In February 2026, more than sixty Indigenous leaders from Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru gathered in the Peruvian Amazon city of Pucallpa. They came to map what was already killing them.

Criminal networks now affect 67% of Amazonian municipalities. Thirty-two percent of Indigenous territories are under dispute between armed actors. The crimes are interconnected: illegal gold mining, drug trafficking, logging, wildlife trafficking, human smuggling. In Peru’s Condorcanqui province, more than 800 sexual abuse cases remain unresolved. Thirty-six territorial defenders have been lost. Mercury poisons the rivers. Armed groups — Brazil’s PCC and Comando Vermelho, Ecuador’s Los Lobos and Los Choneros, FARC dissidents in Colombia — control transportation routes and exercise systematic violence. As one leader told the gathering: “They have taken over entire territories.”

The result was the Pucallpa Declaration, signed by COICA, AIDESEP, CONAIE, and dozens of regional federations. They sent it to the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Their demands: full territorial recognition. Indigenous participation in anti-crime policy. Protection for defenders. Respect for Indigenous justice systems.

Not soldiers.

“Militarization has not brought security to our territories,” said Ercilia Castañeda, vice president of Ecuador’s CONAIE. “On the contrary, it has deepened violence.”

When organized crime expands into Indigenous territories, the state response is not to support the governance systems already there. The Wampís Nation runs the Charip guard — territorial patrols that monitor their own land. The Kakataibo women defend their communities. Sarayaku practices Kawsak Sacha, the Living Forest framework. These systems exist. They work. They predate the states that now send armies instead.

A 2022 Colombian military operation intended to address organized crime in Indigenous territory killed eleven people. The former head of Peru’s drug commission, Ricardo Soberón, said military responses “distort any possibility of addressing the problems.”

The answer to crime in Indigenous territories is always soldiers. Never sovereignty.

And they’re bringing this petition to a forum that’s being dismantled.

The UNPFII Trust Fund: $300,000 to $50,000 in five years. Nine contributing nations down to three. The UN80 restructuring threatens to eliminate the forum entirely. The body that was supposed to give Indigenous peoples a voice at the United Nations can barely keep its doors open.

Sixty leaders gathered in Pucallpa. They mapped the crisis. They wrote demands. They traveled to New York. They delivered a declaration to a desk that might not exist next year.

That’s the verse they teach: the system works. Indigenous peoples have a forum. They can petition. The mechanism exists.

The verses they don’t sing: the forum is being starved. The petition arrives at a body with the budget of a small-town nonprofit. The states that fund the UN also fund the armies sent into the territories. The gold from the illegal mines enters the global supply chain. The coca becomes cocaine that moves through the same ports that ship the gold. The 296 environmental defenders killed since 2012 were not protected by the forum that was supposed to protect them.

The petition is real. The forum was supposed to be real too.

Herlin Odicio, vice president of ORAU, said something at Pucallpa that I haven’t stopped thinking about: “Indigenous patrols, community monitoring, and ancestral knowledge are already protecting our territories.”

Already.

The protection isn’t the thing being asked for. The protection is the thing being ignored.

// NEON BLOOD

Sources: Amazon Watch · Mongabay · Amazon Watch (Pucallpa) · ICT News/AP