is drying up. A huge sediment bank, a result of recurrent droughts since 2015, is blocking the head of the lake, threatening fish supplies and a biodiversity-rich ecosystem.

After talking to the community about the local environmental crisis, Nampikchai and Pérez Ramírez go on the lake. They know this ecosystem is vital not only to the Kandozi, but to the entire Amazon Basin as a whole.  In addition to harboring great biodiversity, these wetlands are essential for flood control, groundwater recharge and, as they are large CO2 sinks, for climate change mitigation. “This lake is like a womb of the Pachamama,” Pérez Ramírez says.

On their way back, Nampikchai and Pérez Ramírez decide to take a break and take a dip in a backwater of the lower Pastaza. This is the same river on which the community of Sharamentsa sits many kilometers farther north, in Ecuador, where Nampikchai is from. “The river gives you wisdom, it has its spirit. It is a connection. In this hour, it makes me connect upstream, with my grandchildren,” Nampikchai says.

“It’s important to keep going until there are young people who can take over. We must train them, bring them into the fight,” Pérez Ramírez says. “All our work is focused on the next generation,” Nampikchai adds.

Toward the Santiago River

As soon as Nampikchai sets off back to Ecuador, Pérez Ramírez embarks in his canoe for another long journey up the Marañón River that will take him to his Wampís territory via the Pongo de Manseriche, a tough-to-navigate river canyon that forms a natural barrier and has historically protected this rainforest from colonizers and Jesuit missionaries.

Past the Pongo, large pyramids of boulders on the Marañón riverbanks indicate the presence of semi-artisanal alluvial gold mining. For many kilometers, dredges emerge here and there, working and churning the river bottom in search of gold, whose price has reached all-time highs this year. According to Peru’s Mining Cadastre, this stretch of the Marañón River is plagued by mining concessions competing with a swarm of illegal dredgers working with apparent impunity.

As the boat makes its way up the Santiago River, entering the Amazonas department, Pérez Ramírez, who was Pamuk (president) of the Autonomous Territorial Government of the Wampís Nation  between 2015 and 2021, warns: “This is an area abandoned by the state. We have barely five soldiers on the border, who don’t even have a canoe for patrolling. This makes it a no man’s land.”

He is concerned about the proliferation of mining activity that clears forests and contaminates the river with mercury and other chemicals — this also reaches the fish, a basic source of protein for the Wampís, who in February 2023 denounced the presence of more than 30 gold dredgers to authorities in Lima. In late April 2024, the Wampís government signed an agreement with the Peruvian state to curb illegal mining, but they remain highly vulnerable against criminal structures that control all extractive activities.

In order to stop miners from entering the Santiago River, in recent years, the Wampís government has built its own control and security system.  “We want to prevent this from becoming a new Madre de Dios,” Pérez Ramírez says, referring to an Amazonian region devastated by illegal mining on the border with Bolivia. That is why he has long insisted on the need to promote alternative productive activities. “There is a need” for jobs for young people, he concludes, “but this cannot force us to destroy our own home.”

Climate change impacts on Wampís land

When Nampikchai finally arrives in his community of Chosica, he’s welcomed with a ceremony with singing and dancing. But he’s also come back to see broken trees, uprooted bamboo and farms affected by an unexpected episode of strong winds that swept through the community.

“This has never been seen before,” a local teacher says.

For Nampikchai, the link between mitigating the climate crisis and preserving tropical forests, which are key CO2 sinks and sources of climate-regulating moisture, is obvious. At COP26 in 2021 in Glasgow, both he and Pérez Ramírez, part of a delegation from Sacred Headwaters, warned that the Amazon Basin is on the verge of ecological collapse. Although the summit resulted in a Declaration on Forests and Land Use with world leaders committing to halt, and reverse, forest loss and land degradation by 2030, little progress has been made since.

Using a Starlink satellite connection, Pérez Ramírez connects by video call with Nampikchai, who is already in Ecuador. “We have to coordinate,” he says. Nampikchai planned to attend COP16 in Cali this October, and Pérez Ramírez was attending COP29 in Baku. “We have to keep working. Not on paper,” Pérez Ramírez says, “but in actions.”

They know that funds will be increasingly available for climate change mitigation, but they also know corruption and the limitations of communities to manage it properly could disrupt efforts. “What do we do with the funds that are coming, and are we, Indigenous people, prepared to receive that money? I would say no,” Pérez Ramírez says. “We have to prepare young people to learn how to manage that money.”

The success of the Sacred Headwaters initiative depends on being able to ensure a generational handover. They had the vision, but the young people have yet to catch up. “Having everything here, they go there [to cities]. That’s the problem,” Pérez Ramírez says, as he boards his canoe to go and supervise his fish farm, a pilot model of the productive projects he considers essential as alternatives to depredation.

On the way back to Chosica, navigating shallow waters through sweltering heat and a landscape of broken trees and roots uprooted by the recent gale, the canoe barely makes headway, and the sun cannot pierce the smoke-tinged haze. Then, like a specter, lying dead on a trunk emerging from the river, glows the yellowish back of a large boa. “The water is worth a lot,” Pérez Ramírez says. “I’m going to tell a story, because history repeats itself.

“The tale says that four brave Wampís warriors wanted to kill theyumi  (rain) because it rained so much and did not let them do anything,” Pérez Ramírez says. “The warriors failed, and as the rain found out that they wanted to kill it, it stopped raining for a long time, leaving nothing but a single water well, which was occupied by a panki (boa)), the owner of the water.” Many died trying to kill the snake, until the smallest men in the community teamed up with animal species specialized in digging, such as the armadillo, and succeeded. “And so, the water recovered: with alliance, with strategy, but with blood. With struggle.

“We don’t live without water. That’s why we have to make a great alliance to recover the rivers, the jungle,” Pérez Ramírez says. “Not to extract gold, as the non-Indigenous man wants. Gold is not eaten. … Time is now, and we must act fast, because time is not gold. Time is water.”

Citation:

Larrea Burneo, A. (2022). Socio-ecological conflicts and (cosmo)political reconfigurations in the Peruvian Amazonia: The case of the Wampis nation. Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Revue canadienne des études latino-américaines et caraïbes, 48(1), 113-136. doi:10.1080/08263663.2023.2142392

Banner image: Wrays Pérez Ramírez, vicepresident of the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Alliance. Image by Pablo Albarenga.