YURIMAGUAS, Alto Amazonas, Peru — Our boat sets sail early in the morning. The plan is to travel down the Huallaga River, reach the Marañón, then sail north along the Santiago River towards the border with Ecuador. But after a precarious start in shallow waters, one of the boat’s engines is broken by a powerful blow, possibly by a log or a rock underwater. The rivers in this region of northwestern Peru are running dry as the Amazon Basin experiences its most severe drought in decades.
On board are two Indigenous leaders, Uyunkar Domingo Peas Nampichkai of the Achuar people from Ecuador and Wrays Pérez Ramírez of the Wampís Nation from Peru. They are the current president and vice president of the Sacred Headwaters Alliance, respectively, and are on their way to visit communities of the Kandozi and Kichwa Indigenous peoples after participating in the alliance’s General Assembly in the north Peruvian city of Tarapoto, in the department of San Martin.
The Sacred Headwaters Alliance, a collaboration of Indigenous peoples and civil society organisations from Ecuador and Peru, seeks to permanently protect more than 86.5 million acres across the two countries. It’s an area in the Amazon home to 600,000 people of more than 30 nationalities and Indigenous peoples historically united by the rivers that interconnect their territories and their lives.
