Recently contacted Indigenous communities in Peru call for a halt to extractive projects, fortress conservation, and REDD in areas inhabited by isolated peoples

Chachibay Declaration: “When the Forest Breathes Through Our Voices.”

In May 2025, a meeting took place in Peru’s Ucayali Basin, hosted by the Chachibay Native Community. The meeting brought together representatives from 12 recently contacted Indigenous communities of the Matsés, Chitonahua, Yaminawa, Iskonawa, Huni Kuin, and Sharanawa nations.

The meeting was organised by the Iskonawa People’s Wellbeing and Development Organization (OBDEPI) and the Transborder Indigenous Territorialities Network of the Amazon Basin (TITCA).

The meeting established the Confederation of Nationalities of Recently Contacted Indigenous Peoples and Their Families Living in Voluntary Isolation. The meeting also produced the Chachibay Declaration, which is the Confederation’s guiding document.

The Chachibay Declaration condemns carbon offset schemes, fortress conservation models, and demands an immediate halt to extractive projects in areas inhabited by isolated peoples.

Kimberley Brown reported on the Declaration for Mongabay, and spoke to Wilian Ochavano Rodriguez who said that illegal logging and drug trafficking had increased in recent years. Indigenous communities, including those living in voluntary isolation, are exposed to criminal groups.

Ochavano Rodriguez said that carbon offset projects and other conservation projects often limit the livelihoods of Indigenous Peoples living there. The projects also create borders in the rainforest.

“They know very well that Indigenous People have no borders, no territorial limits, and those things limit many things,” Ochavano Rodriguez told Mongabay.

These conservation and carbon projects are often set up without the free, prior and informed consent of the Indigenous Peoples who live there.

Here is the Chachibay Declaration. The Declaration refers to Peru’s Indigenous peoples in Isolation and Initial Contact with the Spanish abbreviation, PIACI.

Chachibay Declaration

“When the Forest Breathes Through Our Voices”

Presented at the Founding Assembly of the Confederation of Nationalities of Recently Contacted Indigenous Peoples and Their Families Living in Voluntary Isolation

Chachibay Native Community, Ancestral Territory of the Iskonawa
Ucayali Basin, Peruvian Amazon
May 10, 2025

I. The Forest Speaks First

We gather where the roots of sachamama (Mother Forest) cling to the Puca Alipa (red earth) – on the unceded territories of peoples who choose isolation as their shield, where shimbillo trees remember footsteps older than borders. This land – yompor sant (“our territory” in Yine) – is not “wilderness” to be managed, but a maloca (communal house) without walls where our isolated relatives whisper to macaws rather than missionaries. Echoing the forest’s diversity, we declare:

To our relatives in voluntary isolation: We read the smoke of your fires as maps.
To communities of initially contacted families: Your scars are our compass.
To NGOs and governments listening: This soil holds both our ancestors’ bones and your unsigned contracts.

II. We Are an Unbroken Woven Thread

Our isolated kin are not “remnants” – they are revolutionaries resisting 521 years of invasion through their mere existence. Their distance is not born of fear; it is the ultimate protest against chainsaws, protected areas, extractive industries, and the false solutions of carbon merchants.

Do you remember when the chullachagui (forest guardian spirit) cared for these woods without GPS? Our peoples managed biodiversity through stories, not spreadsheets. Now they call our sacred sites “protected areas” and “reserves,” but they protect them from us – the original architects of balance.

Ironically, the same organizations promoting “PIACI-Amazon protection campaigns” drown our voices in their crusades while no benefits trickle down to our peoples. They fly over our ancestral territories snapping photos, measuring “carbon reserves,” and tallying future profits – while we count graves.

III. The Irony of “PIACI Protection”

To Conservation Giants:
Your 30x30 agenda and carbon offsets taste familiar – like rubber barons mapping “untapped resources.” Your satellite patrols mirror the missionaries’ bibles. You speak of “carbon sinks” while sinking our rights beneath technical jargon.

The Murunahua Reserve here in Ucayali – that “model protected area” – has more illegal coca fields and loggers than guard posts. Our families there don’t need another biodiversity report; they need all those profiting from our misery to leave.

