Abstract
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Peruvian government failed to protect its sparsely populated Amazon region. While infections were still rising, resource extraction was quickly approved to continue operations as a declared essential service that permitted an influx of workers into vulnerable indigenous territories despite weak or almost absent local healthcare. This article analyzes territorial counteraction as an indigenous response to pandemic national state failure, highlighted in a case of particularly conflictive stakes of resource control: Peru’s largest liquid natural gas extraction site Camisea in the Upper Amazon, home to several indigenous groups in the Lower Urubamba who engaged in collective action to create their own district. Frustration with the state’s handling of the crisis prompted indigenous counteraction to take COVID-19 measures and territorial control into their own hands. By blocking boat traffic on their main river, they effectively cut off their remote and roadless Amazon district off from the outside world. Local indigenous control had already been on the rise after the region had successfully fought for its own formal subnational administrative jurisdiction in 2016, named Megantoni district. The pandemic then created a moment of full indigenous territorial control that openly declared itself as a response and replacement of a failed national state. Drawing on political ecology, we analyze this as an interesting catalyst moment that elevated long-standing critiques of inequalities, and state neglect into new negotiations of territory and power between the state and indigenous self-determination, with potentially far-reaching implications on state-indigenous power dynamics and territorial control, beyond the pandemic.
Highlights
Despite one of the strictest lockdowns in Latin America, Peru quickly became one of the most affected countries worldwide, taking first spot in the tragic global ranking of highest COVID-19 deaths per capita (Mortality Analyses–Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, 2021)
Amazon indigenous groups in the country struggled tremendously as the pandemic added, in many cases, another layer of difficulty on what had already been dire situations. They raised their voice against the delayed and half-hearted support the national government offered, and, above all, for not having been consulted and included as the national strategy allowed extractive operations to continue in their territories despite of the health crisis. They deployed their own measures that included the closure of their territories and local self-organization to promote traditional medicines, as well as COVID & Amazon Indigenous Territorial Counteraction widespread protests across the Amazon against expanding extraction and breached agreements between the company and communities, which ended in three deaths of indigenous protesters in August 2020 during the takeover of Canadian PetroTal facilities in the northern Peruvian Amazon
As an example of such flaring tensions of the coronavirus pandemic across the Amazon and the world, this article focuses on one of Peru’s clashing hotspots for industrial hydrocarbon extraction, rainforest biodiversity, and indigenous rights in what has become known as the Amazon resource extraction frontier: located in the Lower Urubamba Valley in the southeastern Peruvian Amazon, close to the Brazilian border and far from a connecting road system, is the country’s largest natural gas extraction site Camisea, Peru’s flagship energy project that produces more than 60% of the country’s hydrocarbon extraction (Perupetro, 2019)
Summary
Despite one of the strictest lockdowns in Latin America, Peru quickly became one of the most affected countries worldwide, taking first spot in the tragic global ranking of highest COVID-19 deaths per capita (Mortality Analyses–Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, 2021). Frustration with the state’s handling of the crisis prompted local action of indigenous communities in Megantoni to take COVID-19 measures and territorial control of their district into their own hands They did not declare opposed to hydrocarbon operations, they blocked their remote district off entirely from the outside world, through simple but effective means of physically preventing river traffic. Drawing on theoretical perspectives of governmentality and indigenous self-determination, this article examines Peru’s Megantoni case for two advantages to explore political ecologies of COVID-19 in the Amazon It sheds light on the understanding of the complex, nonlinear, and ambivalent dimension of indigenous power dynamics in which they internalize, digest, and reexpress dominant norms during COVID-19 as an attempt to resist extraction while confirming it. This tension was evident in Latin America during the last extractive boom in the early 2000 s when states facilitated a rapid expansion of resource exploitation into indigenous territories, countered by growing social protest for the defense of territorial and indigenous rights (e.g., Stocks, 2005; Bebbington and Humphreys Bebbington, 2011; Bryan, 2012; Coombes, Johnson, and Howitt, 2012; Pacheco, Barry, Cronkleton, and Larson, 2012; Kröger and Lalander, 2016)
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