标签： South America

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – In a landmark step toward collaborative conservation of the Amazon rainforest, Brazil’s Ministry of Indigenous Peoples announced Friday that it has formalized a new bilateral agreement with Peru’s Ministry of Culture focused on strengthening joint protection of Indigenous territories, particularly those housing uncontacted communities along the two nations’ shared border.

Negotiations for the memorandum of understanding first launched in 2024, and the full text of the agreement is scheduled to be officially published in Brazil’s government register in the coming weeks, per Brazilian officials. Once implemented, the pact will create a structured cross-border framework for sharing intelligence, aligning enforcement strategies, and coordinating conservation efforts to address shared threats to vulnerable Indigenous lands.

The announcement arrives amid urgent calls for action from Ashaninka Indigenous leaders, who are currently meeting with federal authorities in Brazil’s capital Brasília to request immediate security intervention for their cross-border territory. Earlier this month, five heavily armed men carrying machine guns entered the Ashaninka lands, threatened local families, and targeted the community’s senior leadership. Spanning the remote western Amazon along the Brazil-Peru divide, the Ashaninka territory has increasingly become a target for transnational criminal groups seeking access to unpatrolled land for illegal activity.

The growing encroachment is directly tied to the expansion of a key drug trafficking corridor known as the Solimões River route, experts confirm. Criminal gangs and drug traffickers have increasingly carved out smuggling routes through the region, leveraging the dense, remote Amazon rainforest to move illicit goods. While Indigenous stewardship of these lands is widely recognized as one of the most effective barriers to Amazon deforestation – a critical front for regulating global climate systems – that same dense, remote tree cover that Indigenous communities protect also makes the territory ideal hiding spots for criminal networks.

In response to the recent incursion, Brazilian federal police have opened a formal investigation into the attack, and launched a joint enforcement operation with state authorities in the region earlier this week. The operation’s official mandate is to prevent and crack down on cross-border incursions, organized criminal activity, drug trafficking, environmental harm, and other illegal activities that cross the two nations’ boundary.

The Brazilian Army has also bolstered its presence in the border region, deploying approximately 30 additional troops to step up patrols. Preliminary intelligence gathered from Indigenous leaders and government agencies indicates the armed attackers were Peruvian citizens who crossed into the Brazilian side of the Ashaninka territory to carry out the incursion. This reinforcement, however, has drawn criticism from Indigenous advocacy groups, who have long argued that temporary troop deployments do little to address the permanent, ongoing threat of criminal encroachment on their lands.

As of Friday, Peru’s Ministry of Culture had not responded to requests for comment on the new agreement or the recent attack. The Associated Press’ climate and environmental reporting is supported by funding from multiple private foundations, with the AP retaining full editorial control over all content. More information on the AP’s philanthropic partnership standards, a full list of supporters, and funded coverage areas is available at AP.org.

For 30 years, the Ashaninka Indigenous people have stood as a global model of Indigenous self-governance and rainforest stewardship along the remote Brazil-Peru border. After reclaiming their ancestral territory from illegal settlers three decades ago, the community built a thriving, self-sustaining way of life: they manage their own governance systems, grow traditional crops, and have successfully protected the old-growth forest that forms the core of their homeland. For Indigenous communities across the Amazon basin, the Ashaninka’s success has long been a beacon of what sovereign Indigenous land stewardship can achieve. Today, that hard-won way of life is under growing violent attack.

Criminal drug trafficking gangs are increasingly encroaching on Ashaninka territory, turning the remote Amazon rainforest and its winding river networks into major transit corridors for cocaine moving from Andean producer countries to global markets. Ashaninka leaders confirm that violent incursions have continued as recently as this month, and have formally pleaded for federal protection, including a high-level meeting with Brazilian government officials in the national capital this past Thursday. While security forces have been briefly deployed to the region in response to these appeals, Indigenous advocates across the Amazon note that government security presence in these remote border areas is almost always temporary, even as the criminal threat remains constant and growing.