To Philanthropic Foundations:
Your boards debate our future over coffee sweeter than our stolen honey. You fund “REDD capacity-building,” “30x30,” and “REDD+” while we build resistance. We reject your false solutions wrapped in greenwashed neocolonial projects – we demand you stop profiting from our pain.

To PIACI Researchers:
You who hunt data like jaguars stalking easy prey: How many doctoral theses will sprout from our tears? Your “informed consents” are leaves swept away by wind, while you loot ancestral knowledge to fill academic papers, university shelves, and Technical Working Groups. You call us “study subjects,” but where is the study of your colonial complicity? Next time you enter our territories, bring fewer questionnaires and more humility. Our elders are not bibliographic sources; they are living libraries demanding respect, not extraction.

To Government Agencies:
We have basic survival needs, acute shortages of clean water, medical posts, and support to monitor territories against illegal actors and land grabs. Our food sovereignty, health and wellbeing, native languages, and governance systems are risk; we need recognition of our personhoods, territories, and intercultural education.

IV. The Fiber of Our Demands

(Written in Lupuna Tree Sap and Our Own Policy Ink)

1. Territorial Rights as Birth Certificates, Not Bureaucratic Formalities

   • No more “fortress conservation” locking us out of our physical and spiritual sustenance. We are not zoo exhibits.

   • Immediate halt to extractive projects and carbon offset schemes like REDD in PIACI territories – whether labeled “illegal” or “investment opportunities.”

2. Self-Representation Without White Saviors

   • Dissolve “PIACI funds” controlled by unrepresentative organizations. If you wish to support, do so directly through our communities. We will manage resources through mingas (collective work), not your fiduciary protocols.

   • Exploitative conservationists: Take note – we say NO to your control. Your role is amplification, not authorship.

3. Health Beyond Drones

   • Replace vaccination campaigns treating us as lab rats with intercultural clinics where plant wisdom dialogues with penicillin.

   • For every epidemiologist sent, train ten Indigenous health guardians in ancestral and Western medicine.

   • Respect our food systems that nourish our families and the forest.

4. Technology on Our Terms

   • Drones? Only to monitor invaders, not our resources and intimate rituals.

   • Internet? Yes – but to fight land invasions, false solutions, and biopiracy.

V. Our Compass Will Be Our Federation

This Declaration is no workshop report. It is a living chacra (forest farm) where:

• Seeds = Are the right of our uncontacted families to remain invisible

• Soil = Is our collective memory of resistance

• Harvest = Are policies first written in our languages

We refuse to be “beneficiaries” in your projects. From today onward:

• No decision about us may be made without the indirect consent of our isolated relatives (through environmental signals, not forms).

• No PIACI funding may be granted unless it flows directly to our communities and grassroots organizations.

• No more “PIACI awareness campaigns” that turn our isolated families into mascots for others’ gain.

VI. To Hesitant Allies

We see your hesitation – how foundation officials clutch pearls when we say “self-governance/self-representation.” They whisper: What about accountability?
Our answer lies in the aguaje palm: The aguaje doesn’t ask the swamp’s permission to grow. For 12,000 years, we’ve been accountable to the jaguar’s hunger and the river’s thirst. Your spreadsheets have yet to be born here.

VII. Our Final Call: Let Us Indigenize the Future

The Iskonawa Paucar (sacred bird spiritual leader) sings that this Federation will be the ayahuasca brew making the world vomit its greed. With this spirit, we declare:

• To our isolated relatives: Your choice to avoid contact is a human right, not a "conservation management strategy."

• To governments: Your laws are newcomers; our customary law is the original constitution.

• To all: The forest will not be saved until the last uncontacted child sleeps unafraid of extractivists’ and conservationists’ drone hums.

We close with an Amazonian proverb:
"The best way to care for a tree is to know the song its roots sing to the worms."

We thank the great Iskonawa people for their hospitality, the Transborder Indigenous Territorialities Network of the Amazon Basin (TITCA), the Indigenize Fund, and the Swift Foundation for their support.

Signed in the spirit of the maninkari (The Invisible Ones).

The Founding Indigenous representatives of the Confederation of Nationalities of Recently Contacted Indigenous Peoples and Their Families Living in Voluntary Isolation