The Amazon is being flooded with death in its communities, villages, towns and cities. The COVID-19 is raging with the so-called “forest peoples” who are suffering from centuries of indifference, neglect, exploitation, extractivism, racism and ethnocide. This region, which is essential to the stability of the Earth’s ecosystem, is experiencing accelerated ecocide and terricide.
The causes of the deterioration of the Amazon are agro-industrial corporations, monocultures, the planting of transgenic seeds, agro-fuels, legal and illegal mining, the extraction and spillage of hydrocarbons, bio-piracy, hydroelectric and waterway mega-projects, poorly planned transmission lines and highways, international financial organizations and their loans and investments, drug trafficking and organized crime.
The governments of the North and the South, both neoliberal and progressive, encourage extractivism in different ways, weakening the Amazon on a social and ecological level. Now, under the title of “reactivating the economy to get out of the COVID-19 crisis “, the governments of the region are felxibilizing environmental, indigenous and social legal provisions to further promote extractivism.
The destruction of the Amazon brings us closer to the precipice and the climatic hecatomb. Without a living Amazon, there will be no future for humanity.
Many are fighting and resisting in the face of this destruction. The women of the Amazon are the most threatened and at the same time the most creative and resistant in the defense of their bodies-territories.
The challenges are very great and unity in diversity is urgent and unavoidable, with the protagonism of the original peoples, guardians of ancestry and Good Living.
Faced with this reality, movements, collectives, networks, activists and organizations of indigenous peoples, quilombolas, riverine people, siringueros (rubberes), caboclos, marrons, peasants, artists, religious, defenders of nature, communicators, academics, women, youth and inhabitants of the Amazonian cities, we self-call ourselves in the First Global Assembly for the Amazon that will take place virtually on July 18 and 19.
Our objective is to articulate an alliance at the service of existing platforms and campaigns, to strengthen our actions and impact in the defense of human rights, the rights of indigenous peoples and the rights of nature. We seek to build a spiral process of cycles of assemblies/actions in order to add wills, reach consensus on common objectives and agree on mobilization initiatives around proposals that emerge from the debate and consensus.
To this end, we will dedicate the first day of our Assembly to reflect and debate the problems of the countries and the pan-Amazon region, and on the second day we will discuss proposals for action and enrich three campaigns that we are building:
Global campaign to address the serious impacts of the Covid-19 on indigenous populations, afro-descendants and the entire Amazon.
Global campaign to boycott products, companies, investments, government policies, trade agreements and extractive industries that destroy the Amazon.
Global mobilization days to stop ethnocide, ecocide and extractivism, and to save the Amazon which is essential to face climate change.
The Global Assembly for the Amazon will be held virtually on Saturday 18th and Sunday 19th of July at 3:00 p.m. in Ecuador, Colombia and Peru, 4:00 p.m. in Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Guyana and Venezuela, and 5:00 p.m. in Brazil-Sao Paolo, French Guyana and Suriname. Each day we will have a two-and-a-half-hour session and will have simultaneous translation into Spanish, Portuguese, English and French.
To participate in this process and receive the respective Zoom link you must fill out the following form.
The First Global Assembly for the Amazon will also be broadcast by facebook and youtube.
