Declaration for the International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples

El CLACSO Working Group on Indigenous Peoples and Extractive Projects Greetings to the indigenous peoples, native peoples, indigenous peasant peoples and nations, indigenous nationalities and Afro-descendant peoples of Abya Yala, the Americas, on this day, August 9, International Day of Indigenous Peoples.

We salute the struggles of indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples in defense of their territories of life, of Mother Earth, the integral defense of their communities, and of their epistemic sovereignty.

We welcome your contribution to the social movements throughout the Americas, which during the last year have risen up to protest against neoliberal measures in the region in defense of the good life of all people.

We salute the capacity of indigenous communities during the pandemic, despite government measures that have made them invisible, to exercise their right to self-determination, whether by closing their territories as a measure to prevent contagion, implementing measures to reinforce the use of their traditional knowledge for health care, implementing strategies to disseminate information in their own languages, strengthening their articulations between communities and peoples to share experiences and strategies to face the pandemic, as well as the solidarity they have shown between communities and with other social sectors in rural and urban territories.

We note with great concern the setbacks in the rights of indigenous peoples over the past year due to neoliberal measures by President Moreno in Ecuador, the political crisis in Bolivia with a new government that has denigrated the achievements of the indigenous movement towards building plurinationality, the advance of racist discourses and religious fundamentalism in the Bolsonaro government in Brazil, the murder of spiritual leaders in Guatemala, the criminalization of protests by Mapuche communities in Chile, and new murders of indigenous land defenders in Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil.

We observe a setback on the path to the full recognition of collective rights to territory, to the political, cultural and economic rights of peoples, and to the plurinational character of States.

We are concerned about the complicity of states and companies in intensifying extractive and development projects in the context of the pandemic, defining them as essential activities, and taking advantage of the difficulties communities face in informing themselves, organizing, participating and mobilizing in contexts of confinement and economic and food insecurity, as well as our concern about the new oil spill in the Amazon territory.

We denounce that through various bills, special permits to continue the operations of extractive projects, criminalization of legitimate social protest by communities, and continuation of environmental assessment processes, the governments of the region have intensified their commitment to the commodity consensus despite its environmental, social, and even economic effects, since the pandemic has highlighted the fragility of extractive economies dependent on highly volatile commodity prices.

On this International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples, we urge Latin American societies to respect and promote the civilizational traditions of Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples, which demonstrate the importance of reciprocal, community-based relationships with respect for Mother Earth. The current pandemic shows that the path of plunder and exploitation pursued by states and corporations leads only to disaster.

August 9th, 2020
CLACSO Working Group
Indigenous peoples and extractive projects

This statement expresses the position of the CLACSO Working Group on Indigenous Peoples and Extractive Projects and not necessarily that of the centers and institutions that make up the CLACSO international network, its Steering Committee or its Executive Secretariat.