The Amazon rainforest is privileged with rich biological and cultural diversity, natural splendor, and the potential to benefit all humanity by helping to stabilize the…
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Throughout ACT’s more than 20 years of conservation and indigenous rights work in South America, one of the greatest challenges our partner communities voice is…
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Along the Saramacca River in central Suriname live the Matawai people. They are descendants of Africans who escaped slavery in the 17th and 18th centuries…
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When I was growing up in New Orleans in the sixties and early seventies, the airing of environmental documentaries like the National Geographic Specials brought…
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Carolina Gil is among the women who have dedicated themselves protecting the forests of the Amazon. The challenge that Colombia has ahead can only be met with many hands. She believes in collective work, for a rainforest without heroes. Before the Amazon became a hot topic in the media because of the 144,417 hectares razed in that region of Colombia, the mining threats and the science that began to explain the Amazon’s importance in the regulation of global climate.
Carolina Gil, program director of the NGO the Amazon Conservation Team, knew the other face of conservation, which few others were emphasizing: to try to conserve a territory without taking into account the people who live in it was a formula for failure.
“It is the communities that can ensure that a forest is healthy, with the means of living that they require.”
The Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) enthusiastically congratulates Colombia on the announcement of a 1.5-million-hectare expansion of Chiribiquete National Park, the country’s largest protected area.…
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The second international meeting on “Perspectives on Protection Policies for Indigenous Peoples in Isolation and Initial Contact”, held in Brazil, was successfully completed. The Colombia delegation consisted of Robinson Lopez, Human Rights and Peace Coordinator for the National Organization of the Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon (OPIAC); Oswaldo Silva, a leader of the Curare – Los Ingleses Indigenous Reserve of the Amazonas department; and Daniel Aristizábal of the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT), who presented a paper on the prior consultation process for a proposed decree for the prevention of risks to and the protection of the rights of indigenous peoples in isolation of Colombia.
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We know that our partner communities can best safeguard their forests when they have access to their traditional territories, sustainable livelihoods, and intact traditions. But…
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Indigenous peoples, through their national organizations, reached an agreement with the government of Colombia on the development of a public policy and a regulatory framework for the prevention of threats to and the protection of the rights of indigenous peoples in isolation of Colombia. The spirit of the decree seeks to ensure the prevention of threats to and the protection of rights and the permanence of the condition of isolation of these peoples through territorial intangibility, which manifests through the no-contact principle.
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After waiting 27 years, the indigenous governments of non-municipalized areas of the Amazon finally will be able to manage the money from their national government transfers without intermediaries.
In Leticia, the Presidency, the Ministries of the Interior, Finance and Agriculture, DANE (the Colombian national statistics agency and the Colombian National Planning Department recognized the governments of 36 indigenous reserves that occupy 26 million hectares of practically intact territory and that had existed in a state of legal limbo with respect to territorial zoning that prevented them, in effect, from governing what is theirs by law.