Inspired on its mandate, COICA at the meetings of the Coordination Council (CC) and the Directive Council (DC) of the 2002, 2003 and 2004, proceeded to elaborate, ratify and start the implementation of the Amazon Indigenous Agenda-AIA, as the guiding framework of the policies of the organizations in all the Amazon region. Its objectives were: generate its own policy as indigenous peoples in the Amazon, identifying and consolidating common objectives; developing actions to attain human, environmental and economic sustainability from our own perspectives; with the following specific objectives: define through relationships with Amazon governments, cooperation organizations, the implementation of a policy in the Amazon to attend our real interests in the countries that we live in; generate within the Amazon Basin real initiatives that promote the welfare of the populations that live there; generate and subscribe sustainability agreements between indigenous peoples and governments for the security of the Amazon and of our future.(7)The AIA is conceived as the framework where concrete and real answers will be built over the questions of the present.

The Amazon Indigenous Agenda is the guiding and organizing framework for our policies within the Amazon Basin, which is focused on human sustainability. However, in order for us to move forward, it is crucial that the territories and the entire Amazon’s resources are under our management and control. We are ruled by our own legal systems, which need to be recognized in national constitutions and international treaties. We are managed by a horizontal organizational system guided by our ancestral Cosmo vision. Furthermore, we need further education so as to be able to fully integrate ancestral wisdoms, which must be applied and respected, recognizing our right to unrestricted academic education and to scientific knowledge, as an important support to our decision-making and continuance of our Cosmo vision, our territories and life itself.

The co-existance of occidental and native ways of thinking within the Amazon Indigenous Agenda, are an evidence that we are not proposing a return to the past, but rather what we seek is to articulate better both ways of thinking and come out with the best result from the first. It is in addition, the acknowledgement that we do not live imprisoned, but that we interact with the environment in which we live, taking from these contexts, the knowledge that will help us to become stronger as peoples. In this sense, it is crucial that the guiding principle of our comprehensive policies be coherent with our reality and according to our needs, that is, to the components of Amazon Indigenous Agenda. These are themes that are linked together and are generators of integral policy-making from us and for ourselves, breaking with the fragmentation of objectives, something very characteristic on current development programs and initiatives.

The programmatic areas of focus or themes within the Amazon Indigenous Agenda are linked together. They are: Human Sustainability, which seeks to affirm the values and principles, where human beings can become sustainable and that these values allow us to live with dignity in our own territories. Territories and Natural Resources, which refers to territorial security as an indispensable base for our own continuance as peoples that we are and that the use of natural resources will be able to benefit us too. Our Own Legal Systems and Constitutional Rights, will strengthen our legal systems before national and international laws, as an affirmation of our diversity and our own justice systems, where countries must recognize it, and even include them within the constitutions of Nation-States. Ancestral Wisdoms and Organizational Strengthening, seeks to affirm and protect our ancestral wisdom to avoid generalization, with the creation of general concepts and appropriations by strangers. Our new organizational arrangements will be strengthened, as a defense instrument and as a way to guarantee our ideals and rights. Academic and Scientific Education, will enable us to acquire new knowledge that would allow us to take decisions based on our own Cosmo vision, our territories, nature and life itself.

This means that the programmatic themes of the Amazon Indigenous Agenda have been defined to boost their implementation as crosscutting topics that articulate and intertwine through Human Sustainability, which generates a synergy between all these topics, leading to the understanding that one issue can’t be improved without the development of all the programmatic themes as a whole. In this way, the fragmentation of objectives will be broken, something very characteristic from sustainable development programs and initiatives. Therefore, the components of the Amazon Indigenous Agenda are linking crosscutting topics, generators of integral policies from ourselves to ourselves.

Therefore, this Agenda is an instrument that invites not only for the participation of the members of COICA, but to other social and State actors found at the Amazon Basin and other regions of the planet. For this, it is crucial for us to make it a reality.
  

(7) COICA: Presentation AIA. 2003