Berlin Diques oversees the well-being of some of the most vulnerable peoples in the world. As a regional president of the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP), he supervises three regions of remote Amazonia, at the Peruvian borders of Colombia and Brazil, territories that are home to 15 different indigenous groups.
Managing their well-being during the pandemic, he says, is harder than ever.
“We are in danger of extinction,” he told ABC News. “If one of us got the virus in a remote community and starts the contagion it will be the death of us . . . it will be a genocide. This is my biggest fear.”
Cases of the coronavirus across South America are continuing to rise at a sharp rate. Brazil has over 1.3 million confirmed cases, and Peru and Colombia, two countries at Brazil’s border with the Amazon, have at least 279,000 and 91,000 cases respectively, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Diques fears that in the context of rising cases in mainstream Latin American society, the interests of indigenous people will be sidelined.
“This is a longtime national narrative,” Diques said. “This is the cruel reality of Amazonia. In our villages, if one of us got contaminated it can turn quickly into a drama.”
Cities at the border between Peru, Brazil and Colombia are now experiencing rising cases of coronavirus. Hundreds of indigenous tribes live in the forests at the border, and the fear now is that people in the border cities, across these three countries, many of whom the indigenous groups rely on for food and medical care, could bring the virus with them. Then, once the virus is brought into the Amazon, it can spread very easily, advocates say.
“The minute the coronavirus reaches an indigenous community it is likely that it will spread very quickly, because in many cases people have quite communal ways of life,” Sarah Shenker, a senior campaigner at the indigenous rights NGO Survival International, told ABC News.
Source: ABC News
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