The invasion of Ashaninka land is not an isolated incident. It is part of a broad, dangerous shift along the Amazon’s border regions, as criminal organizations expand their operations along what experts have named the Solimões River trafficking route. This network of interconnected navigable waterways stretches from the Peru-Brazil border all the way to the major Amazonian hub of Manaus, and has emerged over the past decade as the primary transit corridor for cocaine produced in Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia en route to Brazilian Atlantic ports, from where it is distributed to consumer markets across Brazil and Europe. Today, the route is largely controlled by one of Brazil’s most powerful criminal organizations, the Red Command gang, according to retired Amazonas state police colonel César Mello, who now teaches at the Federal University of Pará and the University of the State of Amazonas.

Indigenous territories have become strategically critical to this illegal trade for multiple reasons. Remote, densely forested, and largely cut off from consistent government oversight, these lands offer ideal hiding spots for traffickers to store product and move shipments undetected. Beyond the geographic advantages, Mello explained, language barriers, cultural differences, and widespread lack of economic opportunity in Indigenous communities leave many residents vulnerable to criminal exploitation. “These factors make Indigenous peoples a vulnerable population and an attractive source of labor for criminal organizations,” Mello said. Gangs typically first attempt to recruit young Indigenous people with offers of cash and social status that are unavailable in the formal local economy, and turn to intimidation and violence when recruitment fails, he added.

At the same time, decades of research have confirmed that Indigenous territorial stewardship is one of the most effective tools to curb deforestation in the Amazon, the world’s largest tropical rainforest and a critical bulwark against worsening global climate change. The same forests the Ashaninka have spent 30 years protecting, in other words, have made them a target for the criminal groups that now exploit that remote, dense cover for their operations.

Local tensions boiled over earlier this month, when a group of armed men invaded the Kampa Indigenous territory, part of the larger Ashaninka ancestral homeland along the Amonia River in the western Amazon. On July 6, five armed Spanish-speaking men carrying machine guns threatened entire families and carried out a targeted search for the territory’s top Indigenous leaders. “It’s one thing for outsiders to enter our territory to steal resources, like timber and wildlife. But this was different. They entered our land looking for our leaders, intending to kill them,” said Francisco Piyãko, coordinator of the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the Juruá River, who filed formal complaints with Acre state authorities and the Brazilian Army following the incursion. The complaint prompted the deployment of federal security forces, but the damage and fear have lingered.

The Ashaninka have a long history of pushing back against illegal activity in their territory. Decades ago, traffickers approached the community seeking permission to build a clandestine airstrip for drug shipments; the Ashaninka refused outright, and have remained a consistent block to criminal expansion in the border region for generations. “We have a long history of opposing any kind of illegal activity,” Piyãko said.

Despite repeated formal appeals to authorities, Ashaninka leaders and other Indigenous advocates say consistent, targeted government protection remains out of reach. Major Jonatas Soares, a police officer based in the key border city of Tabatinga in Amazonas state, near the borders of Colombia and Peru, says there is a fundamental failure in how Brazilian public security serves Indigenous communities. “There is an institutional and intercultural blind spot in the public security services provided to Indigenous peoples,” Soares explained. “The state formally recognizes their territories, yet it fails to translate that presence into continuous protection tailored to their specific needs.”

Earlier this year, Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Flávio Dino ordered the federal government to ramp up efforts to dismantle criminal organizations operating in the Amazon, citing official investigations that confirm criminal groups are expanding their presence and posing an existential threat to Indigenous communities across the region. Multiple Brazilian government agencies, including the Ministries of Indigenous Peoples, Foreign Affairs, and Justice, as well as the Brazilian Army and the Acre state government, did not respond to requests for comment from the Associated Press on the recent threats to the Ashaninka.

While the community remains shaken by the recent targeted attack, leaders say their commitment to defending their territory and their way of life remains unbroken. Still, Piyãko stressed that confronting heavily armed criminal groups is not the responsibility of the Ashaninka or other Indigenous communities—it is the legal duty of the Brazilian and Peruvian states. “They allowed this to happen through their absence, so they bear that responsibility,” Piyãko said.

