Rethinking Indigenous Politics: The Unnoticed Struggle for Self‐Determination in Peru

Abstract

Most scholars characterise Peru as a country with weak indigenous movements, whose demands would have no influence in regional and national policies, even though its socioeconomic structures are similar to those of Bolivia and Ecuador, where indigenous movements are stronger. Based on fieldwork in the northern Peruvian Amazon and Lima between 2012-2013 and 2016-2018, this article argues that pro-indigenous legislation enacted as a response to strong indigenous mobilisation as well as the creation of indigenous autonomous governments in the Amazon express an unnoticed struggle for indigenous self-determination. These social phenomena also raise questions about the common assessment of the strength or weakness of indigenous movements.

Ground Truths: Community-Engaged Research for Environmental Justice

“…These concerns have echoes elsewhere in the world. The Land Back movement in North America and elsewhere calls strongly for full decolonization of Indigenous lands, and for a return of full sovereignty to Indigenous peoples (Merino 2020). In West Kalimantan, Indonesia, Dayak communities have also rejected monetary benefits from protected areas for similar reasons (Myers and Muhajir 2015).…”

Pandemic State Failure, Hydrocarbon Control, and Indigenous Territorial Counteraction in the Peruvian Amazon

“…As an international norm and concept, self-determination is rooted in freedom and equality for individuals and groups, in a way that entitles them to participate, change, or transform governing institutional orders, including those that are seen as a remedy of historical marginalized processes (Anaya, 1996). Broader purposes and goals of indigenous self-determination movements can entail 1) greater autonomy from a nation-state as a form of self-government; 2) greater participation in decisionmaking institutions at higher political levels such as legislatures or electoral coalitions; or 3) institutional changes that expand indigenous self-determination or seek to obtain state power to achieve social change (Hawkes, 2002;Jackson and Warren, 2005;Cornell, 2015;Petray and Pendergrast, 2018;Merino, 2020;Sidorova and Rice, 2020). The literature of self-determination emphasizes plurality and diversity of indigenous activism to continuously contest hierarchical relationships between governors and their subjectivities, while understanding how these produce and expand their self-determination through state, market, civil society, coalitions, and everyday practices (Gonzales and Gonzalez, 2015;Merino, 2020).…”

“…First, Camisea's Megantoni District and its local organizations represent an opportunity to explore indigenous strategies that, rather than pursuing totalizing changes, promote alternatives of resistance alongside, and within, the existing apparatus of the state and hydrocarbon corporations. In contrast, many other indigenous selfdetermination and autonomy struggles in Latin America have focused, or continue to focus, on anti-systemic activism, and challenge the state apparatus and implement legal autonomy as, for example, in progressive constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia (Van Cott and Lee, 2010;Merino, 2020). Second, analyzing the roles of the territorial and access control in Megantoni during the pandemic help understand indigenous nonviolent conflict through different dimensions of power (material, cultural, and political-economic) that can be subtle but crucial components in indigenous territorial defense and exercising self-determination, and finally, the Megantoni case lets us examine forms of emerging indigenous leadership that combine de facto and de jure strategies in the so-called co-living socioenvironmental conflicts that dominate extraction landscapes in Peru, to secure their rights beyond ownership of the extraction revenues (Presidencia del Consejo de Ministros-Viceministerio de Gobernanza Territorial, 2019; Defensoria del Pueblo Peru, 2020).…”

International humanitarian narratives of disasters, crises, and Indigeneity

“…Third, non‐Indigenous audiences are often unfamiliar with Indigenous politics (such as self‐determination) (see, for example, Merino, 2020 ). This amplifies the importance of humanitarian communications as a source of information.…”