Paper short abstract

Legal struggles by the Kichwa to recover the ancestral territory taken and overlapped by protected natural areas due to the exclusionary model of conservation

Paper long abstract

In the San Martín region, Peru, the exclusionary conservation model that deprives indigenous peoples from their territories persists. It does so by creating protected natural areas without prior, free, and informed consent, and through arbitrarily imposing artificial boundaries from a distant cabinet over our Kichwa territory. These natural protected areas were created in places where our parents and grandparents used and cared for the forests for generations. For this reason, we the Kichwa decided to recover our territories by legal means through a range of demands among which are the cases of the community of Nuevo Lamas, Puerto Franco, Alto Pucalpillo and Mishkiyakillu. In addition, we presented a lawsuit against the land titling policy that affects our Kichwa territory when subordinating our indigenous property rights to the policies of natural protected areas, with the excuse that there were no local communities existing prior to the creation of these areas. We the Kichwa people are learning and strengthening in the process of building legal demands, and we will continue our firm struggle to recover our territory.