Indigenous peoples confronting COP16

Representatives of indigenous peoples from different parts of Latin America participating in the Conference of the Parties on Biodiversity -COP16- have taken a critical position towards the summit being held in Santiago de Cali, Colombia.

We see that at COP16 “there are no voices of leaders or indigenous youth... We want to see actions because actions help us save the planet, the more actions there are, the more alive the planet will be... we want less words.” Adriana Guatatuca, woman of the Kichwa indigenous people of Ecuador.

At the same time, Ati Quigua, an indigenous woman from the Arhuaco people of Colombia, referred to how indigenous peoples faced the Covid-19 pandemic from ancestral medicine, where they had no other way to care for and protect their communities: “this leads us to value indigenous medicine even more and our commitment from the People's Health Movement is to defend the natural heritage expressed in medicinal plants, ancestral knowledge and popular wisdom. Together with other representatives and authorities of indigenous peoples we work in a global alliance that we are making together with China, India, Africa and peoples of America. We reaffirm that we will be defending the importance of having mechanisms that adjust to our times in our territories, that have to do with the decision making of our medicine and our plants, and not here in a closed space with a dominant language, with methodologies that have nothing to do with the needs of the peoples. Nor do we accept these spaces such as COP16 as ideal spaces to decide on our biodiversity.”