“The Amazon has often been described as the world’s lung, but it is like a heart pumping humidity. This 135 million hectare corridor, half of which belongs to indigenous communities, could be the world’s most important ecosystem right along the Equator,” says Martin von Hildebrand, the Colombian-Irish ethnologist, environmentalist and official. A major figure in the study, advocacy and delivery of land ownership and democratic rights to communities, he chairs the Gaia Amazones Foundation and is secretary general of the Amazon Co-operation Treaty Organisation. This organisation brings together eight Amazon states to protect its ecosystem and indispensable connectivity for water, people and animals through a corridor linking the Atlantic Ocean to the Andes mountains.
Throughout the region, these systems are under threat from legal deforestation, intensive beef farming, mining, road construction and hydroelectric power plants; and from a $280 billion illegal business in trafficking drugs, wildlife and people, logging, gold mining and land grabbing. Peace deals between the government and the Farc rebel movements exposed the regions as transit zones.
Von Hildebrand and his son Francisco spoke to the Casement Summer School in Dún Laoghaire last weekend to honour Roger Casement’s 1910 report on the brutal exploitation of indigenous communities by British-Peruvian rubber barons in Putumayo. Casement’s scrupulous investigation, anti-colonial solidarity and successful diplomacy on their behalf were ahead of his time, although less well known than his report on rubber slavery in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo – a country still subject to mineral exploitation and brutal conflict.
Von Hildebrand was inspired by Casement’s Irish spirit. He encountered many of the same problems in the Putumayo rubber industry in the 1970s where indigenous people were in debt bondage to rubber companies. Children were routinely removed by Capuchin missionaries to “civilise” them in schools. Von Hildebrand helped break that system and played a part in convincing the Colombian state to restore indigenous ownership and control of the land. That was sometimes challenging for these communities, many of whom believe they are part of this natural system and the land belongs to the animals and birds not to humans.
His advisory role with successive Colombian presidents helped create a self-governing zone of 24 million hectares with 150,000 people, 50 languages and 90 communities in the most remote Colombian Amazon rainforest region, covering an area larger than Ireland and Britain. They occupy 30 per cent of Colombia’s territory, 90 per cent of its Amazon region and 4 per cent of the population. The final constitutional instrument guaranteeing self-rule was signed in December.
The Colombian deal sets a precedent for Latin America and beyond. . More than 370 million people in 70 countries are recognised by the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Historically these people have been marginalised largely by state formation. They are typically non-state people with egalitarian, non-hierarchical and kinship based societies in upland and inaccessible places.
According to the von Hildebrands, many of these communities make decisions by consensus with shamans, regarded as wise elders who have training and powers to communicate with spirits and trees. Dealing with the Colombian state involves difficult negotiations for the communities – as does dealing with their spiritual advisers. Deep listening, translation and dialogue are required on all sides to reconcile their relational ethics and communal interests with external forces.
From the Amazon’s trees and transpirating leaves come the “flying rivers” of cloud humidity which draw 25 per cent of the planet’s water from the soil, deposited there from the Atlantic, and distribute it throughout Latin America. Pressures on its ecology from capitalist greed and carbon release have dried up many areas. If deforestation proceeds from its current 18 per cent to 25 per cent within the next decade, scientists say this risks catastrophic failures of its ecological system including the loss of that water for its agriculture and reversal of its carbon sink. That affects the Pacific El Nino climate system and could also hasten deterioration of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation which warms Ireland and Europe through the Gulf Stream.
In her speech opening the school President Catherine Connolly described Casement as a courageous and meticulous documenter of exploitation and slavery, with continuing relevance for our time when some of the “exact same forces” are at play. He was truly a man ahead of his time and ours – so too are the indigenous communities of the Amazon, whose sufferings he documented. Their ecological wisdom has much to teach a “civilised” world so bad at listening to its seers and critics.
