Public statement of the VI Latin American Congress of Political Ecology "Facing criminal governance and ecological collapse: indigenous and community autonomy as a civilizational alternative"
Gathered in the city of Lima, the researchers, academics, activists, territorial defenders and participants of the VI Latin American Congress of Political Ecology, raise our voice to make proposals to overcome the serious ecoterritorial and bioclimatic crisis that our Latin America, the Caribbean and the Global South are going through,
especially denouncing the encroachment on the Amazon basin.
The current civilizational crisis is a product of an accumulation model based on a power structure that makes the exploitation of nature—including human nature itself—the foundation of its global domination. Today, this so-called “civilizational” power structure is suffocating life on Earth. It is rapidly eroding the biocultural integrity of the Amazon, the most important cultivated rainforest on our planet.
Today, capital is hounding it as a new frontier of commodification. It is the new geography of dispossession. It is a stage for extractive violence without any social control. We denounce the fact that the Amazon is being seized and exploited by a regime of “criminal governance.” In recent years, we have witnessed the mutation and diversification of illegal economies (illegal gold mining, drug trafficking, unauthorized logging, and trafficking of flora and fauna), which operate in close synergy with transnational capital and extractive state structures. Added to this is the expansion of the agro-industrial frontier into the Amazon and the construction of transportation infrastructure and communication routes. This dynamic has transformed the Amazon into a frontier of armed violence, a region that accounts for more than 80% of the murders of land defenders, with Indigenous and Afro-descendant leaders being the main victims of this systematic extermination.
This dynamic is pushing the region to the brink of what is known as an ecosystem tipping point. Scientific data corroborate the catastrophe that communities have been warning about for decades:
- The record-breaking number of fires in 2024 made fire the leading cause of primary forest loss in the Amazon for the first time, destroying more than 17.8 million hectares in Brazil and setting devastating records in Bolivia and Peru.
- The megahydrological drought (2023-2024) caused river flows to plummet to their lowest levels in over 120 years —such as the drop of the Negro River to 12,66 meters in Manaus—, resulting in the loss of 10% of the pink dolphin populations due to water heat waves exceeding 40 °C.
- This hydroclimatic disruption isolated more than 53% of indigenous villages and waterways (more than 1,300 communities in Brazil, Peru and Colombia), undermining their food sovereignty and access to health by paralyzing the river arteries of transport.
The recurrence and increase of this scenario threatens to irreversibly transform the Amazon into a degraded savanna, turning it into a net emitter of carbon.
Faced with this scenario of barbarism that materializes in the name of “progress”, we affirm the geological, ecological, cultural and political value of the local communities and indigenous peoples who ancestrally built the habitability of the Rainforest as a response, alternative and way of realizing other possible futures for humanity, for all the fraternal peoples and for the Earth, our Mother, our Common Home.
In contrast to the false solutions of "green capitalism," which seeks to commodify nature without altering the structures of domination, we affirm that there is sufficient scientific evidence to reclaim the wisdom and ancestral technologies of indigenous peoples and local communities as the authentic alternative and the real underlying solution.
in the face of the socio-ecological and civilizational crisis we are facing.
The experiences shared during the Congress showed that food sovereignty, family farming, community kitchens, local production, and community networks constitute concrete responses to situations of inequality and emergency. The COVID-19 pandemic made many of these inequalities visible, but also
It demonstrated the enormous organizational capacity of the communities.
Therefore, speaking of political ecology also means speaking of who cares, who feeds, who sustains the territories, and how the burdens of crises are distributed. The contributions of ecofeminism and the struggles of Indigenous, peasant, and working-class women remind us that territorial defense is deeply linked to the reproduction and care of life.
Therefore, from the VI Latin American Congress of Political Ecology:
- We demand full land titling from the States and the international community.
demarcation and effective protection of indigenous and community territories as a measure
direct for the re-existence of the Peoples of the Earth. - We demand the dismantling of criminal governance and the guarantee of
comprehensive protection for the lives of human rights and environmental defenders,
fighting against impunity for corporate and illegal crimes. - We call for dismantling the extractive matrix and urgently promoting
just and popular post-extractive socio-ecological transitions. - We reaffirm our unwavering support for free self-government, the guards
indigenous/community groups and the organic forms of territorial self-defense against aggression
of legal and illegal capital.
Not one step back in the face of extractivism and violence!
Sovereignty, territory, and life for the people!
Given in Lima, from August 5 to 8, 2026.
Participants of the VI Latin American Congress of Political Ecology
August 14th, 2026
CLACSO Working Group Political Ecologies from the South/Abya Yala
This text expresses the position of the aforementioned Working Groups and not necessarily that of the centers and institutions that make up the CLACSO international network, its Steering Committee or its Executive Secretariat.
