Book Description

In 2008, President Alan García created a package of legal decrees that sought to expropriate indigenous land and sell it to international corporations as part of his neoliberal agenda. The social movement in the Peruvian Amazon quickly responded by claiming that the decrees breached indigenous rights, particularly the one to previous consultation, stipulated by The Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007 and the International Labor Organization's Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention 169 of 1989, both ratified by the state. This thesis analyzes the complex social relations between the state and the social movement in the Amazon. The first chapter examines the social conditions under which a social movement in the Amazon was formed as well as how Amazonian indigenous leaders surfaced creating social organizations and producing a strategy based upon an indigenous identity. The second chapter explores the transitional period during the 1990s and early 2000s, in which a neoliberal shift intensified the exploitation of indigenous communities' land, while multiculturalism introduced international discourses used by the social movement to politicize their demands and achieve goals. Finally, the third chapter explores the conflict between the state's rhetoric of progress and development used to advance neoliberal policies, and the response of indigenous activists through their indigenous-rights strategy. Through this analysis, this study argues that a new indigenous movement has emerged in the Peruvian Amazon through a self-proclaimed indigenous identity, where indigenous activists are using international documents to politicize indigenous issues in the Amazon and challenge power relations, citizenship, and indigenous rights, creating new social interactions and shedding light on indigenous issues and the Amazon.