The nation of visionaries
Peru, 2016
An historical decision was taken in Soledad, a small village of Rio Santiago, 1,500 km north-east of the Peruvian capital Lima. Representatives of over 100 communities of the indigenous Wampis people announced the formation of the Autonomous Territorial Government of the Wampis Nation, the first of its kind in the whole Amazon, with its own constitution, parliament and executive organs. “We will still be Peruvian citizens”, -says one of their visionary leaders,
Andres Noningo, 62, “but now we have our own government responsible for our own territory; This will enable us to protect ourselves from companies and politicians who only are able to see gold and oil in our rivers and forests.”
In Peru there has always been a mutual distrust between indigenous people and the government, as evidenced by the ‘massacre of Bagua’ in 2009: the approval of new laws, facilitating access to the indigenous lands for extractive industries, sparked protests, which ended in the killing of over 30 indigenous people and policemen. State concessions and recurrent hydropower projects are not the only threats to the Wampis territory:
a rotten 40 year old oil pipeline of the state company Petroperu is leaking more and more each year, while illegal gold miners are on the verge of transforming this unspoiled land into another Peruvian nightmare like Madre de Dios.
Not all the dangers come from the outside. After decades of cultural homogeneization, a lot of the indigenous knowledge is at risk of being forgotten and the Constitution of the Wampis Nation aims at its preservation. It is a culture that reveals the deep attachment of this people to nature. For them, forests and mountains are sacred, hiding waterfalls where aspiring visionary
warriors search for guidance during the ritual of Ayahuasca. Today visionary warriors have become ‘statesman’, setting a new precedent in the Amazon by forming an autonomous indigenous government. On the 20th of March 2017 the newborn nation will be presented to the Peruvian National Congress. A series of other indigenous groups is preparing similar initiatives and how the Peruvian state will respond to the Wampis’ self-declared autonomy may set an historic precedent.