Daniel Herrera Carbajal
ICT
Amidst the Trump administration’s decision to freeze funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development, those who work with Indigenous people in the Amazon say they will continue their efforts to protect the land and its people.
With tens of millions of dollars of funding suddenly frozen, Indigenous people’s stewardship and land rights are in the limelight. Trump’s order paused funding for nearly all programs and grants using foreign assistance aid.
Located in nine countries, the Amazon is home to more than 380 distinct Indigenous communities, all with unique cultural practices.
Andrew Miller is the advocacy director for Amazon Watch, a nonprofit organization that primarily partners with Amazonian Indigenous people in their own grassroots efforts to protect their ancestral lands.
He told ICT that the freezing of USAID funds has had immediate impacts on Indigenous communities.
“The efforts to essentially destroy U.S. aid as an entity have had immediate impacts on local communities in different ways,” Miller said. “USAID was supporting different kinds of protection mechanisms for local activists, Indigenous leaders and human rights defenders that were receiving threats, from different actors, including transnational organized criminal groups. In Peru, for example, we’ve seen, there was an Indigenous justice initiative that was going to receive funding over the course of the next three years that was frozen.”
USAID funds many grassroot organizations that help conserve the rainforest and help improve the livelihoods of Indigenous people.
One of those groups is “Saude e Alegria” (Health and Joy), which works in the Brazilian Amazon. Project Coordinator Caetano Scanavino told the Associated Press that the funding freeze will not only affect the people of the Amazon, but of the world.
“Cutting international cooperation, especially in relation to projects associated with the Amazon, is something that also affects American society,” Scanavino said, “because the Amazon generates global benefits.”
The Amazon is paramount to helping stabilize the climate, with around 150-200 billion tons of carbon being stored in the rainforest, according to the World Wildlife Fund.
Miller said halting foreign aid that is essential to protecting the rainforest will open the door to those who hope to use the Amazon for illegal activities or to extract lucrative natural resources from it.
“Unfortunately I think this is going to open the space for other actors. That’s going to kind of be an additional wind in the sails, as it were, of transnational organized groups of drug traffickers. of other organizations that are major threats to Amazon,” he said. “Additionally, we can anticipate that the Trump administration is going to be backing multinational companies, extractive industries, oil companies, mining companies, to, you know, crack open those markets into and continue to expand further into the Amazon rainforest.”
Extractive industries like illegal gold mining and logging have profound effects on the Amazon.
“You only have to look at some satellite data in the Amazon region, especially in Brazil, and you’ll see really wide swaths of deforestation from agribusiness and colonization that often follows development roads for agribusiness or mining or logging,” said Daniel Lavelle, director of the U.S. office for Survival International, a nonprofit organization that works to advocate for Indigenous people’s rights and land rights.
“And then amidst all this deforestation, you’ll see these intact primary forest areas that often have somewhat odd shapes, kind of, trapezoidal polygons there,” he told ICT.
The fight for the conservation of the Amazon rainforest has been going on for thousands of years. And the key to it? Indigenous people.
“We know that over thousands of years, if not longer, that Indigenous peoples have shaped and, and stewarded these environments,” Lavelle said. “What we’ve seen is more and more scientific evidence and anecdotal evidence as well, that Indigenous peoples in the Amazon are really the best defenders and stewards of the rainforest. There’s plenty of data now that shows lower deforestation rates in Indigenous territories than you do even in the kind of traditional conservation areas.
“Without Indigenous peoples, there’s really not going to be an Amazon.”
Indigenous people see the fight for the Amazon as lifelong and one that will continue, even without USAID funding.
“Even when it gets dire, resistance is always continuing, to go forward. and really, because a lot of people have no choice but to resist and protect their lands because it’s their lives and livelihoods that are on the line,” Lavelle said. “So, I think in any challenging policy moment, it is a moment to double down on work on the ground.”
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