Pope Francis says Amazon indigenous people under greater threat than ever

Pope Francis has warned that the Amazon’s indigenous people have “never been so threatened in their territories as they are now” and demanded an end to the relentless exploitation of the region’s timber, gas and gold.

Addressing an indigenous audience in Peru’s jungle city of Puerto Maldonado, the pope expanded on the environmental message of his 2015 encyclical, taking aim at the multiple threats faced by the Amazon rainforest and telling its indigenous inhabitants they were a “call to conscience for a way of life which could not measure its own costs”.

“We must break with the historical paradigm that sees the Amazon as an inexhaustible larder for other countries without taking into account its inhabitants,” he told native Amazonians, many of whom were wearing traditional feathered headdresses, patterned tunics and intricately beaded jewellery.

Pope Francis said the Amazon was not only a source of biological riches but a “cultural reserve” under threat from new types of colonialism.

He also referred to the issues of territorial rights, land titles and informed consent, including the right to veto infrastructure projects.

On his first visit to the Amazon biome, the pope met members of several indigenous groups who described the threats to their way of life posed by illegal mining, logging, oil and gas exploitation, monoculture and roads invading their territory.

Thousands of native Amazonians had travelled to see Pope Francis in Puerto Maldonado, a city on Peru’s Amazon frontier and the capital of Madre de Dios, a region assailed by illegal gold mining, which has made it an epicentre for people trafficking and modern-day slavery.

“The pope is a means to make our demands heard by the state,” said Edwin Vásquez, the Peruvian representative of the pan-Amazonian alliance of indigenous organisations Coica, who was at the stadium.

“The [regional governments] do absolutely nothing to help us, in fact they blame us for opposing development,” said Vásquez, a Huitoto member of a delegation representing more than 400 indigenous Amazonian peoples.

The group hoped the pope would call on the Peruvian state to grant them formal land titles for some 200,000 sq km of land, it said, as well as urge the government to clean up rivers poisoned with mercury used in illegal gold mining.

Most of Puerto Maldonado’s residents have mercury in their systems at well over safe levels while measurements for indigenous communities are even higher – particularly women and children, according to a 2013 study by the Carnegie Amazon Mercury Project.

The pope drew parallels between the devastation of gold mining and human trafficking, calling the slave labour and sexual abuse of young people and women an “outcry that reaches heaven”.

He also highlighted the need to protect indigenous people living in voluntary isolation in the biodiversity hotspot on Peru’s south-eastern border with Bolivia and Brazil, but said they should not be considered a “kind of museum of a bygone way of life”.

Amazon leaders said they would call for the intervention of United Nations agencies to halt the “ethnocide of 60 isolated peoples”, the spread of HIV/Aids and the “criminalisation of nature’s defenders” across the nine Amazon countries.

More than half of Peru’s territory is forest, and much of that land is indigenous territory. Peer-reviewed research shows that titling community lands in the Peruvian Amazon led to an immediate reduction in deforestation by three-quarters.

“No Peruvian president has ever given such a complete speech about the Amazon indigenous agenda as has Pope Francis,” tweeted Iván Lanegra, a former minister responsible for indigenous affairs. “It’s a national disgrace.”

Andrew Miller of the NGO Amazon Watch said the pope’s words “deepened prior comments in favor of indigenous rights and protecting the Amazon”.

“Now the question is: will Pope Francis make similar comments before larger crowds in Lima and in dialogues with Peruvian decision makers?” he said.