Why indigenous peoples’ issues must be national issues

For the Indigenous communities living in Peru’s Amazon forests, achieving legal recognition that guarantees their collective rights to land can take up to 20 years and sometimes even result in lives being lost.

Twenty-three years have passed since Peru’s ratification of Convention 169, and 11 years since the signing of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). But despite these international efforts, and despite the Constitution recognizing Peru’s multiethnic and multicultural nature, the country is still struggling to promote and protect the rights of its traditional populations, particularly to land and natural resources.

Since 1974, more than 1,300 Indigenous communities of the Peruvian Amazon have obtained communal titles for approximately 12 million hectares of land, including 17 percent of the country’s forests. Even with this important progress, titling is still fraught with logistical problems, making it a long, complicated and costly process that not all communities can get through, and their rights to millions of hectares of forested land therefore remain vulnerable.