"The Invasions Do Not Stop, The Deforestation Does Not Stop & The Threats Do Not Stop"
“The invasions do not stop, the deforestation does not stop, and the threats do not stop,” Iván Flores Rodríguez said by phone from the Indigenous Santa Clara de Uchunya community. A leader of the Shipibo people, Flores Rodríguez outlines the history of his community in the Peruvian Amazon, when, in 2012, the oil palm company Plantaciones de Pucallpa S.A.C. (now Ocho Sur P S.A.C.) settled on the far side of the Aguaytía River, less than 5 kilometers (3 miles) from their homes.
Since then, threats from and intrusions by land traffickers into their territories have increased. Santa Clara de Uchunya’s inhabitants say Ocho Sur P bears some responsibility for these violent events. They say the company encourages third parties to invade their ancestral territories and cut down community-managed forests, and they say they have detected a pattern to their actions. Typically, the invaders present themselves as farmers , after which they request proof of ownership or property deeds from the regional authority, which they then sell to the company to expand monoculture planting of the oil palm.
Flores Rodríguez recounts the most recent illegal intrusion, which occurred on Aug. 17 this year. On that day, Santa Clara de Uchunya community members surprised a group of people who were cutting down trees within their territory in the department of Ucayali on Peru’s eastern border with Brazil. This encounter occurred just as Santa Clara de Uchunya’s Indigenous peoples were reviewing the boundaries of their lands, after the Ucayali regional government’s agriculture agency, the DRAU, approved the expansion of their territory by 1,544 hectares (3,815 acres) in January 2020. Members of the community say the incident is evidence of their vulnerability to outside interests.
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In 2018, he said, the prosecutor’s office launched an investigation into alleged land trafficking by key regional government officials. According to the Cocha Anía case, in 2015, government workers for the region of Ucayali allocated to private individuals 128 plots of land, amounting to approximately 3,600 hectares (8,900 acres) of the territory claimed by the Santa Clara de Uchunya community. One of the people involved in this case is Isaac Huamán Pérez, the former director of the DRAU, the Ucayali agriculture department. Huamán Pérez was arrested in 2018 on charges of being the head of a land-trafficking criminal organization. The investigation held him responsible for authorizing the issuance of certificates of ownership to people connected to DRAU staff so that they could then sell them to “an international palm company” — in this case, to the former Plantaciones de Pucallpa, and he was arrested. Huamán Pérez has been under house arrest since May 2020.
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https://news.mongabay.com/2020/12/an-oil-palm-front-advances-on-an-indigenous-community-in-peru/