In an unprecedented move that marks a new chapter in regional environmental accountability, the Andean Court of Justice — the judicial body tasked with upholding the rule of law for the Andean Community trade bloc — has accepted a landmark lawsuit against Peru over the country’s repeated failures to crack down on rampant illegal mining across its Amazonian territories. This case is the first in the court’s history to examine whether an Andean Community member state has fulfilled its binding regional legal obligations to curtail illicit mining activity, setting a critical precedent for environmental governance across South America.

The legal challenge targets Peru’s long-standing policy of extending deadlines for REINFO, the nation’s formalization program designed to transition small-scale informal miners into legal, regulated operations. Critics of the policy, including the Indigenous and local plaintiffs who brought the case, argue that repeated extensions have not helped legitimate small-scale operators; instead, they have provided de facto temporary legal protection for large-scale illegal mining operations to continue operating with impunity.

Illegal gold mining has emerged as one of the most destructive environmental threats facing the Amazon basin in recent decades. The unregulated activity drives rampant deforestation as miners clear old-growth forest to access gold deposits, poisons river systems with toxic mercury that contaminates drinking water and food chains for both human and wildlife communities, and fuels brutal violent conflict against Indigenous groups that have inhabited the Amazon for millennia. In Peru, illegal mining operations have spread far beyond their historic hub in the southern Madre de Dios region, expanding into untouched areas of the Amazon including the ecologically sensitive Nanay River basin near the northern city of Iquitos — the region where the plaintiffs in the case are based.

The court accepted the case in a formal order dated July 15, and notified all involved parties on July 20, granting Peru a 40-calendar-day window to file its official response to the claims. The judicial body has not yet issued a ruling on the plaintiffs’ request for precautionary measures, which include a temporary suspension of the REINFO program for the duration of the proceedings.

The lawsuit was brought by a collective of Indigenous and rural communities from the Nanay River basin, joined by seven local residents of the Peruvian Amazon. The plaintiffs argue that the Peruvian government has refused to strengthen enforcement against illegal mining, associated money laundering, and other connected criminal activity, despite clear obligations outlined in Andean Community law. The trade bloc counts Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru as its four member states.

The case traces its roots back to a 2025 findings report from the General Secretariat of the Andean Community — the bloc’s executive governing body — which concluded that Peru had failed to adequately build out regulatory and enforcement measures to combat illegal mining and linked crimes, including effective asset forfeiture mechanisms to seize assets from illegal operations. The secretariat also determined that Peru’s repeated extensions of REINFO directly contradict the country’s binding legal obligations under Andean Community regulations.

Environmental organizations and Indigenous advocacy groups across the region have long echoed this conclusion, noting that ongoing extensions have allowed illicit mining to operate openly under the cover of the formalization process. For its part, the Peruvian government has defended the policy, arguing that extensions are necessary because thousands of small-scale miners have not yet completed the required formalization process. As of this report, Peru’s Ministry of Energy and Mines and Ministry of Environment have not responded to requests for comment on the ongoing lawsuit.

César Ipenza, an environmental attorney representing the plaintiffs, emphasized that the case breaks entirely new ground for regional environmental accountability. “This is the first time a person or organization has sued one of the Andean countries for failing to comply with obligations established under the Andean integration system,” he explained. While accepting the case is only a procedural step, Ipenza noted that the admission itself is a major milestone: it opens the door for the regional court to formally examine whether a member state has breached its obligations to combat illegal mining.

If the court ultimately rules against Peru and the national government fails to comply with the final judgment, Ipenza said the case could result in tangible economic consequences for Peru under the Andean Community’s existing legal framework. Beyond the immediate outcome for Peru, he added, the case sets a critical precedent that will shape environmental enforcement across the region. “Without a doubt, this is an important precedent,” Ipenza said. “It could lead the other countries to reconsider and understand that these obligations must be fulfilled.”

This reporting on climate and the environment from The Associated Press receives funding support from multiple private foundations, with The AP retaining full editorial control over all content. Information on AP’s ethical standards for philanthropic partnerships, a full list of supporters, and an overview of funded coverage areas is available at AP.org.